Tag: health

FitStrong PT

Strong is ability

MoveStrongblog

Strong isn’t a size, it’s ability. 

All too often you’ll hear rebuttals to strength training from prospective clients or other adult pops with quotes like, “I don’t want to get all muscly” or, “I’m not a strength athlete, I just want to be fitter”!

I love both of these reasonings for not making strength training part of ones life, not because I agree, quite the contrary; but because I love to explain the why. The ‘why’ we do need strength training in our lives.

Firstly, the whole growing big muscles by partaking in strength training twice or maybe three times a week  for the average adult just isn’t going to result in a Popeye type explosion of all over muscle growth.

Popeye1

Muscle growth occurs with repeated high stress training for multiple sets, repeating a strength exercise to the point of muscular fatigue or momentary failure.

Strength training practice requires the exposure of high tension to muscles with maximum control but not to momentary muscular failure. 

Apart from this important factor that differentiates muscle growth training to muscle strength training; youth, great nutrition, great sleep, minimum stress, natural hormones in abundance are all required to accompany the high stress training protocols. For most of us, we’re not going to train moderately and burst into a behemoth overnight, or even after a years solid training. In reality to boot, even if you were to gain 10kg of muscle, you wouldn’t really notice it in the mirror as huge growth. You’d see a bit of muscle shape and improved posture in most cases.

In any case, don’t worry about strength training adding vast lumps of meat to your frame, it just isn’t that easy. Even for the average dedicated gym bro, adding muscle following the precise muscle gain protocols is a very challenging job.

Now then, as for the other perception that strength is for athletes, well it just isn’t. I wish I could just leave this as it is but my point warrants further explanation.

Let’s start by looking at those who believe that practicing some form of strength training is not for them or wasn’t for them; let’s look at the elderly. Frail, weak, dependant on a stick, a frame, other people or aids to carry out the most basic of fundamental human tasks, it should be obvious that people in this boat could have benefitted greatly from even the simplest weekly strength training practice.

Many hospital ‘incarcerations’ for the elderly patient occur as an outcome of a fall, when weak and brittle bones succumbed to the impact or dislocations or muscle tears resulted. We all run the risk of tripping and falling in life but having the resilience to cope is part choice and part luck.

The choice component comes from choosing to be proactive throughout our lives in regards to staying active, mobile and strong. Isn’t this a definition of ‘fitness’, being fit for our lives and all that it throws our way?

Being stronger not only safe-guards us and makes us more resilient, it makes us more able and capable.

Ask yourself this question:

On your death bed in many, many years, would you regret being strong and able or would you regret being weak and prone to pain and injury? 

Heading into the new year soon, maybe you’re thinking of taking up ‘getting strong and more mobile’. To draw this post to an end, I’d like to offer you a FREE 5 day course for home use, which will take you through some key movements to start first off addressing moving better.

click here

Check it out and if you’ve any further questions or you’re ready to start getting stronger, get in touch.

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FitStrong PT, personal training

How to Incorporate High Intensity Training into Your Week

MoveStrongblog

In part 1 last week [LINK] I talked about how research is finding the commonly used HIIT model of training is resulting in more negative results on our health. Burn out, injuries, overtraining and poor adherence make it unsustainable.

I introduced a new approach labelled High Intensity Repeat Training.

Let’s jump into Part 2.

Here’s a little fitness map I’ve made that illustrates all the ‘stuff’ we should include regularly.

Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 1.04.21 pm

The main categories include:

  • strength training
  • movement practice
  • cardio.
  • nutrition
  • recovery

There is no one item more important than the other, although I am starting to believe that sleep quality and health overrides everything else.

Of this list, the vast bulk of training is the foundation, the aerobic, easy to moderate stuff. Walking, gentle cycling, housework and gardening. The aerobic cardiovascular development is based on having individuals work within their aerobic threshold as apposed to bouncing off their anaerobic zone during HIIT. Aerobic threshold is defined as the intensity just before the beginning of the accumulation of hydrogen in the body, at an intensity where our body can handle the stress put upon it and use oxygen to create more energy and clear away bi-products of the effort.

Can you recall working out so hard you got a ‘stitch’ pain in your side? That’s the build up hydrogen ions from such high effort that the body can’t clear it quick enough. It’s not sustainable.

An ideal aerobic zone is described by Dr Maffetone as 180 – your age. This is otherwise known as the maximum aerobic function heart rate (MAF HR).

Note: You can go to Maffetone’s website for a more detailed way to determine your MAF HR based on your age, health, and activity level.

Now, let’s get to weekly ideals

Health experts recommend 30 minutes of aerobic activity daily or 3 ½ accumulation per week. This is where you should spend the bulk of your exercise effort. This daily 30 minutes can be seen repeated by health bodies around the world. It’s not the maximum, it’s optimal.

Strength is an important function of being an able bodied human, autonomous throughout life to undertake physical tasks and challenges. Who wants to live frail and weak?

When we strength train, our bodies recover and adapt (keeping a long story short) but recover too long and we regress. We failed to adapt. With recovery rates and regressions in mind, an average adult should aim to strength train twice to three times over a week. Think Monday and Thursday or Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. And yes, you can strength train and perform aerobic activities in one day. You’ll not day. You might get a little tired, but your body will thrive with recovery.

Mobility is the fountain of youth in terms of maintaining healthy movement (yup, even including healthy bowel movements too). We sit, we lie down and we naturally stiffen up a little. To stay on top of mobility, daily practice is prescribed by the worlds leading experts in movement skills. This might mean just 5 to 10 minutes daily of practicing some mobility moves or appropriate stretches.

Sleep. Despite the claims of some people, a body does need 7 to 8 hours sleep at night to promote hormone function for recovery, rejuvenation, organ and muscle recovery and function and brain health.

Nutrition is made out to be confusing. At its simplest, we as humans need daily protein, vegetables, natural sources of carbohydrate, natural fats and water. The exact amounts I’ll not get into here. Where it gets confusing is when people try to fast track their goals, seek out miracle drinks, potions or start to follow extreme guidelines including the removal of complete food groups. If we follow a mostly balanced diet of mostly the ‘stuff’ I mentioned above, most of the time; we’ll be okay.

HIIT. Ah finally. How much is needed if any? Some might not like the following guideline so if I hurt your feelings, suck it up, embrace a fresh outlook and try it to see what happens.

If, and only if, you are able to:

  1. accumulate 3 ½ hours of aerobic activity in the MAF HR (180-age)
  2. sleep every day for 7 to 8 hours
  3. eat a mostly balanced diet
  4. strength train twice a week
  5. practice daily mobility / flexibility …

… then and only then can your body be subjected to the stresses of HIIT training that should take no longer than 5 to 10 minutes.

And here’s a serving suggestions for just that.

Option 1: 30 secs of high effort followed by 30 secs rest x 5

Option 2: 10 secs of high effort followed by 50 secs rest x 10

Option 3: 20 secs of high effort followed by 40 secs of rest x 5-10

You’ll notice option 2 has plenty of rest. This protocol is the hidden gem (well, not any more as i’ve just shared it… oops)

Performing at high effort, your goal is to sustain high quality efforts. Answer me this. If you are performing a high effort followed by short rest, how well will you perform the following high efforts? Will there be a drop in forms, in effort? Is that the goal? Is the goal to repeat high effort or just to repeat feeling terrible?

High Intensity REPEAT Training

Now it’s going to get juicy as I take you into the new world of HIRT.

The best athletes do not do HIIT as you see in gyms and bootcamps. Yes, they do perform high effort training, but if you observe their recovery, it is programmed to allow the athlete to perform repetitively, with the goal of finding the sweetest spot of high performance. Injury rate is reduced too with the sustainable high efforts paired with generous rests.

This is nothing new and was in fact around in the 90s but fell out of vogue due to the perceived sexiness of crushing oneself in front of others for the glory, pride and overcoming feeling terrible.

Look, I’ve been on both sides of this paradigm. The first time I certified with StrongFirst (RKC) I was killing myself with kettlebell swings in the older HIIT style. Yes I did get fitter but also tweaked muscles frequently. As I prepare once again for recertification I’ll be following the HIRT style of training that in fact clients followed last January (2018). It was common to see ladies improve their swing from 12 to 20kg to 24 to 32kg in just an 8 week program.

This too was following just 10 minutes a week.

As a guideline, what we followed was this:

  • 7 swings with a heavy weight followed by at least 50 secs recovery.
  • Pulse levels would increase to approx. 180 – age by the end of each swing set.
  • Recovery was based on allowing the pulse to return to 180 – age – 20
  • As pulse failed to hit 180 – age, if it wasn’t due to fatigue, the weight was increased.

You could try this with any exercise you are competent in. You must not fear the weight or the tool. Just commit, rest, repeat for 5 to 10 minutes and leave it for another 5 to 7 days.

The conclusion

I don’t know truely know when and where the idea started that we must suffer to develop healthy fitness. Science tells us it’s not a valid method to improve healthy fitness. The media sensationalise high effort and reward.

I personally embrace new findings and new or improved ways to optimise my fitness and strength performance and I’ll gladly say goodbye to crushing myself and risking injury if I really don’t need to.

What do you think?

What’s your action point now?

Jamie

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FitStrong PT

Are You HIITing
Yourself too much?

MoveStrongblog

High Intensity Interval Training

Doing you more harm than good?

 

Part 1

Studies show hard training sessions quickly improve athletic performance, but if they come with an injury rate of 50 percent would you still do them?

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT for short) has been a mainstay of training programs and systems for only a short period of time. 30 years might sound like a long time, but in an industry, it’s just a snapshot of time.

Studies time and time again show that HIIT protocols do indeed improve athletic performance. HIIT can be described as performing short 10-30 seconds high efforts followed by a short recovery (10-60 seconds) before repeating for up to 8 to 10 total efforts. The high effort would be in the range of 90% of your VO2 max. VO2 max is the maximum effort you can sustain before going red line and you stop using oxygen to create fuel. You instead go into a zone of using other short lived fuels like creatine and lactate.

However, what most studies do not report is that the period we can sustain such training sessions is short, like 4 to 6 weeks. Continue to flog yourself much further and injury rates escalate as do over training risks.

For athletes following a professionally designed program, a period of time would include HIIT training but only during a peaking phase of 4 to 6 weeks of a training program leading up to competition. They do not follow HIIT all year round.

As Doctor Phil Maffetone wrote:
“Anaerobic function creates higher levels of physical and biochemical stress, decreases immune function and muscle repair, increases inflammation, increases the risk of muscle injury and impairs fat-burning. These conditions are also associated with poor (or a lack of) recovery, and are common components of and contributors to the overtraining syndrome.”

So why does the fitness industry keep banging away at the idea that you gotta keep banging away at yourself??

Because HIIT is sexy?
Because high effort is equated to suffering and deserved favourable outcomes??
Because our parents and grandparents suffered to provide for us???

Who knows where the western notion of high effort, suffered and reward stems from, but it is very much a western attraction to fitness. Yes, other cultures follow rights of passage, coming of age rituals, but it’s not an every-day thing!

As I continue, I want to throw out these reality checks for you to ponder:

  1. Every day exercise is a driver to good, better and optimal health.
  2. Athletic Sport performance is NOT about health. It’s about doing everything that must be done to out perform the competition.

When I raced my bike in the 90s, I didn’t race and nor did my colleagues or competition race to improve our health. We trained to race, to do better than every else. The same can be said for most other sports too.

High intensity interval training used too much is not about health, it’s about taking physical performance to its highest potential, regardless of impact on health.

Here’s a glimpse of a couple of studies:
The British Journal of Sports Medicine published the results of a short-term training program, designed by health professionals to reduce running injuries that still resulted in a 30 percent injury rate (Taunton et al., 2013).
The Journal of Strength and Conditioning published a study that showed the popular and notoriously high-intensity sport of CrossFit has an estimated injury rate of 73.5 percent with 7 percent of these injuries requiring surgery (Hak et al., 2013).

One thing researchers may agree on is that they don’t really know what particular exercise effort is best for a given athlete. While the concept of individuality is an accepted approach to programming, it’s not used to a valuable capacity.
The media will continue to present snippets of research, telling us the new solution is here, and people will jump on board the coolaid train, only to risk increased injury and ill health.
Where does higher effort fit into the fitness equation?

Next week I’ll share how a week should look, driven by non-agenda health leaders, recovery and regression from effort rates.

Until then, what do you think? Do you look first at when you’ll do your HIIT or is it something you’ll add once all other areas have been covered?

Let me know.

Jamie

 

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FitStrong PT

Thrive to your Final Day

MoveStrongblog

What a title – how dramatic! But if I had to sum up my message with just 5 words, that’ll do it.

Today I want to touch on a subject many cry away from completely or conversely, drive headlong straight into but crash and burn!

Toughness

In a time when we can utilise tech to do lots of the hard for us, when we can have food delivered to our doors within 15 to 30 minutes, when we can outsource many of the mundane physical tasks to others and again, technology, you can see how it could be easy to say it’s not our fault – the system allows us to become lazy.

So much of modern living has done away with having to deal with discomfort. Physical occupations and past times that we had to do up until the 1970s and 80s have now largely been made redundant. You can easily spend a week, a month or many months not having to undertake anything remotely physically demanding or causing discomfort.

You think that’s a good thing? Think again.

For the most-part, most people for most of the time want to avoid physical discomfort. What happens then when a situation arrises that demands just that from us…. gulp!

I am not implying that you should go out of your way to make everything difficult. Don’t. Enjoy the luxury of modern living but at the same time, practice toughening up a little bit.

How?

As you’d expect, my response as a trainer is, well, ‘exercise’. Whilst a lot of our time in the FitStrong gym is dedicated to learning and practicing great technique, there are times too when we program pushing the boundaries of comfort, expanding our comfort zones. This in fact forms the premise of how we progress. We have a session of light stress, a session of medium stress, then a session where we stretch the comfort zone.

Here’s a quick story of member, Michael, who is a champion of toughening up and thriving.

 

Final thought. If we spend our lives wrapping up in proverbial bubble wrap to avoid discomfort and physical effort we will end up frail, weak and feeble in our later years. If we spend a little time every week getting a little out of breath, lifting some weights and moving around to develop better mobility and agility, we will thrive to our final days.

Got any thoughts?

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FitStrong PT, Healthy Eating

Getting Back to Old Fashioned Health Values

MoveStrongblog

Attaining optimal physical health in the year 2018 is probably a little bit confusing. Do short-cuts exist? Can you hack a boost with a magical coffee and fasting for 3 days? Is there a wonder food? Is there one exercise that’ll do the job and is strength training all you need to lead a wonderful and fulfilling life allowing you to thrive into old age with grace and all your human facets in place?

If anyone tells you ‘just need ____’, they are most likely full of cr@p!

To get a grasp of how and what is means to lead an optimally, healthy life as a human, you need to grasp what it means to be an optimally, healthy human. What is our system designed to do?

Thankfully the impartial and unbiased side of the medical and sports science world has outlined this for us on numerous occasions. We’ll delve into this later on.

For the purposes of physical health, strength, wellbeing and seeing results from training, I like to focus on the following areas:

  • Recovery
  • Nutrition
  • Cardiovascular exercise
  • Resistance exercise
  • Movement practice

Here’s a wee infographic I’m working on. Eventually it will have links to resources for each area.

Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 1.04.21 pm

For a very long time (until recently) people have included the above ‘agenda’ in their lives out of lifestyle necessity.

Until the 1950s and 1960s people had lifestyles that promoted:

  • moving more than sitting,
  • activities that kept them strong,
  • eating mostly unprocessed foods,
  • sleeping a good 7 to 8 hours rather than binge watching TV until they fell asleep.

Standards and values of basic human performance have dropped dramatically. Waist inches have climbed and even though we are living longer, we are just delaying death rather than prolonging life. Let’s read that last sentence again.

Waist inches have climbed and even though we are living longer, we are just delaying death rather than prolonging life.

There is no doubt that we will never return to a lifestyle that demands more physical living unless war and famine dictates it!

If you value old fashioned physical standards of health, attaining a good balance of physical living, what do you need to do?

At the start of the blog I mentioned that medical and sport science has informed us what we need to do. Let’s recap on what is promoted:

Sleep: 7 – 8 hours is optimal despite the fact that some people tell you that 5 hours is all they need.

Nutrition: No diets are required. Just aim to gradually reduce processed foods and meals and snacks and instead target fruits and vegetables that are in season NOW. Three to four fist sized portions a day. Eat unprocessed sources of protein, roughly the same size of 2 to 3 palm sizes. Eat unprocessed (read – natural) sources of carbohydrates like rice, potatoes and other root vegetables. Roughly 2 to 3 palm fulls a day. More information from Precision Nutrition. 

Cardiovascular: The targets have been made clear. Walk 30 to 90 minutes a day. You do not have to get seriously out breath, just get up and walk for at least 30 accumulated minutes a day. Simple really. Once this standard is met, then an additional 2 higher intensity sessions can be added a week – 30 minutes of effort that take you pulse to 180 – your age. Not flat-out death chasing stuff! Read more here.

Resistance Training: Two to three times a week undertake a strength training program that includes all the essential human movements. These are the most common physical movements we are required to perform and designed to perform frequently. These can be labelled as Squatting, Pushing, Pulling, Bracing (our torso), Hinging / Bending at the hips and Carrying weight. A well structured plan can be simple and undertaken in as little as 20 to 30 minutes. Need a hand, just ask.

Movement Practice: This is probably one area that should increase compared to strength training as we age. As a goal now, if you spend 30 minutes strength training, you should spend up to an hour on a movement practice. What do I mean movement practice? Yoga, Animal Flow, Original Strength, whatever flexibility techniques you like but in any case, you gotta get looser. As we age our hips, biceps, chest, hamstrings and other areas develop and hold onto more tension due to fatigue, posture, lifestyle. Stretch, move – get all loosey-goosey.

Building this into a week as a beginner

  • Walk every day for 30 minutes (3.5 hours a week)
  • Strength Train twice a week for 30 minutes (1 hour a week)
  • Stretch / Get Mobile 4 times a week for 30 minutes (2 hours a week)
  • Start a habit of eating mostly natural foods
  • Sleep every day for 7 to 8 hours

Yes, you read that right. Exercising for 6 ½ hours is essential for a beginner. Any less and you really are leaving a lot on the table. Any less and your lifestyle will be underpowered to assist you into old age.

It’s a serious matter but think of it this way. Do you want to spend the final years of your life in assisted aged care, unable to clean your own bum or do you want to thrive until your dying day.

To quote Steve “Coach Fury” Holiner, ‘Live Long, Be Strong, Die Mighty’! 

I know I’ve laid out a handful of information here. If you want to start to thrive now and you’re not sure where to start, get in touch and I will happily steer you in the right direction. Not a sales pitch, I just want to help.

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FitStrong PT, personal training, Strength training

Are you Garry Strong?

MoveStrongblog

G’day. It’s a public holiday today in Queensland. The Queens birthday as it happens. But, the gym still goes on (health and strength don’t get holidays hehe)

hqdefault

Anyhoo, as you’ll probably know by now, we work on moving better (especially for everyone who finds themselves stuck behind a desk or sitting most of the day) AND getting stronger for whatever our lives need.

Simple. Programs can be written to deliver great results for these two areas.

But, one strength that a lot of people do not possess is this…

… watch.

Making progress can happen with the simple act of turning up. Yep, even if you put in a mediocre effort, it’s still better than no effort and sitting around feeling grouchy. I can pretty much guarantee that working through a mobility warm up and then just ticking boxes for the minimum essential dose of the ‘other stuff’ will make you feel better – providing you’re not coming down with something of course.

Adding to your health credits in gradual small steps will make bigger interests than over enthusiastic and inconsistent efforts.

Got any thoughts? Message below.

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FitStrong PT, personal training

Special Message

MoveStrongblog

I’ve had a great week so far and it’s only Thursday!

Over the past days I’ve been sharing my thoughts with quick video log (Vlogs) about what I do here at FitStrong PT.

Why? Because I want to clear up my message about who I want to help and how I want to help them before launching a new side of the business.

I started the week by identifying my passions and talents. The cross-over between each of these is where I want to focus going forward to help and work with more people.

In brief this cross-over of passion and talent is:

  • Sharing the methods I know to work to help people move better and to get away from day-to-day aches and pains.
  • Teaching people the techniques to getting stronger and fitter safely.
  • Writing programs to allow people to train at home or their space to exercise.
  • Building an online product that will help me share with a larger audience than my gym can provide.

 

I would love to hear from you if you are someone who would be interested in joining me online.

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FitStrong PT

Vlog – 5 Pillars of Fitness Progress

MoveStrongblog

Vlog 23rd September 2018

It’s all fine and dandy having an all bells and whistles gym program, but if you don’t address these 5 pillars of fitness ‘progress’, you’re wasting your time.

 

  1. Sleep 7-8 hours a night even if you think you’re a rebel who can survive on 5. Thrive, don’t just survive!
  2. Nutrition. Be an adult and eat your veg, protein, carbs, fats and drink water more. If nature provided it, eat it.
  3. Strength train. Progressively get strong  – we’ll get to this on a later post.
  4. Aerobic exercise. Cardio is not the devil and doesn’t need to be a gut busting, puke-fest. Walk, hike, ride a bike, roller skate or take your skateboard for a whiz. Just get a bit out of breath – that is all it takes to help you.
  5. Movement practice. Choose a movement practice. Original Strength, yoga, pilates, Animal Flow, Parkour, stretch and roll around on the floor – whatever it is, do it every day.

Screen Shot 2018-09-20 at 1.04.21 pm

Got any thoughts? Please talk to me.

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How to Get Lost When Goal Setting!

MoveStrongblog

I can proudly say that I can write up good training programs but ONLY if I know where the destination is and also, where the starting point is.

Starting out into exercise as a beginner or taking a change of direction or starting with a trainer will always take into consideration the goal. The end point at a particular time-frame perhaps or more wisely, when the goal is achieved.

Most People Get Lost before they even start

Picture this example (and it can be any example). Could you really start to train for a 5km park-run right now if you struggle to put on your shoes most mornings because your back’s stiff? Or, is it realistic to join a 60 minute exercise class after work when you wouldn’t normally do more than 60 minutes of exercise per week? Do you get lost trying to plan your own exercise goal or do you just stumble into ‘something’ and see where it goes?

There are plenty of rhetorical situations we could consider but the point is, you must know your starting point before planning your goal. Once you are fully aware of AND acknowledge your Point A, your limitations and strengths then you can start to plot your path to Point B.

This year I wanted to work on getting a hand stand. Why? Why not. It was a challenge. What I needed first off was to get my Point A down. Shoulder stability, mobility, confidence and a plan to get there, to the handstand. I’m still working on it but I am still on the program path.

So, whats your Point A or whats blocking you from getting towards your Point B?

 

Got any thoughts or questions? Just ask.

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Moving Better and Getting Stronger is a Skill

MoveStrongblog

I spoke yesterday on my first of a 10 part Vlog series about how I’m passionate about helping people thrive with their chosen strength and fitness plans.

But, what does that entail?

Watch on and please, any thoughts or questions, do ask.

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