Principles 6-10 for Getting Fit

Last week I gave you my first five principles that make a successful workout program, and today I’ll explain the remaining five:

 

Principle #6: Train the big lifts.

 

There’s a reason that there are several “classic” lifts…they work! People will often disregard the big lifts (deadlift, bench press, squat) in favor of smaller accessory lifts, such as shrugs, cable crossovers, or lunges. While those exercises are extremely helpful in an overall workout program, it’s important to have a mix of both. The big lifts are going to be much more beneficial in training the nervous system as a whole.

 

Principle #7: Take time to recover.

 

When most people think about their “rest days” they picture taking it easy and vegging out on the couch. I prefer the term “recovery day” because, in reality, it’s important to be proactive in truly reestablishing the energy in your body. So, doing things that will stimulate an anabolic (building up) response in the body is essential. Taking a walk, eating the RIGHT foods, and getting on a foam roller all helps in returning yourself to the right state.

 

Principle #8: Set goals.

 

Setting goals helps you get in the right frame of mind and makes sure that you stay on track during your workouts. The act of taking time to really think about what you want to achieve sets you up for success.

 

Principle #9: Customize your program to fit those goals.

 

When finding a routine online, there are many “one-size-fits-all” workouts. Once you figure out what you are trying to achieve through working out, tailoring the workout to meet those goals will give you the best results. This is where having knowledge regarding fitness comes into play, because you will be able to make the right choices for yourself.

 

Principle #10: Make sure that you’re not taking too long.

From a physiological standpoint, workouts that are much longer than an hour will start to tax your nervous system to a point where you won’t derive very much benefit from it. Include in that the fact that it’s harder to fit a long workout into your day, and it starts to become quite apparent why marathon sessions are a bad idea. When it comes down to fitness over an entire lifetime, it’s essential for it to not be an intrusion on your life. If long workouts create stress on your schedule, you’re more likely to abandon them, which really defeats the whole purpose.

My First Five Principles for Getting Fit

 

Last year, I decided to design a workout program for myself that would be far superior to any other “one size fits all” routine that I could find online. It took several hours and four rough drafts before I got all of the right exercises in the right sequence in the right recovery cycle. After that, I tweaked it further as I got in the gym, tested it, and saw how it turned out. I posted a sample of the first four routines back in May, if you want to go to the archives and check it out.

 

Anyway, that’s all to say that I spent a lot of time creating this program to specifically be the best workout possible. But then I started thinking, why not scale it way back and create a much simpler approach? In order to do this, I came up with 10 principles that can be applied in order to get you in the best shape of your life. Right now, I’ll debut the first five!

 

Principle #1: Eat the right food.

 

This seriously needs to be one of your top priorities if you’re looking to change your physique. Depending on your body type, nutrition can be up to 80% of how you look. Plus, this doesn’t even take into account the other benefits of eating good food, such as elevated energy levels, which will carry over into increased performance in the gym. Bodies are shaped during workouts, but the foundation is built during your meals. You truly are what you eat.

 

Principle #2: Start with the basics.

 

Too many new gym goers want to start out with the “cool” gym equipment like the bosu balls (because “I heard they’re good for your core!”), the TRX straps, or kettlebells. These are the things that they see the “professional trainers” using in fitness magazines and what not. If someone doesn’t even have the proper mechanics of a bodyweight squat mastered, there’s no way they should be using that other “supplemental” equipment. Master the fundamentals first.

 

Principle #3: Get uncomfortable.

 

Here’s the simple truth: if you are comfortable during your workouts, it’s probably not doing that much. It may be enough to maintain your body, but I guarantee that you won’t see any results. Make sure that your workouts are intense enough so that you actually have to push yourself to complete it.

 

Principle #4: Stick to it.

 

We’ve all heard it before. Gyms get super busy in early January as people decide that one of their resolutions will be to get a gym membership. Then, after a going a few times, they realize that they aren’t seeing the results as soon as they assumed they would with the amount of effort they’re willing to put in, so they stop going. Your body doesn’t work that quickly, so give it some time to shape itself! As long as you adhere to the “BiG” rule – Butt in Gym – you will see improvements. If you’re dragging your butt to the gym enough, you’ve already won half the battle,

 

Principle #5: Lift heavy, light, and everything in between.

I’ve written about this before, but your body needs the stimulation from all types of weight! Heavy weights will give you more strength, light weights will increase your muscular endurance, and weight that falls in the middle will add more size (if you’re a guy, that is). Make sure you don’t just specialize in one area, because your body will suffer from the overstimulation of one aspect.

Squat Variation to Boost Your Strength

Of all the lifts that you can do with a barbell, squatting is one of the most beneficial exercises in terms of gaining size, strength, and physiological health. Many people try to avoid leg day in the gym – simply because it’s hard – but the serious lifters know that squats are not something to skimp on. Unfortunately, it becomes very difficult to add weight to your squat once you hit a certain “sticking point.” Luckily for you, I’m going to explain a technique that help you get over that plateau and skyrocket your squatting ability!

 

During a squat, you will automatically tighten your stomach, because your body knows that this is the best way for it to balance itself when it’s put in an awkward weight-bearing situation. Tightening your abdominal muscles creates a cinch-like effect for your torso so that it is able to maintain its rigidity and not collapse forward.

 

This is a great way to start out if you are learning the fundamentals of the exercise. However, there comes a time when it will start to inhibit your gains.

 

In order to overcome this hindrance, you can perform “breathing squats.” There’s really not a whole lot to it, and you can probably guess how they are performed just after reading the title.

 

Basically, you just squat like usual, but then take several breaths at the bottom before coming back up. This will be hard at first because your abdominal muscles are so used to being tense and tight during this movement.

 

The benefit of this exercise is two-fold. First, you are removing the intra-abdominal pressure within your stomach that has been keeping your torso stabilized. By getting rid of this pressure, your body needs to compensate some other way so that you don’t fall over. In order to accomplish this pelvic stabilization, your nervous system will recruit other muscle fibers that are generally inactive during the movement. By getting more neuromuscular recruitment, you are building a stronger torso and pelvic floor.

 

Second, you are increasing the time under tension during the exercise. Time under tension is just an indication of how long your muscles are working to move a weight against the pull of gravity. So, by taking a few breaths, you’re increasing how long your muscles are working, which therefore increases the intensity of the workout.

There you have it. By implementing breathing squats into your workout routine, you will see improvements in the muscular development of your legs and the strength of your squat. Be forewarned, these are not easy, but they are worth it!

 

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ACL Injury Prevention

As ACL injuries become more and more widespread in today’s athletes, it’s important to understand what causes them to tear, and how to prevent it.

First, let’s start with a little anatomy lesson. Your anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is located toward the front part of your knee joint, and helps to connect your femur (thigh bone) to your tibia (shin bone). When an athlete lacks the adequate strength for their activities, has poor running form, or has an off-kilter pelvis, it contributes to the stress being placed on the ACL. Over time, this will result in the wearing down of the ligament, and then a quick cut, stop, or pivot can end in a loud pop with a lot of pain.

The first thing to address is the lack of lower body strength. Specifically, the lack of ECCENTRIC lower body strength. There are three types of contractions within your muscles: concentric (shortening muscle fibers, like during a bicep curl), isometric (holding a contraction, like stopping a bicep curl halfway through and keeping it there), and eccentric (the controlled lowering motion, where you are keeping the weight from freely dropping to the ground).

During many sports, an athlete will often be running at a high speed, and need to suddenly stop. If they don’t have enough strength in their muscles to stop as quickly as they need to, it overextends the legs as they strain to defy the laws of physics. For a time, this method will work for an athlete, because the tendons and ligaments in their legs will help out by stopping the leg from going too far. However, every time this happens, those tendons and ligaments get a little more worn down, and will eventually snap. So, having strong quadriceps and hamstrings will aid in supporting the health of your ACL while playing a sport that demands changes of directions often (like soccer, football, or basketball).

Another factor in the degredation of ACL health is an athlete’s running form. Most people walk and run with a “heel strike.” This just means that the heel is hitting the ground first, which results in a huge spike in the force that your leg absorbs. Each step you take, your body – and especially your ACL – is taking on almost your entire weight, so focusing that force on such a small area coincides with a lot of stress on your bodily structure. When this heel strike is coupled with a quick change of direction, it places a large load of torque on the ACL and weakens it.

Another unfortunate issue is the anterior pelvic tilt. I’ve blogged about this before on, but it essentially just means that the hips face downward instead of straight ahead. When a sport requires a lot of running, you will see many athletes with this because it is generally caused by tight hip flexors and weak glutes and hamstrings.

As mentioned above, weak muscles will result in lots of stress. This pelvic tilt contributes to the important muscles used during the eccentric motions of running (glutes and hamstrings) AND will mechanically encourage a run that involves a heel strike. All bad.

So what can we do to prevent this? Well, strength training (obviously), a focus on running technique, and a stretching routine that reduces the pelvic tilt will all be beneficial. ACL injuries are especially common in women – there are several other factors not mentioned here that contribute to that – but the most easily fixed factor is their lack of strength. Male athletes are usually encouraged (pressured, almost) to start going to the gym and lifting around 14 or 15 years old. Women, however, hardly ever have a serious strength and conditioning routine until they get into collegiate athletics.

The prevention of ACL injuries is fairly simple, but rarely implemented. By focusing on training athletes so that their risk of injury decreases, it creates a stronger athlete and more solid team. If we take care of our bodies, our bodies will take care of us.

The Case for Sleeping More: Part 4

I’m sure we’ve all experienced that feeling you get the day after a night of little sleep. You have a hard time paying attention. It’s difficult to stay alert. Your reaction time increases. Your memory, your reasoning skills, and your creative thinking all go down the drain.

These processes are all affected after just one night of not getting enough sleep, so when this becomes a normal pattern, your brain faces a huge struggle to keep functioning properly. Chronic sleep deprivation will not end well, no matter how much you think you should study for that test, or stay up late to work on a project. By compromising your abilities, you are actually doing more harm than good.

Plus, you can’t do very well at school or at work if you’re sick, right? Well, cutting down on sleep has a negative effect on your immune system, to boot!

There are certain types of cells that are designed to fight off foreign antigens and repair damaged tissue. During the N2 stage of sleep, those cells peak in concentration. As this is happening, your body also starts to secrete a larger amount of growth hormones, and it suppresses the cortisol and catecholamine production. What happens when all these factors come together? It creates an environment that supports inflammation.

We’ve all been told that inflammation is bad, though!

Well, this is usually the case. But when we get an adequate amount of sleep, this state of inflammation is actually beneficial to the immune system, because it basically gives the cells something to “practice” on. After they have been in that environment, they are able to remember how to perform like that in the future when there is an actual problem going on.

Unfortunately, this inflammation is not good if you don’t get enough sleep. Because you don’t give your cells enough time to balance the inflammation back to a normal level, and you will be living with chronic inflammation in your body. This impedes the function of your immune system, and puts you at risk for infection, chronic diseases, and cancer.

Ok, over the past few days we’ve covered how your body needs sleep to repair itself, why your bright phone screen is inhibiting the quality of your sleep, how sleep cycles work, how deprivation screws up your hormones, why your metabolic state relies on sleep, how sleep is related to diabetes and weight gain, how your brain has trouble functioning without it, and how it affects your ability to stay healthy. Understand that sleep plays an important role in the quality of your life, and you don’t want to mess with it.

Stay healthy, and go to bed early!

The Case for Sleeping More: Part 3

So, we’ve covered how sleep helps the body repair itself, both physically and mentally, and how we go through several stages of sleep that allow the body to perform specific functions during that period of recovery. Now, let’s discuss how skimping on sleep affects your hormone production.

After an extended period of poor sleep, your body undergoes big changes in its glucose tolerance (glucose is a type of sugar). When you aren’t functioning properly, your cells start to be less efficient in recognizing the glucose that is floating around in your blood. Under good circumstances, the cells will absorb that glucose and turn it into energy that you can use. But, after getting a few bad nights of sleep, they stop absorbing as much glucose as usual.

Time for a quick biology lesson. Insulin is one of the main regulators of blood sugar (remember, glucose) in our bodies. When we don’t get enough sleep, our cells start to build up an aversion to insulin. This isn’t good.

If our bodies aren’t able to regulate the levels of blood sugar, it wreaks havoc on the metabolic system, which can cause cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In fact, the study “Sleep duration as a risk factor for diabetes incidence in a large U.S sample” by Gangwisch et al. showed that there was a correlation between average hours of sleep and the rate of diabetes in the sample of over 8000 people that they recorded over a 10 year period. They found that subjects who slept less than 5 hours per night were TWICE AS LIKELY to develop diabetes than people who slept for 7 hours on average. This is even after they controlled for body mass, so that that wouldn’t be a confounding variable.

Also, if you’re trying to watch your weight, there is a neurological reason for sleeping, as well. When your body doesn’t uptake glucose into the cell efficiently, you tend to be more tired and hungry. Bad combination, because you won’t want to workout, and you’ll want to eat a whole lot more than usual. Also, when you get tired, the release of dopamine (your “reward” or “pleasure” neurotransmitter) is much higher in response to thinking about high-calorie foods.

As if that weren’t bad enough, while you get more and more tired, your willpower decreases. Try this out. Go to the grocery store early in the morning sometime. Another time, go really late at night, when you would normally be sleeping. I’ll bet that if you compare what you bought, the late night trip will bag a ton more carbs than the early morning trip. This is also influenced by the decrease of leptin (an appetite suppression hormone that is mostly secreted during sleep) and the increase of ghrelin (a hormone that stimulates hunger). The combination of these two has been shown in various studies to increase subject’s tendency to crave carb-dense, sweet, and salty foods.

So where do all those excess calories go? Well, your body places a premium on protecting your vital organs, so it will usually prioritize placing fat around them. And where are most of those vital organs located? You got it. Right down in the torso. Perfect for that beach-bod of yours.

By this point, I don’t know how anyone could be unconvinced to sleep more. But that’s not all! Tomorrow, in what will most likely be the last post on this subject, I’ll talk about how a lack of sleep influences brain function and your immune system.

Sleep well!

The Case for Sleeping More: Part 2

*Part two of my series for why you should be sleeping more*

When you go to sleep, it’s not just the same TYPE of sleep the entire time. You go through four predictable cycles, which all serve a different purpose in the body.

The transition from being awake to drifting off to sleep is called the N1 stage. It only lasts about five minutes, during which your eyes move slowly under your eyelids, your muscle activity slows down, and you are still able to be awakened fairly easily.

After your body has gone into sleep-mode, you enter stage N2. This is what you would consider “real” sleep, and it lasts between 10 and 25 minutes. As you leave the first stage and enter this one, your eye movement stops, your heart rate slows, and your body temperature starts to decrease. This is why scientists recommend sleeping in a room a bit colder than room temperature – around 65 degrees or so. This way, your body’s temperature can drop a bit quicker without having to work as hard, and you enter this stage in less time.

Finally, you enter stage N3, which is often referred to as “deep sleep.” This is the time when you become harder to awaken. If you do get woken up during this stage, you will often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. This is why you can sleep for a good amount of time, and still wake up feeling lethargic and out of it. In this stage, your brain waves are extremely slow, as blood flow is redirected from your brain to your muscles, so that it can restore your physical energy.

Anywhere between 70 to 90 minutes after you fall asleep, you enter rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is the time when dreaming occurs. Your eyes move rapidly (shocker!), your breathing becomes more shallow, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase. During this stage, your brain essentially creates a barrier between your mind and your muscles, so that you don’t start to act out your dreams in real life as you sleep. You effectively paralyze yourself! This is the time when you start to repair your psychological state.

So, what can you do with this information? By understanding how your sleep is structured, you can plan your schedule more efficiently so that you get as many of these full cycles in per night. Also, you can make sure that your alarm won’t be going off while you’re in the middle of a deep sleep stage, or else you’ll wake up “on the wrong side of the bed.”

I generally shoot for 7.5 hours of sleep, since each cycle lasts for an average of 1.5 hours. This way, I can get 5 full cycles in before I wake up at the beginning of a stage N1 or N2 sleep. Of course, we all have different sleep patterns, so yours may last longer or may be done quicker, but on average they will last for around 1.5 hours. Play around with it if you can, and see what amount of time makes you feel the best when you wake up!

The Case for Sleeping More: Part 1

*This post contains lots of information, and I don’t want to be putting out essays, so I’m going to break this up into several smaller parts throughout the next couple of days*

In today’s society, lack of sleep has essentially become a “badge of ambition” for many people. I see this especially in college-age students who work and go to school, which puts them in the position of burning the candle at both ends. Waking up early to work and then staying up late to study is becoming the norm, and is often paraded as a tribute to their work ethic, or their commitment to good grades.

While I certainly commend the effort, I can no longer support this method as the best way to be successful. Until recently, I was under the impression that in order to “get ahead” I should sleep less and work more. I viewed sleep as the enemy – a necessary evil that should be kept to a minimum. However, I now believe that raising your productivity levels will be far more beneficial than gaining several more hours of daylight.

So, let’s dive right in to see how sleep can affect how productive you are. Your body secretes tons of different hormones, one of which is cortisol. Cortisol has been labeled the “stress hormone” and is partially responsible for activating the body and preparing it to move, work, and be alert. So, cortisol is very helpful during the day when we need to be doing those things, but is a nuisance at night when we are trying to sleep.

Cortisol is released mainly when you should be waking up, and starts to diminish as you wind down for bed. But it is responsive to light because the sun used to be the main source that told us when we should be up and active and when we should be asleep and resting. As technology has become more and more integrated into our life, we have started staying up with it longer and longer. This means that we have a light shining in our face right up until we hit the hay, which causes a release of cortisol right before we’re trying to sleep. This significantly reduces the quality of sleep that we get.

So why is this important? Well, between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM, your body seeks to be in a state of physical repair. This is its prime time for recovering from stressors it encountered throughout the day, so by 1) going to bed late, and 2) not getting quality sleep, we are putting our body in a situation where it cannot properly grow. This is why sleep is so important if you have been trying to gain muscle or lose weight.

Then, from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM, your body is primed for psychological recovery. Your brain is under a tremendous workload throughout the day, so this is the time when it undergoes a period of repairing any damage that has occured. If your job requires you to wake up before 6:00 AM every day, you are missing out on proper psychological functions.

Obviously, it’s just unrealistic to try to be asleep by 10 and awake by 6 every single day, especially if you’re in college. The main take-away from this should be an understanding of how important sleep is to us on a day-to-day basis. Next time, I’ll give you some information on your sleep cycles so that you can decide how much sleep you should be getting every night for optimal performance.

Physiology of Training

The body is always seeking to maintain homeostasis – a state where your entire body is working together in synchronization. This means that when it is put under some type of stressful stimulus, it will adapt in order to keep the body running smoothly and efficiently. However, not all types of stress will result in a beneficial adaptation.

In terms of both psychology and physiology, there are two kinds of stress: distress and eustress.

Distress is the type that most people associate with the word “stress.” It is the negative, destructive kind that happens when you’re worried or anxious. Eustress, on the other hand, is the kind of stress that is constructive and will facilitate building you up. The easiest example to point to is when you are working out. During a training session, your body is being placed under stress for the purpose of building an even stronger body. When talking about your mental state, the same classification can be applied for studying. Neither of these things are pleasant while you’re in the midst of it, but they are both necessary in order to grow.

Fortunately for those involved in athletic development, the adaptations that occur after being subjected to eustress are fairly predictable. When an athlete trains and then improves as a result, it is the result of a 4-step process called supercompensation that has occured. This simply means that the body is overcorrecting itself for the muscular breakdown that just happened.

Step 1 of the supercompensation process is the application of neuromuscular stress, which will cause the body to actually tear muscle fibers. Step 2 is the recovery phase, where it will replenish the body’s energy stores and will bring performance back up to the baseline where the athlete started. The third step is finally where we enter the true supercompensation phase. The body realizes that it was not prepared for what just happened, and knows that it may need to perform at that level sometime in the future. So, as an adaptive response, it actually builds itself up bigger, stronger, and faster than before, to ensure that the muscle fibers will be prepared for the next time.

However, this phase does not last for long. Step 4 is the declination of this supercompensation. Because the body is not familiar with maintaining that level of physiological power, it is unequipped to sustain it. The type of energy system used will determine how long this period lasts. For example, extensive endurance recovery will usually peak around 12 hours after the training session has ended, and then will quickly return to the baseline over the next 24 hours. On the other end of the spectrum, intense weightlifting will generally result in a peak after 72 hours, but will slowly return to the baseline over the course of the next 3 days.

This is why elite athletes have such a strict schedule when they start to approach a competition. Their coach must ensure that they are going to peak at exactly the right moment so that they will perform at their best when it really counts.

Importance of the Foot

When constructing a house, the foundation is one of the most important aspects. Without a base that is structurally sound, the rest of the house will be thrown off-balance, ending badly for all those involved. The same is true for a tree; if the roots are all jacked-up and have nothing to latch onto, it won’t be able to support itself once it gets to be a certain size.

For some reason, this stuff makes perfect sense to us, but we often neglect our feet when we think of our overall fitness. The foot is what plants us firmly on the ground and gives us structural integrity. If the musculature and bone placement is imbalanced, it does not bode well for everything up north.

Most of us are on our feet. A lot. Everyday. And if you’re not, you may have other problems that you need to attend to (get active!) first. Since they are constantly being used, all the tissue gets very tight and often inflamed. If you’ve been a newsletter subscriber for a while now (email me at Aspire.Perspire.Inspire@gmail.com if you’re not), or if you’ve read through the posts on my blog, you know what myofascial release is, and how it can alleviate this problem.

For those of you who haven’t been so lucky yet (shame on you), I’ll give a quick run down of what myofascial release entails. Your muscular system is covered by layers of a thin film-like tissue called fascia (pronounced fashuh) which will eventually tighten up if it is used too often without proper relief. To loosen up the fascial tissue, you apply pressure on a certain area, which will signal the muscle to provide “slack” to that area.

In order to do this, I will often use a foam roller, a raquet ball, or a tennis ball to get the job done, depending on how much pressure is needed and where it’s located. For the feet, I started out with a raquet ball, because it provided less resistance and, therefore, less pain (which will be CONSIDERABLE when you first start). These days, I use a tennis ball because it provides an amount of pressure that my foot can take.

Start by putting your foot on top of the ball and pressing down to a level that’s a bit painful, but not excrutiating. Then, roll your foot across the ball, keeping the same amount of pressure on it throughout. Cover the whole area of your foot. After your done, it should feel much looser.

While you probably won’t notice some drastic difference in your posture or anything, trust that it’s quite important to pay attention to your feet. With the type of shoes that we’re cramming them in these days, they take tons of abuse all day.

Just like you wouldn’t neglect the foundation of a house, or the roots of a tree, don’t neglect your own base of support!