How Tough Should Our Training Be?

Why Crossfit and Insanity DO NOT set the rules of fitness

I feel a little worried about where fitness trends are going.  It’s as if Crossfit and Insanity are setting the standard to which we set the intensity of our training.  A lot of us go to the commercial gym and while most people are either doing their cardio or in the weights room engaged in 3 sets of 10 someone in the corner is doing flying burpees, supersetting with some clean-and-press.  Now I admit that I used to think that this was cool but now I do find myself backtracking.

Such is the strength of this trend that now if you audition for a role as an instructor you’re judged not by your own technique, knowledge or ability to interact but how tough you make your class.  Instructors are judged now according to how tough they make their class because participants now believe that this is the proper way to train.

 So how tough should the workout be?  Well, you’ve seen insanity being done like this

 

But when you see it being done like this…

 

The workout is too tough.  He's out of breath after the warm-up and at one stage he says screw form.  For a start you only go as far, as fast and as hard as form allows.  Once form is compromised you regress or you slow down.  The beauty of this approach is that when you try to execute things perfectly, that top level of breathlessness you feel while preserving perfect form tends to be the maximum you need to train at.  Try that yourself.

 So you don’t like Crossfit you don’t like Insanity, Is there anything you do like?

For a start Olympic lifts are not designed to be performed at high repetition or high tempo.  Most people don’t have the joint mobility needed to execute the moves.

As for insanity, if jumping around the living room like a chimpanzee in front of the telly is your thing then fine.  Fact is, half those moves aren’t designed for beginners yet the workout is promoted primarily to people that don’t work out, by people (in the DVD) who have been working out for years.

I actually prefer good old school aerobics, because at least the instructors have a concept for non-impact and high-impact moves.  It’s part of our teaching.

So how should we train?

I prefer not to mix weights with cardio.  Weight-training is done for a medium to heavy rep range and cardio is performed in a pure form by attending run clubs or spinning class, maybe some football/netball training to make it interesting.  To this we only add one circuit or high-intensity class a week.  That does mean around 4 training sessions per week which not everyone has time for, in which case you may need 2 circuit sessions per week or even consider an aerobics class which incorporates some weights.  You’ll be surprised by how tough they can be.

 So go out and find a class near you.  In London and the UK you can go to websites like evercise and classfinder and find a pay-per-class workout in your area of any modality.

 

 

Functional Flexibilty. How Flexible must one be?

 

Flexibility tips you wouldn’t get from your yoga instructor

Mention flexibility and people immediately talk about ‘touching your toes’ or ‘doing the splits’.  Now I don’t dispute how great these things are but they should not be seen as the ‘be-all and end-all’ of flexibility and fitness; for how many dancers do you know are suffering from aches and pains yet they are some of society’s most flexible people. 

Do we need to touch our toes or do the splits?

Not necessarily.  In this blog we talk about functional fitness so let us talk about the splits; rarely during the day are we required to perform the splits so is there any point?  Having said that, it is still necessary to have a certain degree of flexibility in the groin area to perform acts like, well you know, use your imagination!!!  So stretching this area to get SUFFICIENTLY FLEXIBLE would be a requirement, that’s the key word. 
 

 

 

How about touching the toes?

A little more important as while it isn’t quite a daily life requirement with good and fluid lower extremity reach we have less need to round our backs so much when lifting.  So once again we simply work on getting enough flexibility to make our heavy lifting safer.

Is there such thing as tight shoulder?

Sort of.  While not quite a misnomer a more correct description would be ‘restriction in shoulder mobility’.  The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body and the movement there is more multi-dimensional than anywhere else.  The overwhelming majority of western society have very poor external rotation at the shoulder joint simply because phones, computers and steering wheels always require our arms to be turned inwards.  The other mobility issue we tend to have is limited overhead reach.  Try to get in this position as a test.  Heels, back and shoulders against the wall then lift your arms and try to hit the wall behind you, WITHOUT ARCHING YOUR BACK.  If you can’t do this comfortably then every time you reach for that can of beans on the top shelf or reach for the support bars on a train you can potentially aggravate something in the lower or upper back, even somewhere in the shoulders. 

 
 

 

 

So here is my gift to you; perform this mobility exercise to help with all round shoulder mobility.  Lie on your side and place hips and knees at 90 degree angles.  Then straighten your top arms and make a circle with it, ideally by keeping fingers in contact with the floor at all times.  There is also a progression there to help you.  It’s an exercise performed by Olympic lifters (who are not body builders) showing that there is more to flexibility then what your yoga instructor teaches you.
 

 

 

 
Why are super-flexible people so flexible then?

To a certain extent there is just that notion we have of flexible and flexible people; they tend to be people that can lift their leg up very high and do the splits.  These people tend to only be flexible by virtue of their natural skeletal shape and the way they have trained through their lives giving their bodies a tolerance for excessive lengthening.  We perhaps can’t lengthen so much because our pain receptors kick in so early. It is also worth knowing that with so much movement, what the super-flexible might be lacking is the ability to control their movement which exposes them to risk of injury.  Moving on further, when we begin to envy such movement and try to overstretch to do the same what we may be creating is adaptive-lengthening around the joints which can have the detrimental effect of destabilising them.

 

I hope this has shown you that there is more to flexibility than meets the eye so don’t worry if you can’t do the splits and attach more importance to good movement, your ability to get down and up in the most fluid manner, or pick something off the floor in a very safe way.

 

Hopefully, the last paragraph made things a little clearer.  For more of an insight into functional flexibility refer to the Gray Institute. 

Gym-Free Training the Primal Way

With my last post endorsing gym-based training I am now going to contradict myself and want to talk about not needing a gym; when I talk about gym-based training I am actually referring more to a style of training that involves a lot of pushes and pulls, squats and lunges.  Although these exercises emerged from the gym we know that they do not have to be done in a gym.

Home and outdoor training is now becoming popular with workouts like insanity, p90X, even Jilian Michaels and Tracey Anderson (below).  So the material is out there, what seems to be missing is any movement-based programming.  Of course you have the body-part splits but in this blog we talk about movements.  Going back to our primal movements, we need to make sure our programme covers them all in some shape or form to ensure every main muscle receives the necessary treatment.

The issue then comes with pulling; it is hard to find a pulling exercise which is bodyweight only unless of course you have a horizontal bar.

Enter the push-plank, an exercise which I learnt from my mentor Scott Sonnon.  He bills it as the only exercise of its kind, a horizontal pulling exercise that is bodyweight-only.  It is demonstrated here as part of his firefighter workout.

 

Of course, the puling strength needed is minimal but we must keep the goal in mind and that is training movement.  We just need the brain to get the message that a pulling action has been completed.  This is a health-first approach to fitness so intensity can be worked on later.  Putting it together then this workout will incorporate all 6 primal movements.

10 reps of each of the following:

1. Press-up to rotation
2. Squats
3. Single-Leg Deadlift
4. Push Plank
5. Lunge

3 sets of this can be quite challenging and a great mini-workout by itself.  It also works well after 2-3K run before your stretch.

 

And here is the video to help you

 

 

 

Why Primal Movement

Much of fitness is promoted via the avenue of aesthetics.  It seems that the general public only look at fitness as a necessary means to look good.  Hence, if one is naturally slim there is simply no need to keep fit.  I feel that this is something that needs to change.  Keeping and staying fit is an important part of being healthy.  That is why we get our kids out the house and away from the computer, tablet and games console.



As we get older this activity needs to continue but the nature of activity needs to change.  Of course there is nothing wrong with continuing the pursuit of that sport but I would argue that a traditional gym approach to fitness needs to be implemented even if not in a gym.  This is because sports like running, football and netball do not train the whole body proportionately.  A traditional gym method however allows one to exercise all the main muscles adequately.

So how do we go about a gym routine?  I argue against routines from magazines as these tend to be inspired by bodybuilders and athletes that, in their later years, become adapted to their activities and the imbalances evolve into injuries.  It is more challenging to find a format that can be adopted at any age and any level which gives the whole body a balanced a workout.  Enter Paul Chek, a leader in fitness with a health-first theme.  He coined the concept of primal movements; the movements that we all have to perform in some shape or form.  If we structure a program around them we can be satisfied that every main muscle in our body has received a good workout with little fear of an over-compensation anywhere.

  So what are the primal movements?
1. Pushing Pressing overhead and kneading dough
2. Pulling Pulling a rope (of a well)
3. Lunging Using the legs to lift an object
4. Squatting Having to stay low behind cover (staking out prey)
5. Bending Getting down to life something
6. Rotating Chopping down trees


For primal people these movements would require significant strength.  Today's modern world still requires us to execute these movements although often without the high load.  Hence there's an area within our physiology, even within our brains that remains untapped unless we train loaded movement.  In fact (excuse the simplistic explanation) we could say that there is untapped energy within our system that is just sitting there in the form of fat deposits laid around the body because we do not train loaded movement.

For the original source in primal movement patterns I recommend this book available via most popular book stores.