What did you expect?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Although Newton's third law of motion does not directly relate to todays blog, it made me think of the topic. What I want to talk about is expectations, or actually unrealistic expectations, and how they can be hampering your progress.

My bikini shrank too!

When an individual decides to undergo a change in lifestyle, the expectation of change or success is directly correlated with the amount of information that person has received regarding how much time and effort is going to be required to achieve the goal.  For example if a person has been bombarded with information stating that 20lbs of fat can be lost or 20lbs of muscle can be gained in a matter of weeks with minimal effort, it is natural to expect this to be true. Therefore they enter into this endeavor with a high expectation of success with a very low level of commitment. Of course when results fail to meet unrealistic expectations the person becomes discouraged and thinks they somehow failed.  After this cycle has been repeated a few (or many) times, the person gives up trying to achieve such goals and deems them impossible.  The real issue though is not that the goal is impossible to achieve. It is impossible to achieve in the time frame and effort level you have allotted to it.

Fitness marketing today is really no different that get rich quick schemes that have been around since anyone can remember. These schemes are based around the premiss that if you follow their "program" you can achieve wealth beyond your wildest dreams with;
1) Very little monetary investment
2) Very little time investment
3) Very little effort and sacrifice

You could take the ad copy from most of these schemes and switch out the words "wealth" and "money" for "abs" and "lean" or "glutes" and "ripped" and have a website or infomercial ready to go for the latest and greatest supplement, fitness gadget or weight loss/muscle building program.

Instead of citing Newtons law perhaps I should invent my own formula.  Lets try this. Results = Effort x Time.  An even simpler way to state this is, you get out what you put in. Now if you set your expectations based on the fact that results come with consistent hard work over the long term, expectations become much more realistic. When you enter into an endeavor with a realistic expectation of success based on your willingness to be consistent in the long term, your chances of reaching that goal are greatly increased. Apply this to paying off your credit card or trimming some bodyfat.  The variables may change but the basic principals always work.

Close your eyes and save your money

I had a email question from a client this week and I thought I would share it in todays blog. Hope it helps someone out.

Kevin

I was having a discussion today with one of my friends who weight trains on a regular basis as well as does a few 5 and 10k runs per year.  She said she has been using glutamine to help with muscle recovery for awhile now.  I was wondering if I should start taking it to help with my own recovery?

Sincerely
Mary (not her real name)

Hi Mary. Thanks for your question. 

For about the last decade or so one of the go to supplements to improve muscle recovery has been glutamine. The supplements main claim to fame has been its anti-catabolic effects as well as its ability to rebuild tissue, improve immune response and increase protein synthesis.  I know this sounds perfect for anybody involved in regular training.  The problem is the studies that showed these benefits were done on people recovering from major trauma (surgery, sever burns, blunt force trauma). Although the workout routine I provided you is intense,  you only suffer a very small fraction of trauma that these conditions represent. Unless you are deficient in glutamine (which is very unlikely) or you are recovering from major trauma, I see no reason to take extra glutamine. In this recent study done on healthy young athletes, no significant difference was found between the group that received a massive amount (0.9g/kg) of glutamine and the group that received none.

Just 5 more minutes

In my opinion the best anti-catabolic and recovery supplement anyone can use is simple shut eye. Trying to find a supplement to replace sleep and rest is nothing new and that is not really surprising.  There is very little money to be made in telling someone to go to bed earlier. That still does not change the fact that it is true. If you want to get the most from your training efforts, fuel your muscles with whole nutritious food, and try getting an hour or two more sleep per night that you currently do. You will feel better, and you will save some money to boot. Hope this answers your question.

Kevin

A Word On Coaching

 

I often have aspiring trainers and coaches ask me how I became a coach. What books did I read, what certifications did I take etc. I usually don't have a good answer for them, mostly because I don't know. I have read countless books and taken many useless certifications. I am not convinced any of them made me any better than the next. I usually end up just telling them this. If you want to be a  coach/trainer, coach a thousand people. If you want to get better, coach a thousand more. Repeat until your satisfied you know everything. Don't expect to ever be satisfied.  I came across this little blurb from the great coach Vern Gambetta.  It seemed to sum things up pretty well. Enjoy.

Learning to Coach

What is the best way to learn to coach? The answer is quite simple, get out and coach. There is no substitute for being on the firing line. Not only to write the workout but to coach the actual workout. To make it happen, to make adjustments, change exercises; manipulate rest intervals, to discipline an athlete, whatever it takes. No textbook, no online tutorial can prepare you. Certifications will not prepare you. Internships at palatial training facilities will not prepare you. You must get out in the real world. What do you do if you don’t have a weight room, or a track? What can you do? The best teacher is experience. If you want to be a coach, then start to think like a coach, act like a coach. I knew I wanted to be a coach by my senior year in high school, so I started watching how coaches coached, how they organized practices, how they communicated with their athletes and I coached. During the summers I helped my high school basketball coach. I had coaching classes in school where we had to coach. Gather experiences, put yourself in situations where you must innovate, must organize, must lead. You can never know too much, you must keep learning. Learn from your successes and failures. Above all remember coaching is so much more than the X’s and O’s, those X’s and O’s are people, they have feelings, they have lives. Coaching is about helping to make people better, not just better athletes but better people. I learned very early on that coaching is not something that you do it is something that you are.

Vern Gambetta

Ways to cope with people who sap our energy and cause us stress

http://bit.ly/jPFgtv

We all have a colleague, acquaintance, or relative that can shower you with negativity and sap your energy every time you interact with them.  check out this link for some tips on how to deal with them and minimize their impact on your day.

Feel sick in the stomach after talking with someone? Or like you? ve been hit by a hurricane? Perhaps exhausted, stressed-out or overwhelmed? Sounds like you?re the victim of an energy vampire attack. Energy vampires don?t suck our blood ? they ?suck? the life force out of us. They feed off our energy during social interactions, [...]

Exercise can be as good as or better than antidepressants for treating depression

Michael Otto, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of psychology, says the effects of exercise on treating depression rivals antidepressants in head-to-head studies, reports Susan Seligson in her April 2010 article on the Boston University website BU Today. Otto says many clinical trials show that people with major depression who regularly exercise get better Read more

Want to protect your knees. Squat deeper!

Nice squat but this
guy needs a tan

  Right off the bat lets get one thing straight. A squat is when the hip drops below the top of your knee and the back remains straight (straight and vertical are not the same thing). Anything above this is not a squat and I can not vouch for its safety. It has long been thought that it was safer for your knees if flexion was reduced. This has led to people stopping well above parallel all in the name of safety. Then of course we have all witnessed the performance of squats where depth is reduced in direct relation to weight going on the bar. This has nothing to do with safety and a lot more to do with impressing your friends.  The very act of reducing this range of motion while increasing resistance has probably lead to more knee and back injuries, in and outside of the gym, than any amount of properly performed squats with any amount of weight.

Partial squats stress the quads and the knee joint without activating the supporting structure of the glutes, adductors and hamstrings. In the full squat position the anterior force provided by the quads is balanced by the posterior force provided by the hamstrings. So in simple terms the quads put forward tension on the knee  and the hamstrings put tension in the opposite direction. Without this balancing tension a shearing force is produced on the patellar tendon and tendinitis (or worse) is likely to occur sooner or later.  The squat of course takes the blame but you have not been doing squats. The hamstring group of muscles does not come into play before parallel so they can do nothing to counteract this shearing force produced by the quads as they try to to grind the weight to a screeching halt before it staples you to the ground. 

Having a load on has
really improved my form

Doing your squats to a full, deep position protects your knees outside of the gym as well.  ACL injuries are very common in sports.  The ACL is primarily involved in preventing the tibia from sliding forward relative to the femur.  The hamstrings do the same thing.  If the hamstring have not strengthened from correct range of motion squatting, they cannot help the ACL support the knee and the ligament is left to take all of the strain.  Strong  hamstrings can do such a good job of helping to support the knee that it is possible to do a correct full squat with a damaged ACL while a quarter or half squat will cause sever pain.  If more high school and college football/hockey/soccer players were made to squat to correct depth it would likely go a long way in preventing ACL injuries on the field. Back injuries would also be reduced as athletes would not be able to load their spines with nearly as much weight. Its rare to see a high school student that can squat 225 properly but it is not uncommon to see one doing some bastardized form of a squat with 400+ while the rest of the team spots him.

Many times knee injuries and hamstring pulls are blamed on athletes being too "quad dominate" when in fact their quads are not too strong, the hamstrings are too weak.  Spend your time in the squat rack wisely and get every rep below parallel. It may surprise you initially how little weight you can do but I promise you it will pay off in the long run, both in how you look and how you perform.

Do you want to be comfortable or would you like to improve?

Yeah, I usually work out 2-3 hours per day

Everybody has heard someone talk about being in "the zone" when they are training.  I have seen hundreds of people in a zone when they are working out but its not the one you think. The zone I want to talk about, and I want you to avoid completely if you are trying to make physical change, is the comfort zone. The first time you workout it is very hard to get into the comfort zone. Everything is new to you and physically nearly everything is challenging beyond what you are used to. This produces the typical soreness in the days that follow.  You feel like you must have done the most productive workout in the world, wether it be running stairs, lifting weights, or swinging around a pole while sweating to the 80's.  Logically, you continue on with this same attack. The problem is very soon the challenge your body was not accustomed to becomes not such a challenge anymore. Our bodies being by nature quite lazy, stops changing simply because it no longer has to.  You have hit the comfort zone. To kick start the process again you need to introduce a new stimulus, one you are not used to. This is one of the reasons (there are several) "Long Duration Slow Exercise" is so ineffective at producing long term results as far as body composition changes go. You are limited by how you can add stimulus. This is the same reason why many people can play sports like soccer, hockey, and golf on a regular basis but not lose any weight. You quickly become accustomed to activities you do on a regular basis. If you want your exercise to produce a body that looks like it has not been comfortable most of the time, you need to add intensity to pull yourself out of the comfort zone, and you need to do it often. This means something different for everyone. If your weak, work to get stronger. If your slow, work to get faster. Most people are both but don't really work on either one. Treat your workouts like a challenge and not just something you do for a set amount of time. If you up your performance you will change guaranteed.  Have a good day.