Questions from the week gone by
I’ve been a bit remiss with my blog writing recently. So, I decided this morning to blast out a short piece detailing some common questions I’ve had in the last week.
So let’s get started…
Why are you doing ‘extra cardio’?
Here’s the long answer: Now, people pay me good money to help them identify their goals, assess their current status and build a road that gets them from A to B. Building a training plan is like cooking a good meal that has a starter/appetiser, a main course, a dessert (because contrary to popular belief we are allowed the occasional dessert!) and perhaps coffee to finish.
Each course of a meal has a specific function and can be likened to a workout:
- Starter (prepares the palate for the main course) = Warm up
- Main (should be nourishing and tasty, but not too filling) = Bulk of session (let’s use a strength session)
- Dessert (an indulgence, shouldn’t be too large but should ‘entertain’) = This has to be a HIIT finisher!
- Coffee (and a mint) = The stretch/foam rolling that lets you ‘close’ the session
Now, each course has its own recipe and each course has to complement the others. If we added a wine to our meal we need to follow certain rules of palate, such as white wine doesn’t work with red meat and red wine doesn’t work with fish or poultry. The same type of rules apply with workouts.
We need to follow the order of the meal: warm up, strength work, met-con, cool & stretch. If we do them out of order, say have the coffee before the dessert, we’ve ruined the meal by screwing up our palate. A lemon sorbet preceded by a coffee and a mint just doesn’t taste good!
The best example in workout terms would be to do met-con before strength work. We’ve already heavily taxed the anaerobic system and developed an oxygen debt… this makes us weaker and unable to use the heavy loads we require to develop our strength.
Now let’s take on the issue of ‘extra cardio’ or too much cheap lager/wine. You’ve spent a lot of money going to a restaurant (or trainer) for a five star meal, you turned up with a few cheap lagers in you and proceeded to drink too much wine throughout the meal. The next morning you can’t remember anything of the fantastic meal (so wasted your money) and are throwing up all over the place. You blame the fish course (you did have the fish, right?) as it must have been ‘bad fish’.
In the meal that is a workout, if your trainer has specified strength work followed by met-con, but no steady state cardio in your programme, the chef has done that for a reason. This may be that you have strength deficiencies he’s trying to address and/or there is no need for LSD (long slow duration) training. If your body is asked to adapt to strength and cardiovascular demands simultaneously during the same workout phase, it will choose cardiovascular which may be the wrong attribute to develop.
We trainers need to educate our clients as to the outdated idea of ‘calories burned during a workout’, as LSD training tends to slow down resting metabolic rate whereas a met-con activity is designed to raise resting metabolic rate (which is good for clients who want to lose body fat). If you ask your body to do both at the same time, it will choose the former and you will become what we call ‘skinny fat’.
The short answer is: If you change my programme, don’t complain to me that it’s not working and you’re still overweight. It tastes like crap because you drank the coffee first and had red wine with fish!
There doesn’t seem to be any sit ups in my programme…?
A leading question if ever I heard one.
The short answer to this is: Well spotted, there aren’t.
The long answer is here: To crunch or not to crunch
Basically, the debate is up in the air as to whether additional spinal flexion (or ‘sit ups’) is bad for you. I take the view that we have exercises which work the whole core simultaneously and can develop the core just as well, if not better, than sit ups, so we avoid any risk by using those. Now, for my clients involved in combat or collision sports (and rowing) we do use sit up variations, as we have a sports specific requirement to do so.
You seem to have a bee in your bonnet about ‘metabolics’, What’s up with that?
“Metabolism is misunderstood and to explain it would take a book, not a section of an article. Understand that metabolism is one of those buzz words thrown around in the fitness industry used to sell a whole bunch of pills, powders, potions, and magic bullet solutions based off of fear — fear of the unknown. A “slow metabolism” could be loosely translated to, “I don’t know what the hell is going on” and lumped in with the words functional, muscle confusion, and adrenal fatigue in the “buzz words whose meanings have been bastardized so much that they can be thrown out” category. A slow metabolism is often the term that describes what happens with the combination of related factors such as stress and poor food choices.” – Jon Goodman
Because for ‘metabolic workouts’ to work, you need to have successfully achieved several things prior to doing them:
- Strength
- Form
- Diet
- Not wasting time on ‘extra cardio’
- Sufficient rest (see ‘extra cardio’)
In my opinion 99% of people ‘doing metabolics’ have poor form, insufficient strength, a crap diet and tend to want to do extra cardio because they are not strong enough to perform their met-con at the requisite level of intensity. Sounds harsh right? To add a disclaimer, I do use met-con with almost all of my clients but they have to ‘Earn it first‘.
Will you teach your class this move?
My son asks me this all the time. He’s four years old and very active. He keeps showing me cool moves from his gymnastics class and asking me to teach them to my classes. Unfortunately my answer tends to be:
“No, because most of them aren’t as balanced as you son.” (Actually I say “Sure I will” because it makes him smile).
This is a ‘state of the nation’ crisis. Why does a four year old have better movement quality than 99% of adults? Because we haven’t nailed him to a chair behind a computer yet. The fact that our society is hammering out of us our natural ability to move makes me sad. One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of the Turkish Get Up is because it ties our body together. My main reason for teaching the TGU isn’t because of the awesome core and shoulder stability it develops, but because it gets the left and right side of the body talking to each other again. It’s about the movement, not the load.
Why do squats hurt my knees?
Because that ain’t a squat kiddo. But seriously, Out of ten people I see ‘squatting’ in the gym, only about 1-2 of them are actually squatting.
What are reverse flies?
A colossal waste of your time. Seriously. Unless you are a body-builder (and even then…) you’re better served learning how to do a pull up via: Planks, bat wings, bent rows, inverted rows, negative chins, chin ups, then pull ups. If your goal is to lose body-fat, look sexier, be stronger, hit harder, throw further… then let’s get rid of this isolational exercise crap and get you doing something real. If it was put in your programme by your trainer and you aren’t a body-builder (which is a lifestyle, not a ‘thing you do twice a week’), then they probably put it in there to fill some of your hour because they weren’t prepared to give you a real goal (doing a pull up).
It’s commonly accepted wisdom by Strength and Conditioning coaches that any female who can do five consecutive dead-hang pull ups (fifteen for men) will not have to worry about ‘body fat’. Being strong does that for you.
Okay kids, that’s all for now.
Ciao!