Have you earned it?

“I want to lose weight. I heard that HIIT training and kettlebells are the best for cardio… and that you only have to do four minutes of work a week to lose fat…..”

As a Personal Trainer this can often be the opening sentence when conducting an initial goal setting session with a new client. And to be honest, all of the above is kinda true…. ish.

Most clients approach a PT with a worthy goal of losing weight or gettin’ ripped! Leaving aside the mechanics of ditching bodyfat and increasing lean muscle mass, I want to have a look at whether you’ve earned the right to lose fat or ‘get muscly’.

Whilst tools like kettlebells, clubbells and barbells are fantastic tools to use, are you ready for them?

Let’s imagine that you want to build your dream home. You level off the ground, put up some walls, insert the windows and doors and then throw on a roof. Sorted! But it isn’t very comfortable inside your new dream house, is it? There’s no electricity or gas because you never bothered to set it up and after the first thunderstorm there’s a giant crack down the side of your new house because you forgot to lay… foundations! The ground swole up and buckled, the wind lashed down and because your house wasn’t on an even keel anymore it broke in half.

This analogy seems far fetched but it’s not really.  Many people join a gym, find a programme in a magazine or the internet and jump straight in. This is very similar to our dream home-builder, you’ve levelled the ground (joined a gym and found a programme) and started to work out (walls, doors and roof).  If you’re lucky enough that you’ve built your house on solid bedrock in an area with no thunderstorms you’re going to be comfortable in your new house for a long time (so long as you have 3G connectivity and a portable gas stove).

If you’re coming from a sedentary background or from a layoff from injury, your movement patterns here have been compromised or compensated. You are no longer moving the way you’re suposed to.  You have a disfunction and to para-phrase functional strength and movement Guru Gray Cook:

“You don’t want to build fitness on top of dysfunction.”

What happens is similar to our dream house example. You start to find it uncomfortable in your body (your house), there are niggles and pains that constantly bother you (we didn’t even get into household sanitation!) and then one day… BANG!

“OUCH! What was that?”

That was your ankle/knee/back/shoulder/neck just giving out on you. Congratulations, you now need physio if you’re lucky and surgery if you’re not. You didn’t lay your foundations and now you are paying the price.

Often sedentary people have led a life where they repeat the same pattern of activity (or inactivity) and this leads to certain muscles just deciding to take the rest of the life off! What’s very interesting, is how in some cases it might just be one muscle on one side that decides to take a holiday, lets use the example of your right gluteus medius (or the middle muscle of your right butt).

Through whatever mechanism that is routine in your life, be it the way you drive your car, lounge on the sofa, or only kick things with your left leg, your right butt decides to turn off… Then you decide to hire join a gym to get that weight off of you.

This left/right imbalance is going to cause a big problem for you, if say you decide to blast straight into some HIIT style kettlebell training. BANG… there goes your right knee, cue pain, cue swelling, cue swearing to never step foot in the gym again!

This happened, because you hadn’t yet earned the right to do this protocol (HIIT) with that tool!

So how to do we earn the right?

It’s very common for me to be approached by a client with some muscular imbalance and what we first have to do is restore ‘normal’ pain free functional movement.  This can sound kind of boring (it’s not!) and clients can get disheartened because they aren’t doing the cool HIIT stuff from ‘The Biggest Loser’.  But regaining functional movement patterns has an interesting side effect….

You start to move again! Like you did when you were a child, and do you know what also happens? Because you’re moving more, you’re burning more fuel and….. the weight starts to creep off of you, almost over night.  And the big bonus?

You have now earned the right (and developed the body) to move onto some of that cool HIIT style training.

So when I ask you whether you have earned the right, I’m not asking from a moral perspective but instead I’m asking whether you have put in the work and prepatation to bring you to the point where you will reap the greatest benifits.

HIIT, Tabata, or even German Volume Training (if you want to get all muscly) are excellent protocols to follow, but are you ready for them yet?

Be fit, be strong, be happy!