That is awesome. But, what derails many people. Are injuries!
If you can’t train consistently, you can’t change your body and health.
No fat loss
No muscle
No improving your fitness and health.
2 ways not to get banged up are
Warm-up properly
Trains movements that your body loves.
Let’s start with the warm-up.
A few things we want a warm-up to do.
Warm-up the body temperature.
Loosen tight muscles
Put your joint in ideal alignment.
Practice movements you’ll do later.
Ramp your nervous system, for a great session.
A warm-up should look like this
Exercise 1 – Stretch tight muscles that will limit you. These are often front side muscles like the chest, front hip, and front thigh.
Exercise 2- Core, we want to do an exercise to activate your core. This will get your core muscles ready but also allow your hips to be more flexible.
Exercise 3 Backside, we want to activate the back side. This is due to the backside muscles are often weaker and need more work to get going. Doing so will also put your joints centered for a safe workout.
Exercise 4 Movement prep, is where we practice the most important move, we will do in the workout. This is usually the exercise that you’ll go most intense with. I usually program two exercises here. Example bodyweight squat and pushups for 3 sets of 3. We are trying to perfect our form, so when we add weight later. We are ready to rock.
Exercise 5. Power, we want to get our nervous system ready to work hard, do a few sets of low rep power exercises. Jumps. Sprints or throws. Have these go with what you will train. For example on leg day, do jumps and on an upper day, do throws.
In my next, blog I’ll go over training movements your body loves. But, for now, make sure your warm-up is right.
Here are some same warm-ups examples
Leg day warm-up
Couch stretch 60s per
SidePlank 2x 20s
Bridges 2x 10
Light kb squat 3 reps, then a light kb RDL 3 reps for 3 sets
We are all busy, so we want to make sure the time in the gym, is helping us.
2 ways to do this are to focus on fundamental movements, instead of body parts.
And go deep on a few exercises, instead of doing many.
Fundamental movements are movements that we, made to. When we wrap our training, around this, we tend to
Get strong and build muscle easier
Burn more calories
Become resilient to injuries
The movements are
squat
single leg
Hip hinge
Upper push
Upper Pull
Locomotion, like walking, sprinting, jogging and loaded carries
So, throughout the week, we want to hit each movement at least twice. By doing this you will supercharge your results and get a great workout in less time.
The next thing is to stop doing a bunch of work, that is subpar and start working hard at just a few things. We can do that by
Doing more warm-up sets.
Focus on great form and control.
Rest properly, so we can go harder with each exercise.
A great example of this is my basic leg day
Squat
Hip Hinge
Single-Leg Exercise
Hamstring or glute work.
On paper, it doesn’t look like much but, when we focus on the things above. It is a kick-ass workout, that produces results.
HIT is regarded as the king of fitness and losing fat.
But, there is something much better.
Actually, when this was taken away from people during the shutdown.
This easily was the reason people gained 10,20 and even 30lbs of fat.
Here is the cool thing, it is not hard to do and it won’t leave you exhausted in a puddle of your sweat.
It is NEAT
Nonexercise activity thermogenesis
Yes, it is better and more effective than HIT in most ways.
NEAT is all the movement we do that isn’t planned exercise. Here are a few examples.
Going to work, walking to your car, then inside the building, then going from meeting to meeting all day or walking stairs, etc….
Small movements you do all day.
It’s leaving your house to grab lunch or dinner, as well as picking your kids up from school. So much of this stuff, we stopped doing.
It is going for walks or walking your dog.
Playing with your kids.
All of this was taken away during the shutdown, people suffered big time.
Now, that people are trying to get back into shape, they are thinking super intense workouts.
There is nothing wrong with that, but if you aren’t back to work, intentionally getting your NEAT up will pay off big time.
NEAT can burn 1000 calories a day or more, where even the most grueling workout will get you maybe 200-500 calories.
If you are not back to work or you have a sit-down job here are two ways to drive up NEAT, get lean and improve your fitness and health.
#1 Track steps on your phone or tracker, shoot for higher daily averages. 10,000 is usually the standard but if you’re doing 2000, and get up to 5000. That is going to make a big impact.
#2 Not into the tracking thing. Start a daily walk practice at least 10 minutes a day. Let’s be honest we all have 10 minutes. Do it in the am, on a lunch break, or in the evening. You’ll be surprised how effective a nice walk can be when done daily.
Before you worry about the HIT sessions, get your NEAT up.
By the way, if you’re looking for a great training program to pair with your NEAT.
I’m looking for personal training clients
I have open session at:
6,7,9am and 430,5,530 pm Mon-Fri
All programs come with a free Saturday Group Workout.
E-mail me atbobby1057@gmail.com if you are interested.
Fitness can be broken down into a few modalities Strength Cardiovascular Mobility and flexibility Power/ speed Resiliency injury prevention
Strength training is the only one that will positively affect all 4 in a big way.
This is the reason why most of my client’s workouts are strength-based and why I spend most of my workout time lifting.
To get all the benefits, there is a certain way to lift. Here are the top focused
Mostly compound exercises Lift heavy for low to high reps Lift pristine form and control Rest properly Do more overall work on weaker muscles usually, these are the upper back, hamstrings glutes, and core You warm up properly
If you need help getting into shape, check this out.
My results in advanced program
Get results at a discount before you invest
Get 2 personal training sessions a week
1 team training session a week
Nutrition coaching
Weekly nutrition Q and A
Online support group
A training app to log your workouts and get extra workouts
For most of my training career , I got people to eat healthy and get leaner by following an eating approach, that was anti- calorie counting.
Here is the thing. I never really liked counting calories personally and I assumed many other didn’t either.
If I could make it, simpler, people were more likely to do it, I thought.
This worked for many people.
I advocated improving your food quality and you’ll most likely eat the right amount and reach your goals.
The big things I would advocate were
Eating protein based meals with real foods like chicken, beef, fish protein shakes, yogurt , cottage cheese etc
Eat more fruits and veggies.
Eat healthier and more natural versions of fats and carbohydrates, the ones that were not highly processed like potatos instead of breads and olive oil instead of fake fats like margarine.
Drink plenty water
Eliminate or reduce, most other foods.
Now, for most this way works and works well. The problem is right now,
It might not be something your even willing to do.
Also , you can still be overeating, even if its healthy foods, this can stop you from getting lean.
I wanted to give you 5 reason why counting calories, may be just what you need.
To me counting calories means
-Recording the foods you eat on tracker like my fitness pal.
-Doing your best to accurately measure and weigh most of your foods.
This isn’t something to do for ever, but maybe a month or so. To educate your self and become more aware.
Not everyone has to do this, but it’s smart for some situations . I’m going talk about this today.
Your brand new to diets and eating healthy. There is a lot talk about eating intuitively. The issues is you don’t know, what you don’t know. I’ve been, eating healthy for most of my adult life. I can look at a plate of food and judge how many calories are on that plate better, than some one who hasn’t paid attention to food much in there life .
There lays the issue, often when people struggle to lose fat, there eating more than they think. This is why spending a brief time, counting and measuring food. Can be real eye opener for many and make it very clear, what you have been over doing.
For beginners focus on hitting a calorie goal of around 12 x your ideal body weight and hit body weight in grams of protein, is great place to start. Than try to fill the rest of the foods you eat with, healthy foods and foods, you enjoy.
2. You like eating junky food. For some people there just aren’t willing to eliminate all unhealthy foods.
That is perfectly okay. You’ll see a tremendous health benefits and be able to lose fat by eating mostly unprocessed foods and not overeating.
If your someone, like this , who always likes to include some junky food like, ice cream, candy, chips etc.
It best to always track calories, because your not going be just eat those things and expect to lose weight. There just too easy to over eat.
Like I said this okay. You can include some of those things, if you keep your calories and protein in check. You’ll still get really good results. With this style of eating, but there is always a give and take.
You want your chips, you have to sacrifice carbs or calories some where else. So maybe less carbs at dinner or lighter breakfast and/or lunch, so you can still have chips and not going over your calories, so you can still lose fat.
3. You’ve been eating super clean. So, this another situations that happens. You’ve been eating healthy. You eat a ton of clean food. You might of gotten some where, but maybe your stuck now.
But, you feel stuck. There is a myth that eating healthy is the same thing as easing for fat loss. Healthy is good but fat loss is always about eating less calories, than you take in.
Hence why tracking calories, might be a huge eye opener for you.
4. Direct way to fast fat loss. So, many people want fast results. But, the most direct way to lose fat is tracking calories diligently .
You can eat clean , you can eat keto or go low fat, but you can still get stuck, if your still eating too much.
Counting calories, is the best way ensure fat loss, if your in a rush.
Those are a few times,when counting calories is the thing that you may need. But, you don’t have to count to get results.
I had guy go from 300lbs to 180 without counting calories.
But, just because you don’t count calories to lose fat doesn’t mean that you didn’t lower calories, which caused the fat loss.
If your looking to get leaner, I offer free nutrition coaching with me personal training. Hit the contact button and schedule your free assessment and free workout today.
The 2nd most common pain , is shoulder pain. It something I have to deal with .
Being very active most of my adult life.
Lifting, doing OCR races, grappling and fighting, has done a number on them.
There certain drills, that are a must for me.
The funny thing is, people who not as active as I have been, will still experience shoulder pain in the almost the same way.
Three things we need to think about, when it comes to developing better shoulder health and increase the chance of getting out of shoulder pain.
Breathing
Posture
Movement and exercise routine.
These are three different subject. I’ll talk about. But, there all interconnected. Poor breathing, drives poor posture and poor posture effects, the how we move and how we exercise..
Breathing
This might not seem like a big deal but how we breathe effects our posture and also the health] of the muscles, that will contribute to shoulder pain.
If you think of breathing , we do this in two different ways.
Chest breathing, where we breathe shallow into our chest, this is constantly expanding and retracting our muscle in the upper body. This is equivalent to doing 1000’s reps of on these muscles a day. This creates very tight pecs, lats and traps. Which can contribute to shoulder pain and poor shoulder movements.
Also this style of breathing will, also causes us to extend at the lower back 1000′ of times a day. This creates a posture, wherever it is hard to breathe in the second way, I’ll talk about . This is how , poor breathing patterns, create worse posture .
The second way breathing is breathing into our diaphragm and into stomach . This the ideal way to breathe , most of the time. This way reduces our stress, improves our cardio, as far shoulder pain reduces, the tension in all those, upper body muscle we over use, when we breathe shallow into the neck.
There is an issue, though. If we have bad posture, it is hard to breathe into the stomach.
The hips and bottom of the rib cage align to create, this canister or chamber to breathe into the stomach. Without this posture belly breathing can be very tough.
Notice how when the ribs and hips are lined up, the bigger the space to breathe and also the up and down pressure, which protect your low back.
But, if we have poor posture and hips and rib cage are not lined up. It becomes harder to breathe this way. It will feel more natural to breathe through the chest,
This kind of thing, like the chicken or the egg.
Do we have bad posture because we breathe poorly.
Or do we breathe poorly because we have bad posture.
But, by working on both we can, reduce tightness in the shoulder and create better posture, that leads to greater shoulder function and hopefully get out of pain.
Posture
Next is posture, how we spend most of our time. Determine our default posture.
Good or bad.
Sit slouched.
Sit down with back rounded and head forward for 8 hours a day at work.
We are going to have less than ideal upper body posture.
This creates tight muscles and weak muscles, causing an imbalance between the front and rear shoulder. This can create dysfunctional and painful shoulder. Because they can’t stabilize like, they want to,due to this.
What is ideal upper body posture?
This what most people are dealing with. The cross line , shows the tight muscles, and than the weak muscle. This often due to our daily movements and posture
This is ideal posture. Lower back flat , upper back without an excessive curve and head over shoulders. You’ll notice the line, going through the body, that shows you, what great posture is.
Movement and exercise
The third things , we can do, is to exercises to balance things out.
We want to stretch or open tight areas and get the area that are weak, stronger. In general the tight muscles, will be the front muscle and the weak muscle will be the ones in the back.
So, since we are talking the upper body we have to open up.
Pecs/chest
traps
lats
T-spine the part of the spine right behind the chest
We have to get the upper back and shoulder stabilizer stronger and the lower and mid traps, as well rhomboids.
This is where a great programming is important, we don’t want do a program that makes, these things worse. Which is what many workout of day style gyms, can do.
So, what would make this worse?
Too much bench work or chest work.
Not enough push ups
Not enough upper back work
Using bad form and with heavy weight.
So a good program would do theses things.
Have proper warm up that opens the chest and lats and activated the upper back and shoulder stabilizer.
Than during the workouts, we will get more upper back work, than chest and front shoulder work.
Example might be
Warm up
Chest stretch 60 sec per side
Lying wind mill 10 per side
YWT 20 sec per side
Face pull with band 20 reps
Yoga push up 10
Workouts
DB bench press 3x 5
Push ups 3x 10
Ring rows 4 x 10
Band pull aparts 4x 20
Rear flys 3x 15
lateral shoulder flys 3x 15
I hope this helps, you out.
This is something, that wont works like magic, it going take some time to get better shoulders.
Be committed.
Work on breathing, if your shallow breather
Be mindful of posture and do the best you can correct.
Warm properly, make sure we stretch open chest , traps and lats and activate the upper back and back of shoulders
When you train use proper form, make sure not all chest exercises are presses and do more push ups too, there better for shoulder health. Do more upper back than chest, when doing this, think total reps. The workout I gave there, was total 45 reps of chest and 165 reps of upper back, 80 those being lower intensity upper back exercises from band pull parts.
If there is one subject, when it comes to fitness, that is close to my heart.
It is building muscle and getting strong for harder gainer and scrawny dudes.
That was me.
I told this story many times , I was in auto repair shop and I was trying break lug nut.
I was struggling, putting my whole body behind it and I heard a few kids begin me laugh at me.
That afternoon , I joined a gym. I was 17 years old.
The rest history.
There has been many things, I’ve learned since than.
I’ve been working out for the past 16 years.
Here are some of those lessons, I’ve learned.
Bodybuilder Don’t Have The Answers(At least not for guys like you and I)
This was one of my first mistakes Following bodybuilding program in the magazines. . Body builder have a few things, most of us do not have.
Fundamental levels strength and muscle
Great genetic
Taking drugs
So, the programs that you’ll see in magazines might work great for genetically gifted guys, like the ones who would play football in high school.
But, for people like us, they suck. Too much volume and accessory exercises.
What we need to do is to build a strong foundation of strength by
Mastering the basic compound exercises and getting strong at them.
The basic exercises would be a
Squat
deadlift
single leg exercises
upper push like bench press
upper pull like row
Shoot for staying in the rep ranges of 5-8 reps, until you build strong strength foundation. Unlike bodybuilding, your not going hit one muscle group once week.
You want hit it with frequency, hit the same muscle group 2-3 x week. So , full body workouts are great for beginners.
A quick examples
Squat
DB press
1 arm row
Reveres lunge
Plank
Supplements Are Never The Answer
With picking up bodybuilding and fitness magazines. You get a ton of shitty workouts.
But, you get bombarded with ads for all theses supplements, that clam, they will change your life.
I got sucker in , spending so much money on these.
Supplements are exactly, what they are. They should supplements your diet. There far from the most important things.
If you take them, focus on the ones that comes from food and that your having trouble getting in your own diet.
Things I like are
Protein powder
vitamin d
fish oil
magnanimous oil
Green powders
High Intensity
Like I said earlier, I would follow these body building program ,the problem with this was, the volume was way too high, for someone who was very weak.
When you do high volume but your not loading that much weight, this is highly ineffective.
One of the first times, I realized how important intensity was, when I got in to this training program called Heavy Duty by Mike Mentzer
It was doing 1-2 exercises per body part but only doing 1 set to absolute failure.
At that time, I saw my best gain with this way. Way better than any gains I did following workouts, that had 20 set per body part.
Although, I now do more sets, than 1 . It taught me how to train all out and how effective it can be.
You don’t know intensity until, you know what failure looks and feels like. Having parts of your workout, where go to failure, is important. Just from a stand point of learning to go all out.
You might, think ,you did a hard set of 10, but maybe if you did that to failure, you would got 20 reps instead.
Which mean that set of 10 wasn’t really, as intense as you thought.
There was this squat, challenge I’ve done in the past. That I loved. Where you put your body weight in pound on the bar and squat for max reps and see what you can get.
There were times, where after 12 reps, I would feel like I was done, like I only had few reps left.
But, I would take it one rep at time and and push it until I couldn’t. Before I knew, I would be at 25+ reps.
Intensity is important .
A method of tracking this, is rating your RPE after each set
RPE is rate of perceived exertion, rate from 1-10
Most of your working sets should be a 7-9.
A good way to think about this, is if you went all out for , how many more reps you could get past the given rep range.
Say your doing sets of 8,
If you could get 3 extra reps or more it is probably a 7 or lower
If you could get an extra 2 reps, it might a 8
If you could get 1 extra reps, it might be a 9
If you could get 0 extra reps, it would be at 10.
This is great way engage intensity , this is also a great way to know, when you should add weight.
If you do a set of 8 chest presses and the RPE was 9, you probably know, that you don’t need go up, for your next set, or next week, you should stay at that weight.
Ramp Up Sets
This was a game changer, for the longest time, when I did a workout. I would do the prescribed sets and reps, that was it. Maybe I would a 1-2 warm up sets for real heavy lifts.
But, when I started to incorporate ramp up sets, notice huge difference.
A ramp up set are 1-4 easy to harder sets, that help, you get ready to handle heavy weight, but also give you the opportunity to practice great form, when the exercises are easier, thus increasing your performance at that lift, when the weight is heavy.
I kinda did this for big lifts, but when I took it more seriously and did this with almost every exercises. I added more muscle and got stronger.
The reason for this is most likely due a few things.
Your better prepared to handle heavy weight.
The little extra volume, may have help build muscle.
Because I’m warmed up better , I has the ability to go harder on my working sets.
It help me know which weights, are the best for my working sets, instead of guessing, and going to heavy or light for my first 1-2 sets, which used happen often.
Here an example for ramp up sets with a bench press.
Say your workout call for 3x 8, to me a hard set of 8 might be 155lbs
I might do this
bar for 8
95lbs for 8
115 for 8
135 for 8
Than do my first working set at 155
If your not doing this, start doing this and notice more strength, more muscle and maybe more importantly less injuries or aches and pains
Mix Methods (conjugate)
Typically we work on one thing at time, during weeks and months of training.
We might focus on, just building muscle, than strength and maybe than power, etc.
But, I’ve seen my best gains working on multiple methods at a time.
I don’t like working on different thing each phase.
Like a few months of strength work than, than building muscle and than power development.
I find that, doing this causes you to lose your gains in one area, too fast.
I prefer working on everything in each workout or at least each week.
Popular by westside BB conjugate system.
Does this, you work on multiple modalities simultaneously.
For example my strength workout yesterday for my group training was.
1A DB Press 2/3x 4-8 (max strength)
1B Rotational MB Slams (power)
2 Push ups 3x 15 (hypertrophy/muscle building work)
3A Strap rows 15 (hypertrophy/muscle building work)
3B Forward and backward lunges 8 per side (hypertrophy/muscle building work)
3C Rack Walk 30 sec (core development)
Repeated for 10 minutes
Finisher: Hill sprints 10 sec 5 sets( conditioning and lactic power development)
In one workout we built multiple, things : max strength, power and focus on building muscle. As well building conditioning.
This work well because it hits the three triggers of building muscle
Mechanical tension aka heavy lifting
Time under tension aka high reps with controlled tempos
Metabolic stress- combination of higher reps with incomplete rest and the intervals
This is fun way of training, with a huge bang for your buck.
Recovery
Last thing I want point on is recovery. After , I grew frustrated with bodybuilding workouts, I found in magazines.
I discovered this old school body builder, who taught the complete opposite.
Instead of more sets, he said one.
Instead of training 6x week, he said train 2-4x week.
He emphasis recovery.
I saw at that time, my best gains by following his guide lines.
Although, I don’t agree with all his thoughts now.
He was way a head of his time, with how important intensity and recovery are to build muscle.
He advocated 1-2 exercises per body part and 1 brutal set taken to failure and than you would take 3 days off.
If you want build muscle, you have to respect the recovery process, that is focusing sleep and structuring your workout in way, that allows for recovery.
For sleep , I’d shoot for going bed by 10pm and trying get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep.
Than for workouts, try not to lift 3 straight days. Here are a few splits I like
Mon Weds Fri Fullbody
Mon Tues Thurs Fri Upper/lower split
Mon Weds Fri lower upper and pull
Now, let take this stuff and hit the ground running . Let me know if you have any questions.
