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Q: I walked by your gym the other day and noticed through the window that you guys had people do exercises that I’ve never seen before. They were jumping, skipping, hurling barbells over their heads and swinging what looked like cowbells. So at my own gym tried skipping and even swinging a dumbbell similar to what I saw people do at FIT, but I can’t feel exactly what muscles I’m working. Can you tell me exactly where I’m supposed to feel the burn?
A: You most likely won’t feel a burn anywhere, other than when your aesthetician pours hot wax on your legs. Then you’d feel it on your legs.
But the “burn” during exercise is theoretically caused by lactic acid buildup, which decreases the ph level within that particular muscle group toward the acidic level. (Lactic acid is a by-product of glycogen breakdown during muscular work.) This high concentration of lactic acid in the muscle causes the burn sensation.
This burn sensation is normal and occurs commonly in isolated or smaller muscle groups, such as those emphasized during bodybuilding-style training, but can be felt in bigger muscle groups with other types of exercises, too, such as sprinting, multiple jumping or even skiing. The build up of lactic acid is not a bad thing, and may actually condition the body to improve its efficiency at buffering and removing it.
Since our training goal for almost everyone is “function over form,” we don’t use the bodybuilding method extensively at our facility. We include primarily athletic movements that take the body into many joint directions and complete joint range of motions. These optimize the functions that your body is designed for, but might have lost some of them over the years. When you concentrate on function, then form will follow – and, for the vanity in all of us, “form” refers to aesthetics.
Our focus is in primarily training the body as a whole, rather than as parts. Generally we have a few simple rules:
1) When appropriate, we progress people steadily toward harder physical work, in order to affect positive hormonal and physiological changes. This harder work can mean doing more pushups within one minute for a CEO, squatting more weight for a teacher or standing up from a deeper box for a grandfather.
2) Exercises you’ll see are often ground-base and multi-directional. Many exercises are just body weight done in modified gymnastic-like maneuvers, while others are weight bearing and are done at varying speeds. Sometimes many of the exercises are timed. But they are all modifiable to fit everyone’s fitness level and starting point.
So, at FIT, you won’t find too many exercises that we do which cause a “burning” sensation in any one particular group of muscles. You’ll find that we use the whole body in many different and athletic ways, so that the metabolic cost is optimized, function is improved and, as a result of hard work, form will follow. Our exercise programs are designed to target and improve all the metabolic systems that you live, work and play by.
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Q: So give it to me straight: How hard must I work? I already train twice a week with a personal trainer, and I’ve been doing this for two years. Why can’t I lose the 15 to 20 pounds that I have wanted to lose in forever?
A: To get it out of the way: It isn’t weight that you want to lose, rather it is body fat. Now that we got that out of the way, let me tell you about a client of mine, whom I’ll refer to as Client X.
She is in her 40s, never played a sport, and doesn’t consider herself athletic. She holds a PhD and admits that she is far more cerebral than she is physical. She owns and runs a business. She is like many clients I know – a job, a spouse, some good friends, social activities, personal responsibilities, vacations, and a wrist watch to keep her on schedule with everything in life. But on most days of the week, if she is not already in the gym working with trainers and coaches, she carves time for herself at home, in the middle of a busy day, for more exercise.
In the beautiful and quiet neighborhood of Los Altos, Client X can be found in her garage lifting a heavy barbell above her head, over and over. She also goes to the track regularly for sprint intervals, and she runs a certain loop in the neighborhood. She stays active even while on vacation, lifting volcanic stones along a trail in Hawaii, and she has pictures to prove it – all in good fun, of course, but it doesn’t take away the physical work.
She remains physically active year-round, even through plantar fasciitis, as well as through the most stressful periods that inevitably come with business ownership and sometimes with life itself.
Client X also eats a diet that puts mine to shame, and I’m very conscientious of what I put on my plate. But this is not to mean that she deprives herself of good food and flavors. In fact, the exact opposite: She is a die-hard fan of food. She even gave me a book on this very topic, appropriately called Slow Food: Collected thoughts on Taste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food, written by Carlo Petrini. (If you haven’t read it, you should. You will look at (and eat) food differently, in a good way.)
You see, Client X eats a good variety of whole foods that are minimally processed and high in fiber, nutrients and flavors. She even enjoys microbrewery beers. The secret? Two things: variety and moderation.
Oh, also slow down and truly taste the food.
Although you can hardly see any fat on her well-defined physique, exercising for improved aesthetics isn’t her main goal. To her, exercising is a cerebral process as much as it is a physical one. She likes to think about how she can do something better, whether it’s perfecting lifting technique, adding weight to the barbell, or becoming faster. While exercising makes her body sweat, it also keeps her mind busy. It is an anchor in her day, all other daily events being scheduled around her exercise, forming a cohesive relationship between the daily tasks that make all of us regular members of modern society. She has made exercise a part of her life, and has vowed to take it into her 70s, 80s and 90s – for as long as she can lift something over her head and fit into running shoes.
By now you are beginning to get the idea of how hard you must work and how great your commitment must be. Ask yourself this question: If there are 168 hours in a week and if you workout twice a week, totaling a mere 2 hours, do you honestly think that’s enough to lose the fat weight that you want to see gone? Client X works out with a trainer twice a week, and then she does something else four or five other times through the rest of the week on her own.
So if we can learn something from Client X, it is that great physical effort is needed, frequency must be a high priority, and the attitude toward exercise should transcend mere body image. Train hard, train often, and train for life.
On days that you don’t workout with your trainer, get out there and go for a walk, a hike or a run. Do some high-intensity interval training by sprinting repetitively in short bursts. Or if you’re not prepared for sprinting, walk the hills at a fast pace; if your legs or lungs begin to burn, slow down or stop to observe the squirrels, spy the birds, or smell the roses. But don’t make a hobby out of nature watch because when your legs and lungs are recovered, it’s go-time again. On some days you may just want to go for long a walk with your dog or with a loved one. But, the bottom line is, try to do something every day, making sure that some of it includes intense physical effort.
(And if you feel that time constraints and endless family responsibilities invalidate this story for you, I can tell you about another client who has three kids at very busy ages and who is also involved at a high level in her kids’ schools, yet wakes at 5 o’clock three mornings a week to do a boot-camp class in addition to training with me two other times a week. But I won’t tell you her story because I know you get the idea.)
Well, there it is. You asked. Which means you’re serious about result. Which means you have the right attitude. Start planning what physical activities you’ll do for those days you’re on your own. Good luck.
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Q: I used to work with a personal trainer who was extremely diligent with her instructions for every exercise I did. I believed this constant delivery of instructions was beneficial, but it often got so distractive that I would become paralyzed and feel insufficient. Is this normal or am I just screwy?
A: The average person, it has been said, can process only one or two cues while under physical stress, such as while exercising. Additional cues simply become noise that tugs and claws at the fragile mental focus and physical effort. This is especially true while learning a new exercise, but can still be down-right annoying while struggling through a familiar exercise. Some people can tune out excessive cues, like well-trained athletes, but most average people become discombobulated.
Trainers at a company I used to work for were all told to give their clients constant instructions and verbal cues. This, we were told, increases perceived value in the service we gave. I would imagine that this is a common practice in the personal training industry, passed on by “master” trainers and even by presenters at personal training seminars. In addition to the increased perceived value, many trainers may believe that constant instructions (most of which is merely verbiage or irrelevant information) make them appear smarter. They’re afflicted with what I call the pedantry syndrome, or the need to appear intellectual.
Physical training isn’t rocket science. It isn’t engineering a skyscraper. It isn’t brain surgery. The image of a personal trainer feverishly pulling a measuring tape against a client in all sorts of directions, calculating the kinematics of every limb movement, and controlling every single motion is a comical one. Of course this is an exaggeration, but I have seen verbal instructions from many trainers that parallel such busy distractions! This practice suggests that the human body is completely stupid and that movement is an entirely novel concept. Us homo sapiens, haven moved about and survived on earth for two-hundred thousand years, are motor morons!
While physical training isn’t quantum physics, it also isn’t merely a spit in the bucket. Most people, if left to their own accord, will eventually learn to perform various exercises correctly, for sooner or later the body always discovers the most efficient way to accomplish a task. The body is an efficient machine, a brilliant result of evolution and its own will to survive. But one of the benefits of receiving good instructions from a personal trainer or a coach is that an exercise can be learned much faster than relying on the body’s natural motor instinct to learn. Not only does a trainer or coach save time, but he or she can minimize injury risks that naturally come with increased physical activities. In the context of sports and athletics, instructions help with faster skill acquisition in more complex motor tasks, as well as prevent bad motor habits from occurring.
During an exercise, good trainers or coaches can differentiate between universal technique and individual differences. Therefore, just the right instructions should be given, with just enough cues offered to address the most important points during the exercise. Complicating the motor learning process with a barrage of instructions and cues is like feeding a child his lunch with a spoon, a fork, a pair of chopsticks and a shovel.
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