This pattern is the typical cycle of New Years resolutions, both fitness related and not, and it is the explanation for the typical progress most people seem to make.  However, it is much more devastating to who and what we are when we quit on our comittments to ourselves than we recognize  and it is much simpler to attain our goals than we are willing to admit when we’re trying to quit.

Physically speaking, postponing your fitness goals another year, another month, another day, is a problem because its not as if you have the option of maintaining the status quo if you’re out of shape.  If you suffer from obesity, lack of strength, lack of stamina, etc. It’s not as if you are going to be able to maintain your current fitness status, exactly as it is, for another year.  That year the obstacles to ever reaching reaching your goal will grow mathematically by the strength of a year.  And I don’t mean this in psychological terms.  I’ll address that later.  What I mean is that your body will have had another year living in its current state and accepting that as your norm creating a stasis in an undesireable state, making the momentum harder to break.  It will be another year without challenging your musculoskeletal system will lead to another year of your body allowing unneeded muscle to atrophy so it doesn’t have to feed it.  Blood sugar imbalances, cholesterol build up, hormone production slow down  and all of the physical ailments resulting therefrom will occur.  You’ll write it off as aging, but in the end it isn’t necessary.  The year could have been spent moving in the opposite direction.  But instead you’ll deteriorate, little by little, imperceptibly, not realizing it till you see a picture of yourself as you are today, maybe next year, and you’ll wonder what happened.  You’ll probably end up making the same resolution all over.  And you’ll be starting from further back than where you are now…physically.  As the bodybuilders’ saying goes, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Psychologically is worse.  Counter-intuitively, failure will probably feel less bad the more you do it.  Eventually you will become accustomed to not moving forward, even to physical deterioration perhaps writing it off as the seasons of life.  Failure, will become the norm and eventually you’ll be more and more impressed with less and less performance from yourself.  You’ll become one of those people who can pat themselves on the back because they took the flight of stairs instead of the elevator at work, or consider mowing the lawn a workout and other things that should only be condsidered accomplishments in an old folks home or a physical rehab center.  You’ll be happy with yourself, but it won’t be because you set a high standard for yourself and met it, but rather because you will continually lower the bar to your current performance level thus always achieving your ‘standard.’  That’s the problem with justification.  It works.    The problem is, on some quiet evening, when you’re by yourself, you will be reminded of what you could have been, had you just stuck to your committment this year.  Regret sucks.  And if you want to talk about something that will cause self-doubt, that moment, if it doesn’t spur you on then, to the action you should be taking now, will do more damage than all the positive affirmations to make you happy with your failings will ever be able to cure.  That’s because it will be a recognition of reality.  Not pessimism disguised as reality, but real reality.  You will have to face the fact that the condition you are in, is what it is instead of the best condition you could be in, because you chose it.  “Losers make excuses.  Winners make it happen.”

And regretful and out of shape is not the worst that can happen.  Eventually, unless reversed at some point, it leads to apathy and at least psychological, if not physical, death.  As Nietzche famously informed us, “that which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”  Maybe the reverse is also true.

The good news, unless you’re hell bent on making excuses, is that solutions are usually simpler than we usually at first think.  Notice I didn’t say easier.  Regardless of what areas your fitness goals are focused on, generally speaking they require heavy work in resistance training and aerobic trainng.  They also require planning and discipline for nutrition intake and time management, not only for establishing training time, but ensuring the availability of healthy food and conditions for recovery.  They require the ability to self-prod to do the work when we don’t feel like doing it and the ability to motivate ourselves so it doesn’t require ‘prodding’ any more than is absolutely necessary.  But hard as they may be, the answers are usually simple. 

Often times, when working with clients, the answer has boiled down to something as simple as splitting workouts in half, or condensing them into one, getting the workout in first thing in the morning, or setting a specific block of time aside in the middle or the end of the work day to make it possible to trian with some routine.  For nutrition, its usually as simple as packing a lunch made up of healthy left-overs while clearing the dinner table or keeping some food and/or protein drinks in the car.  When we drop the emotion, stop making excuses, and start actually trying to nug out a solution, its usually not at all as complex as it seems at first.

So don’t let this time of the year, do what it usually does to most folks.  If you’ve been having trouble sticking with your fitness goals for the year its not too late to rededicate yourself to achieving them.  You may want to re-look your plan to achieve them but don’t quit on yourself or the goals you set just six weeks ago.  Make this year different.

Raise Your Standard,

Jeff Bradford

Owner/Fitness Consultant

Objective Fitness

copyright 2011

                Recognizing that I can get overly excited about this stuff and get long winded I decided to put a summary of the concept described in detail below, up front. 

                The bottom line is that your training needs to be periodized.  Included in that periodization needs to be a maintenance phase where you don’t ask for continued progress but rather just that it maintain the progress it has made up until that point.  This will allow all of the systems necessary for physical adaptation, especially the endocrine system to keep up with the demands you ask of them in terms of progress.  It also puts you in control of your own plateaus and helps avoid overtraining.  It will, over the course of a given period of time, allow for faster progress than attempts at continued progressive overload would give you for the same period of time because you control the plateaus and because you are limiting the number of adaptations your physical resources must spread themselves to cover at any given time.  By appropriately matching the cycles for your strength training and endurance training you can achieve competitive levels at both without sacrificing gains in either. 

Details:

                There is a very basic physical training principle with which anyone who has pursued fitness is likely to be familiar.  Formally it is called the progressive overload principle.  It says that as we adapt to the physical demands we create for ourselves in a workout, we should increase the challenge for continued progress in physical performance.  We do this by increasing the weight we lift or the number of miles we run continually as we improve.  Most people who have trained for awhile also have encountered periods of time when they could not increase the weight lifted or number of repetitions performed or miles run.  These periods of time are commonly referred to as plateaus.  There are a million books and magazine and web based articles out there that try to provide tricks for breaking these plateaus.  But very few have ever considered what causes a plateau.

                Simply stated a plateau is your body’s temporary inability to adapt to increased stressors.  They’re seen as negative, but perhaps they are not.  Progressive overload itself, a necessary component for growth may be partly to blame.  The rest, all things within our control being ideal, is likely biology.  Think about what a workout is for a moment.  It’s an imposed demand designed to create a desired physiological change such as increased strength, size, power, endurance or flexibility.  After we impose the demand our bodies make the necessary adjustments to meet the new demand and to prepare for its next imposition on us.  In strength training for instance your body synthesizes proteins to increase muscle size and strength, increases energy (ATP/CP and glycogen) storage within and around the muscle for future energy requirements and repairs any damaged tissue.  To do this glands are required to produce the hormones such as testosterone, insulin, and human growth hormone, necessary to enable and activate these processes.  Thus, when you demand your muscles adapt, you also demand a whole chain of other body functions adapt as well.  Increased testosterone levels are likely required, not only to grow new muscle but to maintain that new muscle.  We’ll come back to this.

                Now think about why we humans might have such adaptive capability.  It’s unlikely that this survival mechanism was designed to continually adapt to a progressive overload for years or months.  More than likely it is designed to help us adapt to a new environment that is unlikely to change immediately after we make the adaptation.  Imagine an office worker spending years in the cubicle jungle is suddenly forced to work as a lumberjack.  The physical demands placed on him by his new line of work will exceed or at least challenge his physical capabilities in the beginning.  But over time he will adapt, become stronger, have greater endurance and be able to perform his job much more easily because his body adapted to the new stress.  Now once he achieves that level, he doesn’t start lumberjacking more!  The job stays relatively the same for him on average.  There is no reason for the challenge to increase.  This gives all of his body’s systems time to adapt to the new level of performance.  Glands have time to adapt to the new norm of hormone production necessary for him.  He went through progressive overload to get there, but once he got to where he met the load (no longer overload) he stopped progressing. 

                It is common though in fitness training never to have that point.  We do the equivalent of lumberjacking (is that a word?) more as soon as we get good at the job.  We don’t give our system a chance to catch up to the new demands placed on it and it eventually refuses to budge. The glands are incapable of continued increases and we stagnate… and worse, risk overtraining.  There are available solutions to this.  Acquire the needed hormones from an outside source, which is not only something I would recommend against, but illegal at least in the United States, and can cause long term problems, not the worst of which is in the atrophy of the very glands you need to be more productive.   Or we can give the system time to adapt by planning when we will stop progressive overload and let the whole system catch up to what is we are demanding of it.  This brings in the concept of training periodization. 

                Training periodization is rotating specific phased training modalities each for specific sub-objective designed to meet your overall fitness objectives for a given year (or whatever period of time you are using for a complete cycle).  Also know that you may cycle through all of your phases several times in a given year or hit each just once.  But that is beyond the scope of this blog.  I will go into more detail on this concept in a later blog, but for now a general understanding of training periodization will suffice.  Doing this allows you to focus on a limited number of objectives at any given time without losing ground you made toward other objectives previously.  By limiting what adaptations you demand of your body, you have more resources available to meet those demands.  So rather than trying to build muscle size, lose fat, pick up lagging body parts or fitness aspects, increase endurance and increase speed all at once, you focus on knocking out each of these objectives no more than one or two at a time making less demand on your body in terms of nutrition and recovery and the stress on the endocrine and other systems.  Basically more of your resources can be focused on just an objective or two at once rather than being divided to try to support a multitude of adaptations.  Thus your progress in each of them will be greater and your progress in all of them over the long period will be faster.

As an example, for me, my training cycle for bodybuilding competition involves four separate phases.  They are base training where I focus on improving size, strength and power, competition prep where I focus on bringing up lagging parts and improving definition and shape and otherwise preparing for the show, competition season which involves just trying to maintain competitive condition during the competition season (late spring/early summer) as well as a short recovery period (a week or two off of bodybuilding training completely after the last competition), and the maintenance phase which involves just keeping the progress I had made through the base training and competition prep training phases without demanding new progress.   It is this maintenance phase where I allow my body to adjust to the new capabilities (size, strength, power, definition) that I acquired over the course of the year up to that point.

                The great thing about training periodization for the full spectrum performance athlete is that it allows you to pursue two seemingly opposite objectives in the same year by appropriately adjusting the periodization for the other end of the spectrum.  Because endurance training is such a different demand than strength and power training and the adaptations are also therefore different, the periodization cycle for endurance can be matched up appropriately with the periodization cycle for strength and power without interfering with each other.  Actually, as you will see from the example, they can be supportive of each other. 

                As an example, I am now also pursuing competitive distance running in addition to bodybuilding.  I’ve broken it down into into the same phases as well.  While I’m in the base training cycle for bodybuilding, I’m in the maintenance phase for running.  I’m not asking my body to make gains in the running at this point, just to maintain and get used to the gains I made over the previous cycle.  Thus I am not required to make any new adaptations for running and all of my physical resources can be focused on improving strength and power.  The supportive benefit that the running provides is the calorie burn.  While I’m consuming many calories for muscle growth, the extra running helps me prevent taking in any excess calories that could be stored as fat that I would have to burn during competition prep.  During competition prep for bodybuilding, the requirements for adaptation in the strength and power aspects of my fitness become less resource intensive.  Now rather than trying to attain vast amounts of muscle, I’m simply trying maintain what I have while burning off any excess fat and working on building just those muscles that may be lagging.   During that phase of bodybuilding training I move into the base training of running.  These long slow distances are sustainable during the caloric depletion from the competition prep diet and it allows me to not have to diet as hard because of the fat and calories the running is burning.  During competition phase, I have dropped body fat and need to maintain that.  Energy levels are probably depleted but I am also probably at my lightest weight of the year.  Shorter intense bouts of running are possible because of the decrease in weight training (I’m doing just enough to maintain a competition physique) and necessary because of the decrease in calories.  Thus I go into running competition prep.  After competition season for bodybuilding ends, I move into the maintenance phase with my resistance training and focus on the running competition.  Since I don’t need to spend as much energy and recovery resources to maintain the muscle and definition I developed over the course of the year up until that point, I can focus my energy and resources toward winning my races.  Besides the conditioning acquired from the bodybuilding will help sustain me and perhaps avoid injury during the competitive running season.  Additionally, my calories are not restricted and I can eat what I need to have the energy to run my best.  And then the cycles repeat themselves (bodybuilding/running) in the following manner:  base/maintenance, comp prep/base, comp/comp prep, maintenance/comp.   While I feel it is a bit on the cheesy side to be using my own training as an example, it is the training with which I am most familiar and since it’s my blog I reserve the right to be cheesy. 

                It is in this manner that I think we’re going to find our way to building the full performance spectrum athlete.  The athlete who can win a bench press competition in the same year he wins a 5K, 10K, half marathon or even a marathon.  It is also through this method that we are going to make our fastest progress.  Taking control of your plateaus by incorporating them into your training will make your gains greater over the same given period of time because it is taking into account what your body needs from you so that it can meet your needs.

Raise Your Standard,

Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET

Owner of Objective Fitness

copyright 2010

Bench Press:
–Warm up
–2 sets of 2-4 reps to near temporary failure
–3 sets of 10 reps to near temporary failure on last set

Barbell Row:
–2 sets of 2-4 reps to near temporary failure
–3 sets of 10 reps to near temporary failure on last set

3 sets of 10-15 Dive Bomb Push-ups, supersetted with 3 sets of 10-15 Pull Ups

Hanging leg crunches: 3 sets of 15

Cable Crunches: 3 sets of 15

Run: 2-5 miles moderate intensity

This program is designed the way it is based on the following principles, facts and theories: 

1)  Muscle Fiber Types:  Muscle consists of three types of fibers.  They are Type I, Type IIA and Type IIB.  Type I is known as slow twitch muscle fibers.  As the title implies they contract slowly and have very little power output but take a very long time to fatigue.  Their primary source of fuel is triglycerides (fat), and they require oxygen to burn that fuel.  These are your aerobic endurance fibers.  They contribute very little to muscle size and adapt by becoming more efficient in their use of fuel and oxygen.  Type IIA and Type IIB are both fast twitch fibers but they have some important differences.  Type IIA contract quickly and have a high power output.  While they do not last as long as Type I fibers, Type IIA fibers are also fatigue resistant for a long time.  They function until lactic acid buildup and temporary glycogen depletion force them to stop.  These are your anaerobic endurance fibers.  They adapt to training by growing in size and storing more ATP/CP and glycogen.  Type IIB contract very quickly and have a very high power output, more so than the Type IIA.  They are not fatigue resistant and last only for a matter of seconds.  They also adapt to training by growing in size and storing more energy in the form of ATP/CP and glycogen.   

 2)  Activation of Motor Units:  When muscles are activated to work they start the activation of the slow twitch fibers first moving onto more and more of the fast twitch fibers a necessary to accomplish the task.  The command to contract is sent through the nervous system to motor units.  These motor units are attached to multiple muscle fibers.  Each motor unit controls only one type of fiber.  The faster twitch motor units require a greater bioelectrical ‘charge’ to activate than slower twitch muscle fibers.  Your muscles will use the lowest charge (and thus the slowest twitch) fibers necessary to perform a task.  This only makes sense as otherwise we’d all be jamming our forks into the back of our throats every time we tried to take a bite of food.  Thus, every time we activate the motor units that command the Type IIB fibers to contract for a given muscle, we know we are already activating the motor units that command our Type IIA and Type I fibers for that muscle.   

 3)  Stimulation and Progression:  Fitness progress in power or endurance is a result of physical adaptations to stresses placed on it during training combined with adequate rest and nutritional support.  In order to cause that adaptation we need to train our bodies to work harder than what they consider normal.  Otherwise, if your body is easily able to meet the demand, it will not adapt because it will not need to.  Successful training must force us out of our comfort zone if we want to make any significant progress.  Further, as we become more fit, the amount of stress necessary to cause continued adaptation (and thereby continued progress) increases with our increased capabilities.  Therefore our training will require us to continually lift heavier weights or run longer distances or at a faster pace.   But as long as we continue to challenge ourselves, we will continue to improve, assuming for the moment we are allowing appropriate rest and ensuring proper nutrition.   

 4)  Training for Anaerobic Power:  In order to train for anaerobic power, you need to activate Type IIB fibers and work them to exhaustion.  To do this you need to use a very heavy weight in terms of percentage of the maximum amount of weight you can lift properly and completely for one repetition of a given exercise.  This is known as your one rep max (1RM).  Also great speed of movement can be used in lieu of heavy weight.  But without such heavy weights or breakneck repetition speeds your nervous system will not activate the motor units in charge of your Type IIB fibers.  But focusing on the weight option for the purposes of this discussion, you will know you are working your Type IIB fibers by the number of repetitions you can perform with the weight.  Remember that the Type IIB fibers are not very fatigue resistant, but they are very powerful.  Thus if you are moving a weight that is very heavy (demonstrating a lot of power), so much so that you cannot do it more than three repetitions (demonstrating  lack of fatigue resistance) then you know you’re working your Type IIB fibers (as well as activating the Type IIA and Type I fibers for that muscle as well).    

 5)  Training for Anaerobic Endurance:  In order to train for anaerobic endurance you need to continue to temporarily exhaust the Type IIA fibers.  These are the fibers primarily responsible for your anaerobic endurance.  While it is true that these fibers were activated during the sets that targeted the type IIB fibers, due to the greater fatigue resistance of the Type IIA fibers, they were unlikely exhausted enough to stimulate much adaptation.  So once the Type IIB fibers are spent, its time to move on to the type IIA fibers to work their endurance.  To do this you lighten the weight and increase the amount of times you lift it.  The number of sets, repetitions and length of time to be spent on this has been the subject of much debate.  We know that generally speaking the oxidative cycle, which is the requirement of oxygen by the muscles so that they can start burning fat in order to continue moving, doesn’t really kick in gear until 20 minutes into a given exercise.  However, doing 19 and a half minutes of bench pressing certainly seems like overkill.  Traditionally, these fibers have been hit, with great success by bodybuilders and other athletes by training with a weight that makes them hit temporary failure within 8-12 repetitions.  I admit that what is ideal is debatable and hopefully science will explain the best method for enhancing anaerobic endurance, but in the meantime much of the empirical evidence is pointing toward the legitimacy and practicality of the eight to twelve repetition range method.

 6)  Training for Aerobic Endurance: Critical factors of our aerobic endurance training are:  1) that it lasts more than twenty minutes, 2)  that we continually progress and challenge ourselves by increasing the duration or intensity, and 3) that we apply the principle of Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (SAID) as necessary. 

 Application to our Sample Workout:

 If you look at the sample workout you will note that the first two sets of an exercise for a given body part are very heavy with a low rep range.  The idea here is to stress the Type IIB fibers to stimulate progress in power and speed.  In doing so, we have also activated the type IIA and Type I fibers of that muscle as well.  We have activated them, but we have not exhausted them as they are more fatigue resistant than the type IIB.  Thus we continue on with lighter weights and additional exercises with lighter weights to exhaust type IIA muscle fibers and stimulate adaptive progress in anaerobic endurance.  Again, Type I fibers were also activated when we were working with this program but not exhausted due to their greater fatigue resistance.  Now if we wanted to we could continue at a much lighter weight and ensure that we continued the movement beyond 20 minutes.  However, for most people, there isn’t a need to improve aerobic endurance in something like the Bench Press.  So once we’ve achieved our goal of stimulating growth and progress in the Type IIA and Type IIB fibers of the muscles used for bench pressing (pectorals, triceps, shoulders) we’ll stop there with the resistance training. 

 That brings us to our aerobic endurance training.  Taking our sample example of a person who has chosen running as their aerobic activity then we would want our running to last more than twenty minutes (this does not include sprint training as sprint training is not truly an aerobic endurance activity deriving the bulk of its fuel from the oxidative energy cycle).  It means that we will either increase the amount of time or distance we are running or the amount of distance we cover within a given time (that again must be over twenty minutes).  Finally, in applying the SAID principle, the bulk of our aerobic training will be running.  However, if it is just a calorie burn you are looking for and general cardiovascular health, then cross-training or any other type of activity is perfectly acceptable.  But maybe we’ll discuss more on that in a later blog.   

 So this is the science behind the training sample program and an illustration on how athletes can achieve advanced competitive levels for performance fitness in both strength and endurance events simultaneously.  Next week we’ll discuss how to fit such a workout into daily life.  As a finishing note to this, there is more than one way to skin a cat.  There are other program designs that would meet the same purposes of this program and discovering new and more effective ways is the goal of this whole blog line.  If you have any suggestions or questions they’d likely be useful in advancing our knowledge, and are certainly welcome. 

Raise Your Standard,

Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET
Objective Fitness
Owner, Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com

Copyright 2010

 If you are interested in your own tailor made fitness program please check out the online and personal services I offer at www.objectivefitness.com.

This workout program consists of a three day on one to two day off resistance training cycle. In the course of those three training days each major muscle group will be worked once. Day one is Chest, Upper Back and Abdominals. Day two is Biceps, Triceps, Shoulders and Forearms. Day three is Lower back, Legs, and calves. The aerobic endurance training for this example will consist of running four to five days a week. For our sample we’ll take Day 1, which brings us to the following workout:

Bench Press:
–Warm up
–2 sets of 2-4 reps to near temporary failure
–3 sets of 10 reps to near temporary failure on last set

Barbell Row:
–2 sets of 2-4 reps to near temporary failure
–3 sets of 10 reps to near temporary failure on last set

3 sets of 10-15 Dive Bomb Push-ups, supersetted with 3 sets of 10-15 Pull Ups

Hanging leg crunches: 3 sets of 15

Cable Crunches: 3 sets of 15

Run: 2-5 miles moderate intensity

[Please note that this workout sample is just that. It is a sample to highlight training programs and I am not recommending you as an individual do this program without consulting me, a physician or another fitness professional to see if this program is right for you. I believe in personally tailoring programs to individuals anyway. So bottom line if you drop a bar on your neck its not because I told you to do it. Be safe and if you want a more personalized program reach out to me through the website www.objectivefitness.com.]

Come back later this week to see the training principles behind this workout and how this type of training can be incorporated into a daily routine. I’m hoping to get this out in the next couple of days. In the meantime.. any comments, questions or concerns are certainly welcome. I’d really like to open this discussion up and receive feedback from any of you interested in physical training science whether you’re a professional or just starting out.

Raise Your Standard,

Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET
Objective Fitness
Owner, Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com

So what kind of mental obstacles are we facing now?

Two plus weeks have passed and you’re not seeing the results you wanted yet.  Maybe you feel like you’re not getting anywhere.  Maybe you feel like you hadn’t thought your goals through, that you hadn’t taken into account the challenge of the obstacles you would face, and that perhaps you should readjust with a reality check.  Maybe you already fell off the wagon, missed a couple workouts, ate some bad foods, had a cigarrette or drink that you swore you’d never have again.  Let me tell ya bruthas and sistas… It ain’t just you.  Everyone goes through that from the ones who give up to the greatest of athletes.  You’re not some Marco Polo in the pursuit of fitness.  You’re not challenged more than anyone else that has made it, but remember this too… you’re not challenged any less either.  We’re all made of the same stuff.

So what do we do now?  Well, my suggestion is first to start feeding yourself some motivation.  EVERYONE forgets this!  You were fired up because of the mood of December 31st.  Everyone is talking about turning their lives around and when you thought about it, you realized that you had that opportunity too and it motivated you. Well, what else motivates you? Is there a particular movie, a song, a friend who motivates you?  Well watch it, turn it up, give him or her a call.  Feed yourself the motivation you need.  We all get down in the dumps and motivation doesn’t stay.  Could you imagine trying to make it through the more routine parts of your day with the attitude that listening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets gives you?  You’d grind your teeth to the gums, get in traffic accidents, scare the grocery bagger, and generally have a bad day.  What works for the weight room or the track doesn’t necessarily work throughout the rest of your day.  Your motivation levels have to wane.  It’s okay.  You just have to feed it to turn them back up when you need them.  When you want motivation.. go get it.  It doesn’t just fall in your lap.  And try to start planning it ahead of time.  Because when you’re trying to be lazy the last thing you want to do is go watch Rocky VI.  Plan ahead of time to watch Rocky VI, with your motivating friend.  Plan to listen to the motivating music before you hit the gym.

Also, have some patience with the results.  I know, I know its the hardest part of the whole thing.  But there are a couple things you can do.  First while you should shoot for the stars for your long term goals, your short term goals need to be realistic and physiologically attainable within the time span you give yourself.  It takes a competitive bodybuilder 12-16 weeks on average to drop the bodyfat to be stage ready for competition.  Now recognizing that they are going for beyond the pale low levels of bodyfat, considering the fit condition that they are in before they start prepping for the contest, and noting how long it takes them all the same, doesn’t it seem a bit ridiculous to beat yourself up?  “I’ve been lifting weights for two whole weeks and chicks still don’t dig me!”  ”I’ve been on that treadmill 5 days a week since the beginning of the year and I still haven’t dropped a dress size.”  Chill folks, it comes with time.  Your body has to adapt to what you are putting it through.  But put it through the workouts and adapt it will.  It must.  One way to feel good about it is to monitor your performance progress (‘performance’ there’s that word again).  Keep a journal.  Know this, if you’re strength is going up in the lifts, you can be assured you are developing muscle even if you can’t see it yet.  That muscle by the way is increasing your resting metabolism which will help you get and stay lean down the road too.  Are you able to increase the time or intensity of your aerobic training?  Is the same workload getting easier?  If so, then your body is getting more efficient at utilizing oxygen and if it is using oxygen it is burning fat, that’s what the oxidative energy cycle does.  The great thing about the whole form following function thing is that you can see if you’re functioning better and it will give you some premonitions of the form improvement to come.  And remember this, ITS ALL ABOUT DIRECTION!  Even if the gains are small at first the fact is they’re gains.  You’re going the right way.  Now perhaps there are tweaks to your overall program you could do to speed them along (which you could discover through research, study and/or hiring a good trainer/fitness consultant - shameless plug again, such as one from Objective Fitness) but the fact is you’re better than you were yesterday.  You’re not stagnant, or worse, becoming less healthy and fit.  You’ve raised your standard.  You’ve raised your standard by one more rep, one more pound, one more minute or mile on the treadmill.  You’re getting better and if you’re getting better you’re heading toward your goal.  The rest is just a matter of the speed with which you are approaching it.  So be patient.  It takes time and its well worth it.  And keep yourself motivated by the gains you are making in function which are leading to the form that you want. 

What about those of us who have already failed to fulfill our New Year’s resolution?  So you goofed and slipped into an old habit or missed a workout.  So what?  If it didn’t kill you you can overcome it.  Further, what’s the difference anyway.. start fresh.. so your New Year resolution startsssss… NOW!  on 17 Jan 2010.  Get back to it.  And you’re not a loser for slipping.  You’ll be a loser for giving up though.  Fact is nobody does it perfect.  I’m not a theologian but it seems that the Christian concepts of forgiveness and sanctification make a lot of sense when developing a soul.  You make a mistake, your recognize its a mistake, your confess the mistake and determine not to do it again and you move on forgiven.  Then, you continue to try to live in accordance with Christian principles.  If we all decided that we were going to Hell anyway, once we broke one of the Commandments, so we might as well not bother trying to be good people, it’d be a pretty miserable world we’d live in.  If that doesn’t work for you for an analogy, what would you think of someone who went up to a second grade kid who got a 75% on his spelling test because he didn’t study hard enough for the test and said the following:  “Hmm… 75%.  That’s average kid.  You got this average grade because you failed to study like you knew you should have.  Might as well just give in now kid.  You’re never going to college.”  That would be ludicrous and that guy would be an absolute jerk.  Everyone knows that the kid can fix his study habits, that he has the rest of his life from that day forward (no matter how many times he has relearned that lesson in the past) to fix it and college is still an opportunity for him.  So tell me, with these things in mind, why is it that because you missed a week of training or you gnawed through a box of Oreos that you can never be fit?  Seems kind of ridiculous right?

The thing is that the past is great for learning a lesson, but beating oneself up over it or even over one’s weaknesses does very little to make one stronger.  Recognize mistakes, plan to avoid making them in the future, remember that you are as worthy as anyone to pursue the life of your dreams and the physique to boot no matter how many mistakes you’ve made in the past or even how many times you’ve repeated them.  Forgive yourself, forget all but the plan you made, and drive on. 

Keep up the good fight and have a great New Year starting whenever it started for you 1 Jan or 18 Jan.

Raise Your Standard,
Jeff Bradford
Objective Fitness
Owner/Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com

 copyright 2010

To test the theory, I am training for both bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions to take place in late spring/early summer.  As for the endurance I want to find some half-marathons, 10Ks and 5K’s near my home. I want to try to schedule them somewhat near the powerlifting and strength training competitions to test whether the combination has any detrimental effects.  If this works, then my plan is to continue to try to progress in powerlifting and bodybuilding (eventually earning a pro-card in bodybuilding) and to try for longer distances starting in 2011, marathons, triathalons, ultramarathons. 

Unfortunately I am a late bloomer in the endurance side.  Before I came up with the theory that challenges the fitness doctrine, I had bought into it and chose to pursue the strength/power side.  Therefore I have some catching up to do.  However, I think if I can improve the endurance significantly without loss of progress rates in strength/power then it will lend creedence to my theory.

Over the past couple weeks I have found that I have a lot of down time.  I have been cursed with an utter lack of social skills and find myself in a place where there is little to do but socialize or workout.  It really would be nice not to be an absolute social klutz, but the curse is a blessing in disguise as it gives me much time to train without distraction.  My weight training has remained the same, but I have significantly increased my cardio training.  I run once or twice a day, most days and swim almost every day as well.  I’m still building up my cardio base but I’ve made great progress, if the decrease in my personal measure of exertion for the same amount of work is any indicator.  Despite that, I have found no corresponding decrease in the progress rate of my lifting performance so far.  However I have found three interesting things.

1)  I have to eat tons of food or I bonk in the middle of the day.  My caloric intake has increased significantly and yet I’m dropping fat, particularly around the midsection.  I’m leaner than I usually am in the off-season for bodybuilding and I’m eating cheescake!  That is totally cool.  Abs and cheesecake.  You can have ‘em both.  But…

2)  I sleep like a bear. I need to sleep almost 9 hours a night when I was getting away with 6 or 7 previously.  That said, I rarely get 9 hours so I drink a lot of coffee.

3)  THIS IS IMPORTANT:  You have to remember to switch gears.   I often do my cardio training in the evening here and I still do my weight training early in the morning.  So when one morning I woke up to do my heavy (read powerlifting training) squats I found that I couldn’t lift the same weight I had been using for as many reps.  

At first I thought I had just disproved my theory.  “All that runnin’ has sucked the power out of my legs!”  But then I stepped back and thought about the lift attempt and realized that I had gone into it with the same mentality that I was using when I was running.  My head was in an endurance mind set, which tends to save some for later, rather than a power mind-set which spends it all now.  After getting, as Cool Hand Luke might say ‘my mind right,’ I got back under the rack with the proper mentality and was able to move the weight much more easily.  Perhaps lack of recognition of the need for this mental switch is what led to the original conclusion that you couldn’t be both strong and have great endurance.

Anyway, so that’s where this personal experiment stands. As I keep a training journal for my own training, I won’t be making use of this blog to yap about my own training.  But on occassion as I come across some items to add to the discussion, such as #3 above, I’ll update on the progress.  
   
As always, I welcome your feedback.

Raise Your Standard,
Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET
Objective Fitness
Owner/Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com
Copyright 2010

I believe that most people, despite what they might tell you, really do want to achieve advanced levels of fitness ultimately.  While many people tell you things like “I just want to get toned a little,” or “I just need to lose this beer gut,” or other similar statements of undershooting their full physical potential, it usually implies one of three things. 

One, that they are setting a reasonable goal because they don’t want to be overwhelmed by the thought of what it would take to get from where they are to an advanced level of fitness.  I am certainly hoping to garner the attention of these people.  They’re smart and ambitious.  Two, they don’t believe that they have the potential to go much further than that based on their current condition, past experiences of failure and fear of failing at another goal, and/or they have been convinced by themselves or others that they are somehow limited genetically or physically or whateverally, in a way that makes advanced performance fitness impossible for them.  I definitely want to address this audience and hopefully we will dispell some of those self defeating myths as we go through our blog discussions.  Three, they might truly be unambitious and happy to never see their full physical potential and the benefits to the quality of their lives that result therefrom as long as they can avoid the work involved.  I wish this third group well and much happiness, but I’m not addressing them and I don’t think they’d be likely to read a fitness blog anyway.  In the off chance one of them is, I’d say, if you change your mind, you can reah your potential, the possibility exists as long as you breathe, but it takes a little time and patience so the sooner you get started the better. 

The fact is, all that training is, is a temporary performance demand you place on your body.  Then your body recovers and adapts to make it capable of meeting the demands placed on it.  We lose sight of this sometimes because our goals are usually along the lines of body composition rather than performance.  Lose fat, gain muscle, etc.  But the thing is that form follows function.  If its appearance your concerned with, then consider the performance that such a build would be conduscive to.  Then focus on being able to perform in that manner and your body will adapt to become efficient in that performance.  If you like the long lean look, then what sports or activities have long lean folks participating in them at advanced levels.  If you like a stronger build, then consider what the sports are that the athletes with that build participate in.  That’s not to say that if you’re looking for the build of a linebacker or a figure skater you have to take up professional football or olympic figure skating, it just means you have to place demands on your body that allow it to perform in a similar way – sport technique and skill aside.   So if a linebacker has to have a certain ratio of explosive power, anaerobic endurance and aerobic endurance, how do we place similar (obviously not the same) demands on our bodies that he does, with the resources available to us?  Those stresses will cause your body to adapt, and included in that adaptation is generally going to be the body composition you are looking for.  In my theory you can take this a step further and mesh athletic builds by meshing performance.  I want the large lean muscles of a competitive bodybuilder, the power of a powerlifter, and the endurance of a marathoner.  By placing the demands of each, smartly upon myself, my body will adapt to the aspects of each of those types of athletes that I want. 

The process is actually pretty easy and pretty simple.  One problem that many trainers suffer is overthinking every aspect of their lives in order to meet their fitness goals.  They completely adjust their lifestyle – diet, rest, etc. all at once and usually in accordance with some prescribed nutrition plan, forced sleep, etc.  The thing is that this is probably the wrong approach.  Sure, it works better than not leaning into the effort enough, but it creates undo psychological stress and slows the process of learning to listen to your body. 

The adaptation process is why I believe you don’t have to start off changing everything and why I believe doing so slows the process of an individual learning to listen to the signals of his or her body.  Once you have determined the performance demands you are going to place upon yourself with incrementally increasing challenge as you improve, your body will automatically do and request what it needs to do to make the necessary physical adaptations.  Your job is to listen to it when it tells you what it needs (and learn to discern that from temptations for bad habits) in order to provide what it needs. 

You’ve probably heard people state that once they started working out they didn’t crave junkfood as much anymore, or they didn’t want to drink as often, or that their apetite increased dramatically, etc.  This is people hearing their bodies submit requests to their brains about what they need to meet the new performance requirements.  Put it this way.  When you are really dehydrated do you crave a bottle of whiskey or water?  If the answer isn’t water the first time I ask then let me ask you this.. the morning after drinking too much, and you’re hung over, does your body crave whiskey or water?  Do you want to eat much?  Probably not.  These are all natural for your body to do as it is trying to detox and rehydrate.  Your body “knows” that water is the best solution in this case and it will signal the brain to go get some.  Similarly when your body is pushed beyond its normal capacity and has to go through the processes of muscle growth, fat burning, oxygen efficiency development etc. so that it can continue to meet that demand, it sends signals to the brain to tell it what it needs.  “Feed me protein, feed me carbs, feed me fats, and feed me the foods that will provide the micronutrients I need as well and if the nasty food makes you too full to eat what we need then skip it until you get me what I need first.”  (Remember mom telling you to eat your dessert only AFTER eating dinner.  Your body will tell you the same thing.)

So its not necessary to deprive yourself of any and all junkfood or to go on the newest fad diet or to adjust or completely alternate your entire lifestyle all at once.  Make the changes as they become necessary.  It’s usually much easier to schedule and psychologically handle anyway.   Simply place the demand on your body and listen to what it tells you to do with one exception.   Don’t let it choose whether or not you’re going to place the demand on it.  That’s where the mind is in charge.  The brain listens to the body’s needs, but when the body’s wants don’t match up, the brain takes charge.  “Listen cells down there!  Let me know what you need and we’ll get it for you, but you WILL perform to the standard I place upon you!”

Thus the performance demand is the key to it all.  It is important to know how to smartly and safely and efficiently place these demands on your system.  To learn that takes study, research or hire someone who can help you (shameless plugh:  such as a certified fitness consultant from Objective Fitness).  Once you demand your body perform though, you have to listen to its needs.  If it says sleep, go to sleep.  If it says eat, eat.  The great thing about this is that it will be what you want to do if you’re tired or hungry anyway. 

It is still of high importance to learn about nutrition and how other lifestyle choices effect you because it will allow you to tweak your plans more effectively, but for the most part, much of the answers are programmed in your cells anyway.  Listen to them, but make them work.  It’s leadership of the brain.  When your body improves its performance, I think you’ll find that it also improves its appearance accordingly.  (This does nothing for your face.. I don’t know how to fix faces.  If you don’t like the appearance of your face or your haircut, that’s another line of work.. I’m not your man.  But otherwise the theory of form following function is valid.)

So this blog isn’t just for advanced competitive athletes.  It’s for everyone out there, no matter what his or her current condition is, who would eventually like to look and perform like one and is willing to put in the work to make it happen.

Raise the Standard,

Jeff Bradford

Owner/Consultant – Objective Fitness

www.objectivefitness.com

copyright 2010

Some basic guidelines for a training regimen that supports excellence in both categories.  Each guideline will be addressed consecutively in follow-on blogs:

1.  Focus on each goal separately.  Exercise programs that try to mix them, such as cardio workouts that involve resistance or resistance training programs designed to create a cardio effect distract from each goal.  You cannot get the most out of your strength training if you are out of breath and you can’t get the most out of your endurance training if you are constantly operating in the glycolytic and ATP/CP energy cycles when you’re trying to make gains in performance in the oxidative energy cycle. 

2.  Develop your overall strength training plan to pursue your power/strength sport goals without regard to your endurance sport goals before determining how to merge the two types of training into the total training plan.

3.  Develop your endurance training cycle to pursue your endurance goals without regard to your strength/power sport goals before determining how to merge the two types of training into the total training plan.

4.  Once two and three are accomplished determine how to mesh the training cycles of each to best meet with the requirements of your personal training bottlenecks to get the maximum benefit possible out of both types of training without sacrificing service to one goal to the other. (See http://objectivefitness.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=16 for more detail on training bottlenecks)

5.  Base your nutrition needs on the highest requirements of each type of training.  For instance if you are a powerlifter, your protein needs are probably at least slightly higher than those of a marathoner and a marathoner’s carbohydrate needs are much higher than those of a powerlifter.  Thus, if you compete in these two sports, you should generally base your protein requirement on your powerlifting goals and your carbohydrate requirements on your marathon goals.  You may have to even add a little more to each of those requirements because you will still need additional carbs to fuel your weightlifting that is taking place on top of your running.  This type of training requires a lot of caloric and nutrient support.

As always, comments, arguments and questions are welcome. 

Very Respectfully,

Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET

Owner/Consultant, Objective Fitness

www.objectivefitness.com

copyright 2010

Motivation. People often complain that they can’t find the motivation to train. Most of us don’t just feel motivated every time we train, even if we’re truly learned to love the training experience. Inertia can be hard to overcome even for the best of us. Sometimes, no matter what, we have to rely on old fashioned self-discipline and drag ourselves to the gym even though part of us doesn’t want to go. On the other hand, clearly there must be some inspiration or we wouldn’t feel the lack of motivation. We must have some desire to train, or at least for the rewards that a fitness program has to offer. But the thing is motivation, inspiration, whatever you want to call it doesn’t just fall into our laps on a regular basis. We see a movie or talk to a friend or hear a song or read a book or something that inspires us to start. Sometimes you’ll hear about someone watching a movie like Rocky (any of them) and the next thing you know they’re training hard and then two weeks later, after a couple missed workouts and obstacles, they wonder where the motivation went and why they’re not working out. The thing I have learned is that motivation or inspiration has to be fed. If a movie motivated you to start working out, then perhaps you should continue to watch such movies. I’m not a fan of self-help books, but if reading such books fired me up to train, then by God I’d read them. Find out whatever it is for you, listening to Barry Manilow or Twisted Sister or NWA.. whatever gets you going and incorporate that into your day. Feed yourself with those types of things that motivate you to train, before you even feel the lack of motivation, and while only a few truly hardcore souls ever feel motivated all the time, you can ensure you will be motivated most of the time. In other words don’t wait for inspiration or motivation.. seek it.
Identifying and adjusting to these bottlenecks is key to starting, maintaining and improving a workout program. How they affect our training will constantly change as our lives are in constant flux. I imagine that perhaps 4:30 am won’t always be the best time for me to train. When that happens I’ll adjust. The key is to understand how they affect our training and to develop practical solutions for solving them that allow us to get the most out of our training time.

Thanks for reading this blog. Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Very Respectfully,

Jeff Bradford
Objective Fitness
Owner/Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com

copyright 2009

     This has been my pet project. Determining the training, nutrition and rest protocols to develop the perfect athlete. One who can compete and win at the extremes of strength and endurance sports. So far my research has taken me to the development of a few principles. Among those principles are:
1) Pick a focus per training session:

When doing strength or power training train for strength or power and when doing your endurance training train for endurance. Mixing the two into the same workout will simply create a lack of progress in both strenght/power and endurance. The current fad has been to do just the opposite. People are adding resistance to their endurance workouts or endurance (meaning aerobic endurance) components to their resistance workouts. “Get a cardio workout while building muscle,” or vice versa. Mixing the training in the same workout does in fact interfere. You can not run as hard if you’re carrying weights and you cannot lift as hard if you are out of breath while you’re doing it. They’re different energy cycles and should be treated as such. Mixed training is great for average people who aren’t after significant gains in either strength, endurance or above average body-composition, but not for the advanced athlete.

2) If possible, separate the workouts:

If not, do the resistance training first. The endurance training will not suffer as greatly from being preceded by a resistance workout as the resistance workout will suffer from being immediately preceded by an endurance workout.
3) Eat to support your training nutrition and caloric requirements:

Training for both requires lots of fuel. Deprive yourself of the proper quantity of fuel or quality macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats) or the necessary micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and you can kiss your progress goodbye. Even dieting to lose fat needs to be done properly and in careful balance to your training.

4) Be disciplined about rest:

Non-essential sleep deprivation and lack of recovery time will not only prevent gains in strength but quickly lead to over training with such a high performance demand on your body.
5) Be disciplined about enjoying life outside of training:

Perspective on where your training fits into your life and occasional mental breaks from training altogether are as critical as getting enough food and sleep. If you cannot enjoy life most of the time (certainly at least once in a while), this type of training will quickly break you down mentally. No matter how hard core you think you are this will eventually take a toll on your longevity in your advanced fitness pursuit in the long run and will deteriorate your mental focus on your training in the immediate term. If your family and work life are falling apart because you are out jogging, you’ll tend to get a little bitter about your pursuit.  You’ll end up overweight and hating fitness altogether except when you’re telling people how in shape you used to be.  Its a sign of a lack of time/energy management and self-discipine to sacrifice the important parts of life for a goal which has the overall purpose of improving your quality of life.
6) Set specific short term goals as steps to a longer term goal and keep a training journal to track your progress:

 Be specific in setting a long term goal and give yourself a deadline. Then backwards plan from there developing a series of specific short term goals as waypoints along the journey. Setting goals and keeping a journal provides an objective measure and gives you the ability to do a map check now and then to make sure you’re heading in the right direction or warns you that its necessary to change course.

7) During the workout, forget the goal and enjoy the process of the workout:

 Whether it be a run or a weight lifting session you should have already planned what you need to do for that day to achieve your next goal. During the session make sure you are doing what needs to be done, but forget about the goal and the distance that needs to be covered, just enjoy the workout, the sense of overcoming a challenge, the blood pumping in the muscles, etc. Think of the workout as a drive to a destination with a deadline. Check the spedometer to make sure you’re moving at the proper rate that you previously planned, but then take the time to enjoy the scenery rather than focus on how far you have to go.
     Generally speaking these principles are suggested for anyone in any sort of fitness pursuit, not just those in pursuit of improving both strength and endurance capabilities simultaneously. However with the greater expenditures in effort, energy and emotion the mental and physical game exact a greater toll in return for the greater rewards. There is less room for error and mental and physical rest become so crucial as to become a necessary conscious effort on the part of the athlete.

     In later blogs I hope to discuss some of the specifics in terms of resistance training, endurance training and nutrition necessary to achieve these goals but for now I will just introduce the concept and as always, request your thoughts or questions.

Please feel free to comment.

Yours in the pursuit of fitness excellence,

Jeff Bradford, CFT, CET
Objective Fitness
Owner, Fitness Consultant
www.objectivefitness.com

copyright 2009