You, that’s WHO, are my first fitness topic for this initial series of articles on The Question Authority.  WHAT’s on second…  then When, Where, Why, & How to Exercise come next.  I’m looking forward to the opportunity of sharing with you as much as I know… as quickly as I can.  Your specific questions are most welcome, as that is the primary purpose of this section.  With your membership to The Best Way to Exercise, you can “question” your own personal exercise “authority” as much as you see fit. 

For now, let’s start with the seven most basic questions regarding exercise.  Thanks for reading and let’s focus on first things first… YOU!

If I’m preaching to the choir, GREAT!  Kudos to those of you who already work out on a regular basis, becoming lean, toned, flexible, and fit.  There is nothing more amazing than a finely tuned body… except, of course, its unhealthy counterpart.  If you haven’t quite yet climbed to the peak of fitness, YOU are my chosen audience.  You are the miracle waiting to happen.  If you are fit-less and frustrated, YOU are MY inspiration.

Why is being overweight, weak, out of breath, and inflexible such a wonderful thing?  Why are you a phenomenon because you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, or smoke two packs a day?  For one, it’s amazing what our bodies are able to handle, even if temporarily.  This alone is an absolute marvel… at least to me.  You are remarkably resilient, regardless of whether your current state of “health” is compromised by years of deconditioning or disease.  It takes decades of hard work (and hardly working) to destroy your body.  For most of us, that’s something to be thankful for.

Now for the true miracle… when you decide to switch gears, it doesn’t take decades, years, or even months to change directions.  Anything you want to change (facetiously speaking, of course) can change immediately.  IMMEDIATELY!!!  Decades and decades of neglect and abuse can stop instantaneously.  Like it or not, exercise is the answer.

Here is some good news.  The worse shape you are in, the faster your results.  You don’t need to exercise every day (or even every other day).  You don’t need to exercise for hours (or even an hour) ((or even a half-hour)).

And how about this?  While long-term goal setting is great, what if you could see and feel changes this week?  How about this very day?

I personally witness ridiculously astounding results all the time.

If performed correctly, exercise will likely:

• Increase your flexibility in seconds

• Lower your blood pressure in minutes

• Stabilize your blood sugar level in hours

• Improve your cardiovascular endurance in days

• Boost the strength of your muscles in less than a week

• Help you drop multiple dress or pant sizes in less than a month

You body is ready when you are.  Who are you NOT to exercise???

Don’t get suckered into only believing in the long-term lifestyle-change approach to fitness.  When I first started working out, I wanted results yesterday.  I firmly believe that most people have this mentality regarding health and fitness.  It’s not the proper perspective, but there is no reason we can’t use it to our advantage.

We all need to exercise forever… move it or lose it, right?  But you can make a change this instant, and not just a change in your activity or your psychology, but an actual change in your physicality and physiology.  I am so thankful that it doesn’t take long to make progress.  I’ve seen instant results in thousands of clients.  And I’ve seen them in the mirror.

Which brings me to my next “WHO” topic.  Me!  Who am I to tell you anything?

Because this could be the first article you are reading from me, I feel obligated to tell you at least a little bit about my background.  Perhaps you can relate to my experience or experiences.  Over the past 25 years, I’ve helped hundreds and thousands of people in our local community, and I am working hard to eventually helping hundreds of thousands and millions of people worldwide.

Going on three decades of personal training experience (yikes!), I know that, along the way, I have already helped you… different body, different brain, same bio.  In addition to training every type of person imaginable, and being a physique transformer, I have also had the “pleasure” of being the physique transformee.  Whoever you are, and whatever you are dealing with, I can probably relate.

I have “been there and done that” myself, working through situations such as: a broken vertebra, systemic arthritis, an eight-year bout of undiagnosed Lyme Disease, and a head-on collision rollover car accident that broke my body and bruised my brain (for years).  Exercise to the rescue!

I hope that helping others, and helping myself, can ultimately help you.  I look forward to continuing our journey together, starting with the next topic… WHAT is Exercise?

“What” is a little more complicated and controversial, but I will do my best to approach it in a tactfully-opinionated way.  As an exercise physiologist, I am particularly persnickety regarding what I consider exercise to be.  Many popular “workouts” unfortunately prove to be an exercise in futility at best.  You may already know this to be true.  Have you ever felt that all of your hard work is hardly working?  Many times, it is not.

My intent is certainly not to offend or discourage you; being active is always commendable and, if you have the extra time and energy, there is a smorgasbord of workouts from which to choose.  However, if you are interested in rapid routines and a timely transformation, it is important to evaluate the fitness of your fitness program.  Is your work out working out?

We all know that exercise isn’t sauna suits, toning tables, and eight-minute abs, right?  But what about skiing?  Team sports?  Elastic bands and “core” work?  How about Pilates and Yoga?  Is stretching the secret?  What about cardiovascular activities such as swimming, running, aerobics, or Spinning?  Is stamina the missing link?

Activity is not always exercise.  Popularity is not always productivity.

So… what qualifies an activity as a quantified exercise?  From a scientific viewpoint, exercise should be defined by what your body needs to possess progressively less disease and better health.  True exercise reduces risk factors for disease.  True exercise enhances the health-related components of physical fitness.  If your workout is not doing both, perhaps it is not truly exercise.

So what activity best regulates the major controllable risk factors of disease… blood pressure, cholesterol, sugars, and obesity?  What activity most improves cardiovascular power, muscular strength and endurance, joint flexibility, and body composition (fat to lean ratio)?  Is any single activity as good as you think?  Probably not.

Swimming, though great for cardiovascular conditioning, does little for strength or burning body fat.  Yoga may be great for flexibility but does little for circulo-respiratory power.  Running alone can actually decrease muscle mass and strength.  “Core” work does not burn fat directly off the midsection.

This is precisely the problem with routine routines.  Most individuals tend to gravitate to one activity… the one that they enjoy (or do not mind doing too much), whether or not it truly qualifies as a healthy and well-rounded exercise.

The closest thing to a one-stop shop for health and fitness is strength training.  Yes, believe it or not, training the muscles with resistance (free weights, machines, calisthenics) is the most well-rounded and beneficial form of exercise available, in my humble – and accurate – opinion.  Strength training reduces blood pressure, positively changes cholesterol and other blood lipids, and stabilizes blood sugar levels.   It also dramatically improves muscular strength and endurance and favorably changes body composition (increasing lean and decrease fat).  Strength training can also favorably influence cardiovascular fitness and joint flexibility.  While separate cardiovascular and flexibility training is also valuable, properly performed muscular exercise is invaluable.

Nonetheless, even with the true panacea of fitness, strength training is typically ineffective due to improper technique. Although many individuals spend hours per week (or per day) involved in strength training activities, if performed correctly, resistance training can effectively produce optimal benefits in literally minutes per muscle per week.

Because this topic is far beyond the scope of this one 700-word article, I encourage you to officially “Join the Club” and learn all of the secrets solutions to strength.  In the meantime, here are some key principles that can help you get started:

• Work every major muscle through a full range of motion.
• One set of each exercise, if properly performed, is often just as effective as multiple sets.
• Train each muscle group at least once, but not more than twice, per week.
• Lowering weights slowly is the secret to successful strength training.
• Slower speeds are safer and actually produce more force within the muscles.
• Use a variety of equipment: free weights, machines, and body weight exercises.
• Change exercises very often, perhaps even for each and every workout.
• Avoid the 3 sets of 12 routine. Use variety… from 6-15+ (sometimes even 100) repetitions.
• Warm up with cardio first. Cool down with stretching in between or at the end.

Next Topic: When to exercise… does it really matter if you have a “good time?”

Exercise isn’t always the best medicine and, depending on the specific situation, can actually be a source of dis-ease.

For that reason, I would like to share with you a few times when inactivity is the most sensible option.  The following are not lame excuses for not working out, but rather valid physiological bases for exercising your right not to exercise.  These are brief… if you need more, you know where to find me.

Don’t Exercise… in the morning.  If you have arthritis or back pain, be very cautious about am exercise, especially during the winter months.  Your body is stationary and cool as you sleep, and it needs time to warm up before activity.  No matter what, don’t begin with stretching or strength training.  Cardio comes first.

Don’t Exercise… in the afternoon.  If it is mid-day and you haven’t eaten yet, skip the workout. Your body is running on fumes… not fuel for burning fat or building muscle.  Also, if you just had lunch, your body wants to pump blood to your stomach, not your muscles.  Digest for an hour or two first.

Don’t Exercise… in the evening.  If you tend to skip exercise or have a family waiting, don’t try to work out after work’s out.  Instead, make sure your fitness regime is finished before your day gets started.

Don’t Exercise… on Sundays. In other words, always take at least one complete day of rest each week.  Remember, exercise is only effective with sufficient rest, repair, and recovery.

Don’t Exercise… if you’ve exercised.  If you ran yesterday, don’t run today.  If you trained biceps today, don’t train them tomorrow.  Always rest tomorrow whatever you work today.  Lack of soreness doesn’t mean that your body isn’t finished repairing itself.

Don’t Exercise… when your are exercising… and you experience any of the following “throw in the towel” symptoms: nausea, dizziness, pain or tightness in chest, difficulty breathing, or blurred vision.  If something doesn’t feel right, trust your feelings and stop.

Don’t Exercise… if you don’t exercise.  If you have been sedentary for months or years (or ever), make sure you get a physical before you get physical. A doctor’s work up is always recommended before a trainer’s workout, especially if you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, family history of heart disease, or if you are a smoker.  None of these necessarily indicate that you can’t exercise… just not yet.

Don’t Exercise… if you haven’t exercised recently.  It seems like every day at Stand Firm Fitness, my fitness center in Connecticut, I see a client walk in who hasn’t been here for at least a couple of weeks.  It comes with the territory.  Unfortunately, inactivity undermines fitness very quickly.  Use it or lose it, right?  For every week you take off, take at least one workout at a lower intensity to re-progress.

Don’t Exercise… if you’re sick.  At least do a check up from the neck up.  If you have a sore throat or nasal congestion, a light workout might make you feel better.  However, a chest cold or bronchial hack deserves rest and relaxation.

Don’t Exercise… if you’re injured, at least not with that specific body part.  There is a difference between working through and around an injury.  A qualified physical therapist can help you work through… a professional trainer can help you work around.  Don’t go it alone.

Don’t Exercise… if you smoked.  I can’t think of anything more blatantly dangerous than smoking before or after exercise.  Carbon monoxide in cigarettes has an affinity to hemoglobin 240 times stronger than that of oxygen.  In other words, your blood can’t transport oxygen too well when it is being used by toxins.  Because exercise creates a physiological oxygen deficit (during exercise) and an oxygen debt (after exercise), it is insanely dangerous to do anything before exercise that can limit the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood.  Smoking literally sucks the wind out of your sails… away from the muscles, brain, and heart.

Other than that… enjoy your workouts!!!

When I first started my business, I didn’t have a facility.  I didn’t have any equipment.  I didn’t have any clients.  In fact, I lived in the attic of my mother’s house in Wilton, CT.  So did my wife and my twin two-year-old daughters.  I had just recovered from a one-year hiatus from fitness, including both work and working out, due to a cracked L5 vertebra.  I was just getting back on track physically, but was also in desperate need of recovering fiscally as well.

When I graduated from Wilton High School in 1985, I had a very clear vision for my life.  I vividly remember setting the goal of becoming an educated and experienced exercise physiologist, and then coming back home to make Wiltonions and Wiltonites healthy.  Ten years later, I was definitely back home (staying in an un-lofty loft) and, relative to my broken body, Wilton was already remarkably healthy.  This wasn’t exactly what I had expected; nonetheless, I used my situation as motivation for myself and others.

One body at a time, starting with my own, I formed the foundation to Stand Firm.  With no facility, equipment, or clients, I basically went door to door searching for people who were willing to trust my recently acquired knowledge and training systems.

Many had home gyms with machines, treadmills, dumbbells, and bikes.  Most had absolutely nothing.  Forced to be creative, I soon realized that, as long as the major tenets of fitness were included (cardio, strength, flexibility, and proper nutrition), it doesn’t matter where you do it.  Regardless of where my clients were and what they had, they could still exercise.  Everybody and every body can realize results everywhere.  What you know is more important than where you go.

I am blessed to say that many of those people are still clients today, fifteen years later, and their support has been a source of inspiration for the expansion of Stand Firm Fitness over the years.  I’ve worked hard since 1985 for my goal of making my community a healthier and happier place.  But I also realize that, as hard as I try, I’ll never be all things to all people, and maybe somebody out there might be a better “fit” for you and your own personal transformation process.  This is especially true for those of you who don’t live within driving distance of my club… which is 6.72 billion of you… and counting.

With that being said, I’d like to encourage you to pick up the phone, get on the web, or jump in the car.  You can get results anywhere, but you need to act… and there’s no time like the present.  It only takes one action to start the process, and THE BEST WAY TO EXERCISE can help you regardless of where you live, work, or play.

You may have a variety of options from which to choose for your regular workout location; in any case, do your homework and pick the place that passes your personal test, whatever that is.  If you are a current member or client of a facility, congratulations… keep going!  If you aren’t getting the results you desire there, look in the mirror.  Are you really doing what they recommend?  Speak with somebody about it.  They probably have more answers than you think.  I am always amazed, even at my own facility, how few people seek proper guidance.

There is definitely a right and wrong way to exercise.  And, even more importantly, there is The BEST Way to Exercise… and you can do that anywhere at anytime.  Remember, it’s not necessarily where you go… it’s what you know.

And to increase what you know for where you go… keep reading.  I look forward to opening some eyes with “why” to work out.  It’s worse than you think… and that’s a good thing!

Well, this past year, a new book hit the market that elevated quite a few heart rates.  The “controversial” title, if you even want to give it that much credence, is “The Cardio-Free Diet,” by Jim Karas.

I don’t buy it… the concept or the book.  The excerpts were enough for me.  For what it is worth, Jim was educated at the Wharton School of Business in fiscal fitness.  Here are some of his quotes (and, just so there is zero doubt, this is Jim Karas speaking… not me!):

“Are you interested in losing weight, keeping it off and completely changing your body shape to the astonishment of all your friends?  What if I told you this goal is best accomplished without ever stepping on a treadmill or elliptical machine?”

HOLD ON… HE GETS BETTER:
“My goal is two to three years from now we laugh at the fact we used to do all that cardio.”

AND BETTER YET:

“After 20 years of experience, I am convinced that cardio kills.  It kills your weight loss plan, your joints, your internal organs and immune system, your body composition, your time and, most of all, your motivation to stay committed to losing weight.”

All right, enough of Jim.  Now it’s Doug’s turn.

Stretching is one of the least important components of fitness.  Stretching does NOT burn body fat, reduce soreness, prevent injuries, increase strength, reduce cholesterol, improve aerobic fitness, or even necessarily develop flexibility.  It does not make muscles “long and lean.”  Additionally, stretching doesn’t have major impact on the attenuation of major disease, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, obesity, and diabetes.

Does this mean you should not stretch? No, of course not.  Though over-emphasized, stretching should still be included in a well-rounded fitness program.

If being more flexible does nothing more than allow you to strength train through a greater range of motion, thereby indirectly decreasing your risk of injury, it still gives reason enough to stretch.

How about strength training?  Should we not lift weights because it increases blood pressure during the workout?  Or should we lift weights carefully and correctly because we will have lower blood pressure every other hour of the day?

Should we avoid dumbbells and barbells because the exercises are often completely opposite of your muscles’ strength curves.  No.  Free weight exercises are real life movements and should definitely be a part of everyone’s program.

How about machines, which don’t fit all body shapes and sizes, and can cause a lot of problems if they are used incorrectly?  It is practically impossible to correctly isolate each muscle group without them.  I wouldn’t have spent close to a million dollars on equipment for my facility if I didn’t feel machines were warranted.

So what about Jim Karas’ “killer-cardio” perspective?  To be honest, I have to completely disagree with him.  Cardio exercise is definitely not wrong.  People don’t always do it right, but that’s another story.

In support of cardio, nothing has a more positive impact on the functional capacities of the heart, blood, blood vessels, and relevant muscles.  The level of efficiency at which these various systems transport and utilize oxygen improves tremendously with cardio.  Furthermore, improving aerobic fitness enhances your workload capacities (every level from rest to maximum), increases fat burning capabilities at every single intensity level, and provides more energy for daily activities.

And how about thwarting hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, coronary artery disease, anxiety/depression, and diabetes mellitus?

Even if strength training is a better way to lose weight (and it is), when you consider all of the other benefits that cardio offers, who cares about the scale?

Let’s face it; whether we like it or not, we all need a cardio routine now so we can avoid cardiac rehab later.  Training the heart, lungs, and blood vessels is a vital piece of the fitness puzzle.  I can prove this to you in plenty more detail but, deep down, I’m sure you already know.  You may love it.  You may hate it.  Either way, you need it.

My final trump deals with Jim Karas’ notion that heart rate is related to cardio.

“The Cardio-Free Diet” states that you receive a cardio benefit during strength training because your heart rate is elevated.  The author is forgetting the vital detail that heart rate only measures heart speed… it doesn’t measure blood flow or, even more importantly, oxygen consumption.

True “cardio” exercise (running, biking, swimming, etc.) actually is “aerobic.”  Your heart pumps a lot of blood and your body consumes a lot of oxygen.

With weight training, though your heart is racing full speed, your body is only as “aerobic” as a walk.  Your heart is beating fast, but it is associated with a different mechanism.  Scientifically speaking, heart rate is disproportionately elevated due to the autonomic nervous system’s pressor response phenomenon, occurring reflexively from systemic skeletal muscle contractions.

Trust me… and hopefully you do by now… it’s great to lift weights, but do some true cardio too.

To help us get on the same page and all get started on the same foot, I’ll assume that you don’t currently exercise.  If you do, hopefully, at least for my benefit, you don’t exercise correctly.

Thankfully, if you haven’t exercised for a while, your body will respond to almost anything.  Even relatively pathetic quantities and intensities of exercise will elicit rather substantial adaptations within the body.  And not only will your body respond favorably to “next to nothing” workouts, it may also respond poorly to anything beyond that.  An initial “less is more” approach is safe as well as smart.

If you haven’t been physically active for a while, doing less should actually be quite exciting news for you.  As long as you progressively do more than your body is used to doing, you will adapt in a positive way.

To help you get going, here are some exciting principles for those of you about to be committed… to exercise.

Let’s start with cardio.  I have two suggestions for aerobic exercise.  Take it in stride.  Don’t do it on a treadmill.

#1:  Take it in stride.

Your cardio sessions should initially be light.  Easy does it!  Your heart, lungs, and blood vessels are at the mercy of your brain.  If your brain tells them to take a vacation, you can’t expect much out of them when they go back to work.  So… no matter what the person next to you (in the gym or on the fitness video) is doing, don’t try to keep up with them.  You’ve now heard it straight from the horse’s mouth; don’t try to “keep up with the Joneses” at first.

There are many fancy options on cardio equipment today… hill sequences, random programs, time intervals, etc…. but don’t use them at all for the first couple of weeks.  Just pick a comfortably low workload that you could maintain for a long time, and do it only for as long as you feel comfortable.  If you only have three minutes, do three minutes.  If you have ten, do ten.  15-20 minutes is probably a better target but, at least at this point, duration really doesn’t matter.

Although a five minute workout is “next to nothing,” it still is more than what you’ve been doing recently, right?  Your body will have no choice but to respond accordingly.  Put your brain in charge of your body for a change and your body will change in a way that will recharge your brain.  It’s a positive feedback loop that reinforces your efforts.

So, you’re taking your cardio in stride for the first couple of weeks… short duration and low intensity.  Sounds easy, but it sure helps overcome the resistance of getting started.  Now let’s look at the part about not striding.

#2:  Don’t do it on a treadmill.

Most people, even if completely sedentary, still walk on a daily basis.  One of the key principles to consistent results from exercise is to regularly perform activities that are not a familiar part of your current routine.

Since your body has already adapted to walking, then getting on a treadmill, even if you walk at an incline, is essentially just a high-tech way of doing what you are already doing each day.  Granted, walking, and jogging, and running are great forms of cardio, but not for you, not for now.  Either it is too familiar or too forceful.

If they’re available, you’re better off performing types of cardio that your body is not used to doing.  Force your body to change by forcing it to do something different.  I would also suggest keeping the exercises limited to non-weight bearing activities; in other words, take a load off.  Start with modes such as biking and rowing so you can at least sit down while you’re moving.  These aren’t necessarily easy, but they’re easier.  Weight-bearing and weight-displacing exercises (such as stair climbing and jumping rope) should definitely be avoided, at least initially.  So begin with the former and progress to the latter, later.

Please take this advice to heart… a low intensity of a little cardio.  There’s always plenty of time to progress and make progress.  For now, let’s just get you out of the gate safely and keep you heading in the right direction.

Even on your “non-cardio days,” your muscles must be warmed up before you can safely, and most effectively, perform intense strength training exercises. No matter what, always perform at least 5-10 minutes of whole-body cardiovascular exercise before working the muscles with machines, free weights, or calisthenics.

2. FLEX BEFORE FLEXIBILITY

Many people believe that stretching is a good activity for warming up the muscles. On the contrary, flexibility training should always be done at the end of your workout, after the blood is pumping and the muscles, tendons, & ligaments are warm. You can either stretch in between exercises for a particular muscle group or stretch your whole body at the end. Stretching a “cold” muscle may actually pose more risk of injury than not stretching at all.

3. EXHALE ON EXERTION

Never hold your breath during exercise. This is probably the most important safety principle. Trying to exhale with your throat (glottis) closed can temporarily double or triple your blood pressure!! As a general rule, breathe out when you feel like you’re exerting pressure (lifting the weight); breathe normally as you release pressure (lowering the weight). If in doubt… breathe out.  Let’s keep those blood pressures down!!!

4. REST IS BEST

Your body responds to training during the rest periods. Training breaks your body apart… rest lets your body mend itself back together… stronger, faster, bigger, smarter, leaner, and with increased mitochondrial density. Anyway, don’t work your muscles over and over without them having the chance to “catch their breath.” At the very most, you should work a particular muscle group every few days. And as you get stronger, you can actually take off up to a week or more between workouts for a given muscle group.

For most people, strength training exercises need to be grouped together so that similar muscles are worked on similar days. Muscle groups that work together need to be trained together. For example, if you are training your legs, you should train all of the different muscles in your legs on the same day.  Makes sense, right?  If you perform squats on Monday (which use the calves for stabilization) and leg curls on Tuesday (which use the calves for knee flexion), you end up working your calves two days in a row. Imagine if you performed calf raises on Wednesday? Don’t plan on walking on Thursday. The same holds true for upper body exercises. If you train chest on day one, shoulders on day two, and triceps on day three, you have most likely trained your triceps three days in a row.

To assure proper rest between workouts, arrange your exercise accordingly:

Group 1: Upper Body Pushing Movements (Chest, Shoulders, Triceps)

Group 2: Lower Body

Group 3: Upper Body Pulling Movements (Back & Biceps)

Strength training exercises should, at least most of the time, also be completed in order from largest to smallest muscles. This not only allows for most of your energy to be directed to larger muscles early in your workout (when you have the most energy), but also prevents fatiguing smaller muscles too soon in your workout.

Push Muscles: Pectorals (chest), Deltoids (shoulders), Triceps (back of arms)

Leg Muscles: Gluteus Maximus (buttocks), Quadriceps (front thigh), Hamstrings (back thigh), Adductors (inner thigh), Gastrocnemius (calves)

Pull Muscles: Latissimus Dorsi (upper back), , Biceps (you know this one), Forearms

And what about abs? Regardless of what you’ve seen or heard, abdominals should always be worked at the end, after everything, because they stabilize the torso when doing other exercises. Even more importantly, Lower Back exercises should always be worked after the Abdominals. Did you hear that… Lower Back after Abdominals.  If you fatigue your Lower Back muscles and then work Abdominals, the potential of injuring your Lower Back increases substantially.

I realize this is a lot to absorb.  Because a picture is worth a 1000 words, and a motion picture is worth 10,000, I encourage you to watch all of the tips that I have posted for your viewing pleasure on the membership portion of THE BEST WAY TO EXERCISE.  Enjoy!!

5. THE SPICE OF LIFE

As soon as you feel comfortable with an exercise, it’s time to change.  Your body and mind become very familiar and very bored very easily.  To keep your brain motivated and your body progressing, it is imperative that you continually adjust your workouts.  Try to incorporate a variety of exercises into each and every workout… body weight exercises, free-weight exercises (dumbbells and barbells), and exercise machines.  Additionally, I find it extremely helpful to completely change your routine every couple of weeks.  As soon as you get used to it, change it.  Physiological and psychological staleness is the beginning of the end of your dedication to a long-term fitness program.

6. SEPS & RETS

Many people get these messed up… they get their metters lixed.  A “repetition” (or “rep” for short) is one complete movement of an exercise, basically a lifting and a lowering of a weight.  For example, during push-ups, you lift your body up and lower your body down… that is one repetition.  If you perform 10 push-ups, you’ve performed one SET of 10 repetitions.  Let’s say you take a break, perform 10 more push-ups, take another break, perform 10 more push-ups, and you’re done.  You’ve completed 3 SETS of 10 REPS of push-ups.  Of course, it’s not always this neat and clean, but you get the picture.

I suggest that, for general training programs, using a resistance that allows you to perform somewhere between 6 and 20 repetitions.  If anything, err on the side of too many.  Too much weight and not enough reps is an accident waiting to happen.  Again, refering back to the “spice of life,” altering sets and reps is one of the best ways to add variety to your program, especially if you have access to a limited selection of equipment.  Performing sets of 6-8 for two weeks and 15-20 for two weeks is a great change of pace to your overall program.

7. DON’T GET A SPEEDING TICKET

Perform each exercise with a deliberately (and close to pathetically) slow speed of movement.  Never use momentum to “jerk” a weight through its range of motion.  In most situations, you should attempt to raise the weight or resistance in approximately two or three seconds and lower the weight in at least four or five seconds.  Watch your watch carefully.  A 7-Second-Down count is extremely slow, but it is probably the safest and most productive way to train.  If in doubt about speed of movement, you are probably moving too quickly.

8. MACHINE SETUP

Each exercise has it’s own specific “right way” of being performed and usually takes me five or ten minutes to explain.  It is essential to spend some extra time initially learning how to performe each movement safely and efficiently.  I have posted all of the specific techniques for many exercises on the “Members Only” sections of The Best Way to Exercise.  Join & Enjoy!!!

9. PROPER PROGRESSION

While there are some exceptions to this rule, it is important to try to progress on a regular basis, by either repetition or resistance, at least until you are at a level of fitness which you’d like to maintain.  Progression can be viewed as a systematic increase in any aspect of your program… reps, sets, exercises, resistance, etc.

Keep in mind, though, there is the law of diminishing returns in effect.  The most dramatic results of any exercise program always come from the least amount of exercise.  Past a certain point, progression only increases the time you spend working out and your likelihood of injury.  As the intensity of your workouts increase, training duration should decrease.  Your body has a limited quantity of energy that can be used either for hard work or for long work… not both.  As you become more conditioned, design your workouts to be progressively harder, yet briefer.  Sometimes program variety alone is program progress enough.

10. SEEK PROFESSIONAL GUIDANCE

The above guidelines are some of the more important aspects to monitor during resistance training;  nonetheless, they are only a scratch on the surface.  If you have specific questions or concerns about your individual program, please continue to peruse The Best Way to Exercise website or contact me personally at: Doug@TheBestWayToExercise.com