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March 22, 2021

Too Much Rest Or Not Enough?

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 2:06 pm

I hated studying for certification tests. Right after college, I took one of the more reputable certifications for strength and conditioning. While preparing, it wasn’t very reassuring to memorize concepts the test-makers thought was more important than I did.

I was arrogant for sure, just like any twenty-something-year-old meathead, but to mount a straw defense, I already had some real experience in formal strength and conditioning. I knew that many of the answers to the test questions depended on the situation.

Theory and lab results don’t always pan out in a practical situation.

One of these theoretical ideas that never sat right with me was standard rest times. Most of the textbooks would have strict guidelines for how long you should rest between strength training exercises or conditioning rounds and bouts.

I dug into why they were recommended and found it to be arbitrary.

Textbooks would assert that:

  • When weight-training for strength, you need to rest for 2-5 minutes between sets.
  • When doing circuits for endurance, 30-second rests between the exercises were best.

Heavier weight means you need longer rest time to recover and repeat—that sort of makes sense.

I think the textbook’s authors did not clarify the rest times regarding recovery or what to push?

Instead, it would help if you had answers to:

  1. Did the specific durations challenge your body’s capacity to endure stress and recover from it?
  2. Were they recommended because anyone, regardless of training history, could recover completely with that specific rest time and be ready to push hard again?

Those are two very different concepts, and I’ll explain.

What’s the Purpose of the Workout?

If you want to feel strong or tireless at the start of each set, round, or circuit, you have to pay careful attention to your rest period.

If you want to challenge how much intensive work you can do and resist fatigue, you adapt to the exercise’s stress and limit your rest.

You need to know how much rest you need first to understand how to shorten it strategically.

  • Sometimes you should be fully recovered and feel your best for each set. This recovery is the best practice for training compound-lifts with heavier weights.
  • Sometimes, training isn’t to feel the best or lift the heaviest weights possible during the training session.
  • Sometimes it’s best to work at a deficit during an individual training session to cause a long-term gain.

Training the endurance and tolerance of fast-twitch muscle fibers to curb fatigue is part of the foundation for your capacity for strength.

These fast-twitch types are the very ones that dominate strength and power movements.

Alactic capacity, the general capability to maintain high-intensity movement, makes up this foundation. To train these abilities, you need to monitor, reduce, and alter how long you rest between exertion periods in a workout as you become stronger and more conditioned.

Does a Real Standard Exist?

The recommended rest times for heavy strength training are usually based on the length of time the Central Nervous System (CNS) and energy substrates, which cause muscle contraction, need to recover.

It makes sense, but I’d strongly disagree that the average rest times given in the textbooks are standard for most people. I assume these studies take place in laboratory conditions.

I can’t emphasize enough how many people I’ve seen not fit this model in a practical setting.

The values, at the least, need to be looked at and tested further. I’m basing my view not just on what people tell me but on my concrete observations of how long it took them to repeat exercises with the same effort and intensity. And, I’ve seen these deviations in both inexperienced and experienced clients.

Textbooks for the associations that certify coaches usually mention that rest times can be changed and provide a range for this.

Still, I’ve never seen any solid recommendations on how, when, or how much to change it.

The Breath Can Tell Us Something a Device Can’t

Technology has created some great tools since these textbooks were written that monitor fundamental physiological shifts and monitor recovery. Heart rate monitors and devices that track heart rate variability are some of them.

While having data to track is invaluable, I think we have a built-in regulator that we can put to use in deciding how long to rest—the breath.

Observing the breath can tell us something that a device can’t.

It gives clues to how psychologically ready we are to take another heavy set or go through another intense exercise period. Controlled breathing can calm the body and mind, and by simply observing it, you can tell if you’re still panicking.

The word panic may seem dramatic, but it’s describing a stress-induced state from a mental attitude, voicing, “I’m not OK, or I can’t do this.”

However, even when heart rate lowers and other metrics show the body to be recovering, your breathing may still be speedy or labored.

And if the breath hasn’t calmed, your mind hasn’t calmed.

The mind can immediately speed up heart rate and blunt neural signals to the body to act coordinated, strong, and powerful. So even if the heart rate slowed and the nervous system and energy substrates had enough time to reset, you’re unsettled mind will kill your effort on the next set or round.

This calm is primarily an overlooked point of performance and recovery, but we teach it in great detail in our JDI Barbell course.

The Signals to Observe

If you’re trying to monitor your recovery between sets by tracking heart rate, you also need to pay attention to the quality of your breath.

  • When you finish a set of weights or round of conditioning, your breath speeds up alongside your heart rate.
  • You may also feel that your shoulders and chest elevate with every breath, even if you usually have a healthier breathing pattern where you expand and narrow your inhale and exhale through your lower torso.
  • Your body is trying to take in more oxygen to make up for what you spend during the exercise.
  • The breathing muscles in the chest, neck, and shoulders cause you to get taller with our inhale and shorter when you exhale. But they’re the back-up muscles for breathing, kind of like afterburners.
  • The lower torso muscles that expand and narrow the belly, sides, and lower back on inhaling and exhaling should be the dominant breathing muscles, especially when resting.
  • So even though those secondary breathing muscles can and should kick on to help you take in more air while you’re pushing through intense exercise, the primary forces should be responsible for your breath before your next set or round. If this doesn’t happen, then you haven’t fully recovered.

This up and down breathing pattern signifies that your breathing is labored, and you’re still in a stressed state.

Observe the Breath’s Patterns

To use the breath to decide our rest times, we have to make sure we naturally breathe horizontally where the torso widens on inhaling and narrows on exhale. If you want to dig into this, you can check out the work I’m doing with Dr. Belisa.

  • If we have this excellent pattern, we can start to track how long it takes after a set to switch from using those afterburner muscles to a relaxed horizontal breath.
  • There’s no need to force it; watch it and record it to use as a baseline. You can also track your heart rate to see the relationship between the two.
  • Keep a log on how long it takes you to make this switch after each set until you find the average time across all sets over two weeks of workouts.

Also, make a note as to how you felt during each set or round:

  • Did you feel like you were pushing just as hard each time?
  • Were there sets where you waited just a little longer because you were more in touch with your breath?
  • Were those sets better when you rested longer?
  • Were you able to keep pushing hard for each set as fatigue crept in as it always will the longer a workout lasts?
  • According to the standards I mentioned above, did you start your next set as soon as your breathing became more relaxed?
  • What happens when you take a few more calm breaths even after you start breathing only horizontally before beginning the next set?

Start Somewhere

Sometimes it makes sense to shorten your rest time to train your ability to recover and push the needle on both local muscular and total endurance. Without a baseline, though, how do you challenge this?

You need to know how long it takes you to recover entirely from each type of activity. You also need to know the feeling of rebounding to a fully rested state.

Becoming more conscious of your breath’s changes and quality will improve the connection and awareness you have of your body.

Often you’ll see those who throw themselves too far into the deep end, trying to work at an intensity that’s not sustainable with too high a stress level for them to recover or adapt.

They’ll plan short rest times based on nothing other than what they’ve been told makes the workout challenging. If you have no idea how long it takes for you to recover completely, you’re just guessing, and you may shorten your rest too much to sustain your effort throughout your workout.

There’s nothing wrong with testing your ceiling, and there’s a time for that, but every set isn’t your last, and you can’t treat it like it is.

If you know your baseline, though, you can set challenging rest times in that sweet spot that pushes you, challenges your ability to recover, and also keeps you moving forward.

Consider the entire picture when planning strength or conditioning training. If you plan to do eight rounds or sets of something but only get through four of them because you pushed yourself to a breaking point during the first few sets, what was the point?

You couldn’t sustain the effort because you went too hard in the beginning.

In the end, you did less work, despite the frantic effort of your first couple of sets fueled by listening to loops of Rocky-themed death metal music remixes.

Sometimes training’s primary focus should be on maintaining as close to the same effort as possible for every bout. This primary focus includes all of your training sessions in a given week.

And to give every set a similar effort, you’ll need to monitor how much rest time you need after each set, circuit, or round to keep this up, and tracking your breathing can give you the details.

Track Your Breath for a Useful Metric

Let’s go over specifics. For the breath to be a helpful metric in deciding rest, we need to make sure we have an excellent horizontal breathing pattern and that our breathing muscles are strong. After this, we can start tracking the breath changes to get a clearer picture of our fitness.

Observe:

Make your set, your sprint, your circuit, or your round hitting a punching bag, as usual. When it’s time to rest, don’t intentionally slow or control your breathing. Watch a few breaths.

Ask yourself how the exercise bout influenced you:

Question 1. Is Your Breathing Labored?

  • Specifically, are you breathing horizontally through your torso while also through your neck, shoulders, and chest?
  • Are you not broadening and narrowing at all through your belly, sides, and low back and instead only using the shoulders and chest’s secondary breathing muscles?
  • Record yourself or look in a mirror. Are you just getting taller and shorter as you inhale and exhale, or is your mid-section moving with it too?

A. 1. The first question’s answers will tell you if your primary breathing muscles need more work and how hard the effort was.

  • If you find you’re just using the secondary muscles (breathing up and down with no broadening and narrowing of your mid-section), you need more conscious practice in using the right muscles and patterns.
  • And if you do practice and strengthen these muscles, your recovery ability and performance will immediately improve.

Question 2. How Do You Inhale and Exhale?

  • Are you inhaling and exhaling through your nose and mouth?
  • Are you inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth?
  • Are you inhaling and exhaling through your nose and mouth synchronously?

A. 2. If your answer to the second question is yes, it probably means you’re using both primary and secondary muscles.

  • You may still be breathing well horizontally, but if you notice your chest and shoulders actively engaging when you breathe, you have more information about how hard that set was.
  • If you’re breathing through both your mouth and nose, you’re pushing yourself physiologically and will need more time to recover sufficiently.

Keep it Going

Instead of slowing down the breath, controlling it, or quickly changing it to nasal only, let yourself breathe rapidly in whatever way comes naturally. Just watch it closely for at least 10-50 seconds without interruption.

At the moment, it starts relaxing even a little, deepen and extend your inhale and exhale without changing the pace of your breath too drastically or trying to inhale only through your nose if you haven’t naturally started doing it.

Take several breaths like this until you switch to an easy more nasal-only breath without forcing it.

Track and Repeat

Have a stopwatch or clock with you, and note how long it took for the change in breath to happen. Remember to write it down. Then make a judgment about whether you feel psychologically ready to start the next set, round, run, or drill and repeat the same effort as the last.

The longer you train, the more fatigue you’re going to build regardless of what you do in between sets, but the idea is to give as consistent an effort as possible throughout the whole training session.

Create Your Baseline

Keep tracking rest times based on the changes in your breath and the effort that follows. Follow this over a couple of weeks with every training method you put yourself through, whether it’s weight training or conditioning bouts.

Now you have your average rest needed for a baseline to use across the board based on your biology and condition.

Create Your Training Plan

Remember that sometimes you can challenge your conditioning (both strength and endurance) by limiting rest. With a baseline that gives you concrete evidence of how long you need to make a full recovery, you can reduce your rest strategically to challenge and improve over time.

It’s also easier to make adjustments. Say you reduce your rest time by 20%, but you’re fighting to finish your training each week. You can adjust and make it only 10% until you adapt to this first.

Re-evaluate and Adjust

Keep following your baseline or adjustments every time you train for the length of a training cycle (3-6 weeks), but stay in touch with the feelings of your breath.

Then, test your ability to recover again. Now you can set and play with rest based on this new baseline.

Just remember, this isn’t always a linear advance. When you change complexity or style of exercise and movement or become stronger and can challenge yourself with heavier loads and implements, recovery requirements can change.

But always, you can check in with the breath.

Source

February 24, 2021

Nature’s Two Most Powerful Exercise Recovery Tools

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 11:52 am

In part one of this series, Train Hard, Recover Harder, I explained that stress is a double-edged sword. To make adaptations, you need to impose stress, but too much stress will interfere with your recovery.

Stress can be both good and bad, but your body doesn’t differentiate between types of stress, and your body can only handle so much stress. Whilst training is good stress; your ability to benefit from it is somewhat dependant on your total stress load.

So, you must manage your overall life stress to free up as much capacity to deal with training stress. Stress management strategies can create a bigger window of opportunity to apply and recover from training stress. 

In the second part, Great Recovery Starts With Great Programming, I discussed optimizing your training program as another effective tool to maximize recovery. By focusing on delivering efficient training stress, you make your recovery easier. 

Intelligent Program Design = Fatigue Management

The four key factors to consider are:

  1. Volume landmarks

  2. SRA Curves

  3. Stimulus: Fatigue Ratio

  4. Relative intensity

At this stage, I am assuming your training is optimized and provides an appropriate stimulus.

From this point forward, the rest of your adaptations, such as gains in size and strength, are dependent on recovery and results in this simplified muscle-building equation:

Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation

In this third installment of the series, I will explain your two most powerful recovery tools and how to maximize them.

The two most powerful recovery tools at your disposal are:

  1. Sleep

  2. Nutrition

If you focus on these consistently, you will be rewarded. When you have sleep, diet, and stress management dialed in, you are primed to make great progress in the gym. 

Sleep’s Positive Impact on Performance

Sleep is your number one recovery tool. I have talked repeatedly about sleep’s positive impact on athletic performance and your ability to recover from hard training. The harder you can train without exceeding your capacity for recovery, the faster you can make progress.

Sleep is the most anabolic state for your body. A lack of sleep will limit your strength and muscle mass gains. It will also increase the chances of you losing muscle mass when cutting and gaining fat while bulking.

To maximize recovery and build more lean muscle, you must make sleep a priority.

Better sleep will also help you to:

Long story short, it will make you a fitter, happier, and more productive person.

Let’s be honest; you probably already know this. Yet, I bet you don’t give sleep the credit it deserves when it comes to your lifestyle choices. Most of us realize we should sleep more. We know sleep is important. Yet, we do not prioritize it. 

I’m pretty confident you make this mistake because I do too. I have been guilty of it on many occasions in the past. Staying up late to watch the next episode of a TV show or scrolling aimlessly through Instagram is all too easily done. Whenever I do this, I always regret it the next day.

Lack of sleep can sneak up on you. You probably don’t realize you are sleep-deprived. The occasional late night has little impact. The problem is when those late nights become normal.

Staying up late on the laptop to meet work deadlines or relaxing in front of a good show both eat into your sleep and have a big impact on the quality of your recovery. In time, you’ll probably feel like a zombie without a hit of caffeine in the morning, your gym performance will start to plateau, and you’ll make worse dietary choices. These all happen gradually.

They sneak up on you. I have seen this time and again with clients that try to burn the candle at both ends. They fool themselves that they are getting away with it because the drop-off in performance is gradual. Be warned, lack of sleep adds up and can stop your progress dead in its tracks if left unresolved.

My experience with lack of sleep was less gradual and more like blunt force trauma. I had always slept well and made it a priority. Then I had kids. After our son was born, it was 18 months before I felt normal in the gym again. I vividly remember the session after my first full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I felt like Superman.

The sad thing is, I wasn’t Superman.

I wasn’t even close. I was just regular Tom after a good night’s sleep. My perception of what normal was had been warped so much by 18 months of sleep deprivation that feeling normal now felt amazing. You might have slept-walked into the same situation without realizing it. Make sleep a priority for a month, and I’m confident you’ll look, feel, and perform better.

The research on sleep deprivation is alarming. Studies show that 11 days in a row with less than six hours of sleep, your cognitive ability will be about the same as if you had stayed awake for 24 hours straight.

At 22 days of less than six hours of sleep per night, your brain function is at the same level as someone who has stayed up for 48 hours straight.​ To put things in perspective, that means your reactions are probably worse than someone who is over the legal limit for alcohol.

Are You More Zombie Than Human?

Do a sleep survey on yourself and assess whether you are more of a zombie than a human.

As a guide, you should aim for this when it comes to sleep:

  • Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep every night.

  • Go to bed at the same time every night.

  • Wake up at the same time each morning.

  • Wake up without an alarm clock.

  • Sleep the whole night through–multiple bathroom trips are a sure sign of low sleep quality (or drinking way too much just before bed).

  • Waking up in almost the same position you fell asleep in (not tossing and turning all night) is a good sign.

  • You should wake up refreshed.

How does your sleep stack up against that list? I’m guessing you don’t tick off all those points. In my experience, most people can’t even tick off a couple of them. Your goal is to work towards being able to check off each one of those bullet points.

Here are some practical tips to help you sleep better and for longer.

  • Set yourself up for success: Get a comfortable bed, mattress, and pillow. Bed quality can affect sleep. It can also reduce back and shoulder pain. Given you will be spending nearly a third of your life in bed, it makes sense to invest in a good one.
  • Establish a routine: Go to bed at roughly the same time and get up at the same time every day. Weekends count too. Being consistent with sleep and waking times has been found to improve long-term sleep quality.
  • Include relaxation: Relaxation techniques before bed has been found to improve sleep quality. Read a book, listen to a chill-out-playlist, take a hot bath or do some deep breathing and meditation. Do whatever it takes to help you relax and unwind.
  • Cut the coffee at 4 pm: Having coffee is cool. I love the stuff, but having it later in the day can disrupt or even prevent your sleep. On average, caffeine’s half-life is about five hours; however, this half-life can vary massively between individuals. If you are a slow metabolizer of caffeine, then you might have levels in your system keeping you alert and awake into the early hours if you drink it after 4 pm. In extreme cases, having it within 10 hours of bed can be disruptive for some people. So, cut yourself off at 4 pm and see if you can fall asleep easier. If you are still struggling, slide things forward to 3 pm and reassess.
  • Disconnect from the matrix: The blue light emitted by the screens on your devices can disrupt your sleep. The body’s internal clock or circadian rhythm is influenced mainly by daylight hours. Artificial light like streetlights and lightbulbs already disrupt it but staring at screens magnifies the issue. Your internal body clock is served by the ocular nerve, which is directly affected by blue light. The same light waves your phone, TV, laptop, and tablet give off. To improve sleep, I suggest you disconnect from screens like this for at least 60 minutes before bedtime.
  • Get natural sunlight exposure during the day: At these times, the body needs light. Studies found that two hours of bright light exposure during the day increases the amount of sleep by two hours and improves sleep quality by 80%.
  • Sleep in the Batcave: Make your bedroom pitch-black, quiet, and cool to maximize the quality of your sleep. Remove all electrical devices.
  • Room temperature: Set thermostats at about 20 C or 70 F. Room temperature has been found to affect sleep quality more than external noise.
  • Stay off the booze: Just a couple of drinks have been shown to reduce your sleep hormones. Alcohol alters melatonin production and decreases Human Growth Hormone (HGH) levels. Melatonin is a key sleep hormone that tells your brain when it’s time to unwind, relax and fall asleep. HGH helps regulate your body clock, is anti-aging, and vital to recovery.

There you have it, your comprehensive guide to better sleep. You have no excuse now. You know sleep is crucial. You can also rank your sleep against the standards listed above. If you come up short, you have nine tips to help improve your sleep.

If you do improve your sleep, then everything else will improve too. Aim to enhance your sleep before you worry about investing in any other recovery modalities.

None of them can hold a candle to sleep, and sleep is free.

Your Caloric Intake and Energy Balance

Your second most powerful recovery tool is your diet.

By fuelling your body appropriately, you can capitalize on the stimulus created by your training. Training creates the stimulus for muscle gain, fat loss, and strength increases. Your recovery dictates whether or not you reach that potential. 

When it comes to diet, there are several variables you can manipulate. The most important variable when it comes to nutrition for recovery is your calorie intake and energy balance.

What is a calorie, and what is energy balance?

A calorie (Kcal) is a unit of energy. Our food contains calories and is what fuels us with energy to go about our daily lives. Everyone requires different amounts of energy per day depending on age, size, and activity levels.

Caloric balance refers to the number of calories you consume compared to the number of calories you burn. 

If you eat a surplus of calories, you will gain weight. If you eat a deficit of calories, you will lose weight. While eating calorically at maintenance, it means you maintain weight. For physique changes, calories are king.

When consuming a calorie surplus, maximizing recovery is more manageable than when in a deficit. You have an abundance of calories available to hit your macro and micronutrient needs. When it comes to nutrition, if you’re in a surplus, keep things simple. Hit your macros, spread your protein intake relatively evenly between 3-6 meals a day, and eat various fruits and vegetables. 

When in a calorie deficit, the details matter more with your diet when maximizing recovery because you have less energy coming in. The fundamental principles still apply but, you have to be more mindful of your food choices when calories are low to ensure you hit both your macro and micronutrient needs. 

Meal timing, food quality, and micronutrition all matter more when in a deficit, but none of them trump hitting an appropriate calorie deficit.

An energy balance and macronutrients are the two most essential factors in your diet regarding physique development and strength gains.

How to Set Calories for Individual Results

When in a surplus, I suggest you eat enough to gain between 0.25-0.5% of your body weight per week.

A quick strategy to estimate your needs per day is to multiply your weight in pounds by 15.

This formula generally gives a good approximation of the calories needed to maintain your weight. A surplus of 500 calories per day will equate to about a pound of weight gain per week. If you weigh 200 lbs, this would be right at the upper end of your target weight gain. A surplus of 250 calories per day will result in you gaining about half a pound per week. So, picking a surplus between 250-500 kcal would be appropriate for a 200 lb lifter.

When in a deficit, I suggest losing between 0.5-1% of your body weight per week.

If you are sustaining a rate quicker than this for a significant period (e.g., more than four weeks), you risk negatively affecting your gym performance and muscle loss.

In much the same way as the surplus example, you can estimate maintenance calories by multiplying your weight in pounds by 15 calories.

From this point, you need to deduct calories to achieve a deficit. A 500-calorie deficit will net you about a pound loss per week. For our 200 lbs example, a loss rate of between 1-2 pounds per week is an ideal fat loss rate. Consequently, a deficit of 500-1,000 kcal per day is the range they should be looking at to achieve this.

Macronutrients

There are three types of macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. All of these supply energy and therefore contain calories. Here is how to establish and set your macronutrient needs and targets. 

The calorie content per gram of each macronutrient is listed below:

  • Protein: Four calories per gram

  • Fat: Nine​ calories per gram

  • Carbohydrate: Four​ calories per gram

This information is beneficial for the practical step of constructing your diet with the appropriate ratios of each macronutrient. 

Protein Is Essential For Survival

Protein comes from the Greek word proteios, meaning “Of primary importance.” 

  • Protein is involved in nearly every process in your body.
  • Proteins are critical to survival and health.  
  • They play an important role in athletic performance and body composition.
  • Muscle mass is predominantly constructed from protein. 
  • Protein helps you recover from your training.
  • It preserves lean tissue when dieting.
  • It helps you grow more muscle when building. 
  • It has the highest effect on satiety, or the feeling of comfortably feeling full, of all the macronutrients.

To build muscle, you should consume protein in the range of 1.6-2.2 g/kg of lean body mass is sufficient to stimulate MPS for the day.

Recent research supports the higher end of this range.

I generally recommend eating 2 g of protein per kg of body weight. This formula is easy to remember, easy to calculate, and comfortably covers your needs. From a practical standpoint, I have also found it is a quantity that satisfies most people’s appetites and eating preferences. 

Key Takeaway–Eat 2 g of protein per KG (0.9 g per lbs) of body weight per day.

Never Eliminate Fat From Your Diet

Consumption of dietary fat is important for regular hormonal function, especially testosterone production.

You should never eliminate fat from a diet. 

There is not so much an optimal amount of fat to consume, rather a minimum of

0.2-0.5 g/kg/day for normal hormonal function. Cogent arguments for fat intakes between 20 to 30% of calories have been made to optimize testosterone levels.

With that said, once 0.6 g/kg/BW is reached, then no significant benefit to hormones is apparent.

How Much Fat Should I Consume?

My preference is a minimum of 0.6 g/kg/BW per day.

  • When in a surplus, this will be sufficient to optimize hormonal function and generally equal about 20% of calories. 
  • Given there is little benefit to hormonal function after 0.6 g/kg/BW when in a calorie surplus, there is no physiological need to increase from this figure as you progress through your mass phase.
  • Even when total calories are adjusted upwards to continue to gain weight, there is no need to exceed the 0.6 g/kg/BW of fat level from a physiological viewpoint. However, in my experience, many people find it easier to adhere to their diet plan if fat is scaled up a little higher when total calories climb.
  • I generally find that anything up to 1 g/kg/BW is effective.
  • When in a deficit, I suggest a range of 0.6-1 g/kg/BW.
  • The risk of hormonal disruption is higher when in a chronic calorie deficit.
  • Whilst many clients have performed well and had exceptional results at the lower end of this range, I tend to take the conservative approach and begin at the upper end when beginning a fat loss phase.

From this point, I take an outcome-based approach based on the rate of loss, client feedback, and gym performance.

Key Takeaway–Consume at least 0.6 g of fat per kg (0.3 g per pound) of body weight.

Carbohydrates Impact Hormones

Carbohydrates, like fats, have a positive impact on hormones. The carbohydrates you eat are converted to glucose and stored in the liver or sent out in the bloodstream. Most of this glucose is, however, actually taken in and stored by the muscles as glycogen. Despite this storage, glycogen is quite low down the list of the body’s priorities.

Glucose gets utilized in a hierarchical sequence.

Cells in need of energy are the priority for incoming glucose. Only once the majority of cells’ energy needs are satisfied will carbohydrate consumption increase blood glucose. When blood glucose reaches appropriate levels, liver glycogen synthesis is the next priority. 

Only after this does muscle glycogen start to be synthesized to a significant amount. When muscles take up blood glucose, they can use it for activity or repair. This is vital for muscle repair, recovery, and growth.

Carbohydrates are the dominant source of energy for the Central Nervous System (CNS) and athletic activities.

They help to fuel grueling training and aid recovery by replenishing muscle glycogen. Stored muscle glycogen is the primary and preferred fuel source for intense exercise. Carbohydrates are a huge advantage to hard-training individuals. 

During dieting phases dropping carbohydrate levels very low has become popular. This is not entirely without merit, as a reduction in carbohydrates can help create a calorie deficit. I suggest you resist the temptation to go zero carbs, though.

To get the most from your training, you need to push through overloading training sessions. Eating sufficient carbohydrates will help you to do this. They will also help you to retain muscle mass even while losing bodyweight.

If you are low on glycogen, then you risk muting the anabolic response to weight training. Eating sufficient carbohydrates allows for a higher intensity of training, higher volumes of training, quicker recovery between sets and between sessions, and anti-catabolic and anabolic effects. 

“How many carbohydrates should you consume?” Short answer:

“The remainder of your available calories”

More Protein Preserves Muscle Mass and Satiety

While in a calorie surplus, hitting your macros will probably deliver 80% of your diet’s benefits from a recovery perspective.

While factors like nutrient timing, micronutrition, food variety, and quality all contribute to optimal results, they only make a marginal difference.

When in a deficit, you need to take care of these marginal gains because you don’t have the safety net of an abundance of calories to do the heavy lifting for you.

Here are some tips for squeezing everything you can out of your diet for maximum recovery when cutting:

  • When you are in a calorie deficit, it is an excellent idea to consume the upper end of the protein guidelines provided earlier (2.2 g/kg/BW).
  • High protein intake has been shown to preserve muscle mass.
  • Anecdotally, high protein intakes also appear to help regulate appetite as well. This regulation is useful when cutting calories.

Protein Timing

Multiple studies have shown that a serving of 25-40 g of protein is sufficient to maximize Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS). To give you a more specific recommendation, I suggest you aim for 0.4 g/kg of body weight per meal. If you weigh 65 kg, that would be 26 g, while an 80 kg guy would have 32 g of protein per meal.

The current literature indicates that consuming a mixed whole food meal causes MPS to last roughly three hours and peaks for 45-90 minutes. While protein shakes/amino acid supplements tend to last only two hours and peak sooner. Then, MPS begins to tail off.

Research indicates that these peaks and troughs in MPS are beneficial to maximal muscle growth.

Based on the available scientific evidence, 4-6 servings of protein per day with 3-4 hours between each are your best bet to maximize MPS. 

When in a calorie deficit, fine-tuning your eating schedule to maximize MPS is your best bet to avoid muscle loss.

The Holy Grail of Nutrient Timing?

We have all heard of the post-workout anabolic window. Post-workout nutrition has for a long time been perceived as the holy grail of nutrient timing. I think this is a mistake. Pre-workout nutrition is, in my opinion, just as, if not more, important than post-workout nutrition.

As previously discussed, the body takes several hours to digest a meal. So, suppose you consume a balanced meal before training. In that case, your body will continue to receive a steady supply of nutrients throughout the entire session and even into the post-workout window.

Many people miss the critical consideration that the important nutrient timing factor is when the nutrients are in your bloodstream, not when you eat them.

The nutrients from your pre-workout meal are in the bloodstream during and possibly after you train. This means you can deliver nutrients immediately to the working muscles. If you only focus on the post-workout meal, there will be a significant delay in nutrients arriving at the muscles where you need them. 

With that in mind, here are few points to consider:

  • Inadequate carbohydrates can impair strength training. 

  • Consuming carbohydrates in the pre-training meal can improve performance in the training session.

  • Consuming carbohydrates intra-workout in sessions lasting longer than an hour can improve performance at the end of the session and prevent muscle loss (especially when combined with a fast-digesting protein source).

  • Consuming carbohydrates post-workout replenishes muscle glycogen more effectively than eating them at other times. This post-workout window is a lot longer than the much-touted anabolic window of 20-30 mins. The 4-6 hours after training when eating carbohydrates replenishes optimal muscle glycogen.

When bulking, your carbohydrate intake is probably high enough that you don’t need to worry too much about skewing your eating to one time or another.

Spreading carbs evenly throughout the day will serve you well.

When dieting, calories and carbohydrates can be very low. In this situation, it is more important to consider your specific timing of carbohydrate intake to support high-quality training and recovery.

It is wise to ensure that you consume carbohydrates at least in the meal before and after training.

After that, you can simply space it relatively evenly throughout the other meals consumed during the day.

Eat the Rainbow

Picking nutrient-dense low-calorie foods is a wise decision. This choice will help you stay full, which means you are more likely to adhere to your diet.

It also means you get all the micronutrition you need to support good recovery from training. A wide variety of vegetables is a wise decision when cutting calories.

A simple way to achieve a broad spectrum of micronutrition is to eat fruits and vegetables of as many different colors as possible.

Avoid Pseudo-Science

While it’s tempting to reach for the expensive recovery tool, backed by pseudo-science, you are better served picking the low-hanging fruit of improving your sleep and diet to boost your recovery.

These two factors have vastly more influence over your recovery and results than other fancy recovery methods.

Use the guidelines I’ve provided to get a massive recovery advantage and save the silly recovery fads for less well-informed lifters.

Source

February 22, 2021

Train Hard, Recover Harder

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:17 pm

Based on my email inbox and Instagram DMs, recovery from training is a hot topic. I get asked all kinds of questions about recovery techniques.

  • “Can you assess my supplement stacks?”
  • “Should I do active recovery workouts?”
  • “When do I foam roll?”
  • “How would you change my nutrition on rest days?”
  • “What stretching routine should I do post-workout?”
  • “Will ice baths or cold showers help my gains?”
  • “What about cupping, compression garments, and percussion massagers!” 

I’m delighted people are giving their recovery some attention. Sadly, I think they are focusing their attention on the wrong parts of the recovery puzzle. In this series of articles, I will help you maximize your recovery and results by focusing on what matters.

I’ll explain:

  1. Why stress is a double-edged sword and how to manage it.
  2. Why recovery starts with great programming
  3. The two most powerful recovery tools and how to optimize them
  4. Six other recovery methods that work

This trend for increased attention to recovery is admirable.

In part, it isn’t surprising given I’m fond of reminding people they don’t get bigger and stronger lifting weights, but by recovering from lifting weights.

I have often tried to illustrate the importance of recovery by displaying progress as a simple equation:

Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation

Stress Can Be Good

Stress can be both good and bad. Good stress, or what psychologists refer to as eustress, is the type of stress we feel when excited. Training is a stress to the body. If adequately dosed, it is undoubtedly useful. 

Bad stress comes in two forms:

  1. Acute stress triggers the body’s stress response, but these triggers and emotions are not happy or exciting. In general, acute stress doesn’t take a heavy toll. The stress response is fleeting, and the body returns to homeostasis, or its pre-stress state, quickly.
  2. Chronic stress is bad. It occurs when we repeatedly face stressors that do take a heavy toll. We often feel crushed, overwhelmed, and trapped by this stress. For example, a stressful job with a jackass for a boss or an unhappy home relationship can cause chronic stress. 

Your tolerance for stress and the ability to manage it is different from mine.

Our tolerance also fluctuates over time. There is only so much stress you can handle. When you have too much pressure, you get overwhelmed. Your recovery from training will suffer at times of high stress.

Managing your stress levels will improve the quality of your life.

It will improve your digestion, recovery, mood, and productivity. It will also enhance your muscle gain and fat loss efforts.

Stress Management; Not Avoidance 

Notice I refer to it as stress management—Not stress avoidance or reduction.

The fact is that you cannot avoid stress altogether.

You can, however, improve how you manage it. If you manage stress better, you will be happier, fitter, leaner, and more muscular. In short, life will be better.

What Is Stress?

The body’s control center is the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The ANS regulates the involuntary functions of the human body. The stuff that happens without you consciously thinking about it, such as breathing or digestion.

The ANS has two branches: 

  1. The parasympathetic is also known as your rest and digest mode. 
  2. The sympathetic is the fight or flight mode.

These two work in a see-saw-like fashion. Whenever one of the modes is activated, the other isn’t. When one is up, the other is down.

Unfortunately, your body cannot differentiate between different types of stress.

When the sympathetic nervous system is upregulated, it cannot tell the difference between the stress of a life-threatening event, a challenging workout, or the asshole who just cut you off in traffic.

To manage stress, we want to spend most of our time in a parasympathetic state. The reality is, however, that we spend too much time in a sympathetic state. The non-stop barrage of stresses adds up as we face daily challenges.

This sympathetic state has many negative health implications and inhibits our ability to build lean muscle and drop body fat. 

In my experience, so many hard-gainers struggle to see progress because they are chronically stressed and work to manage stress, which increases their anxiety and causes a downward spiral.

Rather than being hard-gainers, I refer to these people as easy-losers. 

Their stress levels result in them losing gains alarmingly quickly with the slightest change in a routine or life circumstance because they manage stress poorly.

With that background out of the way, it’s time to identify strategies that help to control stress as much as possible.

Monitoring Heart Rate to Manage Stress

A good proxy for your stress levels and parasympathetic versus sympathetic dominance is your waking heart rate.

Monitoring your heart rate will give you useful data to assess your general stress status and identify when stress levels spike upward.

Significant increases or decreases in your waking heart rate indicate when you are experiencing higher periods of stress. I suggest you get a decent heart rate monitor to assess this. You could also explore heart rate variability apps to add another level of assessment.

Be More Productive With Less Stress

Cal Newport talks about how being on autopilot can help you be more productive and less stressed. He says that there are two types of work in his world:

  1. Regularly occurring tasks

  2. Non-regularly occurring tasks

Being on autopilot is true of almost everyone’s life.

The problem with regularly occurring tasks is that they are so numerous that if we try to manage them on the fly, we get behind and become overwhelmed.

I believe this sense of being overwhelmed is one of the critical drivers of stress in people’s lives. It certainly is a significant cause of mine.

To deal with this, Newport assigns every regularly occurring task a specific time slot. He calls this his auto-pilot schedule. He found that he doesn’t waste time or energy struggling to prioritize and schedule tasks day-to-day. They run on autopilot.

Once you have this stuff allocated to specific times and make that a routine, you can assign all other available time to other things that interest you. This method takes some up-front planning but, it pays dividends.

The final point is to understand that it will take time to refine and adjust this process.

Fortunately, you’ll be so much more efficient you’ll have the time available to make adjustments when needed.

The Miracle Morning Routine for Positivity

Having a morning routine to start your day gets you off on the right foot and sets the scene for the rest of the day.

It allows you to run the day rather than the day running you.

I am a proponent of the Miracle Morning Routine. I do the express version, which takes less than 15 minutes and has six steps.

 The six steps are:

  1. Silence

  2. Affirmations

  3. Visualizations

  4. Exercise

  5. Reading

  6. Scribing

There are various apps available that guide you through the process. 

When I stick to the Miracle Morning routine, I am more productive and feel in control. 

Meditation Combats Stress

Meditation is a great way to combat stress. I have not gone full granola-yogi yet. Perhaps when I’m a bit older, I’ll embrace Zen fully.

I am aware that the word meditation conjures negative connotations with some people (my granola-yogi reference is a case in point). So, if you’re not quite prepared to consider meditation, call it sitting in silence, chillaxing, mindfulness, or whatever makes you comfortable.

Rather than full-on meditation, I sit quietly and focus on my breath for a couple of minutes.

Belly breathing deep breaths through the nose and slow exhalations out through the mouth do the trick.

If you want some guidance, then the app Headspace is excellent. I have done some of the 5-10 minute guided meditations, and it certainly chills you out. These few minutes every day will have a remarkable effect on managing your stress levels.

Mindfulness

Being mindful or present is all the rage these days.

There is a good reason for that. We live in an ever-connected yet hyper-distracted world. The sheer volume of inputs competing for our attention is mind-boggling.

Living in this always distracted state is stressful and similar to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).

Try to fix this:

  • By focusing entirely on one task at a time 
  • Then, aim to be present within that task.
  • Fully immerse yourself in the sounds, smells, sensations, visuals, and taste of whatever you are doing.

Whether that be journaling in your leather-bound notepad while drinking a coffee, hanging out with friends at a BBQ, or drafting that killer sales pitch sitting in front of your laptop in the office.

Being fully in the moment will make you more productive, efficient, and effective at whatever you are doing. It will help to improve your mood and filter out external, potential stressors.

Cheesy quote alert:

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift––that is why it is called the present.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Emotional Reactions Last 90 Seconds

In his book, The Chimp Paradox, Dr. Steve Peters talks about our chimp brain and how it can control us. When the chimp takes over, logic evaporates, and emotion takes over. All too often, when we are under stress, we take the emotional approach. The chimp inside us gets irritable and can wreak havoc before we know what has happened.

When we get an emotional reaction to something, it usually subsides after about 90 seconds if we don’t act on it.

Pema Chodron speaks about this in the book, Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change.

Emotions will ebb and flow. Under stressful situations, they might rise like a Tsunami inside you. That’s only natural. It seems the best way to deal with and keep stress under control is to accept the emotions. To feel them. But do not act on them. If you act on them, you add fuel to their fire. They will rage higher and for longer. Instead, let them burn themselves out. Then, once you are calm and logic has returned, consider ways to avoid repeating the situation, which placed you in a stress position and caused negative emotions like fear, worry, hate, or anxiety to surface.

Pema Chodron

Take a Deep Breath

While feeling the emotions, it might be a good idea to take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it for a few seconds and then exhale through your mouth.

This deep breathing has an incredibly calming effect on your body. In my experience, it can help to speed the reduction in negative emotions when they arise.

A side effect of stress is shallow breathing.

Shallow breathing impairs the proper oxygenation of cells and reduces your body’s ability to recover.

Given I am so fond of saying, “You don’t get big lifting weights, you get big recovering from lifting weights.”

I’ve said it twice in this article, so it should be obvious why I believe being stuck in a stressed, shallow breathing state limits your gains.

Post Workout Recovery Pro Tip: Using some simple breathing exercises, post-workout switches you from the fight or flight mode to the restorative rest and digest mode.

This breathing instantly reduces stress levels, increases the oxygenation of cells, and accelerates the recovery processes. If you train in the evening, it will also help you to relax and get to sleep.

Sleep is the most powerful recovery tool you have available, so this is crucial!

Breathing exercises can also be beneficial as a proactive stress management tool when done daily. As I mentioned earlier, I try to do it each morning for a couple of minutes. It creates a wonderfully calm sensation. I would never claim to appear serene, but this is probably the closest I feel.

Gain Perspective 

Is what is stressing you out that bad? Most of the stuff we worry about is not that significant. It’s rarely life or death or leading us to financial ruin.

Sit back, take stock, and ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Often this allows you to gain some perspective, view the stressor objectively, and place its significance appropriately in the hierarchy of events, needs, wants, or stresses in your life.

Nine times out of ten, you’ll then chill the f**k out and realize you’ve got your knickers in a twist unnecessarily.

Bonus Tip:

Step away from your phone–no, not this very second–keep reading this fascinating article:) then, step away from your phone.

Phone Dependency

While waiting for a train or in a line, what do you instinctively do? Most of us reach for our phones. This dependency for our phone wasn’t the case as recently as 10 to 12 years ago. We would have to wait—occupied only by our thoughts or perhaps the conversation struck up with a stranger waiting alongside us (conversations with real people, in-person–now that is weird).

We’ve lost the art of patience, waiting, and thinking.

Boredom is a thing of the past. There is always a notification, something on social media, YouTube, or Netflix to entertain us. We still plug into the matrix and appear unable to extract ourselves.

There are many positives to smartphones (don’t get me wrong, smartphones are incredible). The downside is we have become slaves to them.

Our phones increase our stress and anxiety and help to push us towards a sympathetic state.

Try to take some time away from them—a digital detox of sorts. Switching off/into flight mode can relieve stress and anxiety. It can also allow you to achieve the mindfulness and presence that I discussed earlier.

Taking time away from our phones isn’t easy. Smartphones are addictive! I struggle with it but, I am aware that when I have work to do, or I’m out with the family, I am less stressed, more productive, and happier when the phone is out of sight. This struggle applies to those that I am with also. Start small and build up the time. 

Some ideas to begin to control your phone usage are:

  • Don’t check it for the first 30 mins of your day.

  • When doing important work, please switch it on airplane mode and set a timer for how long the work task should take. Don’t look at your phone until the time is up.

  • No smartphones at mealtimes

  • Put your phone down in another room when at home so you’re not distracted by it.

  • Are you watching TV with your wife, girlfriend, husband, boyfriend, friends, family, cat, or dog? Have the phone out of sight. Enjoy doing what you are doing and the fact you are not distracted by the phone.

  • Establish no-go zones. Whether it be physical (e.g., not in the bedroom) or time zones (e.g., no phone use for the first hour after I get home from work), this rule will improve the quality of your relationships with significant others.

  • Lead by example on this. If you would like to be less distracted when spending time with your partner, begin by deliberately being less distracted yourself. Then, when you suggest they do the same, they are more likely to respect and value your opinion. Trying to force it on them before you have achieved it will meet with resistance.

I hope the above tips on managing stress are useful to you.

If you can use some of these to manage your stress, you will be a happier, more productive, and focused person. You will also thrive on rigorous training programs and translate your workouts into noticeable gains in strength, size, and body composition.

Stay tuned…

In the second installment of this series, I will be explaining why significant recovery begins with excellent program design.

In it, I’ll outline four key concepts you need to understand how to optimize your training and maximize your recoverability. 

Source

December 14, 2020

Are You the One Sabotaging Your Gains?

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 3:12 pm

A common misconception in strength training is that every set must be taken to muscular failure to yield a positive adaption.

When it comes to high-rep hypertrophy and endurance training, the body will ultimately discontinue work due to your intolerance to bear the high level of hydrogen accumulation or the accumulation of lactic acid.

This is a natural process, as the body is protecting itself from excessive muscle damage.

When it comes to low-rep, maximal-strength work (1-3 reps), the body discontinues work due to the inability to recruit muscle fibers for the job adequately.

In certain situations, carrying sets of exercises to repetition failure are advantageous, such as 1 rep max testing or short microcycles that aim to increase one’s maximal strength.

In most cases, however, training to failure is both unnecessary and detrimental to performance.2

Rarely, if ever, do I have my athletes or clients go to failure when training a heavy compound multi-joint movement.

Should You Train to Failure?

Unfortunately, the notion that training to failure is necessary for performance gains has surfaced over the last several decades.

Advocates of this style often cite that it is necessary to drive adaption and push the limits, paying homage to the old no pain no gain adage.

This couldn’t be further from the truth, and the most effective methods are often less complicated than one is led to believe.

The issue with training to absolute failure in maximal strength is that it causes neural fatigue and disruptions in resting hormonal concentrations.1

I see most 1 rep max tests from novices, intermediates, and even some advanced athletes. Their performance deviates far from anything I’d consider technical.

The range of motion often shortens dramatically, and they often end up looking like more of a survival attempt than a lift.

Athletes who push themselves to the point of failure, session after session, set themselves up for the inability to properly recover and repeat high performance over the next few days.

In a phase where one seeks to gain strength, they will become fatigued and weaker if they consistently push to failure weekly. Additionally, this can lead to injury and retraction from strength training altogether.

The label that lifting heavy makes them stiff, tired, and hurt when, in reality, they never followed a properly structured plan.

When seeking hypertrophy or muscular endurance, reaching absolute failure is less detrimental from an injury, hormonal, and neuromuscular standpoint; however, it is still unnecessary.

It can lead to overuse, excessive muscular damage, and other similar peripheral issues.

Train Smarter

If you resist the urge to bury yourself and always push for that last rep, you will find the results rather pleasant.

  • The most effective method of training is the incorporation of the idea of RIR, Reps In Reserve.
  • This means that when you are working at a percentage of your 1 rep max, say 85%; you should theoretically complete four reps with a fifth attempt failing.
  • Rather than pushing for four reps at 85% of your 1 rep max, the idea should aim for two or three technically sound reps.
  • This is a continuum that can be implemented with nearly any rep range.

In 2011, the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science for Sport and Exercise presented a study3 that displayed two subjects doing squats at ~80% of their 1 rep max.

  • Subject 1 quit squatting with the weight when his movement velocity decreased by 20% (leaving more RIR), and Subject 2 quit squatting when his movement velocity decreased by 40% (leaving less RIR).3
  • These two subjects followed the program for several weeks, and the results were astonishing.3 Despite Subject 2 completing more overall work and pushing himself closer to failure; he sustained a significantly lower gain in strength than did Subject 1, who quit each set earlier to failure.3

This means that strength training should always be performed with technical proficiency and that in most cases, pushing to failure is unnecessary or even detrimental.

Obviously, certain situations will be different in novice versus experienced trainees; however, the general takeaway is the same.

How to Structure Training:

Once you can accept that going too heavy too often is a recipe for disaster, you are likely left wondering what to do instead.

Training with extremely light weights and low intensities is certainly not the answer either, as you will make no progress and eventually regress.

Training hard while training smart is what I preach to my athletes and clients.

Maintaining a disciplined schedule with perfect technical execution and a strong emphasis on recovery will yield the best results.

Training Programs

One of my favorite ways to layout training is through a method developed by Dr. Mike Stone of East Tennessee State University.

To keep his volume and intensity checked with his programs, he implements a system of loading prescriptions on a very light, light, moderately light, moderate, moderately heavy, heavy, and very heavy termed basis.

These terms are certainly not arbitrary, and instead, have a direct correlation to a range of load percentages as follows:

Load Prescription Load Percentage
Very Light 65-70% 1RM
Light 70-75% 1RM
Moderately Light 75-80% 1RM
Moderate 80-85% 1Rm
Moderately Heavy 85-90% 1RM
Heavy 90-95% 1RM
Very Heavy 95-100% 1RM

Dr. Stone then uses these numbers to lay out his program weekly, with each day being labeled appropriately to correspond with what the overall intensity for each lift will be that day.

Click the chart below:

Are You the One Sabotaging Your Gains? - Fitness, 1 rep max, maximal muscular power, rest and recovery, endurance training, injuries, hypertrophy, absolute strength, range of motion, periodization, incline press, training programs, microcycle, Reps in Reserve

As you can see in this picture, each week is displayed directly under each exercise, as well as the number of sets and reps that correspond with it.

  • For example, taking the incline bench press, you can see that three sets of ten reps are prescribed at a moderately lightweight on week one.
  • In this case, the person would perform the lift with a load equivalent to 75-80% of their 10-rep max, resting two minutes between sets.

This method does cater to the RIR paradigm previously discussed and allows the individual to work with a 5% range for that given exercise on that given day, depending on how they are feeling.

Furthermore, the intensity shows a steady increase over the course of three weeks, peaking at a moderately heavy intensity and unloading on the fourth week at a light intensity.

This is only one way to organize your training, but it is certainly a fundamental pattern to programming using a periodization strategy.

Remember to train intelligently and understand that sometimes the adage less is more can still reign true.

Training is not meant to break you; it is a tool to increase your capacity to perform.

There is a time and place to empty the tank and display your absolute end degrees of strength; however, nobody ever wins a weight room training championship.

They let it all out on the court or field.

Think about what your current training looks like and how you can implement a better strategy. Be honest with yourself and question whether you may be going too hard and falling prey to the pain and gain trap.

Train hard, but train smart.

References

1. Ahtiainen, J. P., & Häkkinen, K., “Strength Athletes Are Capable to Produce Greater Muscle Activation and Neural Fatigue During High-Intensity Resistance Exercise Than Nonathletes.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 2009, 23(4), 1129-1134.

2. Martorelli, S., Cadore, E. L., Izquierdo, M., Celes, R., Martorelli, A., Cleto, V., Alvarenga, J., & Bottaro, M., “Strength Training with Repetitions to Failure does not Provide Additional Strength and Muscle Hypertrophy Gains in Young Women.” European Journal of Translational Myology, 2017. 27(2).

3. Sanchez-Medina, L., & González-Badillo, J. J., “Velocity Loss as an Indicator of Neuromuscular Fatigue during Resistance Training.” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2011. 43(9), 1725-1734.

Source

December 7, 2020

Do This To Increase Your Bench Press

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 4:26 pm

Have you ever said any of the following about your bench press?

“I almost had it, I just mis-grooved the lift.”

“I always get pinned at the bottom of my bench.”

“I can touch and go this weight, but when I pause my bench, I’m so much weaker.”

“My overhead press and other bench accessories all got stronger but my bench stayed the same.”

These are comments I frequently hear from people who are struggling to increase their bench press.

The good news is they’re easily fixed by identifying the underlying problem and implementing effective solutions to address them.

Typically when people fail, their bench presses a few inches off their chest because of one or more of these reasons.

  1. Weak pecs relatively to their shoulders and triceps.
  2. Inability to rapidly absorb and reverse the direction of the load.
  3. Poor technique.

When the bar is touching your chest, your pecs are stretched and in an advantageous position to generate force and reverse the load.

However, at that same bottom position, your shoulders and triceps are at a disadvantaged point of leverage.

Their primary contribution occurs closer to the mid-range and upward.

That’s generally the point where we see the elbows flair to transfer loading demand from the pecs to the shoulders and triceps in an attempt to complete the lift.

I am going to provide an overview explanation here but if you need to work on your own specific goals or have other issues just contact me at Stacked Strength.

Weak Pectorals

When a lifter mis-grooves a lift right off the chest, it’s often indicative of weak pecs.

Since the pecs aren’t capable of generating enough force to press the weight up, the elbows flare excessively to shift loading demands onto the triceps and shoulders.

However, as mentioned earlier, at the bottom of the rep, the triceps and shoulders are at a disadvantaged mechanical position to press the weight.

So weak pecs are typically the culprit when an athlete fails a rep a few inches off the chest.

However, this often goes hand in hand with an inability to effectively absorb the load and maximize the stretch-shortening cycle. As the athlete lowers the bar, if eccentric and isometric strength is insufficient, they will not absorb the load leading to a decrease in elastic energy.

This energy, if not lost, would be used to reverse the weight from the chest rapidly.

Poor Technique

Another major contributing factor to failing is poor technique.

But there are several articles and instructional videos on how to optimize bench press technique based on your leverages and experience.

So, the technique won’t be the primary focus of this article since the assumption is that the technique is not the limiting factor.

Here I’m going to teach you a simple strategy that tackles both of these major issues so you can start hitting some new PR’s.

Who Benefits?

But first, let’s talk about who this is for. As mentioned previously, if you fail at the chest, or if you often mis-groove lifts or struggle with paused reps, and assuming your technique is decent, you likely have weak pecs.

Also, you likely lack the specific eccentric and isometric strength to both absorb and reverse the weight.

If this sounds like you, then this strategy can help. The individuals who primarily have these issues are beginners and intermediate lifters.

Advanced athletes are a bit more complex, which can make the solutions equally complex. But I digress.

The Solution

Below is a video demonstration of an effective exercise to correct the aforementioned issues.

The strategy I discuss can be implemented with various pressing exercises with great success and isn’t limited to the demonstration below.

An additional benefit to using tempo while simultaneously removing your mechanical advantages is that it places greater demand on the targeted muscles and connective tissue without generating the same fatigue.

This is because, although the exercise feels challenging, the absolute load is lighter than if you were to do a full powerlifting setup and select a load of the same relative intensity.

For example, with a proper powerlifting setup, you might do a set of 8 at 100 lbs, but if you do a set of 8 at 70 lbs utilizing tempo, it may not feel easier.

Same relative intensity, but less absolute load.

This reduction in absolute load reduces the amount of stress being placed on your body. This allows you to have more productive training sessions within a microcycle without exceeding your ability to recover.

Source

December 2, 2020

Get More Power from Rowing

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 12:39 pm

I’m a rower – on water and in the gym. I regularly watch rowers and trainers work out on their rowing machines with growing frustration. Why am I frustrated?

Because they could be getting much better scores if only they knew one key technique.

Get More Power from Rowing - Fitness, crossfit, rest and recovery, rowing, indoor rowing, power, core strength, power output, hamstrings, hip hinge, back strength, glutes, arm strength, competitive rowing, rowing ergometer, rowing technique, ratio and rhythm

Master the Rowing Machine

Go into the average gym, CrossFit, or a rowing club, and you will see a lot of great athletes using the rowing machines.

What difference does it make?

They are an order of magnitude different. Somehow those on-water rowers seem to coax more and more out of a rowing machine and leave most gym rowers for dead.

Two reasons why this happens:

  1. On-water rowers who use the rowing machines understand the concept of ratio and rhythm. This allows them to get more rest each stroke, thus allowing them to be more powerful because they’re getting less tired.
  2. On-water rowers know how to recruit extra muscles into their effort. The more muscles that are brought into the power phase, the more the flywheel accelerates, and the better the numbers.

The Basic Rowing Stroke

Rowing is comprised of two main parts:

  1. The Power Phase– In which you push against the footboard and accelerate the handle and chain towards you.
  2. The Recovery Phase– You rest and return to a bent-leg compressed posture with the chain retracted inside the machine.

An effective power phase uses legs, back, and arms to accelerate the handle and chain. So far, so good., but that isn’t what I’m seeing being done in the gym.

Most gym rowers fail to use their back muscles to accelerate the handle and chain.

This is a critical difference compared to the on-water rowers. This is what I teach my clients.

Add Back Power to your Rowing

First, learn which muscles to activate. Finding them and feeling these muscles, and knowing how to make them activate is probably the hardest part of this technique improvement.

Then, I would like to show you how to recruit them into your rowing stroke cycle and give you a drill to practice, which will enable you to add your back muscles into your rowing stroke.

Body Swing Only Rowing

On-water rowers learn technique and effective power using drills and exercises. And so I’m going to show you a drill called Body Swing Only Rowing.

  • Let’s start by sitting on the rowing machine.
  • Pick up the handle and sit with your legs straight, arms straight, and your body leaning forward.
  • The key is that your shoulders are forward of your hips (use a mirror to check), and your neck and shoulders are relaxed.

On-water rowers call this position the catch position. It’s achieved by hinging through your hips with a straight back. If you have tight glutes and hamstrings, you may find this challenging.

If you cannot achieve this position, don’t do the exercise. You won’t gain anything until you can stretch forward in this posture.

Stage One

  • Swing yourself backward until your shoulders are behind your hips.
  • Leave your legs and arms straight. Then swing forwards again, and back moving the flywheel with the handle and chain as you swing.
  • Try not to lean back further than 5-10 degrees.
  • Now make the flywheel spin faster by gripping your abdominals just before you start the backswing.

A strong mid-section helps you connect your backswing to the handle and chain without any slippage.

Stage Two

  • Add the arms to the backswing.
  • Start swinging the back alone as in stage one, and then add an arm draw to keep the handle and chain accelerating as the handle comes close to your body.
  • Then straighten your arms and swing forward from the hips.
  • This sequence is important—arms before body swing.
  • Keep working the swing-and-draw with a strong core to remove chain slippage so that when you start to move, the chain immediately accelerates the flywheel. Notice that you can do a tiny bit of backswing before you start the arm draw.
  • This is important for activating the back muscles. You have to get larger muscle groups (legs and back) working before smaller muscles (arms) in rowing.

This is a critical skill for developing stroke power.

Stage Three

  • Half the leg drive.
  • Add a half leg drive. Rowers call this half-slide, and it’s when your legs are 50% towards being straight.
  • Normally this is when your elbows are over your knees.

Stage one is the back. Add stage two, which is the arms, and then add stage three, the legs.

You are now moving the handle and chain faster because more body parts are accelerating the flywheel.

The critical component is the transition from one body part to the next.

Keeping this smooth and keeping the chain taut, and continuing to accelerate will give you the best results.

Stay focused on legs-back-arms and the reverse sequence when you return to start another stroke.

Learning this will reinforce the big muscles before the small muscles rule.

String It Together

Do the drill with 10 strokes at each stage. Then move to full slide and use a full leg drive; try to make the second half of your power phase feel like when you did the drill.

Use the mirror to check your posture. The first half of your power should be using only your leg drive. Check your torso is leaning forwards with shoulders forward from the hips. This is an unnatural posture and has to be learned – but it reinforces the big before small muscle rule, and that’s why it’s effective.

The last thing you can practice is rowing and try to finish your legs, back and arms simultaneously. This is an exaggeration from normal rowing technique – but it’s a good way to get a seriously powerful end of the rowing stroke.

And a good way to continue practicing or use it to do a 10 stroke power push during a workout when you want more power and that split to go down.

Next is learning that second thing… ratio and rhythm. But we’ll leave that for another day.

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