Get That Friday Feeling!!

You've made it to Friday, you've worked hard all week and now you just wanna relax and move into the weekend!! First though you need to finish the week off with a top quality workout to alleviate some of the guilt over the inevitable weekend indulgence to come!!  If you are after a quick, 30 minute sweatathon give this little beauty a try!!

25 DB Push Press
25 Kettlebell Swings
25 Pull Ups (Full/Horizontal/Jumping)
25 Lunges
25 Dips
25 V-Sit

Repeat 4 times with a 60 sec rest in between

That makes 150 reps per round, 600 total reps.

Bring It!!!

CrossFit - Yes or No???

Over the last few years CrossFit has been becoming more and more popular, but what is it and should you be doing it?

What is CrossFit?

The definitiion of CrossFit as given on the crossfit.com website is 

CrossFit begins with a belief in fitness. The aim of CrossFit is to forge a broad, general and inclusive fitness. We have sought to build a program that will best prepare trainees for any physical contingency — not only for the unknown, but for the unknowable. After looking at all sport and physical tasks collectively, we asked what physical skills and adaptations would most universally lend themselves to performance advantage. Capacity culled from the intersection of all sports demands would quite logically lend itself well to all sport. In sum, our specialty is not specializing.

Make sense??  No it didn't really to me either but I will try and translate for you.  For me the most important line in this definition is the last one - In sum, our specialty is not specializing.  Basically this means that sessions are not targeted at a specific set of goals. Each session or 'WOD" (workout of the day) is designed to cater for all.  CrossFit trains you to be good at exercising through variety, repetitions and no real set theme.

Who does it?

The simple answer to this is quite literally ANYONE can do CrossFit.  It truly is one of those activities which is truly inclusive and prides itself on its CrossFit is for everyone ethos.  This attitude, however, is also one in which I feel CrossFit can become dangerous.  There are numerous vidoes on youtube of people doing crossfit and doing exercsises that they shouldn't be doing all under the watchful eye of a CrossFit instructor!  Now I am fully aware that there are many PT's out there who have clients doing things they are not capable of, or it is dangerous for them to do. The major difference, however, is that they tend not to post videos of them having people do stupid and dangerous stuff on YouTube and being proud of it!  

If you are having to ask the question "I wonder where does CrossFit?" or "Do I know anyone who does CrossFit?" Then no on you have ever met has done or is doing CrossFit.  Don't ask me why but CrossFitters seem to have this amazing talent at bringing any conversation back to the fact they do CrossFit, no matter where the conversation started!

Should I be doing CrossFit?

Now this is a difficult question for me to answer, but I will give it a go!  I know it seems like so far I have been slagging off CrossFit, however I feel that it is a very relevant form of training and has some major benefits for some.  But that I have to write "for some" is one of my major issues with CrossFit, there is no specificity.  If your sole reason for training is to become really good at doing CrossFit then it is definitely the activity for you.  If you are looking to specialize in any area of fitness whatsoever - bulking up, increase running ability, sporting preparation for example - then stay well clear!  As a CrossFitter you are the ultimate jack of all trades, master of none!  Again it sounds like I am really having a go at it here, but I am not.  Those at the top are some of the fittest guys and gals on the planet, when you take fitness in its entirity.  They are essentially the decathletes of the fitness world.

So to answer the above question 'Should I be doing CrossFit?'  Yes if you want total body multi faceted fitness that won't really prepare you for anything specific.  No if you are after targeted results and have specific goals.

Conclusion 

Apologies if it seems like I have just spent the last few hundred words slagging off CrossFit, as this wasn't my intention.  The subject of CrossFit is very emotive amongst members of the fitness industry with people either loving it or hating it.  I am somewhere in the middle, I can see that for some it has major benefits, but that there are also a number of glaring flaws.

Pros

• Can be fun
• Great workout intensity
• Teamwork and friendship
• Total body exercise

Cons

• Telling everyone you do CrossFit
• Glorified circuit training
• Not enough emphasis put on technique
• No specificity
• Seem to be too many questionable instructors.

Workout Of The Week - Resting Lifts

The name of this session may be a little confusing, but it is actually quite simple - rest at the bottom of each rep!  This session is a great way to increase your strength at the bottom of a rep, the most difficult part of the rep.  Bench press is the easiest exercise to explain this way of lifting so here goes! 

If you are lifting in a power rack with spotting bars this works best, however you can just rest on your chest.  Lower the bar down as normal and pause and relax for 2 seconds once you hit the bar/chest then press with as much power as possible.  The same format can be used for most exercises, both push and pull.

As this is a session essentially looking at strength you should be looking at completing 3-4 sets of 4-6 reps of 3-5 different exercises.  You can superset with other exercises but try to make them lighter exercises for 10-15 reps.  Adding flyes with bench press for example.

This is a deficult session as once you have rested the elastic energy stored during the downward phase of a movement is negated by the rest.  The muscles stretch shorten cycle is removed, meaning the focus is specifically on rapid concentric contraction.

Workout Of The Week - 21's

This weeks workout is an adaptation of a crossfit session. Now anyone who knows me will be aware that I do have the odd swipe at crossfit, however, I do like some of the session formats.  I regularly use this session as an assessment to get to know the fitness levels of new clients across a range of movements and muscle groups - Pull, Push, Abs, Legs and Cardio.  The session is to be completed as quickly as possible and the time recorded.  The session can be repeated at regular intervals as a rough guage of improvements.

The session involves 7 rounds of 4 different exercises with a 200m row at the end of each round.  The reps to be completed for each round reduce by 3 each time - 21, 18, 15, 12, 9, 6, 3.  The exercises are - 

21 Pull Ups (Horizontal Pull Ups if required)

21 Press Ups

21Crunch

21 Squat

200m Row

18 Pull Ups

18 Press Ups

18 Crunch

18 Squat

200m Row

etc

Why does everyone hate leg day?

No matter who you are, or what you are training for there is one universal truth - EVERYONE HATES LEG DAY! But why?

Ouch

The easiest and possibly most obvious answer is that oh my good god it hurts!!  There is no pain quite like getting out of the car, or getting off the toilet for the couple of days following a leg session. The pain you feel after a leg session is known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short.  This is the term used to describe the pain felt after exercising, which if you have trained you will know tends to not be noticeable at first, but gets progressively more painful for the next 24-72 hours.  There is no real definitive answer as to why we get DOMS and what is the best way to avoid/alleviate them.  There are many proposed cures - massage, going for a run, protein shakes - which may slightly reduce the pain, however i'm afraid the best way to deal with DOMS is to man up and get on with it!  Anyway back to the matter at hand, leg DOMS.  Why are your legs always more sore than your upper body after a session?  Truth be told (and by truth I mean in my opinion) there is no real reason that legs should be more sore than any other part of the body after training, and in fact for some strange individuals this is not the case.  One thing you do have to remember, however, is that for the 72 hours after a big arm session do you walk everywhere on your hands?  If not give it a try and then tell me you don't suffer from upper body DOMS.  In my humble opinion the main reason we believe our legs hurt more than anything else after training is that in everyday life we lunge, squat and step up on a very regular basis, the same exercises that caused the pain in the first place!!

Vanity

This is an image you will never see in any gym!  Why? Well other than the fact he is only in his underwear he looks ridiculous (pretty sure it is photoshopped but you get my point).  The following pic, however, you will see in every gym across the world, just maybe with more clothes on.

The reason for this is plain and simple, if you are not a professional athlete you train in order to make yourself look better - vanity.  There are those of you reading this that will say you are training for health reasons, which is a good and very valid reason to train, and not in order to look good.  I can guarantee, however, that as you start to loose body fat you will look at yourself in a mirror and think to yourself "Damn I look good" or "just a few more kg's and I can fit into that sexy red dress again".  If you ask a man who is lifting weights what his aims are it will 99.9999999% of the time be to 'bulk up' and to better fill a t-shirt, and this is due to the publics perception of someone who is 'built'.  If you see someone on a night out with what can only be described as a spray on t-shirt with bulging shoulders and biceps, peoples first thoughts are along the lines of - he's a bit of a unit - or - he definitely lifts.  Whereas if someone with Chris Hoy sized legs has crammed them into some similarly tight jeans and cannot bend over through fear of tearing is ridiculed for looking ridiculous.  Exactly the same scenarios when looked at objectively, totally different in reality.

Peer Pressure

In order to do a leg session, everyone has to want to do it! If anyone shows even the slightest doubt about squatting, it is not happening.  Anyone who has a training partner, or trains in a group will be well aware of this phenomenon.  It pretty much follows the well known phrase 'all or nothing', either you all want to do it, or you aren't doing it.  As we have already discussed, however, no one likes doing a leg session, so the chances of finding more than one person on any one specific day who want to train legs is about as likely as West Brom winning the prem (nothing against West Brom specifically but you can see where I am going with this).

To conclude you shouldn't neglect training your legs.  Your legs are massive muscle groups in need of some serious training.  Even if, and we know you do, you hate training legs the benefits far outweigh the pain.  The core activation during exercises such as a squat and a lunge is massive, and in many cases far outweighs the activation during core specific exercises.  Numerous studies have shown that training legs actually causes the body to release more human growth hormone (HGH) than upper body sessions, leading to bigger increases in strength and size.  And finally if you are after burning more calories nothing kickstarts your metabolism quite like a leg session!

So, the long and short of it is we know you don't want to train your legs, I don't want to train my legs, no one wants to train their legs but we have to suck it up, get on with it, and avoid visiting the toilet for a couple of days after!!

More more info get in touch or check out www.cbconditioning.com

Fitness Myth 1 - Women shouldn't lift weights because they will get big and bulky

If you have ever trained yourself, or I’m sorry to say been to see a personal trainer (because we aren’t immune to believing the myths) then you will have probably heard things like -

• this number of sets and reps is the perfect amount for building muscle
• if you eat 15 chickens a day you will only put on lean muscle
• ab exercsies are the best thing for getting a killer six pack

Where did these myths originate, however, and is there any truth in them??  I’ve done a bit of digging around and added a few little bits of my own knowledge to hopefully mythbust some of the better known training myths.

Myth 1 - Women shouldn't lift weights because they will get big and bulky

After speaking to women in the gym and during training there is a real hesitancy from them to lift weights, not even heavy weights, just weights in general.  The number one reason is – I don’t want big muscular arms, or I don’t want my boobs to shrink.  I’m sorry ladies but these are both massively removed from the truth.  Women only look muscular when they are either a)on steroids or b) have a body fat percentage of about 4!  Women have to much oestrogen in their system to allow muscle bulk.  In order for muscular size to build large amounts of testosterone need to be present, which women (unless on steroids) do not have.  You can take Jodie Marsh as a perfect example of this.  When she was on stage for her body building competition it seemed as though her muscles were enormous and bulging, yet after a few weeks of eating normally and getting back to a healthy body fat percentage you couldn’t even tell.  

As for chest focussed weights making boobs shrink then I suppose in some ways it is true.  But only in as much as lifting burns calories, burns fat and as I’m sure you are aware boobs are fat.  What trainers need to be telling women is that chest weights will help to counteract the effects of gravity later in life!!

For more info and for more of my opinions check out CBConditioning.com