I had the opportunity this week to chat with a very bright young lady in the gym and the direction of our conversation brought one of my core beliefs to the forefront. I usually see this girl studying while on some piece of cardio equipment, and that is what she was doing when we started talking. While I usually get after her for wasting her time doing lame cardio, the fact that she is there burning some calories while studying her butt off does demonstrate her dedication and her desire to improve herself. That and I admit it’s hard to read notes from class while doing burpees.

I’ve had a few conversations with her and it’s become clear that she’s going places. She is finishing her degree, raising her son, and working for a very large company in an advanced position. When we chat the conversation usually gets into philosophy of life and this one was no exception.
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One of the points that I keep harping on is being efficient in your training. Most of us have busy lives and can’t afford to spend all day wandering around the gym wasting precious time. We need to get into the gym, be productive, and get out.

Unfortunately that’s something you rarely see. Usually people come into the gym, start out on some sort of cardio machine, then sort of fool around for the next hour or two then wander back out. If this is you, then do you wonder why you’re not seeing the results that you want? Even if you do lift some solid weight chances are you’re spending way too much time in the gym.

By increasing your training efficiency you can gain extra time throughout your day, you’ll drop fat, and you’ll increase your work capacity. Whether you’re a competitive athlete or a weekend warrior those are all important improvements. Here are five tips that you can implement today that will speed your training and improve your workouts.
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I received an email today that really got me fired up. It was from Zach Even-esh and it was titled “The Pussification of America”. For those of you who know me personally or know Zach, you know that this is a subject that fires me up. If you’re not on his newsletter list, then I’d recommend that you head over there right now and sign up.

Anyway, the thrust of his letter was that kids today are weak and out of shape. There’s too much time spent on the computer and not enough time doing work and training hard. You know what weak and out of shape kids grow up to be? Weak, out of shape, and obese adults. Those same adults aren’t as productive at work, have a lower quality of life, and have all sorts of obesity-related health issues that cost them and taxpayers money. Plus they tend to have a whiny attitude and a poor work ethic in general. Am I saying that someone who’s overweight is a bad person? Certainly not. I am saying that the lazy qualities that a lot of our kids are growing up with are not helping to shape a strong life attitude regarding themselves or others.

I was just having a discussion about this with a fellow trainer here at the gym and here’s what we thought should happen. Let me ask you to keep asking yourself, as you read this, if my proposal seems too farfetched or “unreasonable”?
More on Phys Ed – Wilkins Power Style

One of the common questions I get when training young athletes is how should they gain weight? I’m going to go ahead and go on record to say that not all athletes need to be as focused on gaining weight (beyond the natural process of growing) as they seem to be. We have a tendency to want our athletes as big as possible and that doesn’t always make them the best they can be on the field. A fat but big athlete is almost always not going to be better than a small but lean athlete.

However, there are times when athletes need to gain weight. Between training, practices, and often a high natural metabolism, it can be tough to gain size and muscle mass. The first step in gaining weight is to just eat more and hit the gym hard. That works to a point, but often you get full and you feel like you just can’t eat any more food.

Here are three of my favorite strategies that I’ve used with my athletes to add quality food to their diet and gain good muscle mass as a result.

1. Add something to every meal. Small changes add up over time. So with that in mind one of the quickest ways I’ve found for athletes to increase their caloric intake is to find two or three small things that they like and add them to every meal. A couple of examples of “add-on” foods might be a small handful of almonds, a slice of cheese, or something to that effect.

None of these things are going to take up much stomach space or really jack up your caloric total but over the course of five or six meals per day can add up to 300-500 calories pretty quickly. The idea is that these additions are small enough so that you don’t even notice them and that they don’t affect your appetite for future meals.

2. Drink your calories. This is one of my old stand-bys. It can be hard to force down a bunch of food meal after meal, day after day. It’s simply a lot easier to drink calories than it is to eat them. Just as it makes sense to remove liquid calories from the diet of those looking to lose fat it makes equal sense to add them to the diet of those needing to add calories.

Get a decent protein or meal replacement powder, add some milk, fruit, almond butter, olive or coconut oil, or most any tasty, calorically dense, and healthy food that can be mixed into a shake. Add an extra shake to your day. Just be sure that you’re putting good stuff into this shake. This is not an excuse to start chugging sugary “weight gainer” shakes or sodas!

3. Have a daily “gotta finish” item. Some people are very goal-oriented and athletes tend to be in that group. So it sometimes makes sense to have a food or drink (see Tip #2!) that your objective is to finish XXXX amount of it by the end of the day. So mix up a big shake and put it in the fridge and start sipping on it throughout the day.

The important thing is to not allow this extra food to take the place of the food you should have in your daily diet. Too often people add this extra stuff too quickly or without much care and find that they don’t eat as much normal food. In effect they end up replacing calories and staying at the same level which is pointless.

It’s also important to note that when you’re trying to gain good weight it’s important to remember to fuel your body with good food. Too often I see athletes use the excuse of “gaining weight” to justify filling up on all kinds of shit. While I admit that you can enjoy your food and probably be a little freer with your food choices when you’re looking to gain weight that doesn’t mean that good eating and nutrition goes out the window. The reason you’re eating so much is to build a high performance machine, so don’t try to do that with inferior ingredients!

Try one or two of these strategies if your weight gain is stalled. Done right you’ll grow more muscle, move bigger weights in the gym, and keep your fat gain under control at the same time.

One of the constants in fitness and strength training is that there are always new fads. There’s always some “new” and exciting style of training or implement (most of which are just rehashes of older stuff) that is going to magically transform the fitness industry. Some of these things end up being useful, while others are pure garbage. Most fall somewhere in between.

A few years ago everyone got all excited about training the “core” and “stability
training”. This spawned a ton of products that put athletes on unstable surfaces and
prompted them to do all sorts of exercises that either belonged in a circus or were
watered-down versions of what they already did. Dumbbell curls standing on a BOSU or
stability ball… Really?

The premise behind the idea is that the unstable surface would cause the body to tighten and train the abdominal muscles so as to create ripped abs, lose fat, and make athletes into miracle-producing freaks. In reality it gave little skinny trainers who were afraid of getting under a heavy bar a hard “skill” to teach their clients and impress them. Enter a horde of fat, weak people rolling around on stability balls in gyms across the country.

Despite my general dislike for this gimmick, there are a few elements of training the
midsection that should be paid attention to when working with athletes, particularly
inexperienced athletes and clients. Let’s look at the function of the midsection first,
primarily focusing on the abdominal and oblique areas, although the whole area consists of the abs, obliques, hips, glutes, and spinal erectors. We’ll focus on the “abs”, which are there to do the following:

-Maintain correct posture and stability, keeping the spine in proper alignment.
-Transfer power from the lower body through the upper body, and vice versa.
-Flex the upper body forward.
-Twist the upper body.

Their function is pretty much in that order of importance, too.

When I start working with a new athlete there are certain steps that I need to go through in their development before we start a lot of heavy training. While most of this stuff is integrated into their training (we don’t spend whole sessions doing “core work” or some other waste of time) there is a definite progression.

First, I need to make sure that they have the ability to maintain a strong position through the mid-section and hips. Many people sit so much in their every day life that they have no ability to hold their middle tight. This exposes them to injury if you load the spine and gives them a truly shitty ability to transfer power throughout their body. Why would I want an athlete to squat with a heavy load on their spine when they can’t hold their hips in position with a push-up? That doesn’t make any sense and yet I see it happen all of the time.

In order to develop that strength we start with a variety of quadrupedal movements. My athletes do push-ups, crawl sideways and forwards, perform crab walks, and move towards suspended holds and more advanced drills.

Next, and somewhat concurrently, we work on anti-rotation. One of the big keys to teach athletes is that rotation of the upper body should not occur deep in the lumbar spine like you see it normally done. This is recipe for a lower back injury. Instead rotation should occur more in the thoracic spine and the hips should rotate as well if a larger range of motion is necessary.

In order to train that quality it’s easier to strengthen and teach anti-rotation first. To do this we work with static movements against rotation, such as the Palloff Press, and unbalanced work (with weight). Wait a minute! I thought you said unbalanced work was for pansies! True, I did, and it is.

However, in this case I’m talking about unbalanced loading. You’ll still maintain firm contact with the ground (how depends on the exercise), but you’ll be loading one side of the body more than the other. Some example could be an overhead dumbbell lunge with different weight dumbbells (fairly advanced), or as simple as a suitcase carry, in which you’re simple walking while holding a dumbbell in one hand. The goal is to maintain straight posture as if there was no load. This teaches the body to NOT twist in response to an imbalanced load.

Once athletes have developed appreciable skill in stabilization then more dynamic exercises involving rotation and flexion/extension can be utilized. They’ll also be far more ready to do the big exercises such as squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, and the like. Their ability to transfer power will be far better as well, which will improve their speed, agility, explosiveness, and training effects.

In my last post I addressed my opinions on real food versus supplements when it comes to being healthy and improving performance. There’s been a lot of talk about this kind of thing around the gym lately and I get asked a lot what I take. So in response to those questions I thought I’d get into what I personally take.

1) A good quality multivitamin/mineral. Try as we might to eat a varied diet, it’s unlikely that we’re all getting what we should have on a given day. Given that hard training strength athletes tend to utilize (slightly) more of many vitamins and minerals plus are just plain bigger, a multi is a good insurance policy. I try to stick with a good, healthy, natural vitamin over the cheapo synthetic ones. I like VGF 25+ by Prograde Nutrition (affiliate link).

2. A quality whey protein supplement mixed with powdered milk or a good blended protein. Strength training athletes need more protein than the normal person. Period. Sure, you can eat more meat, beans, chicken, or fish. However, that food tends to fill you up quickly plus it can be a pain in the butt with many people’s schedules. A good protein supplement can go a long way when it comes to getting extra protein down, adding some flavor to your diet, and adding an element of portability to your schedule.

The reason that I don’t just recommend pure whey protein is that it’s just so fast. Most research is indicating that your body oxidizes it so quickly that you don’t see the benefits from it that you do from a blended protein that has whey and other, more slowly absorbed proteins like casein in it. Whole milk proteins are about 80% casein and 20% whey. By adding some basic dried milk or casein protein directly to your whey shake you’ll have the best of both worlds.

3. Fish oil. I can’t say enough about fish oils. Omega-3 fatty acids used to be an important part of our diet when we consumed a lot of wild or grass-fed game. Over the past 100 years or so we’ve moved towards more of a grain-fed animal diet and eat a lot less cold-water fish than we used to. This has greatly reduced the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in our diet, so by supplementing with fish oil you’re basically adding back into your diet what already should be there.

Fish oil supplementation can:

-Improve your brain and neurological function
-Improve your skin and hair health
-Improve your eye health
-Improve your insulin sensitivity which will stabilize your blood sugar and reduce fat gain
-Reduce chronic inflammation in your joints and reduce pain
-Improve your HDL/LDL cholesterol numbers

4. Creatine Monohydrate. The supplement world is full of all kinds of overblown hype and there’s only a few supplements that have stood the test of time. Creatine is one of the most studied of supplements and when it comes to increasing burst energy and peak power performance it plain and simple works. Creatine also improves cellular hydration which allows a positive environment for growth.

There are about 1000 creatine supplements and variations on the market. This is pretty much just to pull more money out of your wallet. Creatine monohydrate powder is one of the most widely available and cost effective supplements out there. It works just the way it is. Some sugar and protein helps boost uptake of it, so eat it with a meal or mixed in one of your workout shakes. Don’t pay $75 for a bottle of plain old sugar and a few bucks worth of creatine.

5. Microlactin. Ok, this is one that a bunch of you probably won’t have heard of and for the life of me I can’t understand why it’s not more popular. This stuff WORKS, which as I said above about creatine is rare in the supplement world. I’ll let you read about it here. You’ll find that your sleep and recovery are better plus your joint inflammation will be greatly reduced. When it comes to hard training and joint recovery I consider it to be a must-have, even more so when you consider that it’s pretty cost-effective, too.

I know that my supplementation regimen isn’t all that “cutting-edge” and sexy, but that’s because I focus on the things that work. Supplements are simply adjuncts to my diet and training and I take them in only to promote optimal performance and health. If I start dumping all sorts of crap into my body then I eventually won’t know what’s working and what isn’t.

Training can get a little complicated when you’re discussing elite strength and power athletes. Since they’re at the top end of specialization for their sport and working on the cusp of their genetic potential the margin of error is fine and the stimulus needed to make them respond is very high. However, when the subject of developing strength for most athletes, who are far below that elite level, is at hand then it is a different matter. Strength for less-trained athletes is pretty simple. Lift bigger weights, eat more food, grab some ZZZ’s, and they get bigger and stronger. While the basics should be simple, that’s not to say that mistakes can’t (and far too often are) be made.

Here are three of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to developing strength in young to intermediate athletes:

1. Too much focus on repetition and isolation work. Athletes get stronger by moving big weight for relatively few repetitions through athletic movements. Squatting, pressing, pulling, and other big, compound movements utilized for heavy weight should be the basis for all athletic programs.

Bodybuilding culture has dominated Western training for so long that many athletes still feel that they need to focus on isolating and developing individual muscles through high repetition work. This doesn’t make for a great athlete, and honestly I don’t think it makes for an ideal bodybuilder in most cases, either. This dominant style of training has prompted young athletes to focus on curls, triceps extensions, leg extensions, and other less effective exercises. These kinds of exercises don’t do much to develop strength or promote athletic ability.

2. Way too much overall volume. You see this one with young athletes all of the time. They feel that since some training is good, more is better. There’s also this idea that they need to outwork their opponents (good) and to them that means spending more and more hours in the gym (bad). Training for strength means utilizing the means necessary, which is heavy weight, in the most efficient manner to stimulate the body to adapt. The key word there is “stimulate”. That’s all you’re trying to do with strength training, not “beat my body into the ground with hours of training and hundreds of repetitions”.

3. Lack of deload periods. Another thing that people tend to do (and often the same people who overdo their volume of training) is not take the time they need to recover. A well-planned period of reduced training volume and/or intensity is called a “deload”. This basically means that after a period of hard training, you take a little while (a day or two to a week or even two weeks) of greatly reduced training, sometimes no training at all, to recover. This allows your body to heal up from all of the hard training you’ve done, grow like hell from all of the stimulus you’ve given it, and mentally let’s you take a break from the grind. Well-timed deloads are a great thing and you should come back fresh, stronger than before, and hungry to get back into competition or training.

Hard-training young athletes don’t always see the wisdom in this type of thing. They feel any break in training is taking a step backward and so continue to charge hard. Eventually their body just can’t keep up with the constant abuse and either stops improving or an injury occurs. Injuries tend to force a “deload”, but it’s a whole lot longer than the week they could have taken off and they certainly don’t come back improved.

On the flip side, a deload is not an excuse to be lazy. If you haven’t been training hard or you’re making great strides and feel great in your training, you don’t need to deload.

Examine your own training to see if you’re making any of these mistakes. Remember that getting stronger is a goal. In order to achieve that goal you need to be focused and have a good plan of how to get there.

I just had a consultation with a young man who was, as many young men in the gym are, trying to gain weight and “get big”. When the topic got on to nutrition he happily told me about his daily diet intake and supplementation. It basically consisted of a handful of protein shakes per day (various protein blends for different times of the day), a bunch of Gatorade, and an evening meal consisting of a chicken breast and brown rice. His list of pills and powders (most of them with very fierce names) was about half a page long.

Now, I’m certainly not a supplement hater. In fact, I’m a bit of a nutrition and supplementation geek and as such I really enjoy debating the effects of various substances. However, I think that many people are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to supplementation.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of supplements:

Pros:
-Convenient to carry around, generally no special care such as cooking or refridgeration is necessary.
-Very easy to mix and match for precise nutrition.
-Meal replacements and protein supplements can be used to keep overall calorie intake down as many people tend to overeat with food in front of them.

Cons:
-Missing a lot of “micronutrients” that are present in food.
-Some non-natural vitamins and minerals aren’t taken up by the body as well.
-Large, isolated amounts of some nutrients aren’t taken up by the body as well as smaller, mixed doses.
-Often meal replacements and other supplements aren’t particularly satisfying.
-Nobody wants to go out to dinner with the dude who sits there with a protein shaker.

As for the pros and cons of real food, they tend to be the opposite.

In my mind supplements are exactly that: Supplements. They are not substitutes when you look at the diet as a whole. I’m a firm believer in packing my athletes with as much real food as possible. Look, we’re omnivores, and pretty good ones at that. Our body is pretty well equipped to deal with most anything that rolls across its path and make some use of it. As a matter of fact, our nutritional needs are such that it prefers a varied diet. That’s hard to manage if you’re taking the majority of your nutrition in from the same few powders.

To sum it up, I do support judicious use of supplements for most athletes and fitness seekers, but only the basics. Until your diet is in line, supplements should take the back seat to real food. As far as the young man I spoke to the first thing I told him is to stop taking most of the crap he was loading up on and switch to the basics of good, quality food. From there he could add back in some basic supplements until he had exhausted the benefits of good training and good eating, which will be a very long time.

It’s the time of year where people make New Year’s Resolutions and flood gyms. This lasts for a couple of months and then most of these people drop off. which is unfortunate even if it is a relief to those of us who are gym regulars. One of the biggest reasons that they end up quitting the gym is because of lack of results. Sometimes this happens because their expectations are unrealistic (shockingly enough, you won’t look like Terrell Owens or Jennifer Garner in a month or two), but often it’s just because of a lack of knowledge.

So in honor of you new gym rats-in-training, I’m going to give you some tips that I use with almost all of my brand new clients. Strength training is going to be the cornerstone of your body transformation and performance enhancing program, and it’s also where people tend to get hung up. For you more advanced readers, this might be a good reminder.

1. Learn to control your body before you try to control the weights. This is the first thing I focus on. So many people today live sedentary lifestyles and don’t do anything athletic throughout their day that they are just not physically prepared for real weight training.

When I start training people, after an evaluation, I usually focus primarily on conditioning and bodyweight until I’m confident that they can control their bodies. Then I introduce more direct weight training, often with movements that are similar to those they’ve been doing with their bodyweight (squatting, pressing, lunging, pulling, etc). Since they’re already conditioned and have developed a good sense of athleticism they can hit the ground running with the weights.

2. New trainees respond best to high volume but low fatigue training. As a newbie to strength training, your ability to recruit muscle fibers is not going to be nearly as efficient as someone who has been training for a while. You’re just not as good at whatever movements you’re doing because you haven’t done them as much and your body hasn’t figured out the best way to go about them. Make sense? Good.

How do you get better at something? Practice! However, not just any practice will do. After all, you wouldn’t just set up on the free throw line and start heaving basketballs at the net hoping to improve your shot, would you? No, you’d practice with as perfect technique as you were able to do and always strive for higher levels of perfection.

Strength training is the same way. Since you’re not as good at these movements you won’t be able to engage as much muscle as someone who’s more practiced. Therefore, you won’t cause as much muscle damage per rep (not as many muscle fibers are being exposed to stimulus) and can tolerate a higher number of reps (albeit with lighter weight) than a skilled trainee.

These higher rep totals are important, as that’s where you develop that neurological efficiency and start to get strong. However, what happens when you do too many reps? You get fatigued, and then you get sloppy. Before long you’re practicing poor technique because you’re too tired to do it right. That’s stupid.

So what’s the solution? More sets but fewer reps per set. This should also allow you to use a slightly higher weight which will provide more overall work and make you stronger. The “standard” of strength training seems to be three sets of ten reps. I have all sorts of issues with that, but we’ll forget about that for now and roll with it. To apply the more sets/less reps per set approach to that scheme you’d be better off learning with ten sets of three reps or six sets of five reps (or some combination there of) with each rep being perfect and just shy of fatigue.

3. Aim for total rep goals rather than strict set rep targets. This is somewhat in line with tip number two. Rather than focus on hitting three sets of ten, five sets of five, or whatever your target number is, instead focus on hitting a certain number of quality reps. So you might come into a workout with the goal of performing twenty pull-ups in the whole workout, rather than a mandatory two sets of ten. Instead of having a couple of crappy reps in there at the end of the sets when you were too fatigued, you could focus on performing 20 perfect reps spread over however many sets you needed. This is an easy way to make progress as well as you have a target to hit and your goal every session could be to increase that target (either in total reps or weight).

Implement these tips in your strength training, be diligent, and always look to improve. Before long you’ll be well on your way to the physique and performance you’re looking for.

It’s time for the last installment of things I believe. Let’s see if I can ruffle some feathers today!

If you missed part one of this series, check it out here!

If you missed part two of this series, check it out here!

11. Read a damn book. This could have been number one as far as I’m concerned. Thanks to the Internet (yes, I’m aware of the irony that you’re reading this online), TV, radio, and other forms of media our society has greatly lost appreciation for books. Well, books have been around for a long time and there’s a lot of old wisdom there. Do you know what smart people do? Read books.

Our kids today have shitty reading comprehension skills and even worse writing skills because they don’t read anything substantial and because the vast majority of their written communication is through text messages, chats, or emails. Now they write like they text, which makes them sound retarded.

To be able to express oneself as an educated person through both the verbal and written word is one of the most important skills that a person can have (thank you Dr. Michaud for teaching me that in the 8th grade). I firmly believe that the backbone of verbal and written skills is built through a strong reading habit. Plus there’s something about curling up with a good book that is good for the soul and the mind.

12. Rote memorization is important but it is only the first stepping stone of knowledge. The vast majority of education comes from applying and developing knowledge, not just learning facts and figures. I think that all people should develop a strong education base in their field, but many seem to feel that once the “book learning” is accomplished and the exam passed that they know all there is to know. Life doesn’t work that way.

A degree or certification merely says that you’ve learned enough of the background on a topic to be able to really learn the rest of it. That next stage of education and the mastery of your skill comes from being out there in the real world trying what you’ve learned. That’s where you’ll succeed, fail, and adapt your way to mastery.

13. If you want to look strong, you should be strong. I feel that of all fitness qualities, limit strength is probably the most important. If you’re strong, then you can improve your flexibility, conditioning, body composition, and performance far more effectively than if you’re not strong. When strength increases, all other fitness qualities generally improve. Therefore, I feel that sound and constantly progressing strength training is the key to all other aspects of fitness. Notice I didn’t say that it was the only concern, but it is the critical component of a performance and fitness plan.

It is possible to develop a lean, muscular, and attractive physique while being very unathletic and pretty weak. You’ll look strong, though. Why in God’s name would you want to do that? Sure, getting stronger isn’t easy, but sack up, grab your yarbles, and get strong. You’ll look good along the way.

14. Be right, but if you do make a mistake, do it at 100 miles per hour. My high school football coach used to tell us this all the time, and he was right. Indecision and fence-sitting doesn’t do anyone any good. So go for it. Do it. Always try to make the right decision, but even a wrong decision is better than no decision.

15. If you’re not going to lead, get the hell out of the way. Not everyone has to be a leader (that’s why there’s one leader), and even leaders don’t have to lead all of the time. However, if you’re not going to lead the pack, then don’t stand in the way of the one who does. People who do nothing but disrupt groups, derail progress, and undermine leaders are simply a cancer to the group’s success. You know what smart people (called doctors) do to cancer? They cut it out and poison it. Think about it.

Thanks for reading some of my beliefs. Hopefully some of the things I’ve said ring true with you and we’re of a similar tribe. If what I’ve said here offends you or you disagree with me, that’s cool, too. I guess we just don’t see things the same way. As always, feel free to digg, stumble, tweet, and forward this post along to anyone that you think might be interested. I’d love to hear your thoughts, too, so comment below!