I was pulled into a frustrating conversation earlier this week and quite frankly, I’m still a little annoyed by it. A fit, gifted female client of mine had just completed a very intense workout requiring a great deal of relative body strength. We’re talking over 50 chin-ups, push-ups with her feet on a 36″ box, heavy kettlebell swings, the works. She rocked it out.
More on Lifting Weights Causes Injuries?
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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.
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Man, what a killer weekend! I’ve attached a video that goes into some of the things I picked up, but I’ll give you a more detailed rundown, too.
Even though the certification itself was on Saturday, Zach was kind enough to invite us all in to watch his gym in action on Friday evening starting at 4:00pm. Since it’s always more instructive to see things working than just to learn about them, I made it a priority to be there for Friday’s session.
So I arrived at my hotel nice and early (it was an 8-hour plus drive) with the idea of catching a quick nap before heading over to his place. Amazingly enough everything went pretty much as planned, my reservation was secure, and I checked right in with plenty of time for a nap. Of course, the three Monsters I drank on the way down and my excitement kept me from getting any real sleep in, but it was good to relax, stretch, and roll out from the trip.
I drive into the parking lot of the gym and let me tell you what. This gym is a straight up hole in the wall. It’s in this little two-bay warehouse (the other bay has an auto shop) in a parking lot of a bigger, commercial gym, all tucked in behind a house. Sweet. This is my kind of place.
I walked in the front door and this room is tiny, man. Later on Zach would say that it was 1200 square feet, which it probably was, but with the squat cages, dumbbell racks, tires, hanging ropes, a pile of sandbags in the middle of the room, and various odds and ends of training equipment, it was tight. The walls are painted, the floor is covered by loose stall mats, and the music is CRANKING.
The first person I run into is the man himself, Zach Even-esh. On his blog he comes across as a big personality, all “Jersey” and shit, and it’s even more true in real life. I get the big welcome, handshake, etc and even though he’s got a full gym going on he takes a few minutes to make some small talk about where I’m from, how the drive was, and (based on where I’m from) asked a few MMA questions. For all of you business people out there, this is a great example of rapport building. He showed interest in me, and then used some of MY answers to lead to further conversation. That’s the first step of sales and business relationships, my friends.
Zach offered me a water from the mini-fridge (a la college dorm fridge) and stack of Sam’s Club water cases in the corner. Classic.
At this point he goes and starts up training a handful of athletes, mostly wrestlers, while his intern is running a baseball pitcher through a workout on the side. I spend the next few hours observing the interactions of the gym and the athletes/staff (see the video for some things I picked up) and meeting the other UGSC guys that showed up.
After the athletes are through and the gym is shut down several of us hit up a local diner and spent the next two hours chatting training, life, and business. In addition to the obvious learning, a real benefit to these seminars and certifications is to find other people in your field who you can learn from, forge business relationships with, and further everyone’s development.
The next morning I was up and excited. We all rolled into the spot on time and were ready to go first thing. After a bit of introduction we get into the physical stuff. Zach put us through the dynamic warm-up that his athletes do. It was a simple but comprehensive bodyweight program, mostly squats, lunges, push-ups, etc. We hit up the band pull-aparts for 50 or so reps (Zach likes his guys to do 100 every workout to develop the upper back) and then we headed out to the parking lot for some basic agility drills.
After the warm-up he ran us through his “intro” workout which is again mostly bodyweight stuff but is a killer! I was perfectly aware that my conditioning wasn’t great prior to attending this cert, but he really hammered the point home here! That stuff whooped my big ass, let me tell you! More than anything else I realized just how weak my midsection had become. While I was mostly able to hold it together during the actual exercises, I was so fatigued that I couldn’t stand up straight for a fair amount of time afterwards! That, my friends, is not good.
After some more discussion time and a quick break for lunch we were back for some more hands-on learning. This time there was a session on bodyweight training, sandbag training, dumbbell training, and tire training. The great thing about all of this was not only did we learn by doing, but we all broke up into groups and coached each other. Throughout the whole seminar Zach kept hammering that we need to become great at coaching, in addition to “doing”. This gave us the opportunity to really put some of that into practice. It also gave me the opportunity to do some more strength-based stuff, which I’m good at, so as to feel a bit better about myself after the conditioning ass-kicking I received earlier!
After the hands-on portion we spent some time on program design and learned some of the ins-and-outs of how Zach structures his workouts. It’s always interesting to hear the logic behind another coach’s methods and have their critiques on your systems. I personally think a lot like Zach on a lot of stuff, but some of his training structure is different than mine. I picked up a few things and am already implementing them with my clients.
We finished up with a business discussion with Zach and one of his former certification attendees, Jimmy Airey, who’s killing it with a training business inside a wrestling club. I picked up a ton of great info from a couple of guys who are doing it and making it happen.
Three quick strength lessons from the trip:
1. It’s all about culture and attitude. Whatever you’re doing, do it 100%. A “B” program done to its fullest is better than an “A” program performed half-assed.
2. Stand for something. Have some opinions and stick with them. If you’re wishy-washy, nobody should respect you.
3. Put in hard work. Don’t just focus on working smarter rather than harder. Focus on working smart AND hard.
Many thanks to Zach Even-esh for his killer hospitality, motivation, and some great learning. To all of my fellow Underground Strength Coaches, I had a great time meeting all of you and let’s keep building strong bodies and minds out there!
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