How to Train Your Glutes Effectively

 

     Training the “glute” muscles for more than aesthetics has grown in popularity outside the ranks of bodybuilders, athletes, and social media influencers of recent. The glutes are essentially the buttocks and include the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus. They are the largest hip extensors in the body. Along with extension of the hip, they affect both mobility and stability of the hip capsule, provide proper tracking of the knee, and aid in reducing stress on both the lower back and hamstrings. Everyone that trains at our studio does some type of glute training.

 

     Decades ago, renowned physical therapists, Vladimir Janda, noticed certain patterns in patients with back pain. Specifically, he noticed that these patients had signs of inhibited weak glutes. Researcher Dr. Stuart McGill provided data in 2013 that birthed the term glute amnesia, which are inhibited weak glutes. In this study, they monitored glute activation while participants performed glute bridge exercises. They then performed a therapeutic procedure called capsular distension arthrogram which created pain in the hip area. They immediately re-tested and observed diminished glute activity. The common misconception is that the glutes “turn off” when exposed to pain. They never turn off, but rather experience a decrease in neural drive from the brain, a process called arthrogenic neuromuscular inhibition. To maintain a pain-free and healthy lifestyle, everyone should include some form of glute training in their exercise regime.

 

     Here are a few of my favorite exercises for training the glutes.

 

     Supine Single Leg Hip Extension- One of the best exercises you can perform is the single leg bridge. Since most people demonstrate asymmetries throughout their body, I recommend that you perform this exercise one leg at a time to maximize glute engagement. Lie on the ground and draw one leg close to your abdominals by holding the knee. If you experience knee discomfort, you can hold behind the knee. The purpose for drawing in and holding the non-bridging leg is to ensure that the hip extends the hip flexors and not the lower back. It’s a common error to lift oneself off the ground by arching the lower back and performing extension of the spine. Start the movement by driving the hips off the ground by pressing the heel into the ground. Because many people tend to be quadricep dominant and have tight and shortened hip flexors, I recommend the emphasis on driving through the heel. Complete eight to ten repetitions on each leg for a total of three sets.

 

     Loaded Marches- Holding either a dumbbell or kettlebell in front of the chest, perform a standing march in place. Maintain a tall posture and avoid flexing at the hip as you draw a single leg into a flexed knee position. Provide a static pause and hold for one to two seconds before lowering and alternating to the other leg. This exercise trains the mobility of the anterior hip capsule as you draw a leg up, while safely and effectively demanding hip stability from the other leg. Complete eight to ten repetitions for three sets. Challenge the height of the knee as you march and execute a slow and controlled tempo as you march.

 

     Step Ups- While holding two dumbbells step up onto a stable platform or box. For safety,

   

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perform your initial set of ten repetitions without load. Maintain good posture throughout the movement and keep the whole foot securely on the platform as you step up, making sure to extend the hip at the top of the drill. Avoid using too much load and perform ten to twelve repetitions on each leg for three sets.

 

     Give these a try and experience the rewards of stronger glutes.

 


Learn the Rules First

 

     I was recently thinking about how artificial intelligence, AI, is going to affect the fitness industry. Like other industries, fitness professionals and strength and conditioning coaches are using it, but not well. No one has been able to establish a way that AI will enhance, rather than be a passing novelty. It’s more than asking ChatGPT to “Create me an exercise routine”. That’s too vague. You can narrow down the request based upon outcome goals- fat loss, strength, or mobility, but that’s not personalized for the user. You need to add filters to the process to get anything substantial (i.e., movement limitations, strength levels, skill ability, etc.). For the record, I do think it’s going to be a tool fitness professionals use in their daily lives, just not soon. This thought exercise got me to think about what are some of the filters or rules I use when outlining an exercise routine?

 

Categorize Exercise by Movement Patterns- Program design has evolved over the last twenty years. It’s filled with principles (example- Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand SAID), not laws, and principals are theories that everyone agrees are true. In this hierarchy, principals are argued and debated frequently. One of these principles is that muscles do not engage and fire in isolation. Your body can’t utilize your pectoralis without putting stress on the shoulder as either a stabilizer or secondary mover. Muscles work synergistically. Years ago, I was in the camp of categorizing exercises by muscle group. Thirty years ago, when I started personal training, that’s all we knew. Pull-ups are latissimus dorsi (upper back), incline dumbbell presses are pectoralis (chest), lunges are quadriceps, etc. and then strength educators such as Paul Chek, Gary Gray, and Juan Carlos Santana started speaking at conferences about “Functional movement.” These prominent fitness leaders started suggesting that we, and by “we”, I mean strength coaches and fitness professionals such as myself, had it all wrong.

 

     Muscles in the body play in symphony with one another like the musicians in an orchestra. Sometimes playing louder or softer, but never solo. This concept was built upon when Thomas Meyers authored Anatomy Trains in 2001. This book, using cadaver dissections, shows how the body moves using myofascial meridians. The meridians are developed from birth as we go from lying on our back, to rolling over to our bellies, sitting up, crawling, balancing to stand up, and eventually walking.

 

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     The agreed upon movement patterns are:

  •   Squat
  •   Lunge
  •   Hip hinge
  •   Push (both vertically and horizontally)
  •   Pull (both vertically and horizontally)
  •   Knee dominant (flex and extend)
  •   Elbow dominant (flex and extend) People will take my “Personal trainer” card away without bicep curls.
  •   Bracing- This is trainer talk for core work.
  •   Rotation
  •   Gait

     When I create a workout, I focus on including most of these movement patterns. Because of fatigue and time restraints for the participant, it’s challenging to cover every pattern in every workout, but your goal should be to address each pattern somewhere in the program whether weekly or monthly.

 

You Move in 3 Planes of Motion- Along with accepting that we move in patterns, we have realized that we move in multiple planes of motion. There are three planes of motion- sagittal (front to back), frontal (side to side), and the transverse (rotational). This is the reason behind the popularity of exercise tools such as medicine balls, kettlebells, and cable pullies which allow more freedom of movement. In the late nineties, the gym industry exploded, and gym size grew. A common observation was that these enormous facilities were filled with machines that worked your body in a sagittal dominant plane of motion. Years ago, the classic lower body workout consisted of leg extensions, barbell squats, angled leg press and lying leg curls. Each of these exercises are in the sagittal. This also explains how someone can have large muscle imbalances.

 

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     In 1999, I attended my wife’s family reunion. While at the family affair, I did what you do at reunions, eat, drink, and play softball. To provide context, I had won the Junior National Bodybuilding Championships as a light-heavy weight the year prior. I was heavily muscled and carried a sub 15% bodyfat. You can imagine the laughs when I pulled up with a hamstring strain after I took off to sprint to first base at my first at bat. How could this be? I was strong on the leg press and rear barbell squat at the gym. This recreational activity which required me to quickly change direction and accelerate as fast as I could, causes me to be on the side for the rest of the day with a bag of ice on my leg. I may have been considered “gym strong", but my overall movement competency and functional strength was not great. Bottomline, what you do in your workout should have carry over to improving your efficiency in everyday activities.

 

You Must Cycle your Exercise Intensity- At the studio, we have three signs that designate the exercise intensity for the week. Once every five weeks, we increase the intensity level and urge our members to push a little harder for the week. This is when personal records are made on either strength, heart rate intensity, or calorie burn. Then once every five weeks we back it down. Exercise improvements are not linear, and sometimes like pruning a tree, you must cut it back to allow for new growth. This also combats the chances of overtraining or exercise burnout, either physical and/or mental. I consider active recovery, training with a lower intensity level, a key for consistent improvements. I don’t make a practice of critiquing other gyms or coaches, but I will question the effectiveness of a program that doesn’t include a system for recovery.

 

     Following these rules still allows for tons of creativity when selecting exercises. The internet and social media have provided a plethora of exercises to choose from, but you should know the rules of the game before you combine random exercises when constructing a workout. Training shouldn’t be stringent, but rather fluid, and you should be able to color slightly outside the lines. An example is having a workout where you use most of the movement patterns and train in at least two planes of motion. The goal of every workout should not be to break the records of the previous. Rules should be able to be broken. As they say when cooking or creating music, you must “learn the rules first like a pro, before you attempt to break them like an artist.”

 

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     I’ll see you at the studio.


It Was So Good, I Stopped Doing It

 

     In 1859 Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in his book, On the Origins of Species. Darwin, an English biologist and geologist, proposed that all species of life have evolved from a common ancestry is now generally accepted as a fundamental scientific concept. Over the last forty years, in exercise science, we have learned and proven how to get stronger, how to move better, and how to change our body mass composition. These protocols have been scientifically proven to work, and they work so well that we can fall into the trap of stopping them.

 

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(Charles Darwin circa 1874)

 

     When I was in high school and just starting to get intrigued about getting stronger and building muscle, I was astonished to see the difference in the physique of someone who just got out of jail. Stay with me. I grew up in a middle class town, and in my early years before gyms were on every corner, I lifted weights at a local recreational center. This is the late 1980’s and weightlifting was still considered a cult, purely for bodybuilding. Every once in a while, you would see a new face in the gym, and word would get out that our new “iron head” just came home. These guys were always thickly muscled. I don’t think it was their science based nutritional program. I remember hearing stories of guys living off cereal. Cold plunge baths and sauna were also absent from their daily regimes, so it wasn’t their recovery system.  What I learned is that these guys performed basic exercises (pull-ups, push-ups, lunges, and squats) with basic equipment (bodyweight, dumbbells, barbells) consistently. The understated key word in that statement is consistently. It was commonplace for a guy to lose his privilege to lift weights if he was being disciplined for his actions. Yes, if he got in trouble in jail he couldn’t exercise.

 

     I recently was reviewing a few ideas and concepts from a textbook I have, Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF), by Dorothy Voss, Marjories Ionta, and Beverly Myers. I have the third edition published in 1985, but the original book was published in 1956. The book is a staple in physical therapy schools and it explains how the body works in a symphony of muscles contracting and relaxing in specific sequences. These sequences work in diagonal patterns throughout our bodies. One of the first patterns is developed in babies approximately in their third month, when they learn how to roll over from their back to their stomach. In those first two years of life there are multiple patterns developed, with the finale being your gait, or your ability to walk. I was once told by my friend, Eric Konz, who sells equipment to gyms, that he always starts with treadmills in his proposal. They are the easiest to sell, “everyone knows how to walk”. In an interview recently with Tim Ferriss, the Godmother of physical therapy, Sara Sahrmann, stated “everyone can walk, but many people don’t walk well”. Walking uses a repetitious sequence of limb motions to simultaneously move the body forward while also maintaining stance stability. There’s a dance within your body between your two lower limbs, your trunk, and your arms. Just think about it this way, if you have ever taken a cross-country flight and sat the whole time without getting up for the rest room, think of that initial feeling you have once you stand. Man was not made to sit in a middle seat for six hours without moving.

 

     I’m a big fan of chops and lifts when I work with someone. If you have ever trained at the studio you are familiar with them. They won’t tone your arms or give you a six pack but they do reset your body, which then allows you to perform those drills that will provide those benefits.

 

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     I also know that to build strength, and who doesn’t want to be strong, you need to first move well. Strength is a skill and an adaptation from a muscle being overloaded. The central nervous system responds by working with the muscular system to improve the force in the pattern you overloaded. This process has been proven and is referenced as the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (SAID). Simply put, I squat holding a 16kg kettlebell for 10-12 repetitions. Over time, if I’m consistent (there’s that word again), I will be able to squat using a 20kg kettlebell for repetitions.

 

     We’ve also learned that if we manipulate the hear rate intensity during exercise, you can increase the caloric burn along with improve one’s body’s ability to metabolize calories. This must be partnered with proper nutrition. Over feeding will lead to an increase in body fat. You can’t consume more calories than you burn daily. Going back to our buddy Darwin, man and woman were not built to have Amazon deliver packages to their door.

 

     In this ever-changing world we live in, where things change monthly, weekly and sometimes daily, we need to understand that exercise doesn’t have to evolve at the same pace. We’ve learned why things respond the way they do, but we don’t need to always look to change, when there are strategies that have been proven to work if we are consistent. This is when having a coach can help even the most disciplined person from becoming Dug the talking dog from the Pixar-Disney movie, “Up”, Squirrel!!

 

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     I’ll see you at the studio.

 


The Pain You Feel is in Your Head

 

     There are hundreds of tasks your body repeatedly does that stem from your brain. The brain is the center of your central nervous system and is the control center for movement. It controls the firing, relaxing, and pausing of movement in a specific sequential order. There is a series of things that must happen when you take a step, breath, or blink. Unfortunately, the role of the nervous system as a contributing factor for musculoskeletal pain also exists. This can be the skipping of a step, such as a muscle not firing or the inclusion of an extra step such as an extra muscle adding a step in the process. But how does this happen?

 

     These issues can be controlled by teaching the person to control subtle movements by conscious effort. Many people believe that since we can do so many things reflexively, we should also have the ability to make corrections reflexively, and that just isn’t so. A study by Hodges and Richardson identifies that the recruitment of the transverse abdominis muscle, one of the deep core muscles located in the abdominals, is delayed in the person who experiences back pain. Another study by Hides has shown that patients with low back pain are experiencing a delayed engagement from the multifidus muscle (another deep core muscle). Both are examples of a motor control problem. It’s not an issue of having strong muscles, but rather teaching the muscle to fire correctly. Drills such as the bird-dog, dead bug, chops, and lifts with all their variations use proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) to teach the body how to stretch, contract, and relax in the correct sequence. If you train at the studio, you are bound to have these exercises in your workout.

 

     It doesn’t stop with only back pain, as a study from Babyar explains that the source of shoulder pain from some patients is due to excessive shoulder elevation during shoulder flexion to 90 degrees. These people are hyper and overactive in the upper trapezius. These people tend to perform exercises with the appearance that their shoulders are connected to their ears. When coaching people like this I tend to frequently remind them to drop their shoulders. Verbal reminders help them to quickly depress and drop their shoulders. The only problem is that as soon as I walk away to coach someone else, they instantly raise them back up. The good news is that the person can fix the problem, the deeper issue is that they need constant reminding. A frequent comment I get is, “Doug, you need to walk behind me all day and remind me to drop my shoulders.”

 

     Changes in muscle firing can also happen in gait. Another study, by Mueller and associates, shows that people with diabetes have limited range of dorsiflexion, and decreased power of push-off from the big toe and instead excessively use the hip to swing a leg forward. The hip flexion phase tends to be exaggerated. Drills that address ankle joint mobility will include motor control and can carry over to insuring a person does not overuse their hip flexors.

 

     When addressing muscular pain, understand that it may not be strength or lack of flexibility. Mobility and strength can solve a lot of ills, but not everything. The problem may be tied to motor control and the organ that lies between your ears.

 

     I’ll see you at the studio.

 


Workouts Should Be Fun

 

   In my book, Boutique Studio Blueprint, I share a personal story about when I was ten years old, and my father asked me “What do you want for your upcoming birthday?” I responded, “A pair of 10-pound dumbbells”. That purchase and gift would launch my trajectory of a lifetime of weight training and exercise. That love of resistance training is still alive and well, forty-four years later. This obviously played an influential role in what I later pursued as an occupation. I know this isn’t normal and I consider myself a bit of an outlier in that regard. I get cranky when I can’t train or have the time. I understand that many of the people I train and coach do not possess the same mindset. Exercise is considered more a task of what they must and need to do, not a passion. Somewhere along my journey I had a realization that, as a coach, if you mix in an element of fun, you can make the workout more palatable for the average user. To take a line from Mary Poppins, “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

 

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     The layout of a strengthening program plays a part in how it’s received. Whether lifting a kettlebell, weight stack of a machine, or bodyweight, it’s all resistance training, and it requires work. One of the reasons people are stagnant in their current program is because they aren’t challenging themselves. They are putting in the time, but to create an environment where the body must respond by making a positive adaptation or change, there has to a be a stimulus. That stimulus doesn’t have to always be more weight. It could be volume or repetitions, the type of load (example: changing from a kettlebell to a resistance band), or the complexity of the exercise. It’s that variety that can add an element of fun. There’s a reason we change the workouts at the studio daily and have a database of over three hundred exercises which I select from. It’s a dance though, because I don’t opt for variety purely to offset boredom of my members. I program the “big lifts” frequently, because to improve at an exercise, you need to get in the reps. I want people to experience that improvement.

 

     In creating a song, there are multiple parts. The intro, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, interlude, and the outro. A recipe or pattern is used. Workouts are no different. It will vary based upon the goal, but an example for a strengthening and fat-burning workout could be as follows: warm-up, mobility or movement preparation drills, strength, power, and metabolic conditioning. Like a song, you may not like every part, but there’s always that part you like to sing along with. This is when I tell fellow trainers to determine effectiveness, you must consider all components other than does it make them sweaty and tired. This is where the fitness industry dropped the ball years ago, when it was believed every workout had to be a beatdown. “No Pain, No Gain” became an adopted mantra. I’m glad we have evolved from that.

 

     A significant factor in making a workout fun is the way in that it is delivered. I was recently on an airline flight, when in a calm voice the pilot made an announcement that we were about to experience some turbulence. He had a tone like Barry White. The bumps that soon followed went by quicker. It’s amazing how hearing you have three sets of squats can sound when said with a smile. Mix in a chorus of, “You got this”, and it goes down a lot easier. People are attracted to positive energy and tend to mirror one another with it. There’s no place for a Debbie downer in the gym.

 

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     Go lift, lunge, and laugh. Have fun with your workout. If the goal is to make it a habit, and it should be, remember it doesn’t have to be torture. Everything won’t be rainbows and unicorns, but to make it stick you need to have fun along the way.

 


Don’t Wait Until January to Re-Evaluate

 

     As we celebrate graduations and the start of summer, our focus can shift from meal prep and tracking our heart rates during workouts, to barbecues and pool time. Summer is seasonal, and the pool is not open all year long, so I agree you should take advantage of these opportunities, but it’s also a good time to re-evaluate those goals we set five months ago.

 

    ADJUST

 

 In professional sports, one of the ways coaches are currently scrutinized is how they adjust during the game. They approach the game with a game plan and strategy, but it’s the adjustments during the game and at half-time that can dictate the winner. You should consider taking a similar path. This can mean adjusting the schedule or time required for a task. Maybe back in December you thought 30 minutes of walking every evening before bed was achievable to only realize that 15 minutes is realistic.

 

     Another thing to consider is that life happens. Work schedules change and family members get sick. Life is fluid and you must create a plan with some slack in the line. This is a step that I

 

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struggled with. I tended to create a schedule so tight, that I didn’t allow time for things such as a casual conversation with one of my studio members. When I was forced into these predicaments, I would attempt to complete the task as fast as possible as opposed to embracing the moment of engagement. You can’t plan to be in the moment, you must accept that as a mindset, which brings me to my next point.

 

ELIMINATE

 

     Maybe you undertook too much at once. This is one of the biggest mistakes in goal setting. You create a list of five things you want to accomplish. Three goals should be the most. Less is better in this scenario. You must play the long game with goal setting and work towards making things stick for the long term. It’s emotionally a healthier avenue to tackle two to three goals at once, take the six months to a year it may require to in-grain them into your behavior, than to attempt four or five goals simultaneously, eventually quitting on all of them. This takes me to my final point.

 

     A few months into the year is a good time to re-evaluate and quit. Yes, I said quit a goal that may jeopardize your success in achieving other goals. Again, simplicity is the key in making something stick. As a society, we have become surrounded by antidotes that quitting is always bad. You must finish reading the book, you must eat everything on your plate, or you must finish the race. To provide context on how the strength and conditioning field has taken a full 360 degree turn on this, I’ll share this bit of insight. Ankle mobility has become one of the holy grails of sports. Mobility at the ankle joint can provide more power in jumping and running. What has been determined is that by the age of 15 or so, many athletes have already experienced ankle sprain or strain. In sport, the common mantra when dealing with a rolled or sprained ankle was “to walk it off”. You have traumatized a joint, now let’s continue to use it?   Ignore that there may be long-term consequences that cannot be undone. We’ve learned that when dealing with ankle sprains it’s better to immediately rest the joint and avoid weightbearing, while still maintaining the proper range of motion. This may accelerate the rate of recovery, while minimizing long term negative outcomes. Athletes have always tended to take the short gain while ignoring the long-term effects. Now with the investments in athletes at such astronomical amounts, you have heard things such as “We’re shutting them down”.

 

    As we cruise towards the mid-way part of the year, my suggestions for examining your new year goals are to adjust and eliminate. Making a change of course and eliminating friction may be exactly what you need to sail your ship successfully to the end of the year.

 


How to Reset from Sitting

 

     I don’t think it’s earth-shattering news to you that Americans sit too much. Binge watching a new series on Netflix, sitting at your desk at work, and being on the computer all put us is a seated position more than we should be. We can adjust some of these things. Technology has helped by sending us reminders on our watches and phones that we should move or stand after we’ve been inactive or seated for a prolonged period. We can break up watching TV by taking a walk, but not everything is as fixable as that. Some jobs require us to be seated for long extended times. Accountants can’t work on your taxes standing. When your doctor comes into the exam room, would you rather she stands when speaking to you or sit? The research has said people feel better when their physician sits when they address them. So, what does all the sitting do?

 

     There is a name for what sitting can cause: upper and lower cross pattern syndrome. In the upper body, it’s created from poor posture and creates overactive and underactive muscles in the neck, chest, and shoulders. Much of this is associated with the forward head position. This can cause problems for the shoulders. Think about how you stand when looking at your phone. Lower cross syndrome is also a by-product of poor posture and can be characterized as overactive and underactive muscles in the lower body, specifically the deep abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteus maximus and medius muscles. This tends to create back problems for people. You may suffer from issues with one or both syndromes.

 

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Awareness

 

     The first step is to know that there is a problem and that you need to address it. This can start simply by taking mini breaks throughout the day to stand with the correct posture. Months ago, I wrote about what neutral posture is and how to achieve it. If you missed the post here’s the link

 

https://jdfitness.liveeditaurora.com/blog/2023/11/09/what-is-neutral

 

Set an alarm on your phone to take a break for 5 minutes in the mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and before you go to bed to stand for 5 minutes with proper posture. Your goal is to maintain this as your default posture. I’ve had people fatigue while getting into a neutral posture. You want to strive to stand with good posture without having to exert excessive energy.

 

 Address the Muscle Tissue Quality

 

     Sitting is going to cause tight muscles and a fix for that is foam rolling. I nickname the foam roller “the poor man’s massage therapist”. Foam rolling should not be relegated only as part of your warmup before training. Foam rolling should be part of a daily self-care program. A common question I get asked is “what can I do at home?” I always suggest foam rolling. Five minutes of foam rolling for the glutes, hip flexors, and upper back can go a long way in reducing tone in overly tight muscles.

 

Train the Weak Muscles

 

     This is the part where a qualified trainer can help. One of the discussions I have with men is that we’re going to prioritize the muscles of your mid-back before we address the pectorals. Men tend to want to perform dumbbell presses stressing the chest area, when that’s only going to exacerbate the tightness of the pecs they already have. Many of my members will want to focus solely on their frontal thighs from an aesthetic perspective, but our program puts a heavy emphasis on strengthening the glutes, before we address the quadriceps. A professionally designed program will address the muscles you don’t see when looking at yourself in the mirror. Those tend to be the weaker muscles.

 

     It’s easy to advise people to stop sitting, but that isn’t realistic. A better stance is to adopt a few lifestyle changes that you can do daily that will offset the woes of sitting for too long. Take ten minutes to get 1% better every day.

 


What a Heart Monitor Tells Me When Training

     

     In 2014, when I was formulating the structure for our semi-private training, I decided on initially offering two workouts. I created Torch and TRX Flow so that I could offer variety and accommodate different outcome goals. Over the years, we’ve increased this to five different workouts. Based on initial demand, I composed a high intensity interval type workout with an emphasis on functional movement patterns (squat, lunge, pulling, etc.). This workout would cater to someone looking to reduce body fat, increase strength and improve mobility. I understood that the semi-private training dynamic must address the needs of the de-conditioned and beginner, while still challenging the needs of the advanced participant. To eliminate guessing with heart intensity, I wanted members to wear monitors. I opted to use Polar heart rate monitors, which we use to this day. The purpose of the heart monitors was solely for the benefit of the coach. It provided metrics and feedback which allowed a trainer to adjust exercises, duration, and intensity. This is valuable data and allowed me to adjust our training protocols and program design over the years. That’s the good. The downside was that it brought a scenario that people started to compare themselves to one another. Thoughts of “Why is my heart rate lower than hers?” and “How does he burn so many calories?”, started to form. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “The heart monitor is lying!”, I’d be a rich man. That’s the bad. But what does it really mean?

 

     When monitoring heart rates, there are some standards. People tend to walk around between 50-59% of their maximum heart rate. Maximum heart rate is determined by taking your age and subtracting it from 220. To use me as an example:

 

220- 53yrs. = 167

.50 (50% of maximum heart rate) x 167 = 84

.59 (59% of maximum heart rate) x 167 = 99.

 

Before exercise or activity, my heart rate beats at between 84 and 99 beats per minute on average.

 

     During moderate intense exercise, such as performing a TRX row or lunge with a kettlebell, my heart rate can increase to 142 beats per minute (85%). More intense drills such as pushing a weighted sled or riding the Assault bike can have me exceed 175 beats per minute (105%). Not all exercises are the same, and differing exercises are meant to have varying outcomes regarding heart rates. Lying on the ground performing a floor press with a kettlebell can be challenging over time, but since you are lying down and not having to support your body to stand, it’s common to see people experience a lower heart rate compared to a drill performed while standing.

 

     In the HIIT workouts at the studio (Torch, DVRT and Metabolic Disruption), I try to draft programs that will give the user a variance of 20% throughout the sessions. That means you have a low of 55%, peak at 75%, and average 65% throughout the workout. To accommodate for unique fitness levels, skill levels, and age, each of those can be plus or minus ten percent. I wish I could say that we should all be the same, but this is when I use my best Morgan Freeman voice and say, “God made us all different.”

 

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     The final metric that the software provides is a total calorie burn. This is an approximation. Polar uses an algorithm using your age, weight, gender, and heart rate intensity. It can be off. We shouldn’t focus on that, but we all do. Early on, I appreciated that piece of data because I could compare outcomes between users which helped me create the workouts. Soon I observed it could demotivate some people. This is like waking up in the morning feeling refreshed, reading that your sleep tracker says you had a poor night’s sleep, and in response immediately feel terrible. At times like this, I believe the hardest muscle to train is the one between our ears.

 

     Technology can help shape behavior and can provide feedback, but don’t allow it to come at the cost of ignoring what you feel. No program or piece of technology is perfect. Keep it simple. Apply sound programs based upon research and evidence. Stay consistent and apply hard work. Regardless of what an app tells you, you will have superior results.

 


What is Heart rate Variability?

 

     I learned about Heart rate Variability (HRV) when I started to investigate methods and protocols to improve recovery from exercise. This led me to study and understand sleep and the role it plays in the recovery process. One of the metrics used when monitoring sleep is your HRV. HRV has been identified as a complex measurement of the variation in time between each heartbeat. We know that having a heartbeat that is either too fast, too slow, or irregular can be a sign of a problem. Using that thought process, you may assume that a steady heartbeat with no difference between beats (which is a low HRV) is the sign of a healthy heart, but you would be incorrect.

 

     You want to strive for a high heart rate variability, which means that there is a constant fluctuation in time between beats. Understand that this is measured in fractions of a second (milliseconds). An example is if your resting heartbeat is 60 beats per minute, instead of 1 second between beats you may have .8 seconds, then 1.2 seconds, then .9 seconds. This is not to be confused with heart arrhythmia or an irregular heartbeat. A heart arrhythmia occurs when the electrical signals that tell the heart to beat don't work properly. The heart may beat too fast or too slow or the pattern of the heartbeat may be inconsistent. A heart arrhythmia may feel like a fluttering, pounding, or racing heartbeat. Some heart arrhythmias are harmless. Others may cause life-threatening symptoms.

 

     According to several studies, high HRV seems to signal a healthy heart, because it reflects the heart's ability to respond quickly to rapid changes occurring throughout the body. HRV reflects your autonomic nervous system rather than your heart. This primitive part of your nervous system works on autopilot, regulating your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and digestion. There are two parts: one governs the stress (sympathetic or fight-or-flight) response. The other controls the relaxation (parasympathetic or rest-and-recovery) response. It’s a dance amongst the two responses. You want your heart rate to have the ability to bounce between dancing like Carlton from the Fresh Prince and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. 

 

dwts dirtydancing

    

In a healthy person, HRV should increase when your heart rate drops, as it does during relaxing activities such as reading or meditating. HRV decreases as the heart rate rises, such as when you exercise or are under stress. In fact, it changes constantly, both throughout the day and from day to day. But chronic stress, poor sleep, lack of exercise, and an unhealthy diet can disrupt the balance, and your fight-or-flight system can shift into overdrive.

 

     This past weekend I received my second dose of the shingles vaccination. It put stress on my nervous system, and you can see the impact on my recovery from the data of my OURA ring. The first picture is the day of the vaccination, the second photo is the day after, when my nervous system started to recover. 

 

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     Here’s where it can get confusing. HRV is going to vary from person to person. There is no standard HRV variable and it’s highly personalized. The reliability of devices that track HRV such as the OURA ring, Apple watch, and Fitbit have been questioned. In closing, I believe by tracking your HRV you are more probable to make better and healthier lifestyle choices. That should be the goal. 

 


That Aha Moment with Movement

 

     Has this ever happened to you? You’re watching a movie that you have watched several times before. You know the movie well. You can recite lines of dialogue. A scene happens, there’s a comment or a subtle joke that never clicked prior to that moment. You get it now. That “Aha” moment. In this era, where our daily inputs are overloaded from emails, frequent text messages, and social media our brains can approach everything with a quick scan. We treat everything like a speed-reading course. That approach can carry over to everything, including how we perform our exercise.

 

     Nick Winkleman is a PhD and is the head of athletic performance and science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. I met him when he was in the states working for Athletes Performance training athletes in the NFL, NBA, USTA, and other professions. He authored a wonderful book a few years back titled, The Language of Coaching/ The Art & Science of Teaching Movement. I can remember reading it for the first time, and immediately ordering copies for all my coaches. Teaching people how to move is an art. It requires communication from the coach and concentration from the people who are being coached.

 

     It takes only a few moments for me to identify a trainer that has never coached anyone before. It isn’t a lack of knowledge or information. It can be years of learning solely in a classroom and the lack of practical experience that can have them tripping over their words and sounding confused. It’s my belief that the transition for a coach starts to happen when they start to anticipate the mistake of the participant. The magic of using the perfect cue that helps the person make the correction. Then, coupling it with feedback on what they should “feel.” The moment the cue used by the coach resonates with the person trying to perform the task can have a light switch turned on moment. It can almost feel like when you realized the character Bruce Willis plays in the movie Sixth Sense has been dead the whole time. Aha!

 

6sense

 

     For the person being trained, the challenge can be focus. Intuitively, we know that to focus on something means that we can’t focus on everything. This is why you stop talking to the passenger in your car or turn down the music as you approach unexpected traffic on a freeway. Thinking about the text message you received right before you started training, the appointment you have tomorrow at work, and what you’re going to have for dinner tonight can cloud the cue to “drive your hips back, like you’re attempting to tap the wall behind you.” As the adage goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force them to drink. At the studio we use simple cues to keep things, well, simple.

 

     People have not stopped moving, but they have stopped moving well. The evolution of technology has made our lives better, but it has come at a cost. Don’t believe me, just observe the average posture next time you’re at the grocery store. I’m not removed from this, as I write this post at my desktop computer seated for the last hour. My message to you is this. Slow down and think about what you’re doing when you train. Don’t adopt the approach of racing through to get to the next task. Stop to think about how you’re using your feet. Be mindful of your posture. Breathe! Be deliberate with your training. Remember, sometimes the best thing you can do is to slow down. You just might be pleasantly surprised when that exercise you’ve been doing for years finally clicks and you have that moment. That aha moment.

 

     I’ll see you at the studio.

 


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