Our Philosophy
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | Comments Off
- Evidence-based training.
- No gimmicks, fad exercises, or promises of ”extreme fat-melting.”
- Just scientifically-backed strength and conditioning programs and no-nonsense nutrition counselling.
Personal Trainers Exposed – Part 1
Posted on | January 27, 2010 | 4 Comments
Personal trainers pride themselves on being students of fitness, promising results using the latest and greatest secrets from nutrition and exercise science. Most personal trainers, however, exhibit substandard knowledge of strength and conditioning training, prescribe ineffective or unsafe training protocols, and justify their methods with pseudoscience or “experience.” As a trainer, I shudder at the things I see fellow trainers foist upon their clients.
What’s worse, many of the mistakes are easy to correct. If your personal trainer does some of these things, confront him and ask him to justify himself. A wealth of science based information is available to fitness professionals, but most make little use of it. Instead, they rely on habit, misconceptions, and empty promises to market their businesses.
Part 1: Unstable Surface Training
A BOSU Ball In Action
Trainers claim that unstable surface training will improve balance and ‘core strength.’ Standing on a balance or BOSU ball while performing exercises forces a trainee to constantly adjust his weight or fall over. It does require quite a bit of skill to do well. Unstable surface training invariably teaches trainees to balance on unstable surfaces more effectively, but the question is: does that accomplish anything worthwhile? Does training on a BOSU ball make a trainee stronger, jump higher, run faster, or burn more fat?
Another Fat Loss Myth – Meal Frequency
Posted on | December 13, 2009 | 4 Comments
I'm sick of protein shakes just looking at this.
“Eat 6 times a day to boost your metabolism.”
“Eat a big breakfast or you’ll get fat.”
“Only eat protein and carbs before and after working out.”
“Don’t eat a big meal late in the day.”
Everyone’s heard these platitudes but they’re part of a broader class of advice built around the idea that the timing (and composition) of meals is extremely important for losing fat. Miss breakfast and your body won’t start burning calories because it’s in starvation mode; eat a big meal before bed and all those calories will go straight to your thighs as you rest. The advice certainly sounds plausible and actually kind of makes sense, but unfortunately there isn’t any research to back it up.
How a pen and paper could improve your fitness
Posted on | December 9, 2009 | No Comments
Ask almost anyone who works out regularly what they do in the gym and you’ll usually hear, “Well, I usually do some chest exercises, some arm exercises and then I go for a run. On other days I do leg presses and some ab work and I go for a swim.” Just a simple description of their personal routine as they try to get or stay in better shape. Is there anything wrong with that? No, of course not, but I would argue that these people are missing a crucial element. It’s not a super secret exercise or supplement or killer attitude; it’s the simple act of writing things down.
Writing down absolutely everything you do in the gym gives you a powerful tool to measure progress. You can have a handle on things —how you look in the mirror, how your clothes fit, some of the weights you use, or your treadmill setting—without writing them down. But your personal appearance changes incredibly slowly (especially once you’ve been working out for a while), clothes aren’t going to fit much differently unless it’s a suit you wear once a month, and who can really remember how many reps you did on the bench press two weeks ago with 155lbs on the bar?
Writing everything down means you know exactly what is happening with your body. It could be as simple as your strength on a single exercise or notes scrawled in the margin about little aches and pains. I can’t remember how many times I’ve looked back over my log and recognized patterns of accumulated stress and injury which I would never have noticed without my notes.
Nonsense
Posted on | November 7, 2009 | 3 Comments
The fitness industry is one of the most nonsense-filled marketplaces in the world. Most training ’secrets’ can be summed up in a few sentences: Be active several times a week, strength train by moving heavy weights around, don’t eat too much, eat whole foods, and get plenty of sleep. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make anyone much money. Instead, profit comes from a few other things:
- Supplements. This is a huge business, around $20 billion in sales in the US alone according to an industry lobby group report. Very few of those dollars are well-spent. I recommend protein supplementation for some individuals, fish oil caps for those who don’t eat a lot of fatty fish, and maybe some creatine for a more advanced trainee. But these aren’t going to cost more than $30-$50 per month on average. Wander into any health foods store, GNC or the like, though, and you’ll find shelves upon shelves of mass gainer, fat burner, testosterone booster, and general make-you-lean-and-strong-right-now! pills. Too bad none of them do very much at all besides slim down your wallet. One humorous example is that of “Surge Recovery”, a post workout drink marketed by Biotest that “turns on the muscle gaining, hyper-drive switch.” (You can read more sensational claims about the product here.) At about $2/serving, this drink had better be pretty amazing! Alan Aragon did an analysis of Surge earlier this year comparing it to chocolate milk and ultimately concluded that the two were equally effective (based on the research done to date). Chocolate milk, however, is less than half the cost per serving for all the hyper-drive switch muscle building you could want.
What is Olympic Lifting?
Posted on | October 21, 2009 | No Comments
Every four years, the Olympics come on television and between the 100m and archery you come across something like this:
The Olympic lifts are the Snatch, and the Clean and Jerk. Despite their incredibly unfortunate names, these two lifts are some of the absolute best things you can add to your training to improve your speed, explosive strength, and athleticism. Both variants involve literally jumping the bar overhead, using almost every muscle in the body. There is no equivalent lift that is as “full-body” as either the Snatch or C&J. Elite Olympic lifters are some of the strongest and fastest people on the planet with vertical jumps comparable to high jumpers, with short range sprinting ability better than NFL running backs.
The “Carbs are Bad” Myth
Posted on | October 13, 2009 | No Comments
This past weekend I attended a Crossfit Level 1 Certification. I had a great time and learned some new teaching techniques, but I was disappointed with the lecture on nutrition. Crossfit has long been associated with Barry Sears and the Zone diet, which preaches a balanced carbohydrate to protein intake. In practice this leads to a restrictive carbohydrate intake, and very restrictive relative to a typical North American diet. Along the same lines Gary Taubes, in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories argues that insulin dysfunction (eating too much sugar in the form of bread, pasta, processed foods, sweetened drinks etc.) is actually the cause of obesity – not overconsumption of calories. Unfortunately, the efficacy of either the Zone diet or the Good Calories, Bad Calories hypothesis has never been proved.
Strength Training or Cardio for Fat Loss?
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | No Comments
Alan Aragon has a ton of great resources on his website and he’s a fantastic writer on fitness, nutrition, and training. In an issue of his Research Review from 2008 he brought attention to a study done in 1999 comparing strength and endurance training for obese dieters. You can read the abstract here. If you want to avoid the overly technical details, here’s the experimental setup:
Not a fan of this view? Read on!
- Two groups of obese individuals were put on identical 800kcal (very restrictive) liquid diets for 12 weeks.
- One group did endurance or “cardio” training 4 times a week for one hour (walking, biking, or stair climbing).
- The other group underwent strength training 3 times a week using 10 stations with increasing number of sets.
- Fat loss, change in body composition, and change in resting metabolic rate (RMR) was measured at the conclusion of the study.
The results were astonishing (for many people):
Two Personal Training Myths
Posted on | October 2, 2009 | No Comments
1. Do High Reps to Tone Your Muscles
Usually aimed at women that want to get tighter midsections and more toned arms, these workout programs usually prescribe lots of reps (hundreds of crunches) with very low weights (20+ dumbell curls with 5lbs). The fact is, a muscle’s appearance (on both men and women) is a factor of three things: genetics, body fat, and size of the muscle. Muscles will look different on different people because of length of the underlying skeletal structure and insertion points - both of which are genetic and unchangeable. Lower (or higher) bodyfat will make muscles more (or less) apparent on the continuum from flabby to toned to ripped. And because you can’t target fat loss (see Fat Loss Myth #1) lowering overall body fat is the way to go. Finally, bigger muscles are more visible and – depending on your preference – more attractive.
Doing lighter weights or more reps will have no effect on any of these 3 factors. If you want your muscles more toned, you must either reduce overall bodyfat or build bigger muscles. Luckily, both of these things can be achieved by improving your diet and starting an effective exercise program.
Self Myofascial Release (SMR)
Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments
What if I told you there was a way to improve your flexibility, reduce injury risk, pain and inflammation in joints and muscles, and improve strength and performance – all in only about 10 minutes a day? Usually at this point I’d have a 1-800 number on screen next to “$19.95 + shipping and handling.” Self Myofascial Release (SMR), however, really can do all of that.
Tags: flexibility > knots > massage > self myofascial release > smr > tissue quality
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