Summer Interns Update: It's Week 6 Already!

Week 6 is a wrap!

This week was about sandbags and why we use them at Train for Life. The answer is that DVRT (Dynamic Variable Resistance Training) system always use to effectively train and progress people seamlessly in a small or large group setting.  Using these concepts along with understanding specific coaching sequences and cues can help us train individuals with previous injuries or mobility limitations in a pain free manner.  

Now that I’ve been further educated, I’ll share with you what I like about the DVRT Ultimate Sandbags.

1. They make me better! I was born with nerve damage in my left shoulder and it radiates down my arm. At times, muscles on my left side just won’t turn on for me. Not with the Ultimate Sandbags. Within minutes my left lat was fired up.  This gives me an opportunity to safely push myself without making my workouts into a physical therapy session (which isn’t as fun as getting PRs). 

2. I love unconventional equipment. It doesn’t get much more savage than 90lbs bag of sand.  Training with 90lbs in an Ultimate Sandbag versus 90lbs on a barbell feels drastically different.  You can get a very different training effect without always just having to add more weight!

3. Variability. There’s a ton you can do with these things! I spent a good amount of time and greater amount of money building a home gym of dumbbells, barbells, etc. But, for most cases the sandbag can do what various other instruments can do. Less money, less space, oh and easy travel. There’s even a water filler option. So, when traveling take the empty bag with you in the car, fill it with water in the hotel room, and boom you have a portable gym.

We’re continuing to learn new skills and hone in on the basics. This upcoming week is about jumping and plyometrics so be on the lookout for Sienna’s blog.

Conversing with the members reminds me every day that I love the path I’ve chosen. Every day is another opportunity to learn and grow. Looking forward to week 7!

With gratitude,

Kyle Cusson

Member of the Month - May 2017

KATIE MORIN

MEMBER SINCE APRIL 2012

Katie Morin has been a member of Train for Life for over 5 years and with her long time commitment and dedication to her training has completed over 750 workouts with us!  Katie is a model member who always strives to do her best and can always be called upon to demonstrate any exercise with perfect technique.

Katie is always a friendly face in every class she attends welcoming friends and new members alike.  She consistently looks for improvement in all of her movements and is never too proud to ask for help when learning a new skill.  With her strength training experience, she never hesitates to lend a hand to a member or an encouraging comment. 

Katie is proof that hard work and commitment to our system pays off, as she is usually toward the top of the leader board during our challenges, often times putting up comparable numbers to women half her age.   We are humbled to have Katie continue to put her trust in us, and hope to continue to motivate and guide her for many more years to come.  CONGRATS KATIE!

“I love walking into class and seeing Katie.  She always has a smile on her face.  She is consistent, and never complains so you couldn’t ask for a better training partner.”

— Kristin Cressotti

It Begins with One Step

My elbow hurts. Sometimes just picking up a coffee causes me to immediately rethink how I can use my left instead of my right hand, just to avoid the pain. Alright, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but the likelihood of tendonitis is very real and it’s a nuisance every single time I walk into Train For Life. For the past couple of weeks, I have been battling the inner voices that tell me to work through the pain and the others that are telling me to take some time off. Fortunately, this week is recovery week. I went to class Tuesday night with the idea in my head that this reprieve would give me everything I need to resume killing myself by next week. And that’s where it hit me: I didn’t get to this point overnight and this will not heal overnight!

Let me back up a step and explain how I got to this point. Right before the holidays, I became intrigued with a guy named Frank Medrano. If you’re not familiar with him, check out the amazing strength and body control here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFPsvF3UOdo

Whether you watch the clip or not, this guy is in awesome shape and he is a beast on a chin-up bar. I decided I needed to do a million chin-ups and pull-ups to even get to being able to do my first muscle up. And I did a million chin-ups and pull-ups, sometimes using the weight belt to add to my insanity. Well, not a million but pretty close. Then I discovered that not only could I do a muscle up, but I could do multiple after only 3 weeks! Great news, right? Not really. I have some shoulder mobility issues and the way my desk was set up at my “other” job for the past six months or so, my right shoulder slowly began to shift forward. Now this may not seem like a huge deal, but as that happened, I continued to do weighted chin-ups along with other exercises as heavy as possible. When combined with mobility issues, it started to put more and more stress on, you guessed it: my right elbow!

First, let me say that I will be going to a massage therapist to properly treat the injury. Many times, the pain we feel in one area may be the direct result of the lack of mobility or stability in another joint. We should always remember the difference between pain and discomfort. Pain is the point when your movement is actually limited by the nervous system’s reaction to injury. This reaction is often sudden and powerful. If you pick up a weight or begin an exercise and feel that jolt through a joint or radiating down a limb, that’s pain and you should stop whatever it is that you are doing immediately. One of the biggest reasons we utilize regressions and progressions to every single type of movement at TFL is to help minimize the incidence injury while offering the most productive movement for each individual. Sometimes, hopefully not too often, a less complex version of the exercise may not be enough to stop pain. In those instances where the pain isn’t reduced by modifying the range of motion, STOP!

I’m not yelling at you, I’m actually telling myself because that’s how this pain has affected me. Many of us think that “playing through the pain” and resisting the urge to listen to our own bodies is better than quitting. But just the opposite of quitting is happening when we don’t take the time to deal with an injury. If pain becomes so severe that we can’t exercise, then we just put ourselves in a position where we no longer have a choice to quit or keep going. There’s no better way to defeat the purpose of going to TFL than hurting ourselves so badly that we can’t go to TFL.

When Drew posted on Facebook about recovery week and the value of making sure that remains part of our regular routine, I expected a full house at every class. I shouldn’t be surprised when I walk in and that’s not the case but I challenge every member at TFL to look at how mobility, flexibility and stability impact your workouts. Recovery week is the opportunity EVERY SINGLE MONTH to work on those areas that need attention, whether you see it or not. It may not be the same level of intensity as the normal workouts but recovery week is by no means easy. More importantly, improved mobility and flexibility allows the muscles to operate how they’re intended and your regular workouts will get better if you consistently focus on this.

Now back to the difference between pain and discomfort. When a muscle becomes fatigued and starts to “burn,” that is usually where we begin to experience discomfort. Our bodies get tired under the strenuous conditions of exercise and this is not a bad thing. Discomfort is normal. That is the point where we often must push ourselves mentally to overcome the physical exhaustion and finish a workout with the best form possible. Listen to your body and understand the difference between pain and discomfort. Grab a lower weight, regress an exercise, take a break, but try to will yourself to FINISH STRONG and break through! These breakthrough moments are powerful but also fleeting. Most of us have overcome significant challenges to get on the path to wellness and we are all at various points along that journey. Whether it was signing up at TFL or completing the 21-Day Sugar Detox or being recognized for your performance during one of the many challenges over the past couple years, there is ALWAYS a first step and it’s often the most difficult. The key to remember: it is ONLY ONE STEP.  There are going to be more challenges and more steps, so let’s give ourselves the best opportunity to move towards bigger and better goals, to always strive for improvement.

- Joe Willis

Track Your Way to Success

Keeping a food log is one of the most effective ways to manage your weight loss and performance goals. Whether you are struggling to change your poor eating habits or lose those last stubborn 10 pounds, you need to know what you're putting in your body on daily basis. Here are the top 3 reasons why you should be logging your food and training:

1. Accountability No one can help you but YOU! Having a great support system around you is very important, but no one is going to make the changes for you, not your trainer, not your doctor, not your kids, ONLY YOU. Only you can decide to make a change and follow through with it. By tracking what you are doing, you have a clear record of what is working and what is not. Your good and bad habits are staring you back in the face. Every time you eat something, log it! Look back on your logs on a daily and/or weekly basis to see how you've done. Who knew those mindless snacking habits at your desk was the problem? Or that one extra latte every morning is throwing your entire diet plan off by an extra 400-500 calories!

2. Motivation Ever hear of the snowball effect? The snowball effect is a figurative term for a process that starts from an initial state of small significance and builds upon itself, becoming larger and of more importance or significance. Well that's what can happen when you are tracking your progress regular. Small steps like eating a healthier breakfast or attending boot camp 3 days a week instead of 2, build upon one another. As you see yourself achieving each small goal, the bigger goals become easier and easier to achieve. 1 pound becomes 5 pounds of weight loss, a 1 mile run becomes 5 miles, etc. As you set goals for yourself, you can look at your logs and be sure that you are doing all the things necessary to achieve them.

3. Knowledge Knowledge is power. Many people have no idea what is healthy and what is not. With all of the resources out there for diets, exercise, supplements, and more it becomes very difficult to know what to follow and what will work. Using a tracking system can take a lot of the guess work out of your plan. As you log your food, you will learn how many calories are in certain foods, what's high in sugar, what a good source of protein is, etc. Knowing how many calories you should be eating per day and what you are doing now may be very different. Often times we fall into such a routine, we may be feeding ourselves way too much or way too little. It's rare that without proper knowledge of nutrition people are eating exactly the right amounts of healthy foods.

One of the best resources out there to help you with this is LIVESTRONG.COM. Click the link below and set up a FREE account with MYPLATE.

http://www.livestrong.com/

Why We Do What We Do

The following is a few research studies that Alwyn Cosgrove, one of my mentors in the fitness industry, distributed recently in his e-mail newsletter. The studies continue to prove that a combination of traditional strength training, metabolic resistance training and intervals are the keys to fat loss.

Special thanks to fellow geek :) Craig Ballantyne for letting me know about a couple of these: Knab et al. A 45-Minute Vigorous Exercise Bout Increases Metabolic Rate for 14 Hours. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2011 Feb 8. These researchers had subjects undergo a bout of cycling at approx 73% of VO2 max (approximately 84% of max heart rate) for 45 mins. The subjects burned on average 520 calories in the 45 min training session. The following day their resting energy expenditure was increased an average of 190 cals compared to normal. Basically - the subjects burned an additional 37% MORE calories than the workout itself in the 14 hour post workout period -- meaning that a single high-intensity session, when including the post-workout metabolic boost could burn up to 710 cals in total. A second study Heden et al. One-set resistance training elevates energy expenditure for 72 h similar to three sets. European Journal of Applied Physiology. Volume 111, Number 3, 477-484, Mar 2011 The subjects were put on a very simple resistance training routine - full body training, either 1 or 3 sets per exercise of ten exercises. The researchers then examined the subjects resting energy expenditure at 24, 48 and 72 hours post workout. Both groups showed an elevated metabolism (afterburn effect) of around 100 cals per day. But there was no difference between groups. It seems that it's intensity that determines how many calories are burned post-workout, not volume (obviously a higher volume program would burn more calories during the session than a lower volume program. A third study confirmed this: Scott et al. Energy expenditure characteristics of weight lifting: 2 sets to fatigue. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2011 Feb;36(1):115-20. The researchers looked at the caloric expenditure of bench pressing using three different loads and concluded "As more work is completed (i.e., lower weight, more repetitions), aerobic and anaerobic exercise energy expenditures appear to increase accordingly, yet absolute EPOC remains essentially unchanged". In other words - the post workout caloric burn (in this case measured aerobically) One more: Astorino et al. Effect of acute caffeine ingestion on EPOC after intense resistance training.J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 2011 Mar;51(1):11-7. This study showed a 15% increase in post-workout calories burned after the ingestion of caffeine as a pre-workout supplement. The total extra calories burned as a result of this only added up to around 27 cals in the hour after the workout. Not a lot but still something to consider. Plus I like iced coffee :)

Pay Now or Pay Later

A good friend and client recently sent me this article; Supervised exercise improves glycemic control and other cardiovascular risk factors in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to an Archives of Internal Medicine study.

Some 600 sedentary adults in Italy with type 2 diabetes were randomized either to twice-weekly supervised exercise (aerobic and resistance training) plus exercise counseling or to exercise counseling alone. After 12 months, the mean hemoglobin A1c level had dropped significantly more with supervised exercise than with counseling alone (-0.42% vs. -0.13%). The exercise group also achieved significant improvements in blood pressure, lipid levels, waist circumference, and body-mass index. Editorialists say the trial "supports the addition of supervised, facility-based exercise training to standard therapy" for type 2 diabetes. They add: "The cost of delivering such therapy would probably compare favorably with the costs of many diabetes medications, none of which would have the vast range of clinically beneficial effects" observed in this study.

As we approach the New Year, men and women everywhere will begin to set forth on New Years' resolutions. Many of these resolutions will be short lived. As other things begin to pile up with the come of the New Year, things such as time, knowledge, motivation, money, and many others will become excuses that hinder these resolutions. Starting a workout plan and diet is one of the most daunting tasks people face. With that said, looking for help should come to forefront. Everyone needs a coach or a mentor; the best athletes, models, CEOs all look for someone to help them reach their goals and so should YOU.

Supervised exercise programs by a qualified trainer can make these goals much easier to achieve. On average one-on-one sessions can run anywhere from $50 and upwards of $150-200 per hour depending on the demographic. This cost may seem like a lot up front but when we look at the cost of other medical expenses that may be needed in the long run if lifestyle changes are not made, it should seem much more reasonable. As stated in this study, this type of intervention is much more effective in terms of cost and long term results. Along the same lines, if one looks at how much is spent yearly on items like take-out or coffee, again these costs may become more reasonable. Lifestyle changes can be made a little at a time until they become habit. Make your health and fitness a PRIORITY in your life and achieving your goals with the help of a trainer can be accomplished!

More to come over the next month about lifestyle changes...