Are you a one dimensional trainer who loves to lecture?
28 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Most people who seek to lose weight or add muscle through some sort of athletic or dietary approach are biased toward one of the three legs of the fitness triad: progressive resistance training, cardiovascular training or diet/nutrition. People that insist on trying to lose weight by dieting and dieting alone think slashing calories is all they need. Ever wonder why people who lose a lot of bodyweight strictly through dieting still look fat even though they might lose 100-pounds? This is because they still are fat. When the human organism perceives starvation, a primordial hardwiring kicks in that seeks to preserve body fat. Stored body fat is the last line of defense against starvation and this hardwiring wants to preserve life-sustaining body fat at all cost. Dieting alone results in weight loss but as much (or more) muscle as fat is lost as a result of crash dieting. The end result is that the crash dieter ends up as a miniaturized version of their old fat self. I had a self-indulgent buddy who ballooned up from 200-pounds to 400. He eventually went on some sort of weird diet and lost back down to 200. He looked terrible: with more loose skin than a bloodhound, he was still fat and definitely unhealthy. To make matters worse he was now a dietary expert. He acquired the born-again zealotry of a backwoods alcoholic whod found God and become a self-appointed messianic preacher. He would lecture anyone within earshot about how stupid they were to follow any diet other than the one he had used to accomplish his physical miracle. He would hold himself up as an example and I never had the heart or energy to tell him how bad he looked. He couldnt walk up a flight of stairs without getting totally gassed and his approach, based on zero fat and 800-calories per day caused his hair to fall out. His physical miracle prematurely aged him and though he was a few months younger than me he looked like my father.
At the other extreme I once knew a long distance runner who was thin as a rail and lived on carbohydrates. He hated weight training and was a hardcore vegetarian who thought protein was toxic. He was anemic and emaciated; the combination of mega-miles and nothing but carbs and fruit - in meager amounts - produced a physique that resembled an Ethiopian famine victim. Lifting weights to his way of thinking would be counterproductive. Adding muscle would adversely affect his running times, he erroneously reasoned. He too loved to lecture and told me that adding muscle would be like wearing a backpack with a 10 or 15-pound plate in it. Needless to say by the time he got to his mid-thirties he started experiencing predictable problems: repetitive motion injuries required surgery for ankle damage and his eternal shin-splints caused him to eventually give up running altogether. His carb-only diet and zero exercise morphed his body from super thin to skinny/fat. He looked a decade older than his chronological reality. My third example was a former powerlifter whod set some regional records and purposefully grew gargantuan. Eventually he purposefully pushed his weight 350 and was able to squat 800-pounds. He ate everything in sight but quit lifting altogether when he developed circulatory problems. He was dismissive of cardio, ate ice cream for lunch and kept his bulk-up eating habits long after quitting the gym altogether. He had by-pass surgery at age 44 and now looks like Jabba the Hut on a bad day.
When an individual zeros in on one particular leg of the fitness triad to the purposeful exclusion of the other two legs, problems are inevitable. Overemphasis taken to extreme will ruin a zealots health eventually. How ironic. Practiced in balanced proportion the Fitness Triad is the finest system of health and fitness ever devised but when obsessive-compulsive types grab hold of a favored leg, health goes out the window along with rationality and reason. Better to practice a little of each leg of the triad instead of overemphasizing one aspect to the exclusion of the other two. It makes perfect sense when we are presented with extreme and obvious examples. Subtle bias is tougher to recognize but one tip off is if your progress stalls and stays stalled. The elite will shift emphasis depending on the short term goal. Obviously if you are embarking on a lean-out phase cardio and cleaner eating will be stressed. If you are determined to add ten pounds of muscle in ten weeks then power training and heavier eating are the order of the day. But the default position is a perfect balance between the three legs of the Fitness Triad. When all the components are in place and practiced with due diligence a palpable physical synergy occurs and results outstrip reasonable expectations. Take a cold hard look at your proportional training balance and see if bias has blinded you. Continual reassessment is the mark of a seasoned pro.
Fitness Day Camp: I am getting barraged by request for information regarding the content, cost and availability of dates for my one-on-one fitness day camps. In a nutshell, folks travel to my house and we sit and discuss where they are at, physically, and where they want to get to. We determined if aspirations are real and realizable. We hatch a customized game plan based of available time, work and family circumstance and all the other variables of modern existence. We discuss eating and find favored foods that are acceptable and beneficial and go over quick and easy food preparation techniques. We train and I put them through an appropriate progressive resistance session, a cardio session using the polar heart rate monitor. Afterwards we prepare a quick, easy, tasty, nutritious meal using foods they like. While we eat, we discuss training, nutrition, planning and any and all related questions. The whole deal takes four hours. I dont do groups as this dilutes the impact; I will work with one or two people at a time. My wife Stacy helps and by the time the individuals leaves they are equipped with the knowledge they need to succeed. If you are interested in scheduling a day camp date, contact me as MGSO@supernet.com for dates, rates and additional info.
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