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Fitness Training
01/09/2012 by Oliver

Training The Abs Correctly

Ab work. Training the core. Building a 6-pack. Whatever you want to call it, training the abdominal muscles has been basterdized over the years. I’ll be short with this one and just get to the point: you don’t need to do a lot of ab work for them to look good. In fact, too much ab work will make the abs bigger, and this will only give you a thicker waist. Don’t believe me? Look at Britney Spears at the beginning of her career(on the left) and then compare that to the more recent picture of her(on the right), she’s lean in both pictures, sure, but her waist looks a lot bigger today than it did at the start of her career. The reason: she started doing 1,000 crunches a day to try and sculpt a sexier midsection. It only made her abs bigger, which on her tiny frame made a noticeable difference in the size of her waist. The abs are not a muscle that needs to get bigger. They just need to be strong enough to prevent injury on heavy free-weight movements. The abs have two purposes, to stabilize the spine and prevent it from buckling under pressure, and to curl the hips up a few degrees. Proper abdominal training should focus on the former, which is stabilization, and can eventually include hip curling movements like leg raises on an inclined bench or in a hanging position, but mostly it should be stabilization. Good movements to train the abs for stabilization are any variation of the plank exercise, ab-wheel roll-outs, and squats and deadlifts. Charles Poliquin, author of several books on weight-lifting and a highly regarded fitness professional, said, “If you truly isolate the abs, after six to eight weeks an athlete will plateau the rest of his life. Research has shown that the most coordinated athletes master the most difficult abdominal exercises in six to eight weeks. The only things that increase abdominal improvement are squatting and deadlifting.” So, the ONLY way for the abdominals to continue to improve is with heavy squats and deadlifts, which shows you what the true purpose of the abdominal muscles are. I hope this clears things up for you regarding ab training. Don’t train your abs for hypertrophy (muscle growth), train them with mostly stabilization exercises and only to the point of being strong enough to do heavy squats and deadlifts injury-free. One last point, unfortunately, the only way you’ll ever enjoy the fruits of your labor is if you are lean enough to see your abs, as they can quickly get covered up by fat. This can only be accomplished through diet and exercise, so start eating better and get moving!

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Power Training
12/12/2011 by Oliver

Steroids...Why We're Better Than That

What comes to mind when you think of steroids? Big, unnatural-looking muscles I’m sure. We all know Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire used steroids to hit farther than any other baseball players, and we know Arnold Schwarzenegger used steroids to get huge back in the day. Steroids are a dangerous and illegal substance, and yet, like pot, it seems like everyone has easy access to it if they want it. Just step into any “big box” gym and you’ll see humongous human beings walking around doing partner-assisted curls and crunches using a cable machine. Then they might jump on the leg extension machine and do a couple sets, and their legs will look like they are about to explode they’re so big. Other non-steroid using gym members may see these guys training and think that they can mimic the results by doing the same exercises with the same reckless abandon. They may figure it out sooner or later but eventually they’ll see that something vital is missing, because they’re not getting bigger or stronger, even though they’re doing the same things the huge guy is doing. This is the frustration that many have felt over the years, and since most people don’t know how to train properly they think that the only way to make progress is through the use of steroids. It’s an unfortunate fact, but many believe they just can’t build muscle, that they’re bodies will just resist any attempt to increase lean mass and get stronger. The truth is, you just need to hire a decent trainer, and the guy who looks like he is on steroids is probably not a decent trainer. I could be wrong, but my thinking is that he knows what gets him results and not what gets anybody else results, and his body responds VERY differently to training due to his use of pharmaceuticals(steroids). Now, you could teach yourself proper training, and there are a lot of good books written by great trainers out there, but there would still be a lot of trial and error and this could prove to be a bit disheartening for a beginner. The best way would be to find a training partner who is bigger and stronger than you, and learn from training with them. But, if that’s not possible, the next best thing is hiring a personal trainer for a month or two. You’ll learn proper form on technical free-weight movements (if the trainer is a good one) and you’ll learn programming, which is the plan you’ll follow every time you step in the gym. Those who succeed have a plan and stick to it. A steroid-using lifter can peel a banana twice a day and build huge arms from it, but do you think that would work for you? No, but working up to being able to do full push-ups and eventually full pull-ups will do wonders for your arm development. What about those leg extensions to get big legs? Unfortunately that doesn’t work for drug-free lifters either, but a steady stream of squats, lunges and deadlifts will definitely build legs that you’ll be proud to show off. The reason those steroid-using lifters don’t do the free-weight movements is most often because they just don’t know how to do them, much less teach others how to do them. So, you can pay a lot of money to a steroid-using trainer for him to show you how to use a variety of nice, shiny machines (read my article ‘Free weight are king’ to see what I think of machines), or you can hire a trainer who may not be as big but actually knows how to make you better through proper weight-training (we here at Fast Twitch fit that bill, and heck, we don’t even use supplements!).

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Fitness Training
12/03/2011 by Oliver

Reach Your Body's Full Potential

I’ve recommended total body workouts in pretty much all of my previous articles. Now I want to add to that philosophy. Total body workouts certainly can get you great results if you do them consistently and work hard, but there is something else you could be doing to further improve your overall health and performance, and also your looks. It’s called conditioning work, and, according to the highly respected trainer of professional athletes and thousands of non-athletes, Christian Thibadueax, it is literally the key to achieving your body’s genetic potential. Carrying around extra muscle mass is a full-time job for the body, and it has to feel able to survive with that added bulk. The body is remarkably good at surviving, and it has a survival mechanism that it can switch on if it feels the need. Such as if we are starving, the body will slow it’s metabolism and hold onto fat stores as long as possible while letting muscle get burned off, because the muscle requires more energy to maintain than the fat, so we’ll live longer if the muscle mass is diminished. The same goes for the opposite problem, if we are well fed and have extra muscle mass on our body, this demands lots of energy to maintain but also lots of endurance and strength to carry around all day long. Thus, if the body does not feel it has that strength and endurance to carry that extra muscle mass, it will slam on the brakes and not let us build muscle! So, the simple answer to this little dilemma is to increase the body’s strength and endurance, right? Well, yes and no. But mostly yes. I say no because most people think that the only way to increase the body’s endurance is through steady-state cardio such as jogging, biking, swimming, or some other form of “cardio”. Those activities would increase endurance, but they would also be burning muscle, and that is the opposite of what we want. The better way to increase your body’s endurance and strength without sacrificing precious muscle in the process is with intense conditioning work. I say intense because conditioning work should be challenging enough that you can’t do it for more than 15-20 minutes, which, for all you cardio junkies out there, is less than enough time to hit your target fat-burning zone. Coincidentally, you’ll burn more fat from that intense 15-20 minutes of conditioning work than you would from a longer steady-state cardio session because of EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) which increases your metabolism for several hours after your done training, and you’ll even build some muscle in the process, which will make you burn more calories all day every day. Examples of conditioning work include circuit training with weights (which we make you do if you train with us), interval training (steady-state cardio mixed with sprinting, a basic interval is 45 seconds steady-state followed by 15 seconds of sprinting, then repeat 6-12 times, this can be done on a bike, on foot, on an elliptical machine, etc.), pushing or pulling a sled (it’s a sled, that’s all you need to know), running stadium stairs, and pretty much any other activity that is challenging to do and that can be done semi-continuously for 15-20 minutes. Two to three conditioning sessions a week is enough to increase your endurance and burn some fat in the process, but you can do conditioning work every day if you’re motivated enough, and these conditioning workouts can easily be done after your strength training in the gym (which is how we at Fast Twitch would make you do it). In short, conditioning work could be considered “cardio” if that helps you sleep at night, but in fact it is so much more, it’s a way of burning fat, increasing endurance, making you a stronger person in general and telling your body to take its foot off the brakes so we can build some muscle!

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Fitness Training
11/28/2011 by Francois

Dont Spend Less, Make More.

My father has always told me the same thing when it comes to money. Hes always said (in French) “Don’t spend less, make more”. My dad has always had a simple way to express how he feels about a subject – which is important. If you can’t sum it up in a few words, you’ve probably gotten too far away from the basics. His words are just another way of saying the old adage that we all know – the best defense is a good offense. When it comes to fitness, the timid, worn out, reactive approach is exactly the wrong approach to take. Disagree? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You get some new workout clothes, you shovel out a few hundred bucks to join a gym (initiation, first and last month, towel upgrade, etc.), you get on a treadmill, you repeat the “get on a treadmill” part for another couple of weeks and then you never step foot in the gym again – that is until January rolls around again. You're problem isn’t that you're weak (mentally anyway), just ill-informed. Without getting into all the things that make for an effective workout routine that you’ll stick to, I’ll get to the point of this article/blog. If what I described above is you, you’re training DEFENSIVLEY when you should be ATTACKING the problem as aggressively as you can - at your current capacity anyway. The vast majority of people join gyms to accomplish one thing – “lose weight”. This phrase drives me nuts. What everyone is actually trying to do is lose FAT. Think about it, when you get on that treadmill, do you put the setting on “bone and organ loss – level 5”? No. You put it on a setting that claims to be effective at burning fat specifically. Here’s the dirty little secret the treadmill sales people and manufacturers don’t want you to know – you're going about it ALL wrong. First thing you have to realize is that fat is fuel and, far as you're concerned, nothing else. Next thing you have to realize is that bigger engines that run harder and faster burn more fuel than smaller engines that run at a lower intensity/RPM. Now, everything you eat goes to three places – your digestion (10%), your physical activity (aka – PA, ~15-30%) and your metabolism (~60-75%). Your best bet is to take advantage of the last two of these outlets as best you can. You can’t really control the first one so don’t worry about it. You can dramatically increase the latter two (over time) - and get great results - IF you harness their collective powers. Your PA calorie output can be increased very nicely by attending a gym and training 3 times a week, an hour at a time, while getting some cardio on the side. The metabolism, my favorite calorie outlet, is where you can really start doing some damage to your fat deposits… There’s only two approaches that will increase your metabolism - increases in lean mass (chronic) and EPOC (acute). Think treadmills increase lean mass? Negative. They most often DECREASE lean mass - so that the body has less weight to move and because it doesn’t need all that heavy type-2 muscle fiber to do low intensity work. Your answer lies in (drum role……) full body strength training. Strength training? You mean the chest press machine and Smith machine squats? No. Hell no. I mean squats, deadlifts, presses (all of them), upper back work, etc. ALL FREE WIEGHT – no exceptions. In order to gain significant amounts of lean mass, you have to target the biggest muscle groups on your body and do so intensely. This and only this will increase your body's lean mass levels and create a significant EPOC effect. Want to burn fat and keep it off while developing a more athletic looking body that is pain free and more effective at resisting disease and injury? Train for whole body strength.

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Fitness Training
10/01/2011 by Oliver

How To Maintain Your Mind...and Body!

Physical activity has been shown to prevent cognitive impairment in older adults. A research study was conducted at the University of Florida and published in the July 25 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study measured the daily activity levels of older adults and linked that to cognitive performance. The study found that older adults who expend relatively high amounts of energy in their daily lives are substantially less likely to become cognitively impaired than those who exert less energy. The study states that, “The more energy spent, the lower the likelihood of cognitive impairment. Patients with the highest levels of energy expenditure were 90 percent less likely to become cognitively impaired than those with the lowest levels of expenditure.” Kirk Erickson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of psychology and the Center of Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh, conducting studies of his own using imaging technology and found that one year of participation in modest amounts of exercise can reverse Alzheimer’s-related atrophy in parts of the brain involved in memory formation. Now, the study participants were not specifically lifting weights as part of their physical activity. Their physical activity was more likely daily household tasks, walking around, gardening and just leading an active lifestyle. At Fast Twitch we enthusiastically support any kind of active lifestyle, and if gardening is your thing, then get out your pruning shears and your rake and go nuts. Weight-lifting is just another way to be active, and the researchers who conducted the study most likely didn’t know the first thing about proper weight-lifting and thus didn’t try to include it in their study, which is not to diminish their work. If they had included a sensible weight-lifting program into the mix, they might have seen even greater results due in part to the improved balance, strength, flexibility and increase in lean mass that can all be achieved through weight-lifting. All this is to say, being physically active every day can keep your mind sharp for basically your entire life, and on top of that you’ll look and feel better.

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Fast Twitch Training

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