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Fitness Training
03/22/2012 by Francois
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Mommy Fit
Pregnancy isn’t for the weak. Just as athletes have to prepare themselves for their impending physical endeavors, so do soon to be mothers. Make no mistake - babies are physiological wrecking balls. Pregnancy attacks joints, lean mass (muscle) levels, energy levels, body fat levels and muscle tone - and these are just SOME of the potential victims of baby making. Not only is it wise for hopeful mothers to begin preparing themselves for mommy-hood by training for increased strength, endurance, balance and injury prevention (all components of fitness and performance that are compromised by pregnancy) but it is strongly suggested that the mother begin this process PRIOR to conception and not during the pregnancy. The American College of Sports Medicine (and many other reputable health/fitness organizations) suggests that “exercise intensity should not exceed pre-pregnancy levels” meaning that if you were exercising prior to pregnancy, it should be safe to continue to do so at similar levels of intensity after conception assuming all reasonable precautions are being taken - whereas, on the other hand, if you were doing nothing prior to pregnancy, it is advised that you refrain from initiating any vigorous exercise regimens once you are with child. Trying to get pregnant but not having much luck? WebMD tells us “moderate physical activity was found to benefit women of all body types in a new study examining the impact of exercise on fertility.” It’s like the old adage says, proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance (the 7 Ps). Pregnancy is nothing short of war - and one of the battles you’ll encounter during this war will be against atrophy (muscle loss). The trick is to take advantage of the healthy state you are in prior to pregnancy to prepare for the compromised state you will be in during pregnancy or as Sun Tzu put it, “In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace.” So what can you do? Simple, you can plan ahead and be prepared by training your body for strength, strength endurance, joint stability, injury prevention and lean mass gains to combat all the negative effects of pregnancy. The potential benefits of being a fit mom are, but are not limited to, less weight/fat gain and joint pain, higher energy levels, better mobility, better circulation, better mood, easier labor, better recovery after birth of child, etc. Don’t know where to start and/or worried about hurting yourself or your soon-to-be new family member? Call or email Fast Twitch today to set up your free fitness consultation and trial training session so that we can explain to and show you what training with a competent and experienced professional can do to improve your child bearing (and birthing) experience.
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Fitness Training
02/28/2012 by Francois
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Why Train With a Certified Personal Trainer
Wondering whether to train with a certified personal trainer? Below are a few scenarios to consider: New Year's Resolution: You've been trying to work out for the last couple of months but you really don't fully understand how to do it let alone have the motivation to get it done on your own. If this is you, you might consider taking advantage of Fast Twitch's FREE consult, fitness assessment and training session to see if they can help you. You've stopped making gains: If you've been training for a while and are no longer satisfied with the results, maybe you could benefit from a new perspective and over ten years of experience and reults. A Fast Twitch trainer can assess your training routine and make the necessary changes to put you back on track to faster results. Not sure about your form/technique: You can work out day-in and day-out but unless you perform each exercise correctly, you won't see the results you want and will likely increase your chances of injury. A Fast Twitch trainer can teach you good form and exercise habits that will last you a lifetime and prevent injury rather than cause it. You are making headway but you need to be pushed to the next level: Exercise plateaus are often difficult to overcome by yourself. Many people just can't find a way to surmount a plateau without the help of a professional trainer. You can save a lot of time and wasted energy if you hire a trainer when you hit a fitness plateau. A Fast Twitch trainer can put together a personal workout plan that will take you over the hump and onto new results. Youre injured or sick: If you are injured and/or have a specific illness, then your doctor and trainer can work together to make sure that your training routine is effective but safe at the same time. Working out is supposed to create better health, not impair you further.
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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 corrupted 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 your abs 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 tighter 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, squats and dead lifts. 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 dead lifting.” So, the ONLY way for the abdominals to continue to improve is with heavy squats and dead lifts, 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 dead lifts 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
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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
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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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Fast Twitch Training > Flexibility
Flexibility training (aka - range of motion training and / or stretching) is vital for numerous reasons. In order to function correctly and with little to no pain in your back and other various joints, your body's muscles and tendons must have a minimally sufficient range of motion (ROM) and lack of tension during rest. Insufficient ROM can, and ultimately will, lead to joint pain (shoulder, back, etc.), decreased power output, increased chance of injury, etc.
Flexibility has many valuable benefits that most of us don’t think of until it’s too late. The first thing you need to know about flexibility is that it favors women, the young and the active. Basically, young girls that play a lot don’t need to stretch. On the other hand, if you’re an old fat guy, you’re flexibility probably stinks. Flexibility, or range of motion (ROM), is achieved via many avenues. As previously mentioned, physical activity in general improves ROM throughout the entire body via relaxation of the body’s skeletal muscles, tendons and ligaments. Practicing a full ROM of each joint used during exercise/training is also a very effective means of improving one’s flexibility.
Finally, there’s good old fashion stretching. Knowing what to stretch, how to stretch it, how long to hold it, at what intensity to hold it at and what style of stretching to use are all very important. All of the aforementioned affects are achieved via strength training and the accompanying ROM that is required to practice the various techniques involved in strength training. Want to improve your flexibility/ROM? Train for full body strength.
