This applies to my one-on-one sessions as well as to anyone who takes any class I offer.  

The results of consistent class attendance are these: 

• Your body composition (percentage of fat to lean tissue) will improve.
• Your posture will improve.
• You will be stronger and will own vastly better stability and dynamic power.
• Your cardiorespiratory capacity will increase.
• You will acquire a common symmetry and similar degree of strength between opposing muscle groups.

These changes positively affect your self-esteem, daily energy level, and likelihood for preventing injury; as well as various other visceral factors such as blood pressure and bone density.  All of these ingredients are necessary to remain healthy through a long life!

These goals, as well as more targeted performance goals, etc are the objectives of personal training sessions.  Never be ashamed of your starting point!  The body is an amazing organism and the will to excel can propel a person beyond “genetic predispositions…”  If you allow me the honor of assisting you toward your goal, I will use every reasonable avenue to get you there.

As exercise goes, running is great.  But why are you doing it?  If you label yourself a runner, then yes, you have to run to get better at running.  I enjoy working with runners because I know the movement mechanics and can understand their power needs.  But if you’re just trying to lose weight, then should you run? Yup.  Why not.

I don’t remember where I read this but I read an article or post not long ago which condemned running as a potentally injurious exercise.  But check it out–everything is subjective!  (that means it depends on many factors).  If you are a novice exerciser–someone who hasn’t done anything for a “while” (like “months”)–then I would consider the pitfalls.  If you are severely overweight, your joints are gonna hurt.  Especially if you don’t properly warm up, sporto.  Why is that?  It’s from the impact, jeenius.  You have to apply significant force to the ground to get off of it.  Since “running” means that you’re spending a little time off the ground then this is reality.  Sooooo, the bigger you are, the more power you gotta produce to get vertical.

Very few activities are “just aerobic.”  Running is also not on the list.  Depending on your duration then it might be mostly aerobic, but there are objective forces that you must apply to fight gravity as you travel forward.  If you lack the power to execute proper mechanics, you expose yourself to higher odds for getting hurt.  My other “running” article tiptoes around this.  That article alludes to hip flexor and hamstring injury at higher intensities, but shin splints and knee pain are the two popular complaints of aspiring “losers” who choose to run for exercise.  Number three, in my experience is plantar fasciitis; but that one is usually a quick fix.

What I’m getting around to, is that you can hurt yourself a lot of different ways if you do something repetitively wrong.  Running is an easy target for those who seek excuses, because you don’t do short “sets” of running–you don’t stop after a certain amount of “reps”–you gotta go for a while; especially, as I’ve said, if you’re doin it for the metabolic beatdown. And the more you choose to see it that way (moving “passively”) then the sooner it will beat you down; but maybe in ways you didn’t intend.

Yes, all the “standard exercise rules” apply when running. What I mean is: warming up, increasing GRADUALLY, fostering flexibility, and cooling down.

Every part of running should be active; not passive. Your feet should not be “allowed” to hit the ground–they should be commanded to! Stop waiting for your new shoes to fix the problem–believe me, the chances are slim that your old ones were the cause.

In most cases, as often as it happens, automobile accidents are the fault of the driver.  The victim will do one of the following things:  Become momentarily careless, miscalculate the capability of the vehicle, or misjudge his own ability.  So it is with exercise.  The equipment poses no threat when treated with respect.  So just because you’ve been driving your SUV for many years; doesn’t mean I’m going to let you jump in a loaded 80,ooo lb. Freightliner and try going up—no—down, a steep hill…

So why would I allow you to pick up one of my bells without first teaching you technique?  Unfortunately there are those who would profit from the marketing of a “new craze” in exercise without a respect or understanding of its proper place or purpose.  I am not one of them. 

Kettlebells are metal balls with handles.  Their shape allows the user to manipulate leverage and velocity in a way that often cannot be duplicated with dumbbells or barbells.  That’s it.  So, with ballistic exercises such as a swing or kettlebell snatch, be aware that fast-moving things are harder to control than slow ones!  But herein lays the simultaneous advantage of this type of training.

More or less, the benefits of this type of training are:  Lower back stability through increased muscle endurance and improved lumbo-pelvic rhythm, “power endurance” in the hip, a decreased body composition due to a high metabolic demand, a reduced chance of non-contact knee injury, and the learning of the valsalva pressurization technique.  Get this from doing one exercise—the kettlebell swing!

Flexibility equals range of motion.  Greater range of motion allows potential for more force production on any joint or movement chain.  This is important because power is defined with a speed or velocity component, whereas strength works on an absolute displacement or can be static.  Think of power as “rate of force.” 

Athletes use the ground against gravity to move themselves or other objects around by applying opposing forces…   This means that if you want to run forward, at least with some degree of efficiency, your feet will optimally ONLY push BACK on the ground!  “Stride frequency plus stride length” is layman’s jargon for the makeup of the formula for increasing running speed, so how can I apply this to the use of good mechanics? 

What really makes up stride length?  Yes, I hope you said in your head just now that the answer is the distance between points of contact on the ground.  Good.  So how can I increase my stride length?  First of all it doesn’t hurt to be moving fast but you have to start somewhere.  And since, really, the difference between running and walking is potentially as simple as contact time, then it all breaks down to power.  A sprinter will spend a nearly equal amount of time in the air as on the ground… 

Why, then, is it important to lift your knees if attempting to get somewhere faster than your opponent in the next lane?  Answer:  The higher my knees come up, the harder I can bring them down.  AND, the harder my foot comes down, the more force I can apply to the ground.  The more force I apply to the ground, the greater the oppositional thrust is placed on my own (preferably muscular) body mass!  … And when this thrust is generated at the correct angle and in the proper plane of movement AND at an adequate FREQUENCY, the odds are in my favor that I won’t see someone in front of me when I cross the finish line.

The actions of PULLING (a muscle’s only job) my knee up and pulling it back down are both performed at the hip.  The hip is the closest hinge to my center of mass.  If that’s not the case for you then you’re not gonna play football anytime soon.  Why am I talking about this now?  Because running, among a host of other movements, requires healthy hip function; it’s gotta be smooth both ways or one cannot benefit from the other.  If I can’t fire my foot down hard enough to pass you up, it might have to do with poor upward mobility (hip flexion) of my knee.  This can be the result of poor flexibility or weakness (which are closely related) or the fact that they don’t have valet parking at my gym.

So now that you’ve suffered through the previous paragraph, here’s the significance.  The scenario just described (poor hip function in a race) is a dangerous one.  It’s dangerous because the subject is overconfident.  In fact, he still thinks he can win.  In fact, he used to be pretty fast, so I’m not accusing him of being stupid.  Since he’s not stupid, he knows that in order to speed up, he has to compensate for lost range of motion with greater frequency, and thus, much to his chagrin, he’s equally screwed.  He has now raised his chances of incurring an injury either in a seldom-used hamstring muscle (a “stride recovery” muscle in my opinion), or in that same dysfunctional hip flexor.  Okay.  Lesson over.   By the way, the reason for the likelihood of trauma to the hip flexor muscle has to do with the likelihood of equally dysfunctional hamstrings.  Call me if you want to know the rest.

"Weighted good morning" (part of the warm up)

Here’s what we did last :
3 Rounds of:

• The get-up, dissected.  Unfortunately for you.  Twice to the elbow and back and 2x to the hand, 2x to the hip, then 2x with the leg sweep.
• Complete Turkish Get-Ups alternating with snatches
• The “long cycle” (Double clean/jerk) for 1-minute intervals…

It takes time for your blood to re-circulate the energy sources that your muscles use when you’re working hard.  For this reason, I employ “active rest” during workouts and progressively build intensity from the beginning to the maximum output that one can achieve on a lift or a move or a series of movements.

I am an advocate of good time management.  What I mean is that I want you to attain the highest intensity possible, as many times as possible through your session.  To make this happen, you must be aware not only of which muscles you are using vs which ones you’re not, but also of total energy expenditure.  Of course I wanna kill two birds with one stone–but I’m looking at what’s behind the bird when I throw.