Good form vs. Injury

It goes without saying that every exercise should be done with good form. Why then are people risking injury by continually exercising with poor form?
Heavy Weights
Heavy weights demand good form and even though you might be able to cheat to get one last rep, how has that last rep improved your strength. The muscles you would normally use with good form have been supplemented by other muscles during the cheat reps so nothing is really accomplished and you risk injuring yourself in the process.
Metabolic circuits
During metabolic circuits the demand for good form is even greater. Here, by pushing yourself beyond what you are currently capable of you risk not only acute injury but also overuse injuries to surrounding muscles.

Take home tip: Stop your set as soon as your form deteriorates.

Time Saving Techniques

Are you looking to save time in the gym? Here are a few ways you can.

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

HIIT allows you to burn more calories in the same amount of time as steady paced training. Not only that but you continue to burn calories after you've finished unlike steady paced training where the calorie burning stops when the training stops. To perform HIIT you just vary your speed between fast paced and slower paced. You can any piece of cardio equipment to train and the intervals are usually 1:1 or 1:2. That means that if you go fast for a minute you'll then go slow for one or two minutes before speeding up again. As little as 10 minutes of HIIT can provide a great training effect, definitely a time saver considering you probably spend at least double that doing steady paced training.

Compound Exercises

Multi joint exercises give you the biggest bang for your buck when training with weights. If you tried to isolate each specific muscle you'd spend all day in the gym. By using compound exercises you can target 3 or 4 different muscles groups in one exercise. Not only that but you can use heavier weights as well which will increase your total strength and help promote muscle growth. Co-ordination is also enhanced by compound exercises, your muscles and joints have to work together to perform the exercise properly.

Alternating Sets

Alternating back and forth between exercises allows you to perform more sets in a shorter period of time. The best way to alternate your sets is between upper and lower body exercises like pull ups and squats or between opposing muscle groups like your chest and back. If your program calls for 60 second rest periods between straight sets and you alternate between exercises while only resting for 30 seconds it's easy to see that you'll save quite a bit of time. You are able to do this because while you are working one muscles group the other is recovering.

Manage your rest periods

If rest periods are specified in your program then make sure you stick to them. Usually they are specified because you are trying to achieve a certain response from the program. If rest period aren't specified then take the time you need to recover and perform the next set in full. Don't rest more than you need and you won't waste as much time.

Focus on what you are doing

Do you spend too much time socializing in the gym, or too much time walking to the water fountain getting and getting a drink that you don't really need? Focus on the reasons you are training, to get fitter, healthier, stronger. Stick to the basics and you will not only save time, you will make better progress as well.

Are You Fit Enough?

Most people want to be fit and healthy, but what does this mean? Health is relatively easy to comprehend. You are healthy if you have no medical problems and nothing that will decrease your expected life span. Some level of physical fitness is obviously tied into personal health especially when you consider factors such as strength and cardiovascular fitness correlate well with living a long life, along with enabling you to perform daily tasks. With the health part covered, how then do you determine if you are fit enough?

You can be sure that your fitness requirements differ from almost everyone else. Think about it, every athlete has different requirements even if they play the same sport. There are different positions for every sport and different ways of approaching the position based on your strengths. In daily life we all have different tasks that require some form of fitness, be it lifting something, bending down to pick things up and moving around in general. You need to decide how much strength, power, speed, aerobic endurance, mobility, flexibility etc. you require, not only to live a healthy life but to fulfill the requirements of your individual lifestyle.

Check out ExRx.net to help decide your fitness requirements and ask yourself which you have reached and which you need to start working towards. Make sure you are always fit enough for the task at hand.

Training as a Team

Training together with a partner or group can be one of the most motivating ways to train. It is a big advantage to have someone else training with you who can support you in your training. The support provided can be encouraging during your training, pushing you to work harder and accomplish more and a source of feedback that can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.

The motivation of making sure you don’t disappoint your partner(s) by failing to turn up can be strong. If you know that someone else is expecting you to train with them you don’t want to let them down. This means you won’t skip sessions and will improve your training frequency and consistency. I have written before about the advantages of frequent and consistent training, training with others means you won’t have to spend as much time motivating yourself.

You will however have an obligation to support and encourage others. This will help create a positive mindset for you and push your own training along. When positive energy flows between team members you push each to greater heights. Some days you will have to be the one that picks up the group, other days it will be you who is picked up and carried along. Great progress is made when teams work together. Harness that power and push your training to new levels.

Mental Mastery Response

Please read and re-read this Mental Mastery article from Chris Shugart. It really explains the four stages of the health and fitness lifestyle. Really stages two and three will be the hardest to overcome.

Stage two, Conscious Incompetence is tough and as Chris writes "this is the biggest issue in the fields of health, fitness and bodybuilding." He goes on to give a couple of cures for this stage including self-directed anger. The key though is realization that you are rationalizing poor decisions. Identifying your rationalizations and choosing not to allow them is a direct step to stage three.

Stage three, Conscious Competence means you have taken control of your decisions and are now living a healthy lifestyle. Moving to stage four, Unconscious Competence requires time. Make enough of the right decisions for a long enough period of time and your won't even have to think about it anymore. The trap though is falling back into stage two. If you haven't quite made it to stage four and begin to allow yourself one or two small rationalizations they can snowball and you find yourself back where you began.

Be patient, be dedicated and work your way through the stages.

Follow up

Further to yesterday's post Dietary Habits, check out the new T-Nation article. Specifically the part about trying to out-train bad diets. Also after taking a look at the exercise program that is suggested to be able to out-train your diet, I think I'd rather just eat properly.

Training Frequency

You basically have two options when choosing how frequently to exercise. You can do a lot of exercise a little bit of the time or a little bit of exercise a lot of the time. It certainly depends on your situation but for most people, even if you can get the same amount of exercise by training infrequently I think the latter is better.

By doing a little bit of exercise a lot of different times you have a few advantages over doing a lot of exercise infrequently. The first advantage is that you can still fit exercise in even on busy days. Certainly 20-30 minutes of available time is easier to find than a couple of hours. Also it is much easier to make up a 20-30 minutes session if you miss it than trying to make up a 2 hour session.

Secondly by practising more frequently your body learns the technique of the exercise much quicker. This allows you to push yourself to your limits much more safely. You will also recover much quicker which will also allow your next training session to be of high quality. The ability to recover should not be underestimated. Think of how sore you get every time you start a new exercise program. After a few sessions the soreness tends to decrease as your body adapts to the demands of the program. It’s ok to be sore at the start of a program but I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be that sore all the time. Unfortunately you probably will be if you exercise for long periods infrequently as your body struggles to adapt to that duration of exercise.

Adaptation is what we are trying to create with exercise. Once the body adapts it is time to create a new adaptation. It is therefore an advantage to try to force our bodies to adapt as quickly as possible. There is also much less chance of getting injured if our adaptations are small and frequent rather than large and infrequent.

If you have been doing a lot of exercise a little bit of the time, try frequent and intense sessions that force your body to create adaptations and progress quickly to your goals.

Dietary Habits

It's often said that you can't out-train a bad diet. Now there may be some people with the right genetics that don't need to worry about their diet but in general I agree. I would ask why you would even want too though? If your best results come from a mix of great training and diet, why settle for less than the best?

People always look for short cuts and the easiest option but in this instance I don't think that trying to out-train a bad diet is the easiest option. Sure there are instances where it is easier to pick bad food options but the training ramifications don't make it a short cut at all. Justification for poor food habits can only lead down one path, further poor food habits. Break your poor food habits one at a time. It takes about three weeks to break a habit. Pick one thing that you do poorly and eliminate that habit for three weeks and you'll find that you won't even want to get back too the bad habit.

Once your poor diet habits have been broken and hopefully good, new habits formed you might even find that the small amount of time you have available for exercise does allow good progress to occur. As long as your exercise intensity stays high, your improved dietary habits will give you better results than any additional exercise will.