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.

Health and Fitness Standards

If you have been training for a while the desire to compare yourself and your abilities with other is probably strong. This desire for comparison and competition is fine if you have an outlet. What happens though if you train alone and don't have the opportunity to compete?

The first thing to do is compare yourself with yourself by comparing your present results with your past results. Regular benchmark session that fit in with your goals are a great idea so you can track your progress. What about how you compare with other though? Ideally you'll only be focusing on improving one or two aspects at a time so don't feel like you have to reach the top standards across all the fitness areas.

ExRx.net has a huge range of health and fitness calculators. Check them out and see how you compare. Don't be discouraged by any weaknesses you have, instead use your results to help shape your future health and fitness goals.

Sleep and Recovery from Exercise

Are you struggling to recover between training sessions? Getting a good night's sleep is probably the answer. Despite advancements in recovery techniques the most important recovery method we have is sleep. Sleep debt is a common problem and the article "Sleep may be Athletes' Best Performance Enhancer" from Psychiatric News explains why. Also there may be a "secret advantage" to getting enough sleep due to your brain continuing to learn even in the absence of practice while asleep.

Athletes aren't the only ones who benefit from getting enough sleep. Consider this CBS News article outlining a study linking sleep and obesity levels. Individuals who average 4 hours of sleep or less per night are 73% more likely to be obese than those who got a full nights rest. As the amount of sleep goes up to 5 hours a night the likelihood of obesity comes down to 50% and goes down further to 23% at 6 hours a night.

An average of 7-8 hours a night seems to be amount required for most people. You can also maximize the quality of your sleep by using the right sort of pillow and a quality mattress, ensuring your bedroom is dark and quiet and at a comfortable temperature. Short naps of 10-20 minutes during the day can help offset sleep debt but nothing beats a good night's sleep when it comes to recovery.

Bodyweight Training

Performing strength training without weights is not only possible, the world of gymnastics shows that fantastic strength and physiques can be built using only your bodyweight. Upper body strength developers like the push up and pull up are obvious choices as are squats, lunges and step ups for the lower body.

This Everything Push-Ups article from T-Nation has some great ideas and routines for push ups.

Pull up progression is covered in this Clear the bar article from Experience Life mag.

Beastskills has a range of tutorials that cover the entire body and includes a few different combo moves as well.

Putting everything into a routine is covered by Bodyweight Culture which has a series of 20 challenges to progress through. (Please note: you must register first to be able to view the challenges)

The equipment required for bodyweight training is minimal and in some cases non-existent, so don't let not having access to weights stand in the way of your strength progress.

Commitment and Consistency

You cannot have success without commitment and consistency. It doesn’t matter whether you want to improve your personal relationships, financial situation or health and fitness you must be committed and consistent in your approach. Committing to a nutrition and exercise plan will do wonders for your health and fitness. Consistency of effort allows you to improve quickly.

The great thing about being a beginner is that your progress can be rapid. To make the most rapid progress you need to commit to your plan. Three to five hours of exercise a week along with a solid nutritional plan will see you progressing very quickly. Committing to that amount of exercise is the key. Whether you decide to train for ½ an hour a day, an hour every second day or some other plan of attack, make sure you can fully commit to the plan. Having a regular schedule helps immensely as does having a training partner or personal trainer. By training with someone else you cannot afford to skip sessions or you will be letting them down as well as yourself.

Once you have committed to a plan the next key to success is your consistency of effort. It is no good just going through the motions when you are training. Approach each session, day or week with focus and endeavour to improve yourself each time. If you consistently put in the effort required you will achieve progress.

If you wish to do more than maintain what you already have then you must be committed and consistent in your training and nutrition.

Food vs Supplements

I bet you could construct a diet completely out of products that are considered dietary supplements. In fact I’ve seen it done. The V-Diet is quite popular and seemingly effective for a short time frame. My issue is not with the use of dietary supplements but the overuse and over reliance on these products.

There is a supplement for everything, from fast loss to sleep enhancement you can readily get a pill or powder to help. Despite this I don’t see people making great gains or huge progress. Why is this? Could it possibly be due to the fact that supplements aren’t the answer to looking great and feeling healthy. You would have to think so. In fact your real food diet and training program are much more likely to determine your success than your supplement program.

There is no point in spending time and money on inefficient supplements without first having your real food diet in place. Real food is the backbone of your progress. It should be able to provide you with the energy to not only get through the day but your training sessions also. By taking the time to establish healthy eating strategies you are giving yourself skills that can be used effectively forever and provide more benefit than the latest fad supplement.

It is only once you have your real food diet and training program in place and working effectively that you should consider adding in supplements. The best supplements are those that are found in real foods but are not easily eaten in the quantities that you’d like. Protein powders, fish oils and creatine are well studied and effective examples. Take your time in adding supplements to your diet, only add one at a time and measure it’s effectiveness before continuing to use it. Don’t become over reliant on supplement products and make nutritious whole foods the staples of your diet.

Behavioural Goals

Are you having trouble reaching your goals? It may be because you have set goals that are based on results rather than behaviours. Many goals based on results are hard to achieve because we can’t really control them. Losing fat, gaining muscle and improving performance aren’t exact sciences which is why there is so many different approaches to achieving these things. If you choose the wrong approach for your body, you probably won’t get the results you deserve.

When starting out you don’t really know what works for you so setting results based goals may be setting you up for failure. It is better to set your goals based on behaviours, things that you can control. For example, if you set a goal to exercise 4 times a week and you meet that goal you can feel proud that you have achieved something. This is very different to setting a goal to lose a certain amount of week based on 4 training sessions a week. What if you don’t lose the weight even though you’ve followed the plan?

If you set your goals based on behaviours you control your results through your self discipline. You can and should continue to monitor and evaluate your progress, doing so allows you to adjust your behavioural goals if necessary. Achieving your behavioural goals is a source of satisfaction and motivation that will help push you further along the health and fitness path.