Category Archives: Strength Training
Whats The Most Scientific Workout?
With winter closing in, don’t let your fitness fall behind! The calories you burn during workouts are inconsequential to your overall body weight or body fat content! Instead, it is how well you use your exercise time to reprogram your daily physiology that matters. Use strength training 3 times a week, for 30 mins plus your favourite cardio such as brisk walking, swimming and cycling.
What are the options?
At the gym with equipment, hopefully with good instruction.
At fit camp using your own body weight as resistance.
Or using you tube videos, picking exercises at random.
At the swimming pool with aqua aerobics using resistance bands.
At home using resistance bands and dumbbells, with the 24 Fit Workout.
All have their merits. Which is best? The one you will do on a regular basis that becomes habit forming.
The most scientific? Take a look at the 24 Fit Workout, a 24 week programme with 3 phases.
- Teach your body to burn body fat over time rather than just burn carbs..
- Address common vulnerabilities of the human body regardless of age or previous activity level. Make your body more resilient to injury, unlike many “insane workouts” which lead to injuries
- Periodization training so you need to sequence your training, to develop one aspect of fitness at a time and then use that as a foundation to build the next. And principles which recognise that all exercise is much less effective if rest and recovery periods are not provided.
- Workout lasts for 30 mins, the time it would take you to drive to the gym and back!. This length of workout is achievable over time. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
- You will be less likely to quit the 24 Fit Workout once you get started because it follows scientific training principles. The program progresses your fitness naturally, so that you not only keep going, but never want to stop!
- Improve posture with 24Fit. Standing up straight can improve breathing and digestion. And uses less energy. A good antidote for all those people stuck at their desks all day.
- Has 3 levels of difficulty so any age, any condition, anyone can build a better body! ( beginner, intermediate and advanced)
- Clear instruction, it’s like having a PT in the room with you.
- Includes nutritional advice, which is so important to get results, including what to take around exercise
- Developed by Robert Forster a PT that has has worked with top athletes such as Pete Sampras, Jackie Joyner Kersee, Florence “Flo-Jo” Joyner, Greg Foster, Allyson Felix, as well as weight management clients looking to burn fat. Thirty years of experience in a set of 13 DVDs! He learnt from his work with endurance athletes how to burn fat as an energy source, rather than carbs.
Why step up your Strength Training as you age?
“By your mid-30s, most people still look young, but are already experiencing the BIG Three of aging: deteriorating lean muscle mass, worsening posture, and crumbling joints” say Robert Forster, Physical Therapist and PT.
Many people say that, as they age, they eat and exercise the same amount but still gain weight. One of the main causes of this is loss of muscle mass. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn. Strength training preserves and even increases muscle mass, keeping metabolism at a high level.
The key to sustainable weight loss (as opposed to the “yoyo” weight loss and weight gain of trendy weight loss fads) is a high resting metabolic rate.
Stop The Insanity
“Every day we see more extreme “fitness programs” advertised with high-intensity workouts and volumes of work that even my elite athletes would never hold up to. And every day, we see the injuries in the clinic that define these workouts as ill-designed, dangerous, and unsustainable. What most recreational athletes and fitness buffs don’t realize is that elite athletes spend more than half of their time in the gym on injury prevention, and the rest of the time on performance enhancement. Safe and effective stretching and injury prevention workouts might not be spectacular to watch, but they allow athletes to work harder at their sport and in the gym on performance enhancement.” Robert Forster – Physical Therapist to 42 Olympic Medalists, NBA and Grand Slam Champions and Member of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness.
Everyone knows how to work hard — it’s those who work equally hard on stretching, recovery, and injury prevention who reach their highest genetic potential in sport and in health.
24 Fit Workout
The basic premise of all well designed exercise programs is the progressive overload principle. Fitness must be “pushed” from below, i.e. starting slow and progressing to harder workouts slowly. The periodisation model used by 24Fit builds your fitness up with a stair step series of methodical, progressive challenges and recoveries that strengthen your body and keep brain and brawn fresh.
There are 3 phases each of 8 weeks:
Phase 1 – Stability.
Phase 2 – Strength.
Phase 3 – Power.
Phase 1 is about establishing stability throughout every part of your body. Thats Spine and Pelvic Stabilization, Shoulder Stabilization and Total Body Integration. By the time you’ve completed Phase 1, you’ll not only have improved posture and joint health, but your body will also be properly prepared for the strength and power workouts to come in Phases 2 and 3.
Contrast that with some high intensive workouts creating a plethora of overuse and traumatic injuries and other ill designed training programs that not even Olympians would hold up under the stress of these workouts.
Get ready! Armed with a bulletproof fitness program and solid science based nutrition you’ll get great results..
Joint Stability – Shoulder Stabilisation
Choosing a fitness programme? There are some programs out theresucha s p90x where its intensive exercise from day one, jumping through hoops by the end of the week you are visiting the physical therapist!
Too often however, the urgency to get fit quick leads to poor results and injury as we try to play catch up with overzealous workouts and ill-advised dieting.
The basic premise of all well designed exercise programs is the progressive overload principle. Fitness must be “pushed” from below, i.e. starting slow and progressing to harder workouts slowly. In addition, what recreational athletes and fitness enthusiasts don’t realize is that elite and professional athletes spend half of their workout time in the gym on injury prevention. All strength and conditioning programs must begin with a joint stability phase where the body is hardened against injury. This phase prepares the body for the more strenuous work to come later in the training cycle.
Phase 1 of the 24 Fit Workout is about establishing stability throughout every part of your body. That’s Spine and Pelvic Stabilisation, Shoulder Stabiliszation and Total Body Integration. This involves the use of light weights and other exercises to strengthen all the little “helper muscles” around the joints, which, along with a lot of stretching insures that each joint is functioning properly.
Take the shoulder which has the greatest range of movement of any joint in the body, which explains why injuries to the shoulder are common. Maybe interesting to see how the shoulder works before addressing the preventative measures. As the video shows its’ an elegant piece of machinery where hundreds of little muscles and tendons come together and attach and interact with each other.
The bottom line for those injuries is that there is only one way to prevent them – by creating the correct posture for the shoulder joint, which means strengthening and stretching the muscles around your shoulder to prevent injury to the joint. So the 24 Fit workout includes exercises such as “Shoulder Horizontal Abduction in 1/4 squat”,” Shoulder Flexion in 1/4 Squat” “Shoulder internal rotation” etc. etc
Phase 1 prepares your body for the more challenging workouts to come
Why Strength Training For Women?
Research continues to uncover more and more reasons why working out with weights is good for you, many women continue to avoid strength training for fear of developing big muscles.
The benfits of strength training:
To increase your resting metabolism, decrease blood pressure & body fat. Every pound of muscle in our bodies burns 7-10 calories a day, while each pound of fat burns just 2 calories per day.
Reduce bone deterioration and build bone mass to prevent osteoporosis.
Strength training done properly and with planning will NOT give you large muscles, but increase your metabolism which burns more calories and transforms your body into an efficient machine with the tone that we all strive to attain!