body

No Matter What, Aim For Results

Quick Tips

With so much information and bantering over fitness minutiae circulating around the internet, it can be rather confusing to decide on which path to follow.

Should you trust the scientifically supported advice?

Should you trust the “reality based” advice?

Should you trust the “I have a million fitness certifications behind my name” advice?

Should you trust the “new trends in fitness” advice? Trends of the past?

I think the honest truth is that each of us should simply put our heads down and just aim for results.

I do enjoy research driven methods, but I also enjoy the reality based approach. I like new trends and older trends. It all works, if you work it.

Whatever vehicle you choose to get you to your destination, execute it to the fullest, and I can just about guarantee you that following the results based approach is going to serve you well. If you find that the results achieved aren less than you had hoped for, evaluate

As I mentioned, there is an awful lot of bantering on the internet, and to be honest, I have disconnected myself from a lot of blogs and websites that I used to read. It’s fatiguing to read negative articles and postings all of the time, and in my ongoing effort to inject more positivity into my life, I had to begin limiting my exposure to such nonsense, nearly removing all of it from my information diet.

Feels good to have a clean slate if I do say so myself.

So the next time that you head to the gym, and you overhear two meatheads or soccer moms arguing over who’s diet is better or what exercises are best for tightening up their buns, take the high road. Put your headphones in and do your own work. Follow your game plan. By the time those two individual finish up their 20 minute argument, you can have worked your way through two total body tri-sets.

It feels good to get simple get things done. Get in, get out, get on with your life.

Execute.

Let others waste their time bantering over the minutiae while you humbly, consistently and aggressively move closer to your ideal physical self.

Keep aiming for results and you’ll be just fine… trust me 🙂

Cheers to results over minutiae!

KG

A Time Based Bodyweight Workout for Boosting Fitness and Fat Loss

Quick Tips

Let’s face it, time is a commodity.  It’s our most precious commodity.  The clock will continue to tick no matter what we do.

I used to think that people who claimed that they “have no time to work out” were just dishing out lame excuses.  I might be conditioned though.  I have heard this time and time again from people who ask me for fitness advice.  Once I give them a rough outline of what they need to be doing in the gym or at home workout-wise, they raise their eyebrows and throw out the “I have no time for that” card.

What did you expect?  Hahaha.  It makes me laugh every time.

Enter:  Time based training.  

What follows is a simple time based workout program that is an immediate solution for anyone leery of investing decent time in a workout or for people who are legitimately short on time (because I know that you are out there folks).  

You’ll be able to progress this training plan for about four weeks while avoiding stagnation and adaptation.  The body tends to get really efficient at activities that we repetitively engage in, so don’t be silly and try to ride this program out for a year or something crazy like that.  

Building fitness demands that you constantly keep tweaking the variables.

Here you go… 

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Essentially you are increasing the volume of your training sessions by adding one minute per week for four weeks straight.  I like workouts like this for beginners or advanced individuals alike because everyone can move at a pace that is appropriate to them.  Beginners can grab a breather and some water if need be, and advanced trainees can whiz through at break neck pace to get their training effect from the workout.

Best of all?  You can do this type of workout anywhere.  

Worst of all?  No pulling and no hip hinging movements.  Without equipment, it’s really hard to work upper body pulling movements into a workout.  Suspension trainers like the Jungle Gym XT really help this issue.  

Hip hinging is the motion you’d make if you were butt bumping a car door shut.  You’re hinging at your hips.  Without weight, it’s hard to train this movement pattern, which really sucks because hip hinging is one of the most beneficial movement patterns that we humans can train.  

You’ll find that every style of training sacrifices something.  Nothing is perfect.  

The key with short workouts like this is leveraging the training effect of the session.  Short training sessions like this need to be high tempo since you are cramming a lot into short duration. 

If you’re not willing to buckle down on your eating habits, well, prepare to be awfully disappointed by every workout program ever created.  Physical activity is a supplement to eating food worthy of fat loss.  The changes that take place post-workout are just as important if not more important than what takes place during the workout.

Sure, you can reduce body fat and increase performance without any dietary intervention (yes it is possible), but you’ll sell yourself short in the long run.  Sooner or later you’ll reach a plateau.  Eating crap food and training like a crazy person only gives off the perception of health.  Food is the key to the body aesthetic universe and long-term health and wellness. 

Any honest personal trainer or fitness advocate in the world will tell you that nutrition makes up the bulk of the foundation of any athletic or fit-looking body.  We cannot train hard enough or long enough to offset poor eating habits.  Unless you are an Iron Man athlete, in which case you are training for 3-5+ hours per day, almost daily and you have no real world career other than your sport.

Less than 1% of us fit that description, so lets just be big boys and girls and eat nutrient rich foods.  Ok?  Make the food that enters your pie hole primarily veggies and plants mixed with some animal protein and nuts.  Perfect little diet solution that will work wonders.

Plus, it would be so stressful to think about having to workout so ridiculously hard to combat all of the junk food eaten.  

If the food grew from the earth or has a mother, eat it. That’s your checklist to decipher through the food trickery that has saturated our restaurants and supermarkets.  

Rock this workout plan for at least 2 weeks.  Training for any period of time shorter than that isn’t even worth lacing up your shoes for the first training session, and it really shows that you aren’t prioritizing to make some changes.  Stay committed and trust yourself and your program.  

All in good time.

 

Cheers to leveraging our body’s natural ability to burn fat…

 

Kyle

Is a 15 Minute Workout Realistic???

15 minute Workouts

60 minute workouts for fat loss are old news (so it seems).

Heck, in some circles, 45 minute workouts for fat loss are considered yesterday’s methods.

I have thought long and hard about my position on the judging a workout’s effectiveness or quality based on the time it takes to complete it.

While I was in Detroit, Michigan working with high-end athletes, our training sessions would take AT LEAST 90 minutes.

Why 90 minutes?

That is the amount of time it took us to from start to finish, working through this simple template:

1)  Foam Roll

2)  Static Stretch/Mobility

3)  Activation

4)  Dynamic Warm-Up

5)  Explosive (Plyometrics/Jump Training)

6)  Olympic Lifts/Power

7)  Strength/Core (Tri-sets)

8)  Conditioning/ESD (Energy System Development)

Total Time: 90min

This athletic based template was fast paced and continuous.  The breaks between each section were for water or timed rest periods.  Building an athlete requires focused development of a number of different qualities, and this template proved to be rock solid when it came to getting things done in a timely fashion, and most of all… getting results.

Now,  I know that most of my readers are not current athletes.  You may have been an athlete at one time (as I was), but reality is creeping up on you with regard to time available to workout.  It’s ok.  Life happens and we have to make adjustments to accommodate our daily activities.

Some fitness fanatics think that life should be built around your workouts, however, I tend to believe based my own testimonials and my own personal experiences… that your workouts should be designed to fit your lifestyle.

I know that some people are going to take advantage of my last statement, trying to bend the rules to the point where they begin to develop habits of never working out and letting themselves go, but I would hope that most of you choose to maintain a strict training regimen.

In my effort to adapt my workouts around my career and other business ventures, I began to look hard a Javorek’s complex training for fat loss and all around strength and conditioning.

I liked the idea of performing a large volume of work in a small window of time.  Javorek’s complex training is perfect for this as it is ridiculously effective for stripping fat in record setting time (15min or less).

Here are some of the training tools that I have used in the past for a complex:

–  Kettlebells

–  Barbells

–  Dumbbells

–  Suspension Trainers and Weight Vests

KB’s, BB’s and DB’s are what I have found to be the most effective.  You can adjust the loading easily with these training tools to fit your strength and conditioning and experience level and quite honestly… the movements just feel more natural using KB’s, BB’s, and DB’s.  Sometimes you have to go with your gut when you are designing workouts/programs.

Nothing against suspension trainers or weight vests, but trying to adjust the length on a suspension trainer or remove a weight vest while your eyeballs are popping out of your head from oxygen debt isn’t ideal.

For 3 months straight, I tested the idea that I might be able maintain my body composition and performance levels using just one simple complex template.  In the back of my mind, I wondered if I could actually improve my body composition and performance, but I didn’t want to set my hopes too high.

Here is the basic total body workout template overview that I used…

3 months is a long time to use the same general training format, workout after workout.  I have to admit that I worried about developing faulty movement patterns or flat out overtraining from the repetitive nature of the self-experiment.