5 Random thoughts

It has been a busy couple of days at DC Health this week. Plenty of training clients, breaking records, treating clients with kinesiology, writing nutritional programs it has been go go go! With this in mind, I decided it may be a good idea to get a blog out there with what is rattling around my brain at the moment. Hopefully this will inform you as well as provide me with some sanity!

1. Dead Letter Circus is my favorite band! Seriously these guys are so talented and this is their first album. Really looking forward to what they produce over the next couple of years

2. Kettlebell training is awesome!

Kettlebells are a great training tool. I love training with them and use them with a lot of my clients. I do believe they have been marketed incorrectly and are promoted as a tool for every goal. Kettlebells are best used to develop power endurance. They are not the best tool for hypertrophy and maximal strength gain. The best tool for that is a barbell. I also do not use them with all my clients. Doing high rep kettlebell snatches with a person with shoulder issues and a severe lack of thoracic mobility = malpractice. Adjust the tool you use for the body using it. Just because an exericse looks cool doesn’t mean you should, or can do it!

3. Programming is key

Trainers who don’t program don’t deserve to get paid. Honestly. Doing random exercises with no designated sets or reps and with no structure is not training, but entertaining. Seriously this pisses me off. 80 bucks an hour (or more) to supervise someone doing a workout? Thats what a training partner does! According to Alwyn Cosgrove it takes about 5% more skill to supervise a workout than it does to perform a workout. Your clients are paying you for your program design expertise! A good program should include:

Soft tissue work/mobility

Strength

Conditioning

Recovery/Regeneration

All of this needs to be put into context of the persons goals. Click here to find out if your program matches your goals.

4. You do not need to train bad movements

Even as I write this and read it back to myself the whole concept of training bad movements is ass backwards. A concept espoused by some in the industry is because we will perform biomechanically poor movements in every day life, we should train them. This is used by training things like deadlifts with a rounded back and other poor movements. This is like smashing your head into a wall in preparation for when you do. Boxers and other combat athletes do not (I hope!) put their gloves down and get punched in the face because it may happen in a fight. When we do these poor movements, we program our nervous system to use these poor movements as default programs for movement. This is giving bad information to your computer. It’s going to crash! Also, ligaments and other structures only have a limited capacity for stress. Once they lose their resilience, they break. This is what happens with non contact ACL injuries. Poor movement creates this. Why would we train this?

5. Metabolic flexibility is a good concept, but its implementation is of concern

Metabolic flexibility is the concept that our body should be metabolically flexible enough to break down fats or carbohydrates for food. This in theory is fantastic and requires a person to have good health to do this. Some people however are seeing your diet should be as BAD as possible while maintaining body composition and blood measures. This is to keep the bodies metabolic flexibility trained. This is probably the most irresponsible thing I have ever heard!

The breakdown of food as fuel is going to happen no matter what we eat. We can all agree on that. However, the quality and quantity of energy we get is going to depend on the quality of the food we eat. We can all agree that high quality healthy food is better for us than take away. And yes, I can understand that there are times where we can’t eat ideally and our bodies should be able to cope. But when we eat poor quality food we affect our endocrine, digestive, respiratory, immune, neural and all other systems! Is it really worth training our ability to use processed sugar as fuel if it suppresses our immune system for 8 hours, leaches minerals from our bodies to process it, depletes our valuable enzyme reserves and over stimulates our sympathetic nervous system leading to adrenaline resistance and insulin issues? Focus on getting healthy by eating high quality food as much as you can, exercise, drink water and maintain control over your life and your metabolic flexibility improves anyway!

Thats about all for today see you next time!