Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
By Amy Kasden
![MPj04051480000[1]](http://modelper4mance.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/MPj040514800001-300x448.jpg)
Do you ever have one of those weeks where you just can’t seem to get out of your own way? It does not matter what you do, how much you may have accomplished, the week still feels like a loss? Well, I believe those weeks are inevitable.
For example, you’ve been busting your butt, excited about every workout, getting it done and pushing it hard when all of a sudden, bam, it’s over. But why? Maybe it was a tough week at work, maybe your getting sick and can’t wake up to make it to the gym or maybe you are hormonal and it doesn’t matter what happens, you are going to feel off. Whatever the reason your sense of accomplishment is down the toilet.
Jodi often talks about those days when you walk into the gym and don’t even know why you are there. All you do is ‘kick some tires around’ and leave. Maybe you get in a lift or do some light cardio, but in the end of the day, did you really accomplish anything? No. When Jodi talks about these days she says they are inevitable and she is right. You cannot hit a personal record every workout; nor can you get in a killer workout ever time. The body can only handle but so much.
Well, I want to take this lost day one step further. There are weeks when I feel like nothing gets accomplished. Those weeks feel like a total loss; or worse, a backwards step. But before I go and bury my head in the sand, I want to take a deeper look and see if this is really the case.
Last week wrapped up my first 4 week cycle of density training. I actually ended the cycle on an off day (a Wednesday – don’t ask, started on an off day) which, in and of itself, was enough to make me feel misplaced. On top of this being the end of my 4 week cycle, I really pushed my final EDT session and it KILLED me. It was brutal!!!!!!! In addition to that brutal final lift; I thought it would be a fabulous idea to push it past the limit with a plyo training two days later.
I was left with complete exhaustion. Mix that with a very busy week, not getting nearly enough sleep, and nibbling on anything in site and I felt like the remainder of the week was a complete loss. Don’t get me wrong, I was in the gym each and every day; but completely wiped out to the point that it felt like I didn’t get much done.
The sum of the above left me feeling like I had lost a week and taken a step back. However, is that really the case? I’ll make that determination in a minute. But first, I ran a mental scan of other times I have worried that the week was a loss.
When training for the half-marathon I felt so invigorated after my first 8 mile run. I had been progressing with my mileage every week and was on fire. The following week I went to do the 8 mile run again and not even half way through; had to stop and walk the remainder. Have you ever experienced your body doing its own thing, regardless of what your mind wills it to do? This was the first time I had ever encountered anything like it. I was literally willing myself to keep running. In my mind I was still running; when all of a sudden, my body stopped. I finished out that 8 miles; albeit walking. I had to cut my mileage down for the remainder of the week, I was so wiped out.
While that 8 mile walk and the remainder of the week felt like a loss, I know it wasn’t. I had been increasing my mileage every week and my body finally said – hold up, you need to recover. Once my body was ready, I was able to get through a 10 mile run the following week!
This lost week also popped up at least once every time I prepared for a fitness competition. I’d progress week after week practicing my fitness routine when all of a sudden, I’d hit a wall. Entire practices would be nothing but me falling out of moves, missing my timing and not being able to make it through my routine. During these weeks I spent a lot of time lying on the floor of the aerobics room swearing and frustrated. It seemed like a wasted practice, or even worse, a wasted couple of practices and I’d be so upset for not getting anything accomplished. But I would remind myself that you cannot have all stellar practices and in the end, I’d kill it come show time.
So with all of the above in mind, it’s time to take stock and determine whether last week really was as bad as I made it out to be. As I look at it rationally, the answer is no. First, I hit a PR with my EDT training on Monday; second, the end of this cycle allowed me to look back and see what I need to tweak for my next cycle; third, I got in a killer plyo workout on Wednesday; fourth, I got in some much needed rest and fifth, I made it through a very stressful work week. After taking stock of my week, I can’t say it was a loss.
So what is there to do when these “wasted” weeks pop up? I know I typically have the urge to get frustrated with myself and to look back and allow any perceived shortcomings to discourage me. BUT, I only entertain this feeling for a brief moment. Then, I shrug it off, knowing that when I get back in the gym, I will be able to hit it harder. What might feel like a waste was really my body recovering.
It would be great if we had the foresight to see when our central nervous system needed a break. But even the best planned de-loading weeks and recovery weeks won’t always do it. You can’t plan for the 4 days you had to stay late at work, nor can you plan for the family emergency that is going to beat you down emotionally. These outside stressers will do you in, regardless of whether or not you are ready to take a break. One of these day’s we will get Heather to write a blog post all about the CNS; but in the mean time, try to remember that your body is not an endless resource. It needs replenishing and regeneration and even if you plan both, the body may need it ahead of scheduled. When this happens, when no matter what you try to do, you body limits you, take it as a blessing. Or at least do not allow yourself to be discouraged. Often doing less, un-loading and recovering is harder than pushing the limits. But oh so necessary.
Can you share a time when you hit a wall? Let us know, we’d love to hear.
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Do you workout or do you train with a purpose?
By Amy Kasden
Is there a distinction you ask? Is it just semantics? I say there is a difference. Someone taking spinning twice/week is not necessarily a cyclist while a cyclist might take spin twice/week. Running for cardio does not make you a runner while a runner does run for cardio. Playing basketball with your buddies does not mean your training is geared for a basketball player trying to get better. However, a dedicated basketball player might play with his buddies.
There is a huge difference between training for purpose and merely going to the gym and working out with no rhyme or reason. While almost everyone going to the gym has a “reason” to be there and a goal in mind, they have not necessarily thought through their training and organized it in a manner conducive to reaching their goal. If you ask the average Joe at the gym if he has a goal, I am sure he will tell you “Yes”. But if you inquire about his method and really prod deeper than the “I’m lifting to maintain my strength but eating at a caloric deficit so I can lose weight” and ask how he sets up his sets/reps, exercises choices, why cardio is done on an elliptical instead of the stair master, he will respond with a blank stare.
In last week’s athlete’s highlight, when asked what I was currently training for, I said I was in between sports. That answer got me thinking about how I have changed my workouts based on previous sports/athletic events/goals. My training has changed tremendously over the last 10 years. Training for a fitness competition and training for a half marathon are notably different. The only thing they have in common is that every workout I did was geared toward my goal. Yes, I still lifted, did cardio, had sport specific days and practiced yoga, but the specifics of those workouts were like night and day. That specific tweaking is what changes you from merely exercising to training for an event. That change is what makes you an athlete.
But how do you make that change? What does it entail? Training for my week long rock climbing trip in Mexico is a perfect example.
When I started climbing I was fortunate enough to have a good friend teaching me, we will call her J. On an average week J and I lifted 4-5 days/week, did cardio, went to yoga (I introduced her to yoga), and went to the rock gym. After I had been climbing indoors for about a year, J and I planned a week-long trip to Mexico and that is when our training really developed a purpose. (That and the fact that we had finished our half marathon and could now dedicate our training to something else). J tweaked our workouts to supplement and complement our climbing. She was meticulous in making sure we were dotting all our Is and crossing all our Ts to prepare for the trip while not slacking on the rest of our training.
Rock climbing involves endurance, balance, lower body dexterity, lower body strength, grip strength, and body awareness. J broke down our climbing workouts and gym workouts to take into consideration the specialized training we needed for climbing outdoors. We tweaked each workout to focus on the above skills.
Climbing Workouts
One of the major differences between climbing indoors and climbing outdoors is the duration of each climb. Indoor you are limited by the height of the gym while outdoors, the sky’s the limit. We needed to increase our climbing endurance, specifically, how long we could climb before fatiguing. Additionally, outdoors you climb with gear attached to your harness, which is not necessary in an indoor gym. Thus, we needed to learn to climb with added weight on our bodies. Finally, there is no approach to an indoor gym. Outdoor climbing typically includes hiking to the base of the rock, while carrying all your gear. (This list of differences is by no means all inclusive. There are a myriad of other differences from type of holds and the feel of the rock to weather and multi-pitches, etc. However, the above are the ones for which we could modify our training).
About 8 weeks prior to our trip we increased the number of days we climbed from two to three. One day we dedicated to endurance and chose an easier route to climb up and down repeatedly for a set amount of time. In addition, we wore a 20 lb weight belt to simulate the weight of our gear. The second day we used to work difficulty, climbing more challenging routes and perfecting our technique. The third day was a mixture between the first two and we added in some regular, semi-challenging but not too difficult climbs.
Cardio
I don’t remember how much cardio I was doing back then, but we modified it to prepare for our trip. At least once/week we walked on the treadmill at a high incline wearing a backpack stuffed with a 25-45 lb (plate wrapped in a bunch of towels to keep it from moving). This cardio session simulated the approach. During another session we used either the stairmaster or the revolving staircase. We added the weight belt to these sessions to get our bodies used to the weight the gear added to our harness. While it would have been better if we were able to get outdoors and hike, it was the middle of January and the ground was covered in snow. Thus we tweaked our cardio as best we could.
Lifting
We had been lifting 4-5 times/week. Changing our lifting split was less important than modifying our exercise choices. Back, legs and grip were our lifting focus. I say “focus” because we never neglected an area of the body, but merely highlighted some more than others. For example, when climbing, it does not matter how strong your back is if your fingers give out; you don’t have the luxury of gripping a barbell, you might only have the tip of a few fingers on a hold. Thus, when doing a lat pull down, instead of performing every set with an overhand grip, for half the sets we only placed our finger tips on the bar. Instead of doing straight sets of pull-ups we performed pull-ups to failure then hung on the bar as long as we could; until our grip failed.
When it came to our leg workout we focused on single leg exercises. I’ll never forget our step-up variation. Wearing the weight belt, we started at the bottom of a flight of stairs and began step-ups. We skipped every other step, or every third step, all the way up. We never used our entire foot, instead, we did everything on the balls of our feet. To make it harder we stepped up and out to the side instead of straight up. We also modified walking lunges. We never came up from the lunge but instead walked across the gym in a deep lunge position
Mobility and Balance
Mobility and balance work rounded out our week. We met with our trainer once/week in the aerobics room where she set up a mini obstacle courses, primarily with pods (small rubber half tennis ball shaped things) along the floor. We started with something physically and aerobically taxing, such as a round of burpees or a minute of jump rope and then made our way through the course. Each foot stepped on a pod and while there, we would squat down and pick something up. Sometimes each foot would be on a pod, necessitating a squat, other times we would only have one foot on a pod, necessitating a single leg squat, all while maintaining balance. The course challenged our mobility and balance in a winded fatigued state, just as we would find ourselves during a climb.
So that, in a nutshell, was our training for the 8 weeks up to our trip. Was it radically different than what we had been doing before? No. But everything we did had a purpose. I was prepared for that trip to Mexico and had an unbelievable time.
So, what about you? Do you workout or do you train for a sport? How do you tweak your training to focus on your sport? Are you a triathlete, competitive dancer, mma fighter or a basketball player? How does your training differentiate from that of the average Joe in the gym? What do you do that makes that average Joe look at you like you are crazy?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Are you a bit Type A?
Would you say you need a bit of therapy because of it?
I don’t know if I would say that I am Type A, but I am definitely quirky.
If I was a dog, I would be the type that would have to walk in 5 circles before lying down and taking a nap. If I was a cat, I would dig my claws into the chair and pull at it about 5 times each paw til I was comfy and then I would lay down. So I am not so much Type A as I am “routined” or “ritualized”.
Call it whatever you want but make sure when you are done calling it a name, you also call it effective.
If you were to analyze the majority of successful athletes (from novice to elite) you would find a high percentage of Type A personalities in that bunch. (I, personally, would never put that bunch together, but that’s just me—can you imagine? OY!) From folks who plan their days with excruciating detail to others who know what they are eating to the gram, they most likely are thriving at their sport. Yeah, you could say it is inevitable considering how much they plan or that they are like that because they were already good so they were just extra motivated to make it happen because of that but neither would be true. They are good at their sport because of the structure.
Now I don’t want to hang here on the obvious and have this long diatribe about structuring your workouts and etc. because that’s not where the beauty lies in this. No, where the beauty lies is in the not-so-obvious stuff regarding nutrition and recovery.
Your body is a machine. A well oiled, well engineered, beautifully designed machine. It is a work of art. Whether you believe in the big bang theory, two tadpoles and a cesspool of hocus pocus or creationism, it does not matter because no matter how you slice it, the human body is a marvel. If you decided tomorrow that you wanted to wake up and shuttle fat out of your liver faster, you would be hard pressed to make it happen. If you wanted to slow down how often you pee’d, you would still be at the mercy of your kidneys no matter what you did. See, you have zero control of your bodily functions. You are just along for the ride. Knowing this and knowing that your body is a machine that does the same thing day in and day out with or without you, what do you think you would do to maximize the output it is giving you? Structure it.
Structure is what the body craves and when you oblige and give it that consistency, it sings like a tuning fork in perfect resonance. Why? Because that’s how it operates everyday: consistently.
Stop. Do not reach for your planner. If you are not already Type A, you cannot become it overnight. If you are quirky like me, you may be able to put some semblance of a schedule together but you will have lots of “odd” things in there as well that might make your day a bit more complicated (must you always eat oatmeal from the yellow bowl? *sigh*). No. You don’t have to become the ultra planner tomorrow to take advantage of this, you just need to establish some basic rules and let all the mayhem happen in between.
Those are the basic rules. They are simple and do not require you to be this super duper organized Type A maniac who seems to have 25 hours in a 24 hour day. Just about anybody can do these 3 simple steps and begin to see a marked improvement in their athleticism.
What you are doing here when you regulate your body like this is you are “releasing the brakes”. Those little involuntary actions that your body performs without you knowing that slowly eat away at your progress on the field are being minimized by regularity. You are taking the fear of never eating again away from your digestive tract. It worries about that you know. You are eliminating the anxiety of exhaustion every time you go to bed on time.
So many times we think to improve it must be complicated. We want a difficult program, a complicated diet, a load of supplements. No one wants to hear, have lunch every day at noon and you’ll be more agile. Who would believe that? Or, have your pwo 10 min. before training ends every time. They would worry more about the ratio of protein to carbs in the pwo drink than they would the timing.
Your body wants what it gives itself: stability. So the next time you want to buy the latest supplement/gadget/shoe and etc., just try incorporating these three suggestions instead and save yourself some money. You never know, this could be the thing that takes you to the next level.
