What do you do in the gym anyway?

Walk into any gym anywhere in the world and there are people doing all kinds of weird things.  A lot of people must think some of the things I do in the gym are weird.  But there is a difference between weird and effective, and weird and pointless.  You need a good plan every time you enter the gym.  You should be out of there in less than an hour, feeling like you left nothing on the table. Your time in the gym should be based on intensity.  You should be working hard if you want to see results.  If you are working out for two hours, are you really pushing yourself?  

A typical workout should consist of four parts, the warm up, the heavy part, the "pump it up"part, and the finisher. Here is a brief outline of what each of these means.

Warm Up

You need to be warming up properly.  This does not mean touching your toes three times, swinging your arms from side to side and then loading three million pounds onto the bench press.  Run through a couple rounds of some bodyweight movements to get your muscles warm, and to practice some essential movement patterns.Two or three rounds of the following will do the trick.

1. Bodyweight Squats
2. Back Extensions
3. Pullups
4. Pushups or Dips
5. Hanging Leg Raises
6. Hip flexor stretches

Do as many reps as you feel is suitable for you to be thoroughly warmed up, without wearing yourself out.  This little circuit covers all the main muscle groups and should get your heart and lungs into the game too.

After getting warmed up, you need to get some mobility work in.  Hopefully you have access to foam rollers, and if you don't you can make do with a lacrosse ball (or something similar).  On lower body days roll the knots out of your glutes, lower back, IT band (the outer edge of your thigh), and the inside of your thigh.  After rolling these out, do some stretches like these to get your hips greased up.

Those stretches will mobilize your hips better than anything else. After spending some time grimacing in those positions, you should run through some of these movements to tie everything together and get your body working as a stable unit.Some good movements to do this can be seen here.

On upper body days you need to focus on your shoulders in the same way that you focused on hips for the lower body days.  Think about the postural problems you have, such as shoulders rounding forward.  What causes that?  A tight upper chest and biceps. Use this time to try to undo some of those issues, and also develop awareness of which areas need some extra attention.  This is a great general outline, but be sure to add in other stretches to address your individual problems.

Heavy Part

You're all warmed up and moving like a well oiled machine. Now you're good to start working safely.  Don't just throw your working weight on the bar and go though.  Give your nervous system a chance to get warmed up too. Start with an empty bar and incrementally add weight until you reach your working weight. The first part of your workout should be focused on strength.  Work up to an eight, five, three, or even a one rep max in one of the four main lifts.  By slowly adding weight until you reach your maximum weight, you get lots of volume done with heavy weight.  Louis Simmons of Westside Barbell has found, through years of training world champion powerlifters, that it is not necessary to do absolutely maximal weight to get stronger.  His athletes very rarely train with more than eighty percent of their one rep max, and the strongest people in the world almost always come from his gym.  An example of working up to a five rep max with 100kg would look like this,

20kg (empty bar) x 10

40 kg x 5

50kg x 5

60 kg x 5

70 kg x 5

80 kg x 5

90 kg x 5

95 kg x 5

100 kg x 5
105 kg x 5

Your goal was to get 100 kg, but you still felt strong after the 100 kg set, so you added a little bit more and went for it.  That's the beauty of this approach.  On days where you are feeling strong, push yourself.  If you are sick, or slept terribly and feel like a zombie, you may not be physically capable of giving it your all.  Listening to your body prevents injuries.

The "Pump It Up" Part

 A lot of very successful powerlifters will work up to a heavy five, three, or one rep max, do some high volume accessory work, and call it a day.  They believe that getting maximal heavy work done is the most important thing, and accessory work is done only to work on weak body parts.  For people more interested in building muscle, do your strength work first, and then work the muscles related to the main lift with lots of volume.  There are limitless ways of doing this, but the key is to do the strength work, and then move on to the bodybuilding stuff.  An example would be working up to a five rep max on the bench press, doing five sets of ten on incline dumbell bench, and then doing some tricep work.  The heavy part of your training is done to train your nervous system and muscles to work together to move heavy weight. This part of your training is done to get the muscles working and to get some blood flowing into them.  This is where you follow the bodybuilding philosophy of going for that mind-muscle connection and really feeling the muscles work with some lighter weights.  For this part choose rep ranges any where between 6-20.  For the heavy part of your workout, you are trying to break records and constantly increase the weight.  For this part your weights should be increasing over time, but you are more focused on feeling the muscles work.  Have fun here, and do drop sets, pyramids, all those things that bodybuilders love.

Finisher

After you have finished your strength and volume work, it can be fun to do a finisher to get some conditioning while you are still warmed up and ready to work. Pick a conditioning method that will take less than ten minutes, and work as hard as you can.  I wrote some ideas for conditioning in a previous post.  My personal favorites are barbell or bodyweight complexes, or a combo of the two.  This should take absolutely no more than ten minutes.  Five minutes would be an even better goal.  You've done a lot of work already, this is just thrown in to boost your metabolism a little more.

Hopefully this is a good outline to get you spending your time in the gym more efficiently.  Remember that keeping intensity up, and rest periods short is a great way to get more done in less time.  Leave the cellphone at the door.  Your Candy Crush record will never do as much for you as your squat or deadlift record.

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My Top Five Fat Loss Workouts

I recently moved, and so switched to a new gym.  But, before I left my old gym I had a really funny encounter.  I noticed a guy whom I'd chatted with from time to time, giving me an awkward up and down, so I gave him a nod.  He walked over to me, and told me that I'd gotten noticeably taller.  I told him in my haphazard Chinese that at 28 years old, it seemed unlikely that I'd had a noticeable growth spurt. I mentioned that I'd been losing fat, and he agreed that I looked thinner, but urged me to go and check my height, guaranteeing that I'd gained a few centimeters.  We agreed to disagree and the conversation turned to what I was doing to lose fat.  He was shocked to hear that I never once stepped foot on a treadmill or went jogging.  Those are the only real tried and tested ways to lose fat right?  

It seems that many people are at a loss when it comes to challenging and fun ways to burn fat. I want to share my favorite fat loss workouts with you.  These all take less than half an hour including a comprehensive warm up and cool down, and most take more like ten minutes. The principle for all of these workouts is that by exercising really intensely for a short time, you will increase your metabolic rate, and burn calories through something known as EPOC (Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption) or the so called "after burn" effect. So here are five challenging and intense, but also fun workouts.

Sprints

I've mentioned sprints before, and truly believe that they are the best cardio possible.  The only problem is that they suck.  If you truly push yourself when doing sprints, you will probably finish within ten minutes, and will need to lay on the ground begging for oxygen for another ten minutes. To have a good sprint work out you have to warm up properly.  If you don't, you WILL pull a muscle, I promise.  Jog for five minutes, do some high knee raises, butt kicks, squat jumps, side shuffles, and then some stretches for your hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves.  Pick a 40 or 50 meter path, and do two or three easy sprints, slowly increasing your speed.  Once you feel ready to push yourself safely, do your first sprint.  Keep the distance limited to 40 or 50 meters.  Sprint, immediately walk back to the start, and go again.  Do ten to fifteen sprints, gasp for air, walk for a few minutes and then go home. If you are feeling ambitious do ten burpees after each sprint, this is a great test of mental toughness.

Barbell Complexes

You are going to pick up a medium weight barbell and do three to ten different exercises without putting the bar down.  The number of reps will be the same for each movement, and should be between five and ten.  You will do all the reps on the first movement, then move on to the second movement.  After completing all the movements rest thirty to sixty seconds and then go again.  Repeat four or five times. The first time you try this only do three different movements, and add more as you see fit. The first time you will also want to be very conservative with the amount of weight you use.  The first round might be easy, but by the time you've done five rounds it won't be.  If you choose a weight that is too heavy, and the last round takes five minutes to complete because you keep dropping the bar, you have missed the point of this style of workout. Here are a couple of examples.

Beginner

Deadlift x 10

Power Clean x 10

Front Squat x10

Advanced

Deadlift x6

Shrug x6

Power Clean x6

Front Squat x6

Push Press x 6

Back Squat x6

You can program these yourself with a bit of common sense.  Arrange the movements such that you are working from the floor to the roof, and if you want to really go for it, work your way back down to the floor again.

Bodyweight Conditioning

This has always been one of my favorites because it's just so easy to do.  I often run out to the park, think of what I can use to workout, and then get at it.  My favorite style of programming for park workouts is to choose four or five different movements, start at a certain number of reps, and then subtract one rep each round.  For example

Round 1

Box Jumps x 12

Chin ups x 12

Lunges x12 per leg

Dips x 12

Round 2 is eleven reps of each, Round 3 is ten reps, etc. until you are down to only one rep.  It seems like it would get easier as you go, but because each round is faster you get less time to rest before doing the same movement again. With this style, try not to rest between rounds if you can. Get out to the park, take a look at what you have to work with, and get at it.

Jump Rope

Muhammad Ali did it, I rest my case.  This has been a main conditioning tool of successful athletes for a long time. If you can't jump rope efficiently now, just be patient.  It really takes no time at all to get proficient enough to burn fat.  My advice is to keep your elbows tucked as close to your body as you can, and really try to feel the tension on the rope.  You should be able to do it with your eyes closed. When jumping rope for fat loss, intervals work really well. Jump rope for one minute, rest for thirty seconds, and go again.  Repeat for ten to fifteen rounds.  My favorite jump rope workout is one minute of rope work, followed by ten burpees, then straight back to the rope.  You can replace the burpees with dumbell swings, jump squats, dumbell cleans, whatever you can think of.  I think the jump rope with burpees may be almost as tough as hill sprints, if you can push yourself and avoid resting after the burpees.  Catching your breath while jumping rope as fast as you can is intense.

Crossfit

Crossfit posts a new workout almost every day.  Go on their website, find a workout that appeals to you, check the times that other people are completing the workouts in, and go beat those times.  It can be humbling to see how fast some people are able to bang out some of the workouts on there.  My only advice here would be to pick workouts that fit into your workout plan.  If strength training, or building muscle is your goal and tomorrow is going to be a heavy squat day don't pick something that is going to fry your legs and prevent you from giving it your all on the squats.  Remember your priorities.  

This post ended up being far longer than I intended, but hopefully some of these ideas appeal to you, and have given you something new to work with.  With this kind of training, intensity is the key.  If these workouts take you longer than fifteen minutes (excluding warm up) then you are not going hard enough. As always, don't overthink this stuff.  Go out and do something.  You never know, something here may even make you taller, just like it did for me!

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