Are you exercising or training?

Are you exercising or training?

Are you TRAINING or just exercising?

If you want to reduce fat, build muscle and develop an athletic physic, YOU MUST TRAIN🏋!

Now this sounds obvious, the problem we have is people just don’t train, THEY JUST EXERCISE(🦄).

🦄EXERCISING looks like this - You arrive at the gym, you have a quick recce, you spot some equipment you think would be nice to use and would give you a good workout. That is about as advanced as most people go. This can work, especially in the short term, but eventually, you’ll need to get a bit more specific.

🏋TRAINING looks like this - You have a set goal and a set plan to get you to that goal. You know exactly what you need to do for each and every session, you know the exact reps and sets you need to do, you know how much weight you need to lift and how much you lifted last time. You have a nutrition programme that is going to fuel your workouts to optimise your performance. 

📈👨‍🔬The main thing you need to look at when it comes to TRAINING is progressive overload👨‍🔬. This is necessary with both muscle building and fat loss, the more muscle you have the faster your metabolic rate because your body will need to fuel that newly founded muscle.

What Is Progressive Overload?

“Progressive overload requires a gradual increase in volume, intensity, frequency or time in order to achieve the targeted goal of the user. In this context, volume and intensity are defined as follows: Volume is the total number of repetitions multiplied by the resistance used as performed in specific periods of time.” 

That, my friends, is straight out of Wikipedia.

When exercising, your body will adapt to a point, but if you want to make further development then you need to exert greater demand on the body by TRAINING and TRAINING SMART.  If you don't progressively overload the muscles by forcing them to do more than they're accustomed to, they have no reason to make further adaptations. Simply put, your body will not develop unless it needs to!

📝If you want to start TRAINING and not just EXERCISING, you need to be tracking absolutely everything.

Implement these simple changes to your training if you’re not currently following a set and structure regime:

🔵 Increase and track the resistance (weight lifted)

🔵 Increase the volume -  sets multiplied by reps and then multiplied by resistance.

🔵 Increase training frequency - i.e. the number of times you’re training. Remember, there is no such thing as overtraining, just under recovering, so make sure your nutrition supports the increase in frequency.

📢THE HUMAN BODY WILL NOT CHANGE UNLESS IT IS FORCED TO!! 

Banded Push-Ups

Banded Push-Ups

Banded Push-Ups, for when you want to look technical AF.

The biggest restriction with Push-Up is the inability to progress in loading (adding weight to the movement as you get stronger).

The benefit of banded Push-Ups is deloading at the bottom of the movement, where resistance is at a minimum due to less stretch through a band. The bottom position is often the most stressful portion of the exercise, which is why deloading it is great for shoulder health. The strongest portion of the movement is at the top, accommodating the most resistance, therefor keeping great resistance through the full range of motion.

Correctly utilising bands like this can help keep constant tension through the full range of motion, help increase metabolic stress (PUMP) and of course let everyone else in the gym know that you have an amazing imagination.

Time

Time

Let’s talk about time.

Time can be your best friend or your worst enemy. 

When it comes to fat loss, muscle building, strength and endurance, I think we can all agree that time is needed to help you reach your goals.

Now, I would be lying if I said that I was training everyday and eating clean all the time.

However, what I do have is a good base of acceptable nutrition and an active lifestyle.

With me having this base in place, it stops me from going backwards, I’m not necessarily pushing forward all the time, but I don’t do going backwards.

Let me tell you about my base, this is not what I recommend as optimal, its just the minimum I’ll do on any given week, you need to have a minimum of what you will allow yourself to get away with!:

Water 1.5 Ltr (at least)

Protein intake at least 1.5 gram per 1 kg of body weight, but I always nail this and some

Two muscle developing sessions per week (at least)

If you have something like this in place it allows you to only have good weeks and great weeks and even on your worst weeks you’ll still be on track.

Build muscle and drop fat at the same time

Build muscle and drop fat at the same time

You want to build muscle and drop fat at the same time??

You must watch this video.........

Muscle building and fat loss goals?.....Here is the truth!

Muscle building and fat loss goals?.....Here is the truth!

Muscle building and fat loss goals?

Sick of the conflicting information on social media?

You need to watch this video!

Three mechanisms of hypertrophy

Three mechanisms of hypertrophy

Mechanical tension, metabolic stress and muscle damage.

1️⃣Mechanical tension - You want to generate the largest muscle force possible through a full range of motion.

2️⃣Metabolic stress ("the pump") - To optimise metabolic stress you need to maintain constant tension on the muscles. Focus on the pain building up in that muscle, stay with it and embrace it. This way, as blood gets pumped into the muscles by the arteries, the steady muscular contractions will prevent the veins from letting blood escape, resulting in high levels of metabolic stress and cell swelling.

3️⃣Muscle damage - This is focusing on the negatives. It happens with slow negatives, extended range of motion and high tension in the stretched position of the muscle. Doing a random exercise that you haven't done in a while also does the job.

The best lifts are those that can be manipulated to target each of the three mechanisms. The basic big lifts do the trick - squat, deadlift, hip thrust, bench press, military press, pull-up/pull-down and row. These exercises should feature highly in anyone's programming and tweaked accordingly to hit the three mechanisms.

In summary, you can use these three mechanisms in a single disgusting workout, or cycle through them over the course of a week