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Sunday, May 9, 2010

Some Things That Bug Me Part 2

#5 – Program Design

I love when 14 year olds post “I’m making up my own program, can someone tell me if it’s alright.” The alarm bells should ring right there as that must mean that they don’t know if it’s right so why not just do a ready made program form a reputable trainer, or ask for tips on how to make one or even better, research how to make one up.

Here are 10 tips for designing a program:

1 – 95% of us will make the most progress on a full body program performed 3 times a week or 7 times in 14 days. Unless you have appreciable muscle (say 20pds of added muscle, actual muscle) from your starting point or 2 years “proper” weight lifting experience (no, that 1 year when you were 15 and did 280 push ups in your bedroom each night doesn’t count), then full body workouts are probably the best option for you.

2 – Train your lower body more than upper body.

3 – Don’t use just one rep range.

4 – For every bench press, push up, shoulder press, shoulder raise, chest fly, cross over and upright row that you do, you need to at least 1 row variation rep.

5 – If you can do chin ups, then you should never need to do a lat pulldown again.

6 – If you can’t do 10 single leg pistol squats, 20 perfect push ups and 15 perfect inverted rows, then why are you doing leg presses, chest presses and lat pulldowns? I don’t know either.

7 – Antagonist and agonist pairing supersets are far away the best way to set your exercises up as they allow for more weight to be used from relaxing the opposite muscle group and you’ll easily cut 10% of your training time, so your training density will be improved resulting in more calorie use. Obviously this works best with upper body then lower body. Also take into account the load used in each side of the pairing and even that up as best you can. A 100kg Bench Press paired with a 30pd Scarecrow is not even.

Best pairs are Bench Press and Rows, Shoulder Press and Chin Ups and Biceps/Triceps

8 – Training everyday is not the answer and 4 weight sessions a week maximum with 1 – 3 cardio type sessions is plenty. The more weights you do the less cardio you do too.

9 – Do what you need to do not what you want to. Are your shoulders rounded forward? Does your chin enter the doorway 2 minutes before you do? Does your arse enter the same doorway 2 minutes after your chin has? Then why are you still doing 280 push ups everyday, 1/2 squat after 1/2 squat and endless crunches when you should be doing deadlifts, rows and face pulls?

10 – Read the No More Neanderthal series by Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson found here. It's a few years old but it changed me completely in the way I trained and trained my clients.

It’s quite a read but you’ll be plenty of steps ahead of 90% of the people in your gym if you can apply it.

#6 – Muscle Confusion

One of my all time pet hates. Strength is the base of all other fitness qualities and without it, you’ll struggle to optimally develop most of the others. To attain strength, you basically have to repeat and repeat a lift so that the action gets wired into your nervous system until you can do it automatically. Performing a lift once every 6 weeks will not do this and you’ll never gain strength, thus never increase your weights enough to gain any meaningful muscle mass either. Those who use the confusion principle often are the one’s simply inducing fatigue, and also not managing it. To get good at something it needs to be repeatedly practiced frequently. When you learn to walk as an infant you don’t do it once a week, you do it everyday until your nervous system catches up with your body and learns the movement/s.

#7 – “…I burnt 1000 calories in that session…”

How do you know that? You don’t and never will. So may people try (and fail) to match up their energy in and energy out numbers. You can never know how many calories are burnt in any given session. You can have a guide maybe, but you’ll never know for sure.

1 – Metabolism boost is not taken into account so if you’re trying to gain weight then you’re expending more calories then you think and then you won’t be eating as much as you need to.

2 – Calorie counters on cardio machines are never right. How could they be? They don’t know anything about you.

3 – People who usually count how many calories they burn per session are usually too caught up on counting calories then training hard and eating right, and the stress is actually making them fatter from cortisol release.

People simply need to train hard and eat the right foods at the right times. If you think you can train harder then by all means do so. If you know that that the cheese burger you had at lunch because you were too late getting up from the 6 pack you had last night and didn’t have time to prepare any lunch was not the best thing you could have had, well then you know what to do. If you don’t then no one can help you.

#8 – Focusing On The Wrong Things

This is similar to #7. Let’s be real for a second, I think we both know that the type of protein your using is not the problem with our lack of results don’t we. Maybe the leg extensions and 60 minute elliptical trainer sessions are the problem. From what I’ve seen with people in the gym, most don’t seem to train hard enough, it’s as simple as that. Even the most basic of programs will give you some benefits if you do it hard and make it harder as you go. Bodybuilders are great for this as they train extremely hard, even if they’re programs suck complete arse. Simply train, eat then sleep and repeat. Don’t make it harder then it needs to be.

#9 – Supplements

Number 1 pet hate. All they do is get you to the same place as training and food can get you, but about 2 weeks quicker. Yep big deal, cash well spent. This also mixes in with #8. Firstly you need to get your diet organised before any supplement should even bare a twinkle thought in your mind then actually find out what they do and how they work before buying them. I laugh every time I read “I just bought some creatine, how should I take it?”

#10 - "...I've hit a plateau..."

To hit a plateau is to have tried everything you can training, diet and recovery wise and then you still can't make any progress, not when you do a program for 2 weeks which consists of the same 3 x 10 for bench press every Monday, Wednesday and Friday you've done for the last 4 programs and wonder why nothing has or is happening.

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