Reps: How to do Them Properly

November 19, 2009

FrancoColumbu incline press Now I know what you’re thinking; “What a boring ass blog post topic.” But it’s a topic I feel needs to be addressed because some people just don’t seem to have a clue what they’re doing. Or maybe I just feel that way because I’m so OCD and incredibly analytic that I see and think about things that most people never do. But I promise I will do my best to make this worth your time.

Go to a public gym and watch ten different people perform a set of ten reps. You may see speed reps, grinder reps, death reps, pump reps and everything in between. But what style provides the best results?

Like everything else, it depends on a number of factors. Grinders reps are those reps that the HIT crowd is a big fan of. Every rep goes up slowly and painfully and is a fight to the death. There is nothing fast or smooth about it. Grinders reps are also characterized by a lot of locking out, rest-pausing and just overall grinding. It can be argued that locking out your reps is good for your joints. Over time, however, locking out may just grind your joints to powder for a variety of reasons I will get to. Locking out your squats is definitely better for VMO development. Locking out on each rep and pausing ever so briefly also allows you to use more weight. This may be a good thing for many of you. Or it may be a bad thing. It really depends on your goals, what you are training for and how you want to feel 25 years from today.

When I talk about pump reps I am referring to what you see most successful, intelligent bodybuilders do. If you watch Ronnie Coleman do a set of incline dumbbell presses on YouTube you will see what I’m talking about. The sets all look safe, clean and smooth. There is no rest-pausing or locking out; the reps continue in a piston like fashion until the set ends. He goes heavy as shit, but there is none of that silly screaming and shaking that the HIT’ers love, nor is there any dangerous break down of form that the dweebs love (elbows flaring, hips lifting or rotating, etc.) Pump reps are fast yet controlled, heavy yet non-joint-destructive, and the range of motion is always slightly limited. This is a good thing. Despite what your favorite personal trainer told you, it’s not healthy for your shoulders to bring the dumbbells down below the bench when doing flat or incline dumbbell presses. Full range of motion for the pecs would include bringing your arms all the way together behind your back and then crossing them over each other in front of your body. Obviously that would be impossible with any exercise. Like the Red Sox winning another World Series (sorry to my readers from Boston, I joke, I joke). Not happening. So forget about this mythical concept and stay safe.

Failure on a set of grinders reps is a whole lot different than a set of pump reps. Like I said, you will have used more weight and you will have paused and locked out each rep. Failure comes when you are very close to getting injured or your CNS is completely fried. This is great for your ego. It may be great for short term strength gains as well. But this is the worst style of reps you can do if you still want to be able to train 25 years from now. And, in the long term this style of training will lead to burn out and less impressive strength gains.

When you hit failure on pump reps it’s more due to the feeling of rigor mortis setting in, the accumulative fatigue, lactic acid build up, oxygen deficit, etc. This is far, far safer in the long term. You won’t lift as much weight on your sets today but you will probably be stronger in 5-10 years from now because you won’t have experienced so many injuries or burnout. It could even be argued that this style of training is more sport specific because it will help improve your lactic acid tolerance. That’s debatable but I’m throwing it out there, kinda in the same fashion as Baba Booey’s (of Fla Fla Flow-hi to hardcore Stern fans) first pitch at the Mets game. On your really hard sets, at most you might want to lock out one or two reps at the very end to catch your breath and get another one. I don’t think it’s necessary but sometimes it’s fun to do in the heat of battle. Just don’t make a habit of doing it if you want be in the game for the long haul.

Now, before I go any further I need to point out that I’m talking about assistance work here. If you’re working up to a 3-5 rep max on some kind of press, squat or deadlift then by all means, lock out each rep if you want to. On heavy squats, that would actually be safer. It will allow you to reset the proper position at the top of each rep and quickly go through your mental checklist of what you need to do before descending into the next rep. That is a must for safety. But for mindless exercises like one arm rows and dumbbell presses, pump reps will always be safer.

Finally, we have speed reps. It’s been stated by a few intelligent strength coaches that if you are an athlete training for speed and explosiveness, you should stop all of your sets when the rep speed slows down. This is a very valid argument. If you asked me to I could tell you why this is 100% correct and you should do it 100% of the time. But it’s also hard to qualify unless you have a skilled coach watching each of your sets. It’s even harder to do in a group setting when you are training 10-20 athletes. And most importantly, it’s just not as much fun. Athletes love to compete. It’s, umm, why they’re athletes. That means they will compete in everything they do ala Michael Jordan. The weight room will be no different. So if Johnny does a set of eight with the 120’s I can guarantee you that when his training partner and teammate grabs those bells he has a goal of nine reps set in his mind before he even begins the set. And as a coach or trainer you can’t tell him to drop the weights or end his set because the weight is moving too slowly. That creates a shitty atmosphere.

That’s not to say you can’t compete with speed reps, but you have to get creative. Maybe instead of reps you do timed sets of 20 seconds. The reps are all done as fast as possible with perfect form. The goal is to get more reps in twenty seconds. Guys can try to beat each other and beat their PR’s from week to week. Now, that’s a great way to make speed reps effective and fun. I highly recommend you give it a try.

Final Recommendations

So how should you do your reps? I advise that you always use Compensatory Acceleration and try to explode the concentric or lifting portion of the exercise as fast as humanly possible. Imagine that there is a piece of wood at your sticking point that you must drive the weight through like Bruce Lee punching through a brick. If you hit the wood slowly it will never break and you’ll be stuck. You have to explode through it. Never, ever lower the weights slowly for some kind of timed count. That’s nonsense and reserved for internet strength coaches who have never trained anyone. Lower it under control but consciously use the stretch reflex instead of trying to negate it. That’s more natural and will make you more explosive and athletic.

For the most part I recommend more of a pump style on most assistance exercises. This will keep you a lot safer and in the game a lot longer. The last rep should look exactly like the first rep of a set albeit slightly slower. But the form can never be allowed to deteriorate. Never fail mid rep, but stop one or two shy of failure. Beginners, weak maggots and pussies should all train to failure. That’s because you have to learn what hard work is and know what failure actually is before you can stop a rep or two shy of it. These guys should also lock out each rep at the top very briefly just so that they know what “text book form” is before they start modifying it.

Everyone else should pump ‘em out, hard and fast.

Please leave your comments below.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Muscle Building, Strength & Conditioning | 9 Comments

The Main Ingredient

November 16, 2009

cheick kongo The Main Ingredient “Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price.”
– Sun Tzu

Did you know that you can get down to single digit bodyfat and look like an elite level pro athlete in just three easy, twenty minute workouts per week? And you can do it while eating whatever you want? It’s true…cuz I heard it on the radio… and read it on the internet.

Eight minute abs. That’s right folks, in just eight minutes a day you can get the abs of Cheik Congo (pictured). All it takes is a quick crunch workout. No need to worry about your diet or doing any exercises that actually jack up your metabolism and burn fat.

Six minute muscle. Jay Cutler look out. Because some lazy schmuck is gonna embarrass you right off the stage next year by training no more than 18 minutes per week.

Four minutes to super strength. Wait til Chuck Vogelpohl and Louie Simmons find out that they wasted all those years and could have gotten so much stronger with significantly less time and effort.

Two minute conditioning. Poor Tito Ortiz. All those wasted trips to Big Bear in the high altitude. If only he had known that hard work was out of style and that he could have been in even better shape if he cut his training time down to two minutes per day.

That’s what people want. Because not only do they not have the time to train, but they just don’t wanna work that hard. I mean who wants to push the Prowler 25 times straight? Who wants to do high rep squats? Or heavy deadlifts? In the same workout? That sounds really hard…

A marketing guy once sent me an unsolicited email offering me his services. He told me that if I wanted to double my business I had to stop being honest. I had to make it seem like my workouts were easy, that getting in shape didn’t require much work and that the whole process would be painless and effortless.

To his point I put very little time and effort into my reply…

Fuck.

Off.

Getting in shape is brutally hard work. I don’t give a shit what all the scam artists and marketing scumbags tell you. If you can’t handle the truth then you’re destined to be soft and weak forever.

If you’re twenty percent body fat right now and desperately want a six pack you had better be prepared to diet your face off and work harder than you ever have in your entire life. When everyone is drinking beer at the football tailgate party on Sunday you’re drinking a gallon of water. And when the hot dogs go on the grill, you’re gonna have to pull out a steamed chicken breast and broccoli, which you prepared that morning, just like you do with all your meals for the day, every morning of every day. And you’re going to do that EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR SIXTEEN WEEKS STRAIGHT.

Don’t have time to do hill sprints after work? Then you gotta set your alarm clock a half hour earlier and get up while it’s still dark out. And when your strength training workout ends at night, the fun is just beginning for you. Because now you have to do a conditioning circuit of kettlebell swings, jump rope, mountain climbers, squat thrusts and sled dragging.

And let me tell you something else… NOBODY gets ripped in three workouts per week. If you want to see really significant fat loss you need to be putting in a minimum of five sessions per week . For some of you 8-10 would be even better. That could be three weight training workouts, three brutal conditioning sessions and two or three easier cardio/conditioning workouts.

Sucks, I know. But you said you wanted to get ripped. Be careful what you wish for. Because now you gotta earn it, or be looked at as a failure in the eyes of everyone you told.

I’ve seen fat fucks get on a bodybuilding stage in 20 weeks. But they didn’t say they “wanted” to do it. They said they were “going” to do it. And they did all that was necessary to achieve that goal. Which means, in the eyes of most people, their lives were pretty miserable for five months. It means no unplanned cheat meals and undying, round the clock dedication. But these people had the drive that most people don’t and were actually willing to work for something.

Wanting and doing are two completely different things. We all want a lot of things. But how many of us actually achieve our goals? How many are willing to put in the hard work necessary to reach the top?

“Twenty weeks?! That’s a lot of dieting and hard work. I can commit to twelve weeks but not twenty.”

Then go fucking play PlayStation and watch another episode of CSI. What do I give a fuck?

No matter what anyone tells you there is no replacement for hard work. No training system, no diet, no machine, no gimmick and no supplement.

But most people fear hard work more than they fear death. They simply don’t have it in them.

How many times have you gone to a public gym and seen someone squat or deadlift? About as often as you see hot chicks during day light hours I bet.

Better yet, when was the last time you saw someone do a good morning? Now that’s a hard, uncomfortable exercise. Who wants to subject themselves to that? Bent over rows? They hurt your back. Standing military presses?! Who wants to stand? You need to be comfortably seated with lumbar support while “working out.”

Plus, all these exercises take too long to perfect and the learning process can be very frustrating. Much easier to just jump on a machine, right? I mean, you’re at the gym to burn some calories, not learn a new skill, after all. Power cleans? Only a genius with the mental acuity of Albert Einstein could possibly learn to do those properly. Who has the time for that?

What “hardgainers” are actually willing to turn off The Real World and go to sleep an hour earlier to accelerate the muscle building process? Or have what it takes to force feed themselves at the most inconvenient times of day and sneak protein shakes in between classes?

Very few.

Unlike getting shredded, building muscle doesn’t require 6-10 workouts per week. Most hardgainers can get great results in three workouts and everyone else will do great with four sessions per week. But it’s still a 24 hour a day job that requires a monumental effort.

We are all brainwashed to believe that you can get bigger and stronger and leaner in a very short time, with very little effort and even less dedication.

But nothing could be further from the truth, my friends.

The only way to achieve physical greatness is through brutally hard fucking work.

End of story.

No go earn it.

Please leave your comments below.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Fat Loss, Motivation, Muscle Building, Strength & Conditioning | 72 Comments

The Unmaking of an Athlete: Part 2

November 15, 2009

derek jeter The Unmaking of an Athlete: Part 2 Originally written For Elite Fitness Systems in 2004

When Part One of this article was written a few years ago the focus was on college strength coaches. Unfortunately the unmaking of an athlete begins long before college. It starts at a very young age with uninformed but well intentioned parents. By doing what they think is best for their kids; many parents actually end up destroying their children’s athletic futures. For this story to be complete we have to go back to the beginning.

The father of three high school aged boys I used to coach is one such example of the type of parent I am referring to. Paul is a father who lives vicariously through his kids and demands that they excel in whatever sport they play. He picked wrestling and baseball as their chosen sports to specialize in from a young age. The reasoning for this, he told me, was that “White kids have a much better chance of achieving greatness in those sports than they do in football or basketball.” Fun was not an issue; the improved chance of long term success was all that mattered. Whether or not they liked football or basketball was of no concern to him, he picked their sports and that is what they would play.

They were in several baseball leagues and a number of wrestling schools, often rushing from one to the other, inhaling a fast food burger for dinner in the car between practices. On many nights after they went through their training sessions with me they would go home and be forced to do several hundred more pushups and sit ups. This was because Paul didn’t like my approach of keeping their training sessions under an hour. He thought the volume was too low and they needed to do more. Other nights they would have to run a few miles or take a couple hundred swings in the batting cage.

I explained how the long distance runs were detrimental to size and strength gains and actually had no benefit to either wrestling or baseball because they train the wrong energy system. He refused to listen. When I told him I would have to stop training his kids if they continued to do this, he told me it would stop but snuck it in behind my back. These kids were not allowed a normal social life, because athletic excellence was the number one priority in their lives. The father was banned from Little League baseball and several other town organizations. He was an embarrassment to his children and himself but he didn’t care.

On his final trip to my gym, Paul pushed me too far and I had to escort him out of the building and ban him permanently from the premises. He took his kids with him and I haven’t seen them since. I hear they are working out in their basement and doing more running in a day than Forrest Gump. The sad part is that these are two great kids who have had their lives and athletic careers destroyed by an overzealous parent.

Last week I received a phone call from the mother of a baseball player. She told me her son was a standout shortstop with a great arm who never misses a ball. The only problem, she said, was that he really needed to improve his first step out of the batters box and get just a little more power behind his swing. She said that he needed intensive sport specific training for baseball on a one on one basis.

She was convinced that I was the man that could help him and that with his added speed and power he would be the next Derek Jeter in no time.

Squeezing in the time to train with me would be tough, she informed me, because he is currently playing in three leagues and takes hitting lessons four nights a week in the batting cage they just installed in their backyard. He also goes for two linear speed workouts and two lateral speed workouts a week. Even with all that, he will make the time, she assured me, no matter what it takes. When she finally took a breath and allowed me to speak, the first question I asked was how old her son was. Without hesitating she told me that he was NINE!

This is a trend that we see happening way too often these days. It seems that early specialization is the latest craze sweeping the country. According to a recent news report, the training of young children is now a four billion dollar industry which is growing rapidly. Gyms are popping up with kids weight training programs and speed and agility camps every where you look. It’s on television and talked about on the radio. Unfortunately most of the coaches associated with these programs are just trying to cash in on the latest fad and haven’t a clue as to how to properly prepare an eight year old for his or her athletic future. Parents have been persuaded to believe that they have to get every kind of coach, trainer, and instructor they can find to help give their kids an edge over the competition. They put them in six different leagues at once all in the hopes of creating the next Michael Jordan. Start them early and they will be destined for greatness. After all, it worked for Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters so it will work for your kid too.

Right?

Wrong.

Early specialization in any one particular sport is, in fact, the worst thing for a young child. It actually does more harm than good to their athletic skills. Playing baseball during the spring, football in the fall and basketball throughout the winter will do more to create the next Ken Griffey Jr than only swinging a bat and fielding fly balls all year will. The athletic carryover a young athlete can get from playing a wide variety of sports is huge. Playing as many sports as possible allows kids to develop an enormous capacity of motor skills.

Each sport has different athletic demands and requirements and forces the athlete to call upon different types of strengths, energy systems and neural capacities. NBA superstar Allen Iverson has said he was a better quarterback than he is a point guard. NFL quarterback Michael Vick was a multi sport star throughout his childhood and never specialized in anything. By developing the skills necessary to be an all around good athlete, a child can be better prepared to specialize later in his or her teenage years when it becomes necessary. As my friend and youth training expert, Brian Grasso says, “You have to become an athlete first, before you can become a champion.”

Another thing that needs to be addressed is the concept of “sport specific” training for young athletes. The bottom line is this… there is no such thing as sport specific training! I repeat…there is no such thing as sport specific training! Especially when we are dealing with young kids.

All athletes have similar needs which include improving strength, speed, and flexibility as well as preventing injury. When you think about it, most sports have the same requirements. Some of the common needs of most athletes are the capacity to stabilize the core properly and protect the body from injury, the ability to quickly decelerate and change direction, and the potential to rapidly produce and absorb force. Train hard, train smart, and get stronger. That’s all there is too it. There is no need for anything “sport specific” at an early training age.

Of course, as an athlete gets into his later teenage years he may need to start to implement certain things in his training that may be individual to his sport but this is often the exception and not the rule. The case of pitchers avoiding certain pressing movements is one such example. Hockey players needing to correct the imbalance between the vastus medialis and vastus lateralus that occurs from doing a lot of skating, is another. When over use injuries or imbalances occur from a specific sport they need to be addressed. But for the most part, if kids would focus less on the exact “sport specific” exercises they need to do to improve their jump shots or swings and instead focused solely on getting bigger, stronger, and faster, they would be much better athletes.

In countries such as Russia and Bulgaria, early specialization is looked down upon and avoided at all costs. These countries laugh at the notion that the United States has the best ten year old soccer player or best eight year old tennis star in the world. They know that it doesn’t matter what a kid can do at a very young age because that rarely correlates to long term success or Olympic gold. These countries have learned that early specialization is a recipe for disaster. The Process of Achieving Sports Mastery (PASM) is a system that is used in Russia to create super athletes. The odd thing about it, to most Americans, would be the fact that it forces kids to play as many sports as possible and does not allow for early specialization. Athletes usually begin training programs at age six with a focus on a wide array of running, jumping and tumbling type drills. An athlete can not begin to specialize in a particular sport until at least fifteen or sixteen and in most cases, eighteen.

Through years of research, the Soviets have learned that early specialization results in a much higher incidence of over-use injuries and mental burnout as well as a great deal of inconsistency in an athlete’s performance. They prefer a “multilateral” approach, forcing kids to play as many sports as they can. The children are watched closely and assessed as they mature. Finally, when specialization becomes a necessity in the later teenage years, the athletes will have developed a wide variety of athletic skills and will not have suffered the mental burnout that comes with trying to master one sport from a very young age.

The take home message to parents is to let your kids have fun. They are kids after all. There is no need to try and make them the next Wayne Gretzky just yet. Let them play several sports and learn to enjoy them. If parents put too much pressure on their children, the sport is no longer fun. It is supposed to be a game, not a life or death situation. Kids only learn what we teach them. If children are taught that the pee wee football game on Saturday afternoon is supposed to be a blast, then they will have a blast. But if they are taught that it is a high pressure, can’t lose situation, it will no longer be fun. And when it’s not fun, the chances of them wanting to play long into the future are slim.

Everyone understands the desire to want what’s best for their kids. It’s only natural do all you can to help your children succeed. Sometimes, however, it might be what you don’t do that can actually make all the difference in the world.

Please leave your comments below.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Strength & Conditioning | 5 Comments

The Death of Intervals

November 9, 2009

MMA The Death of Intervals Today I have a guest post from my friends Mike Roussell and Alwyn Cosgrove who just launched Warp Speed Fat Loss 2.0.

Mike: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. First so we all have some perspective, how long have you been a trainer?

Alwyn Cosgrove: I started training people in 1989. Actually 1987 if you count teaching martial arts classes. In 1995 (after college) I went full time. Since day one I’ve been very particular about what I do. I track and tweak everything. When we opened Results Fitness in 2000, we really started to gather a lot of data. We currently have 250 members and we track all their workouts and body comp changes week in and week out.

Mike: So it is like you run your own fat loss studies at your gym?

Alwyn: Exactly. We had read all the studies showing interval training to be superior for fat loss than steady state training. This confirmed what we were seeing with our clients. But I am a big belier in that there is no physiological limit to the amount of weight a person can lose in a week, month, or year so I kept tweaking and tracking the results.

Mike: What has been one of your biggest breakthroughs lately?

Alwyn: One day it hit me — cardiovascular programming is an ass-backwards concept.

I don’t know when I first thought this – but it was confirmed to me when viewing Lance Armstrong’s performance in the New York Marathon.

I’d been taught through my college education and countless training certifications and seminars that cardio vascular exercise was necessary to improve the cardio vascular system and subsequently aerobic performance.

But there seemed an inherent flaw in that argument….

Why didn’t Lance Armstrong – with perhaps one of the highest recorded VO2 max levels in history – win the New York Marathon? Or beat people with lesser aerobic levels than himself?

The greatest endurance cyclist (and possibly endurance athlete) of all time – the seven time Tour De France winner – finished 868th and described the event as the “hardest physical thing” he had ever done.

Runner’s World Magazine actually examined Lance’s physiology (and VO2 max which was tested at 83) and compared them to the numbers of Paul Tergat (the World Record holder and defending NYC Marathon Champion at the time).

They concluded:

“This figure wouldn’t mean much if it weren’t for the pioneering research of famed running coach Jack Daniels, Ph.D., who first published his Oxygen Power tables in 1979– According to Daniels, who’s rarely off by more than a smidgen or two, a max VO2 of 83 is roughly equivalent to a 2:06 marathon”

Based on his other physical qualities the magazine suggested that Lance was capable of running 2:01:11.

The world record at the time was 2:04:55

Lance ran 2:59:36 (and don’t misinterpret me – that’s still a great time). But it’s clear that the physiology didn’t transfer the way event he running community expected.

The flaw in this thinking was looking solely at aerobic capacity — VO2 max – the “engine” as it were. And it’s fair to say that Lance had a “Formula One” engine.

But he didn’t have the structural development for running. Lance was a cyclist – his body had adapted to the demands of cycling. But NOT to the specific demands of running (in fact Lance had only ran 16 miles at once EVER prior to running the marathon). Lance had developed strength, postural endurance and flexibility in the correct “cycling muscles” – but it didn’t transfer to running the way his VO2 max did.

From this example we know that cardio training doesn’t transfer well from one activity to another – and it only ‘kicks’ in because of muscular demand – why don’t we program muscular activity first – in order to create a cardiovascular response. Makes total sense.

So how does this relate to fat loss? We have found that our most successful fat loss programs center around stimulating the muscles to burn more calories not ramping up and down the cardiovascular system. What matters is total calories burn and how much you can increase the person’s metabolism. It is a total shift in thinking.

Mike: Wow. So it is this the death of intervals and cardio? How to you put this into action with clients?

Alwyn: What we have found is so great about this approach is that you burn more calories, lose more weight, while putting a lot less stress on your joints.

Here’s how I like to think about it. Let’s look at traditional interval training which uses running.

Depending on stride length – walking a mile takes about 2000 repetitions and running takes 1000-1500 and will burn on average 100 calories or so.
So if we use an interval training model of running and walking – we’re looking at around 1500 reps to burn 100 calories.

If we take traditional models of caloric burn – this means we’d need to do 35 miles to lose one pound of fat from our interval training efforts discounting the metabolic afterburn for now).

So we have a problem. It’s a very poor “rate of return” on our “rep investment”.

Additionally – running applies a vertical force of 2x bodyweight on the joints of the lower body.

So now we have a dilemma.

Let’s choose a 180lb deconditioned overweight client.
1500 reps x 360lbs = 540,000lbs of force to burn 100 calories. (The 360lbs is 2x 180lbs)

That’s a lot of stress on the joints. Now no one was getting injured, but it seemed like there had to be a better way.

So — we started to think of how we could use different interval training methods other than running to get the same metabolic effect without stressing the joints so much.

We used the airdyne bike, other bikes in order to create a training effect with less load. But whenever you take the bodyweight out of the equation in cardio – you have to work harder to burn the same calories. So this usually needs more reps. So that didn’t seem like a much better idea.

At this point we started using metabolic training with weight training implements/kettlebells and bodyweight in the same interval format.

So a circuit of five exercises, performed three times round (15 total sets) would actually burn more calories than the same time spent doing traditional cardio. That was a plus.
But we could also do sets of 10-15 reps. So we’re looking at 225 total reps (with a force LESS than your bodyweight) as opposed to 1500+ reps at double bodyweight.

We gave it a try. Clients loved it (which was a plus), and actually started to get better results than we were getting with intervals.

So we get more fat loss, less stress on the body, and happier clients. It is a win-win-win. Currently we don’t program traditional interval training our regular fat loss clients anymore.

So, yeah…it is the death of traditional intervals.

Check out the brand new Warp Speed Fat Loss 2.0 HERE.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Fat Loss | 14 Comments

The Unmaking of an Athlete

November 5, 2009

This is an old article from 2004, originally written for Elite Fitness. Since it was quite popular and many of you may have missed it, I figured I would reprint it here today…
****

I sometimes wonder if there are any prerequisites at all to getting a job as college strength and conditioning coach. As the owner of my private athletic training company (Renegade Strength & Conditioning) I have had the opportunity to work with athletes from numerous colleges and universities across the country and have witnessed their disgust with their schools strength and conditioning programs. Some athletes, such as those attending Arizona State, are fortunate enough to have outstanding strength coaches and tremendous programs that they need not look elsewhere for help. Others are not so lucky.

Every August I try to send my athletes back to their respective schools as one of the strongest, fastest, and most well conditioned players on their team. Come December I see the unlucky one’s come back to me weaker, smaller and slower. These athletes have the misfortune of training under some Neanderthal strength coach who hasn’t learned anything new about weight training since the release of Pumping Iron. There have been countless advances in the field of strength and conditioning over the last ten years, yet very few people seem to take advantage of them. It is inexcusable that, in 2004, a college strength and conditioning coach does not have a thorough knowledge of exercise and nutrition and can not properly prepare their teams for competition. If your athletes are losing size and strength, slowing down, and becoming more injury prone I think it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Every college athlete that hires me as their strength coach brings me their schools workout to look at before we get started. Some of the things I see in those programs are absolutely unfathomable.

One such example of the insanity is the baseball player I train whose school conditioning program includes running three miles through the city of Philadelphia ala Rocky Balboa every morning at 6am before lifting. Long distance running is useless for nearly every sport, especially baseball. Baseball players will normally run no more than 90 feet at any one particular time. That 90 foot sprint usually comes only once every half hour or so and only if the player gets a hit. So how, I ask, does running three miles each morning improve your ability to play the game of baseball? The only player on the field who needs real endurance is the pitcher. Baseball is a game of skill and hand-eye coordination and the players need to develop strength and speed. The major leagues are filled with pumped up monsters that hit 500 foot home runs and can bench press a car, yet many college coaches continue to run their players into the ground. Endless distance running will only cause the athletes to lose size, strength and most importantly…games. To get a few more wins this season, ditch the counterproductive marathon training and get your baseball players doing sprints and lifting heavy weights.

Another one of my athletes is a Division 1 field hockey player whose conditioning test on the first day of camp consists of running from New York to Los Angeles and back in under an hour. I am, of course, exaggerating but not by much. The test involves more running in one morning than the girls will run in a seasons worth of games. Field hockey players must be highly conditioned, no doubt, but the best way to achieve that high level of conditioning is not through an outdated approach of long distance running. Coaches who implement this kind of training are preparing their athletes for a marathon, not a stop and go sport such as field hockey. While the athlete’s may be able to run a faster time in the mile, the question is, how does that equate to better performance on the field? The answer is obvious, it doesn’t. There is no sport that consists of running miles at a time.

Most sports involve a combination of sprinting, jogging and even walking. Field hockey is no different and as such, these athletes would be best served to do a mix of interval sprint training and longer 200-400 meter sprints. A colleague of mine who works with several NHL players, arguably the most highly conditioned of all athletes, has found that 400 meter sprints performed three times weekly works wonders for conditioning while avoiding muscle and strength losses.

I once trained a football player whose team workout consisted of no work for the lower back or hamstrings, the most important muscles for sprint speed. I have another athlete whose school training program is 100% machine based. One of my standout football players, who I began training in eighth grade lost nearly forty pounds in his first year at college because the team workout consisted of full body circuit training of 15-20 reps with 30 seconds rest, three days a week, year round! There must have been some strong guys in that lineup. Another amazing training program was the one that had EVERY kid on the team do the exact same weight regardless of bodyweight, strength level or position! The reasoning behind it was they had 50 kids to train and didn’t have time to change the weights.

To those with a good deal of strength training knowledge the above stories may sound like fiction. But trust me they are all true, you can’t make that kind of stuff up. Unfortunately, I have dozens more and could go on forever with similar stories. There are endless mistakes made by strength coaches and head coaches on a daily basis but here are some of the biggest ones and some ways to improve upon them:

1) Excessive endurance training- Nearly every athlete I work with gets run into the ground on a daily basis. This is counterproductive and is usually done because the coaches don’t have the necessary understanding of the body’s different energy systems and how to train them properly. Most sports require speed. Speed can only be improved through proper training of the nervous system and by avoiding excessive endurance work. Too much distance work can convert fast twitch muscle fibers into slow twitch fibers and can actually decrease an athlete’s speed over time.

Unfortunately I’ve seen this happen more times than I care to remember and have watched great athletes have their careers ruined by improper training techniques. If coaches kept in mind the requirements of the sport they are preparing their athletes for, maybe this would not be such a problem. For example, in training an offensive lineman, why would you ever have him run miles at a time or sprint more than ten to twenty yards in practice when you know that he will never run that distance in a game? Unless I am missing something, the point of practice is to get ready for what you will do in a game. The problem, much of the time lies in the fact that head coaches dictate how their team’s running is implemented. Most of the time a head coach does not have a degree in anatomy or physiology or even a general understanding of either. The head coach is required to know the sport inside and out but is rarely an expert in energy system training. If head coaches could check their egos and let a qualified speed and conditioning coach handle this aspect of training they just might add a few more victories to their record.

2) Overtraining- Most coaches have an old school military attitude of “more is better,” and usually end up overtraining their athletes. Spending more than an hour in the weight room is a classic mistake. Performing extra sprints at the end of practice as a form or punishment is another one. By forcing the athletes to run in such a fatigued state, you increase their risk of injury and teach them to adopt improper sprint technique. This combined with three-a-day practices, limited rest times, insufficient nutrition and hydration all leads to a severe state of overtraining.

3) Improper speed training- Anyone who understands how the body works knows that to improve speed you must target the central nervous system (CNS). Proper neural training requires the appropriate amount of recovery time between sprints. The CNS takes five to six times longer than the muscles to recover, a fact which seem to escape most coaches. Running ten forty yard sprints with a fifteen second rest is not speed training, it is time wasting and nauseating. The frequency of high intensity speed training is also too great. Most athletes are forced to perform maximal sprints every day of the week. The great Olympic sprint coach, Charlie Francis, has his athletes perform no more than three max effort sprint days per week and finds anything more than that to be detrimental in speed development.

4) Too many reps in the weight room- Most of the college weight training programs I see focus on sets of 10-15 reps, even for Olympic lifts. Any strength coach who has yet to learn that Olympic lifts are never to be performed for more than five reps should not be working at the college level. Where is the strength work in these programs? With all of the other endurance work the kids are doing the last thing you want to do is turn the time in the weight room into another endurance session. Focus on strength and speed which is best accomplished by using multiple sets of 1-5 reps and heavy weight.

5) Using the wrong exercises- Triceps kickbacks, leg extensions, and pec deck flyes are all exercises that I have actually seen in the programs of Division 1 schools. These exercises are completely useless for any athlete. Strength is built using basic compound movements and heavy weight. Focus on squats, deadlifts, bench presses, military presses, rows, dips, and chins and throw out the machines and isolation movements.

Another mistake is taking kids who have little to no training experience and having them perform power cleans or some other complex lift. By the time most male athletes reach college they have done a decent amount of weight training but that is not usually the case for females. I have heard of schools taking freshman girls and throwing them right into a workout consisting of snatches and split jerks. Just because a girl may be superstar Division 1 athlete does not mean she is ready to start doing Olympic complexes. Beginners should always train like beginners regardless of the situation.

6) Improper exercise form- Even if you utilize the proper rep scheme, and train heavy on the compound exercises listed above it is all a waste if your exercise form is horrendous. In the college weight rooms I’ve been in, I’ve seen people bench press with their asses a foot and a half off the bench and have seen more varieties of a hang clean than I ever knew existed. As a strength coach it is your job, above all else, to at least be able to teach your athletes proper exercise form and help them avoid injury.

7) Doing conditioning work before weight training- The point of lifting weights is to get stronger. To do so you should be as fresh as possible upon entering the weight room so you can train at your maximal capacity. Running and doing conditioning drills immediately before lifting drains your glycogen stores and saps your energy, leaving you weak and unmotivated, not exactly the way you want to feel before a heavy workout. Completing an exhausting two hour practice and then going straight to the weight room for some heavy squats is also a great way to get injured.

8] Training the whole team with the same workout- You would be amazed at how many schools use the exact same program for every player on the team regardless of position. Why would a quarterback train exactly like an offensive lineman? Why would a pitcher do the exact same workout as the designated hitter? It makes no sense. Even though all athletes share a common need for improved strength, the needs for each player can sometimes be very different, especially when it comes to conditioning and speed work, and the training programs should reflect that. When it really gets to be appalling is when the weights to be used on a certain exercise are already written in ahead of time. Some workout sheets will say something like: Bench Press- 3 sets x 10 reps x 225 pounds. So the 150 pound kicker who has never lifted before and the 375 pound nose tackle who has spent his life in the gym are supposed to do the same exact weight. It will staple one of them to the bench and be a joke for the other; even a first grader could tell you that. This is one glaring mistake I will never understand.

9) Never changing the workout- Too many schools use the same workout month after month and year after year. They have an in season program and an off season program and the workouts NEVER change. Every year, for a good laugh, a Division 1 baseball player I train brings me his teams’ workout book at the start of each season. For four years straight, it was the exact same three-day-a-week workout, fifty two weeks a year! Talk about boredom and burn out. I would go absolutely insane if I did the same workout for more than a few weeks straight, never mind four years. If you are getting paid to write workouts for a team, the least you could do is put a little thought into them and add some variety.

10) Constant negativity- After many years working as a strength and conditioning coach I know that most athletes do not respond well to constantly being verbally berated. It is, of course, part of the job, you have to toughen the kids up and earn their respect. But when they hate you and no longer enjoy coming to practice or the weight room, you have ruined what should have been a great experience for them and you have just lowered the performance output of your athletes. I appreciate a hardcore, militant attitude and train most of my athletes in this manner. However we do have fun and lighten up when the work is done. At the end of the day, everyone needs positive reinforcement once in a while or they will just give up or lose interest. It’s human nature. Look into it.

The intention of this article was not to bash all college strength coaches and head coaches, because, as I stated earlier there are many great ones. It was simply a way of trying to get through to those that have been stuck in their outdated ways for far too long. Hopefully it opened some eyes and will cause at least a few people to take a step back and rethink their strength and conditioning programs. Properly trained athletes win more games, which as a coach, is always your goal. More importantly, when an 18 year old kid puts his or her athletic future in your hands, it is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The training you give them over the next four years could literally make or break their careers and shape the rest of their lives. Think about that before heading for the copy machine to rehash the same useless workouts you’ve been using forever.

Please leave your comments below.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Strength & Conditioning | 14 Comments

Tap or Nap

November 3, 2009

RearNakedChoke Tap or Nap While everyone’s busy searching for the perfect rep scheme or newest miracle supplement, one of the greatest progress boosters of all is constantly overlooked. The concept of taking an afternoon nap is foreign to most of us yet it can do more for your training than 90% of the other minutia bullshit people waste their time obsessing on.

There’s a popular MMA t-shirt that reads “Tap or Nap.” While the intended meaning of the t-shirt is obvious, this slogan can also be applied to your training. Taking naps is so important that if you don’t find the time for one you may be tapping sooner than you think… to injury, illness, or frustration.

That’s because that afternoon fatigue that sets in for almost all of us is a normal thing. It’s your body’s way of telling you it needs a rest. You can ignore it and just battle through the rest of your day. Or you can drink some coffee to mask the symptoms. But over the long haul it will catch up with you one way or another. That much is inevitable.

The smartest plan is to take a short nap. Twenty minutes is ideal but if you’re pressed for time, ten minutes is better than nothing.

Now right about now the majority of people reading this are probably thinking they’re too busy to take a nap or work in a job that doesn’t allow it or that one way or another they just can’t afford the luxury. And that may or may not be true.

Americans pride themselves on how hard they work. And “hard” is judged in hours. It’s a badge of honor to work 70 hours per week; 90 is even better. Only slackers work 40 hour weeks these days, right?

With all there is to worry about who has time to nap? It’s just not that important.

Or is it? If I told you to get some fresh air and sunlight every day you wouldn’t argue. If I told you to eat fruits and vegetables you wouldn’t tell me I was crazy. So why is the concept of taking a nap still so frowned upon? Because, it my opinion, it’s just as important as anything else.

When your body needs rest you should let it rest. Most of us ignore these signals and then end up having to use sleeping aids to fall asleep at a later time because we are over tired and the body’s homeostasis has been disturbed. A short nap will reenergize you and improve your focus for the rest of the day, making you even more productive. It will also help increase growth hormone secretion and restore all of your body’s depleted functions to a state of homeostasis.

While the majority of us continue to resist the idea there is a portion of the population that has begun to make the shift. Several companies have recently recognized the importance of afternoon naps and have begun allowing employees to take them. Some of these organizations have even gone so far as to add rooms dedicated to power naps. That’s because they know that productive employees make them more money, and productive employees are well rested employees.

Taking a regular afternoon nap will help you recover faster from training, it will help you build muscle faster, it will boost your immune system and your focus and will lead to an overall improved feeling of well being and health.

My advice is to start looking for times to squeeze one in. If you can’t, you can’t. But many of you can and I suggested you start doing so today. The optimal time is right around when the mid afternoon fatigue sets in. Another great choice is to take a nap immediately after training. This is something that I have recommended to my clients for years and something that many well known bodybuilders have always been big proponents of.

I must warn you, though, that the sense of guilt will make your nap difficult to enjoy at first. But you’ll have to get over it.

Secondly, your wife, girlfriend or mother may have a problem with it. As I already mentioned, we have all been led to believe that no one in this country has “earned” the right to take a nap. This is an obstacle you will have to overcome with your house mate. But explain why you need to do this and be firm. No matter how much they oppose the idea… you’re napping. I know a guy who’s been married for three years and his biggest complaint is that he hasn’t taken a nap since the wedding. And he’s absolutely miserable about it. Don’t become that guy.

Please leave your comments below.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Muscle Building | 21 Comments

Do You Have to be Fat to be Strong?

November 2, 2009

Guest Post by Mike Westerdal of Lean Hybrid Muscle

mariusz pudzianowski Do You Have to be Fat to be Strong? Many of you know that I compete as an amatuer powerlifter. One thing I’ve noticed over the past few years is that there are a lot of guys that believe the bigger you get and the more bodyweight you carry the stronger you will get. This was pretty much undisputed in the past.

All you had to do was look up all the world records in the squat, bench and deadlift and you’d find that the super heavyweights weighing 300 lbs and more dominated all the record boards regardless of age.

I’m not sure exactly when it started happening, but the tides are turning. When you look up the powerlifting rankings you’ll see that today the top numbers at many of the biggest powerlifting events each year are not always held by the heaviest guys.

In fact on forums across the Internet people are arguing that the strongest guys in the world today are representing the 198, 220, 242 and 275 lbs classes.

And I’m not talking about short fat guys that weigh less than their taller counterparts. These are lean powerlifters that look like they compete in bodybuilding.

The world famous strength coach and owner of Westside Barbell Louie Simmons is an advocate of having his powerlifters push a weighted wheelbarrow and do sled drags. You can read about it in many of his articles.

What does this have to do with Lean Hybrid Muscle, Mike? Well, there’s a new breed of powerlifters that are taking over and they do cardio! Can you believe that, powerlifters doing cardio? Well they’re doing hybrid cardio or resistance cardio.

Not only are they improving their fitness level, but they are increasing their overall or “absolute strength” which seems to be carrying over to their max strength powerlifting results.

It’s true, times are a changing in the powerlifting world. Pretty soon the word powerlifter may just bring to mind a lean hybrid muscle machine instead of the stereotypical big fat bald guy with a goatee. Hybrid cardio or type III muscle training has a lot to do with it in my opinion.

Sometimes I train with an elite powerlifter named Mike Schwanke over at Tampa Barbell. Here’s another example of a lighter guy giving the heavyweights a run for their money. He squats over 1K and has deadlifted 800 lbs. Even though he’s a powerlifter he implements cardio and hybrid conditioning so that he can reduce his bodyfat while building strength.

Guys also use hybrid conditioning to improve weak spots, to be more adaptable, improve their overall fitness levels and to boost and speed up their bodies’ capacity to recover.

The sled pull, tire flip, farmer’s walk, wheelbarrow push and plate lifting are some of the more common hybrid exercises around. In doing any of these exercises you start out with a goal of doing it for maybe ten minutes or so, with a long-term goal of working up to about 30 minutes.

It’s important to remember this part: Once you reach 30 minutes, don’t keep striving to be able to do longer stretches of time. Rather, enhance your capacity by increasing the weight, not the amount of time you’re doing the exercises. This is where you’ll really see improvements in your performance.

One of the great things about Hybrid cardio as it relates to muscle building is that it involves compound exercises that require you to use multiple muscle groups and multiple skills (balance, coordination, etc.) at the same time. By doing compound exercises you’re not only improving your all around fitness level but you’re also significantly lowering your risk of injuring yourself.

Lots of bodybuilders get totally caught up in building size, focusing on doing the same exercises over and over again. By keeping the focus just on the muscles that you see in the mirror (the “beach muscles”) and not training the core, they are setting themselves up for injury.

Powerlifters are equally guilty on totally concentrating on their maximum strength without paying much attention to their hearts or work capacity as we discussed earlier. If you can squat 700 pounds you should be able to squat 225 for 15 reps without getting totally winded.

Many powerlifters myself included could use the fat burning benefits of incorporating some hybrid cardio training which as a bonus will develop the type III muscle fiber. Maybe there’d be a little more gas in the tank by the time the deadlift rolls around on meet day.

That’s another great thing about hybrid cardio/muscle building exercises, you can do them with whatever you have handy. If you don’t happen to have a sled hanging around the house, no worries just push a vehicle around.

And if you aren’t able to do that, then maybe you can flip a tire or attach some rope to a piece of plywood, put a bunch of bricks on it and start dragging it around. With lean hybrid muscle building workouts, you’re not tied to a specific routine or exercise.

It’s not a requirement that you do specific exercises or follow a particular routine-it’s more important that you do “strongman” type exercises in addition to your current routine that are really going to challenge you.

Even if you live in the heart of the city you can incorporate hybrid muscle exercises into your training routine. The farmer’s walk can be done anywhere. Just grab a couple of heavy dumbbells and start walking. As you improve, use heavier dumbbells.

If the weather is lousy then you can do it at the gym. At the gym you can also carry around plates instead of dumbbells, if you’d like. Kettle bells are great for doing these exercises too. You can use them to do snatches, the farmer’s walk or any number of other compound exercises.

To wrap up, by including Hybrid muscle training exercises into the training routine, dangerous imbalances-and the injuries that often accompany them-can be avoided. Adding some of these exercises into the mix can also help keep boredom at bay and can also keep you from getting burned out on training.

You’ll also be giving yourself a serious competitive edge and as an added bonus, because the body is in all-around better physical condition, you’ll also find that you recover more rapidly and will probably have more energy too.

Click HERE to get your FREE “Rapid Transformation” video series.

Written by jasonferruggia · Filed Under Muscle Building, Strength & Conditioning | 7 Comments

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