As this is my first blog post, I think I should share some ideas and concepts that I work towards with my personal training clients and my athletes.
As a basic overview I will share the “laws” that I stick to when writing a program or training session:
Law #1
“The body works as one unit”
I was once told in a seminar I attended a few years ago “stop thinking of the body as having 650(ish) muscles, start thinking of the body as having one muscle, and 650(ish) parts and strands to it.
This made a lot of sense to me and is pretty much how my philosophy has gone since. We are not made up of bits and pieces sewn together like Frankenstein’s monster. We are one solid unit in where every piece of the puzzle interconnects and has an effect on the piece above and below, with facial lines that connect each and every muscle to one another.
The brain does not recognise muscles, it recognises movements and as such we should train the body in movement patterns and rarely isolate movement, after all, we go to the gym to prepare ourselves for what’s in the big bad world right?
movement patterns such as:
- squatting
- Lunging
- Pressing or pushing
- Pulling
- Hinging
- Twisting
If your goal is muscle mass and you want “big biceps”, that’s okay, I get it, Fear not you can do your bicep curls. Just make sure you prioritise your big movements, and I’m about to tell you how with the next law.
Law #2
“complex movements should go at the start of the session”
so this for me seems pretty common sense, but nether there less needs addressing. It should stand to reason that you are more tired at the end of a session than at the start, therefore you should always start with the most complex movement first, so as you tire out you’re not doing something potentially dangerous under fatigue.
And this goes back to our guy wanting big biceps and still wants to do his bicep curls.
This may be an example of his session:
deadlift 3 sets 8 reps
Pull-ups 4 sets 8 reps
Bent over row 4 sets 8 reps
bicep curls 4 sets 8reps
There you have it a simple workout, the most complex movement at the start, and using smaller muscle chains until you get to the very isolated, single jointed bicep curl.
So you can still do your curls, but make sure you use a big compound movement before going into the smaller single jointed isolation movement.
Law #3
“get on the floor and crawl/roll”
crawling and rolling around on the floor is how we learned to get upright as babies, why not go back to basics? Okay, most people feel silly crawling around the gym, but honestly, your mobility, core stability and strength will all thank you, all for just a few minutes of crawling or rolling.
Most of my sessions will have some type of groundwork in, whether its bear crawls, Turkish get-ups, rolling, or even just standing up and getting down in different ways.
And trust me it’s more tiring than you might think! Your shoulders ache, you sweat like hell, fun for the whole family! Plus we can go back to law 1 and you are training the body as one unit!
So that’s my first three laws of fitness, obviously I’ve barely scratched the surface, but hopefully through a series of blogs I will try and shed some light that is the darkness, and the mis-conceptual world of the fitness industry.
