In my years working as a Glasgow personal trainer I have learned that there are 7 essentials to successful training. The more closely your training follows the following points the better your training plan is and the more likely you will be successful.
1) Choose multi joint movements over single joint ones.
Most gyms are cluttered with people doing curls, lateral raises, leg extensions, tricep kickbacks and a bunch of other exercises undesirable. Loading your session up with these kinds of exercises is a really bad idea for several reasons. Firstly it"s a huge waste of time to train very few muscles with a single joint exercise when you can train a ton of muscles in the same amount of time doing a multi-joint movement. Unless you are starting to rehabilitate an injury to a specific muscle it makes very little sense.
Secondly your body is built to work as a single unit, not lots of separate component parts, so you should train it that way. Training big multi joint movements teaches all the muscles involved to work together to maximize force production and you don"t get this effect with isolation exercises. Thirdly, isolating muscles is a great way to develop imbalances between muscle groups and around joints. Training has to be balanced, front to back, left to right and top to bottom and it"s unlikely that you will get that if your training is full of isolation movements. Spending twice the time on "blasting your biceps" as you do on your triceps will create an obvious aesthetic and functional asymmetry in your upper arm that will eventually pull joints out of their natural alignment and lead to injury problems.
If this is how you train then you need to find someone to write you a good training plan before it is too late. If your training goal is a malformed physique, functional weakness, bad posture, slow progress and increased risk of injury then isolation exercises are EXACTLY what you should be doing. If not then choosing big multi joint lifts like deadlift, squat, pull ups and dips will have you on a fast track to a strong, balanced and healthy physique.
2) Consistency is key.
It is a COMPLETE waste of time training hard for 3 weeks on a random burst of enthusiasm, then missing 2 weeks, then getting back into it for a week, then missing 10 days, then squeezing in a session before missing another week and a half. You might as well not bother. Training builds on itself, but only if done consistently and over an extended period of time. If you keep missing chunks of training for whatever reason your attempt to reach your goals will degenerate into a soul destroying game of snakes and ladders and you will end up right back where you started, regardless of how hard you train just because you only train intermittently. You simply have to prioritise your training ahead of all the non essential distractions in your life and make sure you train 2 or 3 times a week, EVERY week, to get the results you want.
Far too many people are looking for the short cut to the body they want and spend months/years chasing promises of easy results from every bit of gimmick equipment, fad diet and nonsensical training method that comes along without every knuckling down to any prolonged quality training. Train simply, train hard and train regularly. That is the fastest way to success; that is the short cut.
3) "Train" don"t "work out"
The gym is not a social club so you shouldn"t treat it like one. If you do you won"t get any meaningful results and you will annoy the people who are in the gym for the right reason. If your idea of a "gym session" is a meet and greet followed by a couple of phone calls and a debate on the best reality TV programme sprinkled with a couple of sets of this and that all done while wearing a co-ordinated gym outfit then you are completely missing the point. If you want to hang out and meet people then throw a party. The gym is a place to work to get the body you want and if you are not all business in the gym your chances of making the improvements you want are slim.
4) Have a clean, healthy and balanced diet.
Your diet does not have to be fancy; it just can"t be obviously bad. Training for weight loss makes almost no difference if your diet if awful. The best training plan in the world is powerless against constant fish suppers, chocolate, crisps and binge drinking. Until you tidy up your diet there is little point training to lose weight because it won"t happen, you will stay fat, you will blame the training and you will give up. If you do get your diet organised, then add good training to the mix AND stay committed to the process the excess fat will fall off. If you only remember one thing from this article remember this, YOU CANNOT OUT TRAIN A BAD DIET, EVER.
5) Have a plan.
You have to have a plan because constantly changing your sessions removes the possibility of accurately monitoring progress. Monitoring progress is essential and you need continuity in your training to do it. The idea of muscle confusion, never doing the same session twice to "keep the muscle guessing" makes little long term sense. Your training should be like an ongoing scientific experiment. Your should always be monitoring how you are responding to each block of training and making changes to fine tune your training to maximise the effectiveness of it.
Even worse is the idea of "seeing what you feel like when you get into the gym". This typically leads to guys doing 3 sets of 10 on preacher curl, bench press and lateral dumbbell raise, before finishing with a bit on the crunch machine. It also leads to lifting the same weight, and looking the same way you did when you started training 4 years ago! That said, you don"t want to fall into the equally hazardous trap of finding a session that you like and hardly changing it. Do you always use the same movements, the same reps, sets, rest periods, total volume, equipment, type of training and number of movements per session? Most people do, and that"s why most people get stuck at a certain level and with a certain physique.
You can"t stand still in the gym and I don"t mean this literally but figuratively. Your body adapts to the stress you put upon it, so it you lift 50kg for a particular lift your body will become strong enough to handle 50kg, but not much more. Training for a goal means moving forwards towards that goal, it means constantly asking more of yourself to ensure your body is always developing greater strength, power, endurance, speed, flexibility, balance or lower levels of body fat, whatever it is you are training for. Now the idea of "moving forward" in training terms is a gradual process. It does not mean that you have to lift more tomorrow than you did today, but it does mean that you should be striving to lift more next month than you are lifting this month.
It also does not mean that you need to be lifting "60kg" next month compared to "50kg" this month, small increases applied gradually over time add up to substantial gains and that should be your goal, in whatever you are training for. Sticking with the same programme month after month, year after year is like only reading one book over and over again, after a while you won"t get any more out of it and you need to try something else.
Another trap that "No Plan" training leads to is the ego problem. You should know what weight you will be lifting for each exercise, give or take a little bit, BEFORE you get to the gym. Any alterations in the plan should be based ENTIRELY on how you feel. The last thing that should alter your plan is what the guy next to you is doing, but you see this all the time. Guys either avoiding an exercise altogether because they are not lifting as much as some other guy, or trying to keep up with him. Who cares what anyone thinks about you when you are training, it doesn"t matter.
6) Avoid low intensity aerobic training to lose body fat.
The idea of staying below 60% of your maximum heart rate during aerobic exercise to maximise fat burning is a training philosophy that is over 20 years out of date. More recent research has demonstrated that total energy cost of each exercise bout is far more important than grams of fat metabolised during exercise. Of particular importance is the energy cost of a training session AFTER you have finished your training session.
Higher intensity training methods, specifically circuit resistance training and interval training create a lot of metabolic disturbance in the body that you don"t get with low intensity aerobic training. This means that your metabolism is artificially elevated for an extended period of time (36 hours or more) after training, which can equate to anywhere between 400 and 600 extra calories burned AFTER training. This added to the number of calories you burn DURING training means that the total energy cost of hard circuit or interval training is way beyond that of low intensity aerobic training because as soon as you step of the treadmill almost no more calories are burned.
7) Don"t choose fixed path machines.
Fixed path machines are bad for a few reasons. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the path the machine wants to move through is necessarily going to agree with your joints. Free weights and cable machines are far more joint friendly and allow your movement patterns that are specific to your physiological make up. This minimise stress on the joints while maximising the stress on the muscles (where is should be) and that means less joint injuries and better results.
Secondly, fixed path machines require very little control, they are just a mindless out and back proposition and this does nothing to develop overall strength and joint health. The requirement to control a dumbbell (for example) AND lift it means ALL the muscles around the joints involved are working hard, and together to get the job done. In a similar machine exercise only the big muscles that lift the weight are working, not the smaller stabilisers. Weak, untrained stabiliser muscles mean that whatever strength you develop in the gym will not transfer onto any real world activity because without the machines you won"t be able to control whatever object you are trying to move and you will be as weak as a kitten.
Thirdly, fixed path machines generally require no involvement from the core muscles. For example leg press is a staple exercise for most gym users and a lot of guys can push a lot of weight with it. The real question is how much weight can they push with their legs WITHOUT the leg press machine, how much can they squat? Normally the answer is not much, and it"s not because the big muscles in their legs are not used to a lot of weight, it"s because their cores are so weak they can"t keep their spine aligned correctly, then they are trying to push weight WITHOUT a machine to take the strain for them.
Machines might be easier to get started but they will ultimately block your progress because they don"t develop any real world strength while leaving you more open to joint problems. Time spent on them also takes away time you should be using to learn great lifts like the barbell squat.
So there they are, the seven essentials for successful training. I know it is quite a lot to take in, it was more like the seventeen essentials, but I hope you don"t feel swamped by it all. I get really passionate about training and hate to see people waste their efforts by missing one or more of these from their training.
Iain Smith (MPhil/CSCS) owns Standout Gym, an independent warehouse gym in Glasgow focusing on weight loss. He offers small group training as an affordable alternative to Glasgow personal training. Iain is a former international decathlete with 17 years coaching experience. For more information visit his website at www.standoutgym.com
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