Fitness Enhancement Personal Trainer Neil Geddes, who is based in Aspley Brisbane has come up with some great tips on how to train smarter. Neil is a highly experienced Trainer, dad of three kids and our Fitness Enhancement Aspley Franchisee. He also covers other suburbs in Brisbane such as Albany Creek and Bridgeman Downs.
Once upon a time, there was a man who believed that a training session wasn’t over until the tank was completely empty. That you should feel drained and almost sick after a workout in order for it to be effective. That man is now carrying a plethora of injuries and is not living happily ever after…
If you guessed that the aforementioned man was me, you would be right. For the longest period of my life, I always believed that my training had to be full throttle. All or nothing. 100% every time. For those of you who read our last article on Prehab, you may remember that I am essentially a human pretzel of injuries. That was my reward for the “no pain, no gain” mentality. Admittedly, I spent several years preparing my body (albeit incorrectly in hindsight) for Special Forces selection and this alone took a heavy toll. But do you know what the irony of this is? My performance today, even with all my injuries, is far superior to my performance of yesteryear. My body composition today, is far leaner, athletic and more functional than that of the bull headed, 10-foot tall and bullet proof kid trying to prove something to the world.
So what’s changed?
Well for starters, every workout now starts with 10 minutes of Prehab. In the bad old days, a ‘warm up’ consisted of going for a jog and stretching out the parts of the body (that were about to get destroyed for upwards of three hours) for about 1 or 2 minutes. Not my finest moments… I now have a number of Functional Mobility and activation exercises specific to my training routines that I employ before getting under way.
Second, I have learnt the value of finishing a training session feeling better than when I started. I train to feel good. To feel revitalized. To feel alive. That’s not to say there aren’t days when I train harder or train to failure, it just means that these workouts are the exception rather than the rule. And when I do, the appropriate Prehab and recovery mechanisms are in place to support the additional workload. And this creates a nice little Segway to my third and final point…
Recovery. There is no point training if you are never going to allow your body to recover. You will not make any gains, if you continually break down muscle fibers through training, but never let them heal. It is in this healing process that your muscles become thicker, harder and hence stinger. Without recovery, you will simply work already damaged muscle fibers, and guess what that leads to? Injury.
So if you’re currently one of those people training 6 days a week, ending every session feeling completely void of energy, pushing every set to failure, then I encourage you to stop, take a breath and re read every thing we’ve just spoken about. Because if ten years ago, someone had taken the time to share this information with me, things could have been very different for me…
Finish your session feeling better than when you started and train smarter, not harder.