Category: Becoming More Active

This category covers things that relate to increasing the amount of physical movement that a person does. We are a mobile species and movement plans a big role in helping us regulate our bodies, our brains, our mood, and our spirit. It can include things about exercise programs, exercise movements, or general mobility such as walking, picking things up, or the activities that make-up our jobs and recreational life.

Shortening Your Life By Too Much Exercise?

I was hanging out with Tony and I mentioned that I figured I was going to die young from a heart attack. Tony agreed so quickly that it kind of scared me. “You think I’m right?” He says “yeah. There’s a cost to all the adaptation that you are forcing your body to go through.” We riff off of that for a while before the conversation returns to something I don’t recall because I was too busy thinking about my rapidly approaching death.

He’s right, there is a cost to adapting to the physical stress I put my body under. Any environmental change forces the body to maintain homeostasis or adjust and create a new stasis, both of these responses require energy. Anytime your body liberates energy from food (digestion and absorption) and anytime it utilizes energy for biological functions, a chemical reaction occurs that gives off pollution in the form of free radicals and other chemicals. We can conclude that anything a person does to increase the amount of energy they use will increase the amount of pollution that is released within the body.

The inverse is also true, anything you do that lowers the amount of energy you utilize will decrease the amount of pollution that is released. The significance of this comes to light when we consider the claims of health practitioners that participating in frequent exercise will increase your health and will increase life expectancy. If their claim is true, exercise must do something to the body that causes it to eventually use less energy as a consequence to having performed the exercise than it uses directly to perform the exercise. Most people experience this benefit as a lowering of the resting heart rate.

Finite Beat Life – I’m not sure about the science behind the belief that the hearts life span is measured in beats vs. age – once it beats that predetermined number of times, it stops working. If this is the case, you should try to lower the amount of work that the heart does. You can either do less work or, you can make the heart stronger so it does more work per beat.

For example, I have a resting heart rate of about 48 beats per minute (BPM). The average resting heart rate is about 72 BPM. At rest, my heart beats 24 fewer times than an average persons – every 2 minutes my heart is saving 1 minute worth of work. My math may be a little off, but that is a saving of about 33%. At rest, I am using 33% less energy because I have trained my heart to work more efficiently. To me, that’s a huge saving of beats; given that most of my day is spent in a resting type state.

It takes a lot of effort to make your heart stronger, but all in all, the amount of beats that are required to lower you resting heart rate to 48 BPM is probably equal to the amount of beats the you save because your heart rate is lower. Lets call it a wash. You are no better off from the finite beat perspective but you do have better overall health due to your more active state. There is a net gain and you are healthier.

However, it requires a lot less to maintain the fitness required to have a resting heart rate of 48 BPM – 3 X 30 minute working segments of working the heart at 150 BPM per week. That works out to be 13500 heart beats (150 X 90). 90 minutes of rest for an average heart = 6480 beats.

When we calculate the daily heart beats for a trained heart and an average heart we get 78300 for trained and 103680 for the untrained. That is a difference of 25380 beats per day. From a finite beats perspective, you are WAY better off having a trained heart because even with the work required to maintain its health, your heart will work about 25% less. This is all good provided your finite beat life is long.

Shortening your life by working out too much – Am I shortening my life by teaching 5 cycling classes and taking two 3 hour bike rides a week? Yes, absolutely. Sure, I’m aging at 2/3rds the rate when I’m at rest, but since I’m exercising 8.5 hours more than I need to maintain a lower rate, I’m created way more internal pollution and excess heart beats than I would if I just worked out at the maintenance level.

4 Ways To Get More Out Of Your Workouts

Four things that will improve your workouts:

Focus on being present during the workout – when you are working out, work out. Focus all of your attention on the task at hand and be mindful of what you are doing. You will not achieve your potential if you do not put 100% of your awareness into your movements.

Increase the intensity – when you are completely present, the intensity of your actions will increase. The more intensely you move, the greater the amount of work you will completely in a given period of time. More work equates to faster results.

Increase the frequency – if you increase the frequency of your workouts, you are going to see an increase in your results even if you keep the volume the same. For example, people experience better results doing 2 25-minute carido sessions a week than doing 1 50-minute session. The same is true for resistance training, you can increase results by doing half the work in 2 workouts instead of all the work in one one workout. This has to do with intensity – you can work out harder for 25 minutes than you can for 50 minutes, and you can lift with more intensity in the early sets than you can in the later sets.

Increase the amount of overall work you are doing – this is a general statement (use the stairs, walk more, etc…) but as it applies to working out, use equipment that forces you to do more work. For example, use a plate machine instead of a pin machine (loading and unloading plates requires a lot more energy than pulling a pin), use dumbbell movements instead of barbell movements because you need to pick the dumbbells up from the rack and return them when you complete the set and place weights on the ground instead of dropping them.

4 Exercises I’ve Recently Added

Wide grip dead lifts on step – I have never done dead lifting before and needed to work on my technique before I could do them without scraping my shine bone. I found that by taking a wide grip and standing on a step I could get some distance between the bar and my shines. They really work my entire back and I feel them on my hamstrings immediately and my quads the next day. Doing them a couple of times a week over the last two months improved my form enough that I was able to lift 225 on Sunday with a shoulder width grip.

The Corner Barbell Press and Push Press. I love these for two reasons. First, my right side is a little stronger than my left so working each in isolation is helping to close the strength gap between them. Second, they really work the obliques and lower back. The truth is, I don’t enjoy doing side bends at all so doing these helps me work these muscles without doing any extra sets. I’m really happy with the results.

Single arm dumbbell press for the same reasons as the corner barbell press. With both of these exercises, I find myself spending more time working and less time resting – each set takes about twice as long to do, but I need less time between sets because one half of the body is recovering while you work the other side. Overall, I think I’m getting a lot more out of my time at the gym and time passes a lot faster when I’m lifting vs. waiting between sets.

ISO legs press shrugs. I LOVE this exercise! One of my favorites right now. The movement of the machine allows me to use really heavy weights while isolating each side of my body. It is ideal for doing drop sets, cheat reps and pause reps. My traps have seen great improvement over the last 3 months since I started doing these.

How To Enjoy RPM If You Are An All Terrain Athlete

Some road, triathlon and mountain bike riders don’t take RPM classes because they don’t like them. I used to be one of these people. Our biggest concern with RPM is that there are a lot of times when you are not working very hard. We’re working on our cardio base by holding a steady heart rate and the RPM class has the participants HR going up and down over and over again. We don’t see it as valuable training for us because we need to ride flat road for hours.

Even though I teach RPM, I still understand this concern and it is legitimate. As an athlete you have workout parameters that need to be followed in order for your training to progress. Unless you have an idea of what the instructor is going to ask you to do next, you cannot adjust your workout on the fly to satisfy these parameters. The outcome is a lost workout and a bad taste for RPM.

This article will outline what RPM is so you training athletes can plan a cycling workout accordingly.

RPM is different from the other group cycling classes in that it is standardized and it follows a formula.

LMI standard:
All of the RPM instructors teach the same choreography and music, RPM 33 at Milton will sound and feel very similar to RPM at South Common or any club that teaches it.
There are a finite number of songs that you will ever hear at an RPM class so you will hear some tracks a number of times. Each time you do a track, you will get better at it.
Once you get good at riding each track you will be able to focus on your form and your effort level making you more successful.

RPM consists of 9 working sections of varying intensities and is regarded as an interval training program.

The participants are encouraged to work with three levels of physical exertion in mind, comfortable, uncomfortable and breathless. These are subjective and determined by the participant.

Songs are 5-6 minutes long. Track length remains fairly consistent between releases.

The Les Mills RPM classes are choreographed using the following formula (each track position serves the same training function on each release):

  • Track 1 Pack Ride – it’s a warm-up
  • Track 2 Pace Track – continuing to warm up and find your top pace
  • Track 3 Hills – seated and standing climbing – first cardio peak
  • Track 4 Mixed Terrain – speed and hill climbing – recover from track 3
  • Track 5 Intervals – quick peddle speed with seated and standing attacks – second cardio peak
  • Track 6 Speed work – series of races to top speed – slight recovery from track 5
  • Track 7 Mountain climb – seated and standing climbing with heavy resistance – third cardio peak
  • Track 8 Ride home – cool down
  • Track 9 Stretching

You are working to the same perceived exertion level for each track position on each release:

  • Track 1 Comfortable
  • Track 2 Almost breathless
  • Track 3 Breathless
  • Track 4 Comfortable
  • Track 5 Breathless
  • Track 6 Uncomfortable
  • Track 7 Breathless
  • Track 8 Comfortable
  • Track 9 Comfortable

There will be some recovery between tracks as songs fade out and new ones buil

Key aspects of the profile are:
Your heart rate should peak three times during the class, track 3, 5 and 7.

Your heart rate should recover almost completely during track 4 and somewhat during track 6.

Expectation of RPM riders:

You work as hard as you need to achieve the recommended level of exertion, recovering or increasing resistance as needed.

How to adjust your workout to make the most of an RPM class (assuming you are there for training and not just the fitness class):
Class lasts about 50 minutes and the last 7-8 minutes of that are cool down and stretching. Arrive early enough to make sure you get the time on the bike that you are hoping for before track 8. Your workout is over at track 8.

  • Track 1 – you will be peddling a lot slower because everyone else will be warming up. Use a lot of tension and treat track one as a seated hill. Make sure your legs are well warmed up. Hold the effort through the break between songs.
  • Track 2 – group peddling speed will be higher during this track. Adjust tension to find training HR. Carry effort to next song.
  • Track 3 – a beat matched track; riders should try and find push point to the beat. There will also be a couple of recovery period throughout the track and seated climb usually follows standing recovery. The best option is to seated climb thought recovery sections and adjust tension as needed to hold your training effort.
  • Track 4 – this is racing and standing climb at your pace, make it whatever you need it to be.
  • Track 5 – faster paced seated and standing attack. I think you should do this track, use it to spike your heart rate. I offer no suggestion for other options but it’s a high energy song so you could probably get away with staying seated the whole time.
  • Track 6 – this is racing at your pace, make it whatever you need it to be.
  • Track 7 – seated and standing climb, beat matched track. Seated climb through the standing recovery sections and adjust tension as needed to hold your training effort.
  • Track 8 – end of workout.

If you have any questions concerning how to modify your workout to better fit with the RPM format, just leave the questions below and I will address them or come to one of my classes and ask me directly.

My First Pay Cheque

Recently I got my first pay cheque from my fitness instructor job. It was for $20 less tax, EI, and Canadian pension.

It was a happy moment for me. This is the first job that I actually had a passion for BEFORE I started doing it. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s also the first job that I have had that I thought that I couldn’t do. Instructing is a skill that I have never had before so it’s completely new to me. I have been a personal trainer, war canoe coach and manager before, but these things are unique and different from instructing.

The hardest part with instructing, at least for me, is modeling proper form on the bike. When I race, I tend to get into whatever position I need to to get the bike moving quickly. Sometimes the back is rounded, sometimes my knees are pointing in, sometimes my head is down looking only a few inches in front of my wheel. This form doesn’t cut it with instructing because when you are leading a class, you can count on some of the participants copying and exaggerating you positioning and habits. My bad habits become the things that injure participants and that isn’t good for anyone.

I also passed my video which means I’m almost a certified RPM instructor. There is some paper work to complete and then it is done. I’m really happy about this because the feedback I got from the reviewer was mostly positive. As far as positioning goes, the only bad tendency I had on the video was a little upper body bouncing on the seated climb; the video was taped at the end of April and I have been working on this flaw since I noticed it. She also mentioned that I need to connect with the participants more and modulate my voice during some of the tracks; both things I am aware of and have been trying to address.

The positive feedback addressed my physical strength on the bike, my high level of fitness and my knowledge of the choreography. I was very pleased with the choreography comment because this was the first time I had ever learned anything like this so I’m still able to learn new skills.

My class this Tuesday night was my best yet. The participants are getting used to my coaching style and they seem to follow the cues I give them. I heard a lot of gasping at the end of track 5 and 7, which is what the choreography calls for and there were a few smiles during tracks 4 and 6. It is a fantastic feeling when it all comes together.

I still need to work on connecting with the class a little more, but the fact that they are following my coaching and positional cuing means I’m getting some of it right. Is it the world class experience that they are hoping to get out of it? Yes for some, not yet for others. But given that it has been 4 months since I took the training, I’m really happy with the progress.

Oh, and the $20 less deductions went to gas for my car.

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity X 2

This week Steve Pavlina posted 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity and 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity – Volume 2 and both are exceptional. 66 tips to help you get more out of your life.

My three favorites are:

Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.

Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.

Troll hunt. Banish the negative trolls from your life, and associate only with positive, happy, and successful people. Mindsets are contagious. Show loyalty to your potential, not to your pity posse.

Imagine what 63 more of these could do?

NOTE: there are a lot of trackbacks to Steve’s site so be sure to follow a few of them to see how others are using his information.

EPOC At Millcreek

Last Wednesday night I taught All Terrain at Millcreek. I really like the cycling room there because it’s enclosed, kind of dark and has such poor circulation that they have two industrial fans to move around the air; it reminds me of a rave environment. On Wednesday, as luck would have it, the mic wasn’t there meaning I had to cue with my hands and using verbal commands only as loud as I can shout. But by track 3 it was evident that I wasn’t loud enough and that my attempts to communicate were leaving me out of breath and not helping anyone. It was a little stressful so I did what I always do when I’m stressed, I worked as hard as I could. I was hoping that if they were able to copy what I was doing on the bike, they were going to get a heck of a workout.

The class went like most classes, really quickly and I was soaked by the end of it. I locked the studio door and changed. As I was leaving, I noticed that I was still pretty hot. My body temperature was still a little high and my breathing hadn’t returned to normal either. This was about 10 minutes after class ended and about 20 since the last working track. I seemed to float to my car and then sat in silence for about 10 minutes before I started it to drive away.

The drive was blissful. It was a sunny spring evening so I had the car windows open. There was a nice breeze and it was still bright out. Everything about it said that the winter was over and that spring was here. It was peaceful because I didn’t care about anything. “Stop at red lights and don’t hit any cars” was my only mandate. No speeding, no weaving, just mindless driving with plenty of time to get to where I was going. A quick stop to get some groceries and then to my brother and sister inlaw’s place to make dinner and go to bed – I had to be up for 5:15 the next morning.

The thing was, I didn’t feel any different from how I did when I floated across the parking lot. In fact, I hadn’t seemed to come down at all from the workout. I still had the narrowed spacey focus I get when I race and I felt nothing. Whatever was coursing through my veins was coating my insides numb and leaving my brain not much better. Shopping took a while and they I went to Des and Sarah’s to watch American Idol. I feel asleep around 10:30 and slept well until the alarm woke me up.

I get that feeling a fair bit. It seems to come on after every lap or race I complete, after a really really intense weight workout or when I get my heart rate up above 170 for longer than a minute 3 or 4 times in a cardio session. It doesn’t come on with steady state cardio or short duration resistance workout, only after very hard work; work that could be viewed as fight or flight because it taxes the body so severely. While not the result of the acute stress response initiated by sympathetic nervous system arousal, the physical symptoms / reactions are exactly the same – increased blood flow to the muscles, increased heart rate, a deadening of your ability to think clearly about abstract things.

I believe that this is the cause of EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption). EPOC is the tendency for the body to continue to burn energy at an elevated rate after a workout; we know it exists because there is an increase in O2 consumption above baseline levels following certain types of workouts. Most of the evidence comes from studies addressing resistance training workouts which show a sustained increase in O2 consumption following intense exercise because adaptive change requires energy and intense exercise forces adaptive change.

While the amount of evidence on EPOC with high intensity interval training (HIIT) isn’t nearly as robust, anecdote and interpretation of the results of these type of studies indicate greater fat loss for HIIT vs. steady state cardio exercise. I believe that HIIT does one that that steady state does not, it forces the body to adapt to a variety of different intensities vs. just one, which I believe causes more EPOC than steady state cardio.

All things being equal I’d rather connect with the participants of the classes I’m teaching. But when the mic is broken and I can’t yell as loud as I need to, I’ll take EPOC.

Too Many Lifting And Fitness Tips To Count

4 Days in 15 Minutes A Summary of the 2007 Health & Fitness Summit by Chris Shugart of T-Nation has so many tips in it that you really don’t have a choice but to read it; well, maybe you can attend next years summit.

  • Textbooks are often wrong by the time they’re published. Textbooks are not “evidence.”
  • The body is built to walk 3.5 miles per hour, or about a 17 minute mile.
  • Just 17 minutes of physical activity a day can lead to a pound of fat loss a month.
  • The first step in playing fast is to eliminate excess body fat.
  • Too busy to eat breakfast? Then you’re too busy to be good!
  • Grape juice is just as good as wine when it comes to antioxidants.

This is one of those threads were it pays to read the comments as well. There’s a lot of wisdom there for the taking!

5 Advanced Mountain Bike Racing Tips

1) Give your brain the information it needs to guide you through the race

Your brain knows everything that you do. It may seem like a silly statement but many people will ignore what they spontaneously think in favor of something they consciously think. Don’t look at rocks and think “there is a rock”, scan along the trail ignoring what you see. Come back to the rocks only if your eyes come back to them, but it is most likely that your brain will determine a better line and look at something other than the rocks. To do prime your brain with sensory input, deliberately move your eye fixations back and forth along the upcoming trail allowing the sensory input to flood into your brain. Doing this will give your brain the best chance of creating an accurate mental image of the trail that it will then work with to determine the best line and effort level.

Doing this requires a lot of focus and it is pretty draining. The good news is that you’ll only need it when you are going very quickly or riding on pretty technical terrain.

2) Do not pay attention to things that you cannot impact

When you are riding fairly quickly, there is little point in looking at what you are about to ride over because there is very little you can do about it – if you cannot react to what you see, you are not looking far enough ahead and you shouldn’t be aware of it.The same applies to other riders. Do not count on them to make a mistake or call you round because that takes the out come of the race out of your control. Your goal is to get to the finish line injury free and as fast as you possibly can. Anything that takes away from that goal should be eliminated from your race behavior. Flawless riding will get you to your goal and that will only come to be if you focus on the riding.

3) Start your nutritional recovery as soon as you cross the finish line

You should consider consuming dextrose / maltodextrin during the ride. This will allow you to take advantage of the window of opportunity for increased cellular transport.If you have no idea what dextrose and maltodextrin are you should read my post on Post Workout Nutrition. It represents the most up to date science available for body building nutrition and deals with getting the most amount of recovery sugar and protein to the muscles to promote the fastest recovery. Studies have shown that there is a finite absorption rate for each macro nutrient and my recommendations are based on these values – bring in ONLY what your body can use per unit of time. If you bring in more than your body can use you are increasing the likelihood of fat storage. While still unlikely after intense racing, it is possible when you are dealing with high GI carbs like dextrose.

4) Follow an adequate training tapper before your races

If you have no idea what I’m talking about here, just make sure you are well enough rested on race day to perform will as much intensity as you need. Athletes and their coaches tend to come up with complete ways of describing their simple behavior and for they’ve come up with the term tapper to mean a reduction in training before a competition to ensure complete recovery.

Depending upon the event you are participating in, you will need to vary the amount of rest you get. Cross country racers will need to about 2-4 days of dramatically reduced work load before a race because this event does not rely heavily on coordinated muscular strength or power; you are basically holding your top maintainable pace for the duration of the ride. Downhill racers may need to reduce work volume in the week leading up to the event to make sure the nervous system is completely recovered allowing for improved muscle coordination and synchronous firing that can be needed for aggressive down hill racing.At the very least an athlete should not ride with full intensity in the 3 days leading up to an event and they should focus on nutritional recovery after any training or pre-lap rides they take.

You are going to need to experiment with the volume and duration of your tapper for find the perfect balance between rest, recovery and performance. When you find that sweet spot, I’ve found that most of the nervousness about racing goes away because you know you are as well prepared as you can be.

5) Train all year round

This will have more impact on your racing results than anything else you can do. While less important for younger riders, the over 27 crowd doesn’t have a choice in the matter. If you are close to your 30’s, you are going to lose cardiovascular functioning during the off season UNLESS you train with high intensity for 30 minutes 3 times a week. Note, this is just the maintenance level. Improvements are very unlikely with 90 minutes of training per week – think about the gains you make during the season, they are based on riding almost every day. The rule of thumb is the more you train the more you will improve, both in skill and in your body’s ability to adapt to the work.The training needs to be varied and you will benefit from cycling through different phases – strength building, cardio building, maintenance phases, and race tappers.

During the race season you should continue to perform some resistance training to maintain muscle and connective tissue strength. This will help you stay strong throughout the season and avoid injury. It has the added benefit of helping to burn up any extra calories that you may consume after your rides. 4 or 6 sets per body part per week should be sufficient to allow you to hold on to your strength and size.

Priming Your Brain With Sensory Input

Sometimes when I’m trail riding a tough rocky section I notice nothing at all. I see but I do not narrate, my mp3 player is wailing but I hear silence, there’s a shaking in my body but I feel nothing. It doesn’t last very long. In fact, it only lasts as long as my fear, so until the tough part is over. I’ve noticed the same thing with snow boarding, at some speed it stops being snow boarding and it starts being a state of pure awareness. Csikszentmihalyi referred to this as the flow state and outlined the benefits of functioning in this state.

What I like the most about this state is that there seems to be no separation between what I see and how I interact with it. I can’t use the word react to it because the actions have a mindful quality in that they do not cause a fight or flight reaction that one would expect from sustained fear. My brain is processing the sensory information and directing my body to perform the correct action, or at least one that doesn’t see me falling. The key part is that my consciousness does not have to control the seeking of information part, looking at the trail, and it doesn’t need to be involved in the processing and syntheses of a solution, assessing the obstacles and determining the best available path. My brain will do this automatically whenever it has to.

Over time I’ve experimented with this state and have tried to deliberately engage my conscious mind with very poor results. It dramatically disrupts the flow of the experience. On the bike I hit things, my peddles will crash off of rocks, my back tire will find grooves and I clip out or fall when the front tire runs into something that I should have avoided. The bike awareness I have seems to disappear almost completely. It seems that I am aware of ONLY what I am deliberately looking at and commenting on. The creation of the mental map that my brain uses to determine the best route is severely impaired. My involvement in this process is definitely not needed. I’m better off if I let my unconscious brain solve these types of problems.

So, how do I increase the likelihood that my brain will come to the right conclusion and direct my body to perform that correct action? Step one is practice so you teach your body how to move on the bike / snow board / your legs. This step takes a long time depending upon the complexity of the task. Once you are well versed in the movements needed to perform that task effectively you move on to the next phase. Step two deals with providing your brain with the sensory information it needs to create an accurate mental map of the environment on which to base solutions. Think about it this way, if you know 10% about something, what are the chances that you will be able to answer a question on that topic? About 10%. As you increase your knowledge, you increase the chances that you know the answer to the question. This is pretty much the same thing, with one big difference, this information only needs to exist as information in your brain for a very short time therefore a verbal representation is not need because you do not need to repeat it in to memory. That means you simply need to bring the information in and your brain will filter for relevance and encode meaning.

To ensure that you give your brain enough information to come up with the best solution you need to deliberately scan the environment in a mindless fashion. Normally we look at the world in terms of patterns or things we recognize as meaningful somethings. For example, you don’t need to know that the car that is approach is a Ford to know that if you get hit by it you will get injured, you just need to know that something big that is moving can be dangerous so you take appropriate action to avoid the collision. With flow sensory priming you just need to keep scanning the approaching area of the trail or somewhere were you MAY end up going. Very often your brain will find a tight line that is fairly straight, but occasionally you’ll find yourself darting to the other side of the trail and following a better line. You won’t know that you have seen it until you start to change direction and then as you begin to ride the better line you’ll notice it. The key is to continually scan the terrain bringing in as much information as you possible can.

Initially it is very draining to do this but once you find yourself in the flow state it becomes effortless because it is what you do when you are in that state.

It is worth directing you to Steve Pavlina article 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output because it’s an effective way to help you achieve a creative state of flow. Sports participants take notice that by virtue of the fact that you are participating in a sports activity (e.g. snow boarding or mountain biking) you have already taken the 7 steps. With a little bit of increased intensity (speed) and deliberate sensory priming you should be well on your way to finding that state of being one with the bike, hill, board.