Finding Our Space – New Facility

On Tuesday we started our search for a space for the new SST location in Richmond Hill. This isn’t the same as looking for a new place to live. There are so many things to consider that one doesn’t even have to think about when they are looking for a new apartment or house. For example, my concerns when house hunting are grocery shopping, proximity to riding, proximity to a decent gym, space and safety. These things aren’t of much concern when looking for a place to open a gym.

So far our concerns are focused on a few key areas:

Parking. We need lots of parking. Our needs are somewhat different from a typical commercial or industrial business in that our peak times are going to be early in the morning (6-10) and after school (from 4 PM on). This offers some flexibility but we do need to be sure there is room for all of the people who come to the facility to park regardless of when they come to workout.

Location relative to where the people live, where they are coming from and where they are going to. We need to be easy to get to. While our services are first rate, people won’t show up if it takes them too long to get there or if they have a difficult time getting home. We saw a few locations that were the ideal space – very long for a good running track – but they were well away from the residential areas, which took them out of the running.

Dimensions. We’re looking for a space that is between 3500 – 6000 sq feet but it needs to have a track / turf area. Given that SST focuses on making athletes faster, the track needs to be long enough to allow the athletes to get up to top speed but leave them with enough room to slow down. For this reason, a 60 / 60 space isn’t going to provide us with the length we need. The space we’re looking for needs to be a rectangle and not a square.

Lighting. A location that has poor lighting inside is not going to help motivate people to work hard. If there are no windows people may feel closed in and not like coming to workout. If the lighting outside is bad, people won’t feel safe coming to the center when it is dark.

Feeling we get from the space. Can we see a functioning gym existing in the space and one that we are happy to work in? Once we sign the lease and open the center we are there for years. If the space cannot be made into a comfortable location, there’s no point in setting-up shop. The center’s success will be determined by the attitudes of the people who work there so we need to make sure that we can be upbeat all of the time. The space itself needs to motivate people to push past their perceived limitations and achieve what they believe is impossible.

Vision for the final product. We need to be able to visualize the finished facility from a layout perspective. There needs to be a logical layout for the offices, track and workout areas where nothing presently exists and this layout needs to make the most of the available space.

The process of finding the perfect space is a challenge but one that I’m enjoying and learning from. It’s a challenge that almost every business goes through so I know we’re going to open in a great location that meets the needs of our athletes and our team!

Lactate-High

I find contentment when my heart rate hits 160 – 85% of my heart rate max. My brain clears of thought. My awareness of “me” disintegrates. It feels really good to work that hard – mindlessly working and loving it!

85% is right around my lactate threshold – the point at which the body produces lactate FASTER than it can clear it. When my heart rate goes above 85% I begin to tire. The length of time I can spend above 85% depends on how hard I am working – I can build to 92% but need to shut it down immediately or I could stay at 88% for 45 seconds. My tolerance to repeat intervals above 85% is dependent upon the intensity of the efforts – I may have the capacity for 4 92% efforts or 10 88% efforts.

My long-term recovery is also impacted by amount of time I spend above 85%. I haven’t figured all of it out yet, but the more time spent above 85% the less likely I am to be able to reach 85% on the next attempt. I notice this more in the summer when I ride more. Some days my body just can’t work hard enough to get anywhere near 85%. When this happens I need to take a few days off from riding and allow my body to recover. This can happen even when my leg muscles feel fine; just as I can push my heart rate above 85% when my legs are still sore from specific leg training.

Regardless, it feels amazing to be working right on the threshold of exhaustion. It’s both mental tough and mental rewarding. Tough in that I can work harder and longer than my internal monologue believes I can and rewarding because I reach a point where the internal monologue stops and my body functions uninhibited by thought.

The Opportunity I’ve Been Waiting For

My best friend once told me that if you don’t go looking for what you want, you’ll end up settling for what you get. He was right. Before I took his advice I had lots of jobs that were soul destroying and very unsatisfying. Right before I took his advice I quit my job and spend a month travelling the east coast with a tent, my bike and enough money to buy food, beer and a few other things that I may need along the way. I’ll tell you this, it was one of the best months of my life and I learned a lot about myself during my time on the trails, roads and sitting in the tidal water with a belly full of Keith’s Light and growing desire to find my purpose in life.

When I made the decision to quit my job and take the trip I hadn’t realized that my old life was ending and that a new one was beginning – life is funny like that, you really don’t know that a paradigm shift has occurred until you look back on it and that see something new started.

Fast forward to now. I have just started the next chapter of my purpose filled life. Larry, my old boss, friend and owner of Sports Specific Training is expanding his company into Richmond Hill and helped me secure the role as Director Of Sports Programing for the facility. This is the dream role for me. This is the job that I have always wanted (at least since that trip out east when I began dream of getting what I wanted out of life vs. getting what I get).

I am a helper, a guide and a facilitator of change. My purpose in life is to help others achieve their potential. The role I play is to add something to the equation that allows one to move past their plateaus or sticking points and find greater success in their life. As a strength and conditioning coach, the opportunities to do this are huge. As the Director of Sports Programing, these opportunities are almost limitless given that I’ll be creating the programs for the athletes along with leading the team of strength and conditioning coaches.

To say that I am happy or excited about this opportunity would be a modest understatement. I am ecstatic! This role is a singular accumulation of all of my past work experience – my 3 years in IT management, 2 years in fitness club management, 2 years of personal training, 2 years of sales, 2 years of instructing fitness classes and my endless hours in the gym training. It will even draw from unsatisfying soul destroying jobs I took before I realized I had a choice to do what I wanted. I am grateful and see myself as lucky for having decided to work at what am passionate about for long enough to earn the opportunity to do this role.

Over the next few months I will be writing about the experience of opening the new center and my experience of starting this dream role. Check back often to get the updates of the important changes, benchmarks and personal growth steps I take along the way. I look forward to all of it!

New Exercise This Week

Mid cable core rotations / holds. This movement works the entire core along with recruiting the VMO and Gluteus medius and Gluteus minimus. It also recruits the pecs in an isometric contraction.

To preform this movement you need to be standing in front of a mid cable machine that has a handle attachment. Your feet and hips will be in line and will be at a 45 degree angle to the front of the machine and your upper body will be rotated about 45 degrees towards the machine. You take the handle in both hands and straighten you arms so they are extend and at shoulder height. Once you are in this position you rotate your upper body so your shoulders are in-line with your hips and feet.

If you are doing static holds, you hold this position for 15-30 seconds before rotating to the starting position and resetting to work the other side.

If you are doing dynamic movements, you use a tempo of 211 with a 1 second lift, 1 second hold and 2 lowering of the weight. Do 8-12 reps and switch to the other side.

What I like about this movement is the VMO and glute recruitment that you don’t normally get with core rotational movements.

The Dreamer of Ridiculous Dreams

I haven’t written on newstasis in a while because I have had very little inspiration. I left my management job at SST in August and found a job as an IT recruiter. I figured I would try it out and see what it was like and for 7 weeks I was a recruiter. When I took the job I thought that I had found something that I was going to love and make a career out of. I didn’t. I do not have what it takes to be a successful IT recruiter; mainly because I do like it and can’t see myself doing it for much longer than a couple of months.

But there was a lesson in the whole process and now that I am back with SST I’m able to see things more clearly.

I am a pathological optimist. Rachel would say that I have a tendency to dream and I would agree with her. Often times my dreams taint my judgement and I make decisions that are based on the happy-blissful feeling I get when I’m thinking about all the things that are possible vs. the slightly muted or dull feeling that is associated with the acceptance of how things actually are. The end result is that I agree to things that are, in hindsight, not suited for me. IT recruiting is another example of this tendency.

I knew even before I started doing it that the fit was wrong – Rachel knew, my friends knew, my family knew – but such was my decision to leave SST and try something new. They all supported me because that’s what you do with someone who dreams the ridiculous dream.

At 35 I’m not sure I should even attempt to change this aspect of my personality because I don’t see it to be a flaw. In fact, I think people could benefit from being a little more optimistic about the future. I would say that being hopeful for the possibility for change is a requirement for things to get better; at the very least, it’s a requirement for seeing things in a different and better way. This seeing things as better and believing that they can be this way is the first step in make your world the way you want it to be. Even if this means taking on jobs that you don’t like after 7 week.

Hey, I could have been right and found my happiness as an IT recruiter.

CanFitPro – Certification I Now Hold

I attended and took a lot out of the 2008 CanFitPro conference in Toronto. I was like 1000’s of people who attended with the intention of gain new qualifications, certifications and experiences that will make their journey through the fitness land-scape more rewarding and more enriching for those they interact with. I now hold two certifications that I didn’t hold before – my Spinning certification and my CanFitPro PTS certifcation.

So What?

I’m now qualified to be a personal trainer and to teach indoor group cycling classes at places other than GoodLife; given that my LMI RPM certification only qualifies me to teach at GoodLife in Canada.

What now?

There are two things I need to consider now, the first is the easier of the two and that is to create and market some All Terrain cycling classes using my own choice of music and my own choreography. This shouldn’t take me too long given that I’ve been riding while listening to music for the last 4 years. Things I need to complete before I’m ready to launch my class include getting my computer set up with music editing software so  I can cut and paste songs to create the specific profile that a track requires, track objectives or scenarios, riding and hand positions and their names, class format stuff (e.g. length and pacing) and the materials to teach participants about zone training.

The tougher of the two things is setting up a personal training company. I say this is going to be tougher because unlike cycling classes, I’m NOT already doing this. While I have trained before, it was working at GoodLife and at SST, but this is going to be the first time that I have gone out on my own to do it. I’ll need to come up with waivers, educational materials addressing nutrition and lifestyle behaviors, templates for workouts, assessment materials and tests, goals sheets, designing workouts, creating and pricing a list of services, training clients, building a client base and marketing myself as a trainer and a brand.

There is a good connection between teaching cycling classes and being a personal trainer given that both are natural next-steps for the active person. They are a great complement for each other in that those who do a lot of riding should also be doing some weight training and those who do a lot of resistance training should be doing some intense cardio based training.

It’s going to be a fun and challenging venture and I’m looking forward to see how this next chapter of my life works out! Stay tuned for updates!

What If I Was Right When I Was Young…

Rachel got me thinking the other day. She said that “young people KNOW what makes them happy”. We were having a conversation about what my next move should be and she implied that maybe I was on the right track when I was at university right before Natalie got died. In the 13 years that have past I hadn’t really considered that the younger me did know what he wanted out of life and instead felt that I could think my way onto the path. Her words really resonated with me.

At my new job as an IT recruiter I work with a lot of younger people. I’m the oldest person the team and while I bring a lot to the table in terms of life experience, maturity and a keen ability to connect with and engage others, I lack something that the younger recruiters have – mindless drive and ambition. I am all too aware of everything about my job and have a very difficult time looking past the next 2 years of extremely hard work to build my network and create enough relationships with people to see my way into higher earnings. I work hard and give it my all, but my all seems to be missing something that the younger people all possess; I know what two years of hard work feels like and I know what I’m going to have to sacrifice to be successful as a recruiter. At 35, it’s very hard to overlook these things if I’m not able to get lost in whatever it is I’m doing. Young people don’t seem to have this issue.

The recruiters who are in their early to mid-20’s have no difficulty with the hours, the time on the phone and all the paperwork. They seems to just exist in the role doing whatever is needed to be successful. They are highly driven and attack their jobs without so much as a thought about what they are going without by working so hard. The truth is that I am kind of jealous that they are able to function at work this way because they attack work the same way I attack my training and my passions. I think one of two things is happening – either they have found their passion in their job or they can’t tell the difference between work and passion so they approach them as the same thing.

I do recall a time when I was younger and working for Ranger Online. I approached the job with the same intensity and passion that I now direct towards cycling. While it did start to consume me, I can see the parallel between my behaviour during this time and the behaviour I see in the younger recruiters I now work with. It was easy to work extremely hard and lose myself in the job and I did so without thinking about it; something that I haven’t been able to do for more than a few months at a time since then. In fact, the length of time that I am able to stay committed to something that I don’t fully enjoy is getting shorter and shorter as time go on. It seems that my threshold is getting lower with each new experience.

So on Thursday when Rachel mentioned to me that maybe I was on the right path before and have been struggling to find my way back over the last decade, I was able to hear it. I’ll admit that I don’t find my professional life all that satisfying. Sure I do a good job and my bosses are happy with my performance but it’s a constant struggle to forget what I’m doing, forget that I don’t like what I’m doing or to stop thinking about what I’d rather be doing. I have no sense of surety or certainty with my professional actions – I know that I’ll advance my career if I do them, but I rarely feel like I’m on the right track. As such, I don’t work mindlessly and my ambition sorely lacking.

What if I was right when I was younger? What if I had yet to be impacted by life experiences and was simply doing what I was passionate about and enjoyed? Wouldn’t that mean that I had already found my path and that the way back to it was a matter of forgetting what I have learned since Natalie died and simply return to doing what I was doing before? Could it be that easy?

What People Want To Hear

After work on Thursday I met up with Travis who I used to work with at SST. He has started a personal training company call DNA Fitness based out of Burlington and has been interacting with other trainers who work with private clients. At SST we primarily worked with athletes who were driven to succeed but lacked the knowledge to create the right program to achieve optimal fitness. His new venture is different and he is starting to get exposure to the psychology of fitness.

“What do most people want out of a trainer?”

In most cases people who are not innately active want to hear that it isn’t their fault that they are out of shape. They want to be told that they are fine and that there is something unique about them that makes it impossible for them to stop eating unhealthy food, to start exercising and to get into better shape. For those who seem to love to exercise or tend to make more-healthy food choices the knowledge is there that they have control over these choices.

Let’s be honest here and say the way that someone looks is a reflection of their choices in almost every instance. Obese and unhealthy people do make the choice to eat poorly and move as little as possible. For them the realization that they have complete control over their choices has not yet been made. They are looking for validation that they are victims of something that is out of their control. In fairness this is a characteristic of most human beings, it just tends to manifest itself differently in people.

The toughest thing for a trainer to do with these types of clients is to teach them that it IS their fault that they look the way they do and to help them see that they CAN do something about it. Frankly, I found teaching this lesson to be one of the most draining things you can do because there is 10-40 years of thought inertia to overcome. It’s a task that is compounded in difficulty by the human tendency to seek out information that validates their belief and to outright disregard evidence to the contrary. Never underestimate the power of denial.

In most cases a doctor is a better person to teach an individual that their state of health is a result of their choices and too often it comes in the form of bad news – a test revealing cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or a heart attack. The news is a shock to them, but not necessarily a surprise.

What can a trainer do to help their clients hear what they don’t want to hear?

People learn better by doing, particularly when they are not open to learning; which is the case with people who hold victim beliefs about their fitness abilities. If a trainer can get a person moving and eating a little better, their client will notice some results. This is often enough evidence to help them see that they CAN do something about it because they HAVE done something about it.

Let the client know that human beings are 99.9% genetically identical. Since almost everyone has the same potential to achieve a certain level of fitness, by achieving it themselves, a trainer can effectively BE the proof that it can be done. I have found this to be one of the more effective ways to show people the light.

Let the client know that the body has a strong desire to keep doing what it has been doing and that as a part of the body, the brain is the same way. Thoughts are going to be sticky and it is going to require a lot of effort to change the thoughts and to change the behaviour. It could be months before they find working out to be a fun activity simply because they have found doing nothing to be a fun activity for so long.

I think Travis is going to do well with his new business because he is knowledgeable and because he cares about people. I have always known him to tell people the truth and not just tell them what they want to hear and these are the reasons why I would trust him to train my family.

Hamstring Weaknesses

Most of the time we do not use our hamstrings very much. The action of these muscles is hip extension and knee flexion. To facilitate significant recruitment of these muscles in normal life you either need to pick-up fairly heavy things (for hip extension) or run forward or climb something (for knee flexion). These are things that we do not do very often in modern live and in all likelihood the most work you do for your hamstrings is getting into and out of the car followed by getting in and out of bed. Compared to the rest of the lower body the hamstrings get almost no work. This leads to the potential for problems.

The two main issues that come out of this are muscle strength imbalances and muscle recruitment deficiencies.

When you have muscles that are imbalanced, the antagonist muscle group is able to contract faster and with more force; in this case the quads for knee extension. If the force is too great the hamstrings can get pulled or torn. The knee and hip joints may also suffer alignment or tracking problems; given that antagonist muscle pairings do offer structural support to the joints making them more stable.

When you have recruitment deficiencies you lack complete control over a muscle. Consciously you may not be able to contract it at will, or with very little force. Unconsciously when you move, the fibers will not contract is efficiently as they could. For example, 50% of the fibers may fire when 35% are needed or 80% fire when 95% of them are needed.

Unless you live with knee or hip pain caused by weak hamstrings you are not likely to notice anything until that rare occasion that you have a very sudden movement that is well outside the realm of normal. For example a car crash were you need to undo your seat belt and crawl you way out of a flipped vehicle or when you suddenly run very fast and your hamstrings are too weak to slow knee extension. New repetitive movements may aggravate patella tracking issues that are caused by hamstring weakness.

Considerations when training hamstrings muscles:

They are primarily fast twitch fibers so they need to be trained quickly on the concentric phase of a movement and the rep ranges should be no more than 10.

You recruit more fibers when you put a muscle on length. A great example of this is allowing your hips to drift back before you start to go down with squatting or when you start to lower the weight with dead lifting. Doing is effectively tilts your hips forward relative to the legs which stretches the hamstrings.

Hamstring muscles adapt very quickly so you need to perform a variety of different movements to train them effectively. Lying, standing, one leg, and Swiss ball curls for knee flexion. Romanian dead lifts, dead lifts, glut/ham raises, reverse hyper extension for hip extension.

Recruit these muscles when you are training your quads by deliberately trying to contract them – by driving the force through the heels with leg press, you transfer some of the effort onto the hamstrings.

If your hamstrings are weak, or if you believe they are, take the time to give them extra attention on leg day. They will catch up quickly if you focus on it and this will improve performance and decrease the risk of injury.

You Feel How You Think, Not How You Are

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” – Viktor Frankl

I love this quote because it shows us the simplest path to happiness. It explains why the daydreaming fools is usually happier than the focused CEO of a successful corporation.

It also goes a long way in explain much of my behavior and mood. I am a dreamer who suffers when others inhibit my dreams. I believe that I can do almost anything and when I day dream or allow my mind to float I do great things. Most often these thoughts of greatness boost my mood and charge my focus creating a mindset that allows me to actually make some progress towards doing the things I dream.

The inverse is always true – when I am brought back to someone else’s reality and am reminded of all the limitations, hurdles and potential setbacks that exist in my quest towards greatness and soon I feel like garbage. I make the decision to come to their reality and allow my mood to nose dive – in fulfilling my part of the social contract and engaging those who engage me, my ability to actualize my purpose is hindered by the constraints of what the other person has created as their reality. Beauty cannot be created when one is dealing with the thoughts of what is wrong/bad/negative in the world.

Viktor Frankl should have been suffering when he came to the conclusion he wrote above as he was in a concentration camp. However, he wasn’t. He was working with the other prisoners trying to help their mental health as they were worked to the bone. As their therapist, he was their guide towards a more enlightened way to thinking that would produce hope and lead to happiness. He believed that ones experience of life in the camp was determined by their thoughts about their experience vs. what the experience is actually like. He realized that what one believes reality to be very quickly becomes reality.

My first experiences with Frankl’s approach came in the time immediately following Natalie dying. I had been suffering pretty badly and had started to wonder if she had ever really known just how much she meant to me. My counsellor at the time mentioned that the type of sadness I felt now was the inverse of the joy I felt before so it was unlikely that Natalie hadn’t been able to pick up on the positive feelings I had. As I let this statement float over me I started to feel better because I knew it was true. She did know how much I cared for her and how much joy that she brought to my life. While this realization did not remove the grief, it did change my thoughts so that I no longer doubted that she knew how I had felt about her. This eliminated the negative consequence to the thoughts of doubt and freed me from some of the darkness.

Recently I have reconnected with Frankl’s lesson. I spend more time thinking about the world as I want it to be vs. how I believe it to be. I consume the news less because I am powerless to change much of what I see on the television or read on the Internet. I spend less time engaged in political discussions or talking to people about things they don’t like but have no interest in changing. I try to spend time around the people who radiate happiness and optimism and try to avoid those who are dark or conflict prone because their reality will infect mine. All in all these choices have allowed me to accomplish more of what I need to get done while helping me maintain a bright outlook. I am feeling how I want to feel.