Working Out
This section aims to help readers in understanding different of styles of training so that they can build effective workouts. It is common to see people specialize in one style of training while foregoing others. What do you seek to do with your days? A good sense of how you wish to spend your time will help you make better decisions in your pursuit of working out.
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Working out has become as much a sport as it is a maintenance requirement. CrossFit, marathons, triathalons, HYDROX, etc., underscore our enthusiasm for fitness and maximizing our physical capabilities (as well as our desire to make everything into a competition).
However, what do we want our bodies to be able to do, and at what cost? Do you live a life advantaged by being able to pick up very heavy objects sometimes? Is being able to run several miles on short notice important to you? Is elite performance now worth future complications?
Fitness is for Your Life
If you enjoy running long distances or competitive weightlifting, that’s great; you’ve found a hobby that can be beneficial to your fitness. If you’re like many other people (including myself) and see fitness as a tool for development rather than the sport itself, there’s no problem with that either.
In order to train effectively, we need to consider how we want our bodies to work and the risks associated. Even once we stave off the unnecessary risks (I don’t need to do backflips off of any elevated surfaces to feel fulfilled), we are exposed to hazards from our choices of movement (you ever stub your toe on your bedpost or trip on your own feet? Even athletes do it). Overexertion, ineffective training, improper form or even just simple accidents make premature physical wear and breakdown common, especially when we do not train with an eye toward maintaining an active future.
Workouts should help us build bodies that suit our lifestyles, hobbies, and associated injury risks.
Our training choices must look beyond the short term to help us build and maintain a durable future self.
For example, if we are passionate about soccer, we first tend to learn about training things like our endurance, speed, and agility to make us immediately more competitive. As we continue to train, we must also consider areas like balance, joint stability, and strength along wider ranges of motion so that we can resist injury and better control ourselves on the field and beyond sport.
I find that it is nearly impossible to perform at a high level while completely accounting for interactions/collisions with opponents, but this must come into your hobby-making decision. Sports can be dangerous. Injuries are not only associated with our own movements, often arising out of contact with other players. I am frequently reminded of this through participation in an adult recreation hockey league. I love the teamwork and competition, but regularly see broken bones, cuts, and other injuries found even in entry-level sport. Weigh your risks carefully and train accordingly!
Different Types of Training
Understanding different styles of training helps us better fine tune our bodies. Life is more than just a matter of picking things up or walking back and forth, often requiring balance, jumping, sprinting and even a barrel roll or two to get through the day (okay, maybe I add the barrel rolls for my own enjoyment. If you’ve ever lost your balance or been knocked off your feet, though, I’m sure you can recognize the benefit of being able to roll when necessary). When we consider the ways we can train and how they may benefit us, we can more effectively design workouts to fit our goals.
Should you do HIIT training or running? How about free weights? When’s the last time you’ve done sprints, anyway?
Our bodies offer a variety of movement options, allowing us to modify the power, duration, speed, and portion of body applied.
Trying New Training Techniques
In general, I find that adding new training techniques provides more information about how my body can move, helping me increase my fitness and body control. The varying positions rates of movement associated with incorporating diverse training styles provide more experiences to test myself, helping me build confidence in my body. Including varied training styles also allows me to overlap workouts more effectively and reduce repetition.
When I move more, move differently, and test my movement frequently, I feel more durable and prepared for any day.
Different types of training offer their own set of benefits and limiting factors (as well as zealots, who can serve as fountains of knowledge as well as off-putting mascots), which should be considered carefully in deciding to train.
For example, run training relies on well-conditioned feet and legs. While you may have the cardiovascular fitness to continue running, if your calves and/or feet aren’t ready, you can do a lot of damage and slow your overall development. Similarly, weightlifting or isometric/static workouts can thoroughly exhaust muscles, and they may need several days to recover.
Train With Confidence, But Be Mindful
There is no need to be afraid of new styles of movement (unless you’ve decided to take on some new extreme sport with a built-in injury multiplier; it’s normal to fear parkour or cliff jumping). Changing things up teaches you what you can do and where you might seek improvement. This change-up can help us recognize areas of improvement we might have never noticed had we continued with the same routine we have used for days and years before.
When you try new exercises or movements, it is of the utmost importance that you avoid overtraining (which, I must admit, is a tip I struggle to follow).
Overtraining Makes Workouts Worse
Overtraining muscles has several negative consequences (and exposes you serious health risks you might not have even heard of, ex. Rhabdo). First, it creates an association between the new technique and the pain of over exertion (read more about negativity bias as it relates to fitness HERE). Even when we recognize that we overdid a workout and that the pain felt is not the normal outcome, it is hard to forget that pain from pushing past where you should have reasonably stopped. This leads to fearing a type of training and ignoring or replacing it rather than benefitting from it in a more palatable manner.
Overtraining Delays Progress
Beyond creating negative associations with workouts, overtraining also leads to unnecessary injuries, forcing us to spend time healing instead of progressing. Whether you have injured yourself or made yourself sore to the point that it restricts your other training, there is no need to push until you break.
No one needs a cast and crutches because their pride wouldn’t let them stop appropriately.
Overtraining Compromises Workouts
Finally, overtraining compromises the integrity of a workout. As you get tired, you lose your form, causing you to rely on adjacent muscle groups and deviate away from the desired technique. Unless this particular activity is the most important thing to you and you are in the midst of competition, there is no reason to train beyond what your body can effectively handle.*
Now, let’s get into some of the common types of workouts we see, what to look for when doing them, and why we hear so much about them.
*Some may retort that they need to be able to workout under conditions where they are pushing through exhaustion or injury. If you are a pro athlete, MMA fighter, or Navy SEAL, listen to your training and determine your own risk appetite. For the rest of you, consider carefully whether this level of training is worth the risks.
Strength Training
I begin with strength training as I find that this is most often what is presented to young athletes as the essence of exercise.
Strength training is as the name implies: a conditioning technique designed to augment the power of our muscles.
Strength training is an essential tool for developing the ability to control our movement and apply greater power along various ranges of motion. This method of training will allow us to move faster, lift more, and use our muscles with greater confidence. Additionally, strength training, if done properly, will make us more controlled and resilient. My objective in strength training is to add functional power to my system. I use strength training to be able to pick up more, push more, and navigate my terrain in a controlled manner and with less resistance. Strength training is an essential component to building a powerful and durable system, and it is also the most commonly distorted from of exercise.
When we hear strength training, we most commonly associate them with the three pillars of gym dominance: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. These are lifts that can be daunting at first but also immensely gratifying once our numbers go up.
Strength Training is More than Free Weights
Frankly, I rarely do any of these conventional lifts anymore.
What is most difficult about traditional strength training is that it tends to prioritize short-run feats instead of adding usable power to our systems. I certainly enjoyed my times going for a max bench press or squat, but I continuously found that theses conventional gym workouts were not the best way for me to efficiently build the strength I need.
Instead, I focus on studying how my body can move and creating controllable power that can propel me any which way I choose. Additionally, I focus on bodyweight strength training (discussed more in the Calisthenics section below).
Strength training with a focus on how my body can move helps me recruit the right muscles for movements, allowing me to build a stronger chain of muscles and avoid injury. I have found that when I trained with a focus on moving more weight rather than learning how my body can move, I increased my power for the given lift, but left myself at risk of injury if I tried to use my power outside of the specific form or range of motion trained in the lift. It can be hard to notice how everything is feeling or should move if we immediately start with too much weight, and I now spend the majority of my strength training to building power that effectively utilizes how my body can move.
Strength Training for Better Movement
My strength training does not mean no weights (because there always comes a time where we have to move a heavy bag of mulch or a good few textbooks), but instead focuses on learning how our bodies are designed to move and which parts make the most sense for a given movement. When we add weight before considering the nuances associated with a movement, it can be easy to miss how things are designed to work or overlook how our body is using select muscles to compensate for a weak movement (want to learn more about how to regularly check in on different body parts and keep things moving smoothly? Check out my section on Micro Assessments!).
Before anyone comes at me personally for being a snake oil salesmen that advertises functional movements to sell you a workout philosophy, I want you to truly consider how you utilize your body. Do you need to bench press 315? Are you pushing linemen around or going into combat? If not, it may be prudent to add power to your body in ways that recreate how you actually foresee moving.
Cardio
Right next to strength training in the media world of fitness is cardio. Cardio, or aerobic exercises/workouts that target improving cardiovascular endurance, are workouts that improve our ability to move for a prolonged period. Think a bike ride or jog.
For some reason, people tend to either hate cardio or use it as a form of meditation or therapy. I find cardio to be a great way to keep active, build workouts into my day, and explore my community.
With that said, it can come with its own set of risks and needs to be trained intentionally.
When many people begin cardio training, they are concerned about how their heart health or lung health is the limiting factor in their ability to run, swim or bike. While it’s true that strong hearts and lungs are key to advancing our cardio training, we must also consider our muscles involved to avoid inefficient training (yes, the heart is a muscle. Here, I to what is we more colloquially describe as muscles, meaning the voluntary skeletal muscles that drive voluntary arm, leg, core, etc. movement).
Cardio is Demanding
Runs, bike rides, and walks involve repetitive movements. We are continuously pounding the pavement or driving our feet into pedals to propel ourselves forward. This consistency can lull us into a sense of familiarity or comfort, but it is of the utmost importance that we regularly take time to consider how we are moving and whether we are strong enough to safely sustain the activity.
It is easy to disregard how physically demanding cardio workouts can be on our body once we’ve been doing them for a little bit. We feel our lung health improve and think that our musculature will naturally catch up. However, it can be easy to build heart and lung endurance that supports workouts greater than our legs are prepared to handle.
If we do not pay attention to the nuances of running, we run into countless issues. Repeated strikes to the ground lead to shin splints, stress fractures, and the like. We have to focus on both moving our limbs properly and building the strength to consistently power these movements and adapt to our (often) varied environments (note: this variance is a big reason why treadmills feel different than outdoor runs).
We hear all the cons and feel the strain of cardio workout and wonder why we might subject ourselves to such a routine, especially if we no longer play sports. Have you ever been late to an airplane terminal, bus, or class? A good bench press won’t be much help in these situations.
Learning to train cardio effectively can help us move more and longer. Build it into your routine and watch how far you can go. Just try not to overdo it!
Speed Training
A mix of cardio and strength training, speed training is all about bursts of near to absolute maximal power. Almost any form of locomotion can be made into speed training. These workouts are high intensity and require muscular and cardiovascular strength.
It is all to common that we see people give up sprinting after high school or college sports. Why sprint, after all, if it isn’t for sport?
Our bodies are moving machines. Beyond the fact that we are designed to be able to move at varied rates of speed and with different obstacles and weights, aren’t you curious to see what your body can do?
Building the Power to Blast Off
Even if you aren’t curious, your body will probably still recognize itself as a machine that could once sprint. If you are out of practice and run to grab your puppy that snuck outside, you may lead yourself to injury.
Sprints require pushing ourselves to reach high speeds as quickly as possible. These explosive workouts by design push our limits, leading us to fatigue more quickly. Unlike cardiovascular endurance workouts, sprints and speed training look for peaks and explosiveness rather than consistent movement.
When we think sprints or speed training, we often think about our legs. High-intensity movement requires full-body strength. Even if we are only striking the ground with our legs in a running sprint, we are driving forward with our arms and channeling power through our core.
Keep speed training in mind and use it to build stronger, faster, and more durable movements. Of course, when we push ourselves to the limits, we have to be careful and check in regularly to make sure we stay in good working order.
Something to Consider: HIIT
Now is a good time to bring up high intensity interval training, or HIIT. This workout protocol involves alternating periods of intense workouts and short recovery periods. HIIT workouts are great tools to mix sprints and speed training into everyday workouts, confined spaces, and short periods of time.
Given their burn bright burn fast nature, HIIT workouts can be curated to provide comprehensive body exertion in limited periods of time. They can be easily tailored to exercise the upper body, lower body, full body and use body weight alone or additional tools. Additionally, given their popularity, HIIT workouts are well outlined online and there are countless professional trainers available with videos showing HIIT workouts you can do in whatever free time you may have. Example HERE.
Calisthenics
Calisthenics is the pursuit of mastering one’s own bodyweight. As you’ve probably heard from me many times by now, we each have our own unique bodies and it is essential to learn how they work to navigate life efficiently.
Calisthenics often stands for the proposition (not preposition) that the best way to learn how our bodies work is to practice moving. These exercises range include pull ups, dips, squats, lunges, jumps, pushups, and just about any other movement you can imagine with your body.
Calisthenics is Adaptive
While it sounds like foregoing weights may be restrictive in terms of training, calisthenics naturally lends itself to varying progressions based on our level of skill (both in terms of making workouts easier and increasing difficulty).
Can’t do push ups? Try push ups against the wall. As you progress, you can move farther from the wall and eventually to push ups on the ground on your knees.
Can you get to ten pull ups relatively easily? How are your archer pull ups?
Maybe you haven’t quite made it to one-arm pull ups. Pulling up with two arms and shifting weight to one arm (or doing a negative if you’re ready for it) can give you the extra training you need.
Build Your Whole Body, Not Just the Top
Be mindful: online calisthenics feats tend to heavily favor upper body. It turns out that upper body workouts generally look cooler than lower body exercises when to comes to video making (we see all sorts of lower body calisthenics online, they just tend to be advertised in the pull up calisthenics world). This does not mean that upper body calisthenics are more important; rather, they seem to thrive for marketing purposes.
Calisthenics is a useful tool to help practitioners better understand and control their bodies. Exercising with bodyweight alone makes it easier to learn to understand the positions we might actually enter in real life and how our bodies like to move.
Even though calisthenics focuses on bodyweight rather than external weight training, it can be just as hard on the body, especially if we are new to the training or pushing our limits. We must first prioritize understanding our bodies so that each strength building maneuver works towards the ultimate goal of durable control over our physical systems.
Something to Consider: Plyometrics
Do you want to learn to control your bodyweight with increased explosivity, speed, and springiness? Plyometrics is a workout discipline you should consider. These workouts involve periods of explosive workout designed to enable a muscle to reach maximum force in a short period of time. Like HIIT workouts, plyometrics training revolves around bursts of intensity. However, I find that plyometrics training tends to focus on reaching maximum power in a given bodyweight movement while HIIT workouts are routines designed to generate intensity and improve anaerobic fitness.
Plyometrics training will show you the weak links in your chains of movement. These workouts, including jump rope, box jumps, bounds, and explosive push-ups (to name a few), challenge you to recruit all available appropriate muscles to produce the most explosivity for your movement. You are trying to bound farther, push higher, and jump onto a larger box. The goal is to teach ourselves to do more by regularly testing our current explosive capabilities.
Emphasis on Explosive
Be mindful when doing these workouts! Plyometrics are designed to challenge your body’s limits, and will be intense. Therefore, we must approach these movements deliberately to avoid overexertion. Workouts that demand us to push our limits can easily lead to injury if we let our pride control and we push past our effective limits.
That said, we can do these exercises at lower volumes spread frequently throughout the day to focus on our form and control (known as “greasing the groove,” which is a technique developed by the incredible Pavel Tsatouline, who is known for popularizing the kettlebell in modern western fitness. Learn more about his techniques from his books The Naked Warrior and/or Power to the People!, both of which I found to be well worth the read. And if you’re into kettlebells, I am passionate about my BowFlex Adjustable Kettlebell and am happy to tell you why if requested).
Stretching/Range of Motion
Thus far, we have discussed moving our bodies and adding power to them. However, how are we supposed to know where each limb can move?
Stretching or range of motion training workouts are fantastic methods for learning how our bodies can power themselves along their various ranges of motion. When we stretch, we power our muscles along their available ranges of motion, allowing them to strengthen their end ranges of motion and build an understanding of their comforts along ranges of motion.
Stretching can take two forms: dynamic and static stretching. Dynamic stretching is one that is most typically found before a workout, where we warm ourselves up by exposing the muscles we plan to move to potential ranges of motion (think leg swings, hip range of motion movements, and high knees before a run). These stretches prepare our body for these ranges of motion so they can more comfortably and effectively be accessed during our movements.
Static stretching, on the other hand, involves slow, controlled movements to test our terminal ranges of motion. These stretches can be very effective for understanding how we can move along our full ranges of motion and building our muscular connections and understandings across these motions. I find these stretches help me build strength and confidence with my movements, as I am powering myself into movements and building power at the ends of where I could move before.
Actively Stretch to Build Strength Along Ranges of Motion
Stretching (especially static stretching) is often painted in a bad light. Opponents often refer to these stretches as ineffective, pairing them with the term “passive” stretching. Stretching, if done properly, is not passive. When we refer to passive stretching, we describe the concept of pulling ourselves along a range of motion rather than using our applicable muscles to express the range of motion. Imagine this:
You’re doing an arm stretch. You want to test your right arm’s range of motion across the body. An active stretch would involve using your right arm’s range to pull itself across your chest to understand the muscles involved in completing this movement. A passive stretching would involve using your left arm to drape a floppy right arm across your chest. While an active stretch teaches our right arm which muscles are involved in pulling itself across the chest so that we can more effectively move our right arm across our chest if needed, a passive stretching merely brings our right arm along where it’s allowed to move given our anatomy and muscular tensions. The passive movement does little more than present a position the arm can enter, while the active stretching builds our ability to enter and exit the position in the future.
Our bodies need to move. There will often be times we will need to move ourselves beyond our natural resting positions. If we want to learn
Balance
Much of life’s movements require balance. Balance, while also heavily influenced by various systems including the inner ear, is largely impacted by our strength and muscle control. It is our ability to maintain our line with gravity so we are not falling over and/or losing physical control.
Our ability to physically support ourselves impacts how well we can balance. Take, for example walking. If we have a weak core or legs, we might have trouble keeping ourselves upright and moving consistently in a manner that keeps us in line with gravity. When we lose our line, if we are unable to recorrect, we will be at risk of falling due to gravity’s pull.
Balance Builds Strength as well as Control
Balance workouts focus on developing strength and coordination that allows us to control ourselves through regular positions and movement. It is one thing to have power to push or pull something, but it is something entirely different to be able to finely adjust in various directions to maintain a position.
Imagine standing on one leg. While our legs may be strong enough to squat or push things around, we now require strength along the whole chain of our leg, up through our core to our head. When we’re on one leg, we may feel our weight shift side to side, onto our heels, and onto one or all of our toes. A one-legged balance workouts focus focuses on actively maintaining our position.
Note: it is essential that this maintenance is “active” rather than passive so that we are affirmatively controlling all the muscles involved in keeping ourselves upright on one leg. If we are passive, we may be standing upright, but collapsing at the hip and standing in a way that is balanced but does not effectively utilize our muscles. While we are not falling, we are also not building the strength to master this position so that we can consistently enter it and leave as needed.
Balance Keeps You Strong and Safe
You may wonder why this matters. Imagine you’re walking, not paying attention to your surroundings, and you notice you’re about to step into a pothole right before you take the final step. If you’ve trained your balance (and catch yourself in time), you may be able to stop before you step, hold yourself while you assess the situation, and move your suspended leg in the air toward safe ground.
Single leg balance strength better prepares you to support yourself on that leg while your other leg (and the rest of your body weight) shift for safe ground. If not, you may have been able to stop yourself, but your lack of strength and training of your leg to support itself leaves you more prone to injury or falling over. Nobody wants to fall from walking around.
Putting Workouts Together
You may have just read that all and wondered when this guy is going to give you a workout routine already. Sorry, dear reader, but I am not here to give you workout routines and say “follow this and be great!” My goal is to help you learn how you can study and and improve your movement.
Don’t fret!
We are lucky to live in a digital age where online workouts and routines are plentiful and fit most any format. It is most important that you learn how your body works so that you can judge whether workouts make sense for you and if you are doing them right.
While I will not be making you routines anytime soon (though I will if readers so demand!), I will, upon reader request, recommend various programs and professionals who have helped me along the way.
-G
Efficiently ELITE
At the end of the day, this site is designed to serve as a resource. Like many good resources, Efficiently ELITE is always seeking outside input to refine its content and improve its ability to help people take more autonomy over their ability to move. Do you have any suggestions? Please contact me and let me know below!
