It’s that time of year again. As a gym owner I get to be subjected to hundreds of articles about fitness designed to get page clicks and advertisers paid. The entire thing is quite maddening because the stuff pedaled will mostly be silly bullshit. If I’m lucky I’ll even have a few people ask me about the silly shit a friend told them about “getting in shape”- then get to watch them tune me out at the point I mentions squats, deadlifts and caloric restriction to lose weight.
Luckily by the end of January things will mostly be back to normal and I will only deal with weakly silliness. But one thing is for certain. The first week of January millions of people will crowd the local gyms to jump on treadmills, bosu balls, ellipticals, hit the body pump class, the cable machine, and GNC for all the right supplements.
In the spirit of the time for new found fitness I have come up with a simple guide to help you navigate the gym in 2017. A simple list of all the things you will WANT to do to “get in shape” come January 1st and all the things you SHOULD do to get strong in 2017.
What you want to do
Hit the gym 5 nights a week and do some extra cardio on the weekend. Seriously, summer is just around the corner.
What you should do
Carve out an hour from your schedule three days a week that you WILL stick to. Pick these three days with a rest day in between. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays work great but the choice is yours. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays will work the same. As will any number of days with at least one rest day in between.
These three days a week are all we need when we first get started. Missing workouts make most people feel guilty. Most of us have a pretty busy life with work and family obligations. The thought of needing to hit the gym 6 days a week can set you up for failure before you get started. Unless you are a 19 year old college student you will more than likely miss workouts on a schedule like this. These missed workouts can lead to guilt and that guilt snowballs into more missed workouts. Failed diets often work like this. “I ate a pizza for breakfast, might as well have this cake for dinner. Cake for dinner last night, might as well have this pie for breakfast.” Failure leads to more failure.
Make those three days in the gym as optimal as possible. Training optimally is one of the most important things you can do to see results. Training optimally begins with proper exercise selection. For 99% of you reading this this means just a few basic exercises. The squat, press, deadlift, bench press and chin-up will cover you for the first 4 to 6 months in the gym. No need for more.
These five exercises are optimal for a few simple reasons. They give us the most return on our time invested in the gym because they use the most muscle mass over the greatest effective range of motion and allow us to lift the most load.
You will want to do endless curls in front of the mirror. Don’t. Just do chin-ups. If we use the above criteria for the selection of our exercises it becomes pretty clear why. What is the effective range of motion on a standing dumbbell curl? Go ahead and stand up, pretend to do a curl. Now compare that to hanging from a pullup bar with arms straight and pulling your chin over the bar. See the difference? How about muscle mass? What muscles are being used when you curl a dumbbell? Now compare that to the required musculature to hang from a bar and pull your chin over the bar. See the difference? Which one allows you to lift the most load? How much can you curl? 60 pound dumbbell? How much do you pull over the bar when you do a chin-up? Your body weight?
Lastly, my own criteria- which one is harder? Now, which one do you think you should be doing as a beginner?
We can do this all day long. Squat and the leg extension. Deadlift and the cable machine.
Using more muscle mass over the greatest effective range of motion handling the most load means MORE adaptation. More adaptation means more results. More results means you will keep at this thing longer than a few weeks.
What you want to do
Lose this gut and get a stronger “core”. Time for endless sit-ups and planks.
What you should do
Oh the time wasted doing sit-ups and planks. None of this works this way. You don’t lose your gut by doing sit-ups. You lose your gut by losing fat. You lose fat by eating less food. Simple.
If you need to lose fat you need to eat less calories than you burn. You can do that a number of ways but the common theme to fat loss is caloric restriction. The best way to do that is with a combination of eating less calories and more activity. Guess what? The first thing we talked about covers the more activity nicely. Just eat less. Track your calories for a week while eating normally. The second week drop your calories between 200 and 500 calories a day and monitor the results. Make adjustments only when needed.
Things can get more complicated than this but you are just starting out. Simple works and adding complexity is not needed and only serves to overwhelm you. Keep it simple at first and it will work.
So, no sit-ups and planks? Why? Because they don’t work nearly as well as the five exercises we covered earlier and sit-ups can potentially hurt your back. If you are squatting, pressing, deadlifting and doing chin-ups- as a beginner there are absolutely no reasons to do sit-ups and planks.
The musculature of the trunk functions to provide support isometrically. Think or them as functioning
much like a corset. They contract to increase support so your spine doesn’t do wiggly things when you lift, run or jump. Take a look at the picture to the right. She has 210 pounds on her back at the bottom of a squat. Her trunk muscles are held in rigid isometric contraction to prevent her “core” from folding under the load and dropping the weight forward. Using our criteria above (most muscle mass, longest effective range of motion, most weight used) which do you think is better for building “core” strength- a body weight plank or sit-up or this 200 pound squat?
How did her “core” get strong enough to hold over 200 pounds? Slowly over time of course. She started with a 75 pound squat and over several months slowly increased the load. The body adapted. We already learned the body adapts the quickest when we train optimally with big compound exercises. Adaptation is results and results keep us going back.
Lastly, sit-ups just are not good for your back. If they are suboptimal for results AND they have a potential to make cranky backs crankier, why would we do them? I know people like them. I know your CrossFit gym has you do them. There was a time I had people do them. It still doesn’t mean you should do them.
But don’t just take my word for it. Read all about why you can cut the silly sit-up from your new program.
Furthermore, if your back is hurting, something is usually inflamed.
If jamming the spine into a compromised position triggered the irritation, wiggling the compromised structures can increase the irritation, and thus increase the inflammation. Keeping your back rigid and internally motionless as you strengthen the muscles does not increase the irritation, and does not bother an older spine nearly as much as situps and back extensions do. Situps obviously don’t hurt everybody, but if your back hurts already, situps may be part of the problem.
If your back hurts and you are doing situps, just try this for six weeks: Stop doing situps and back extensions. Just stop. – Mark Rippetoe
What you want to do
Jump on a treadmill for 60 painful minutes or start a couch to 5k program.
What you should do
Spend the entire hour you have in the gym each of the three days building strength. When first starting in the gym it’s the most important and useful adaptation you can acquire. In the beginning it will do everything you are trying to do BETTER than running long slow distances. Everything.
Strength is the foundation of all domains of fitness. Your ability to produce ever greater force against objects in your daily environment will literally make everything you do easier. Yes, even running. All the tissue of your body will adapt to the ever increasing loads from the barbell. Muscles will become bigger, tendons pulling on the bones will become thicker, bones will signal to lay down more bone mass, cartilage will adapt to handle increasing loads and the list goes on and on.
Focus all your energy and recovery on this process. Stress the body, allow it to recover and adapt then do it again. In less than 6 months you will have acquired the strength required to do all those other things you want to do safely and effectively. Just get strong first.
There will be plenty of time to train your couch to 5k once you have built strength and toughened your bodies connective tissue and bones. Save yourself all the overuse injuries and heartache with a little time investment in strength acquisition now. Your body will thank you later.
Getting stronger with a barbell is also a far better way to lose fat and build muscle than running. Yes, you want to build muscle to look good. When you tell a strength coach you want to “tone up” what you are saying is, you want bigger muscles. Bigger muscles and less fat. By now I think you have a pretty good idea how to get bigger muscles and less fat. So, get started.
Don’t make the same mistakes you made last year. Get in the gym. Occupy a squat rack. Start light and put a little more weight on the bar every time you hit the gym. Squat, press and pull every time you train. Track your training. If you need to lose weight eat a little less than you have been. Get outside and move on your off days. Go for a walk, a hike, a bike ride with the kids. Make 2017 your strongest year yet.
I have been doing basic strength training since 1985 when I was given a Bill Starr program. Simple focus on the big basics over time has worked, eating healthy foods in the right amount has worked. Over the years many people have told me they know “so and so” and they are a trainer and they have to do mega-zippy-crazy workout and buy meals from a get-skinny-fast company. Just put in the work outlined in this article, you will make steady progress. Change your habits, change your life. I was lucky enough to get to train at the authors gym last year, they get it. The people training there “get it”. I sincerely hope those of you trying to improve your health succeed in whatever fashion works for you.