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Fitness

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Ready to start

Thank you for joining me on this journey of learning the how and why of becoming fit, specifically concentrating on strength training. We learned that strength training is the basis for life-long fitness that will amplify your other fitness pursuits beyond strength. Fitness brings improved health, resilience, and confidence in yourself. It will reward you as you grow older by making your life easier and more enjoyable. You learned that it's a demanding prospect that will require you to re-evaluate your priorities and make time for training that you may not immediately have. It will be worth it. You learned...

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Plateau

The introduction to why getting strong is hard began with the idea that the beginning of the journey toward strength is easy. No matter what you do, you will almost certainly get good results, which leads to internalising incorrect conclusions. You only get to be a novice once. By the time you become an intermediate lifter you will experience many occasions where the rule determining your progression is unmet. For example, say you need to lift a certain weight successfully 10 times in a set to raise the amount you lift next time by 5%. Your progressive training will come...

4 min readRead more →
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Move outwards from the core

A tree touches the world with its leaves and ever-burrowing roots, the edges of this complex organism supported and fueled by the tree trunk. Likewise the blood and central nervous system reaching the tips of your fingers and toes are connected all the way through to the heart and brain. Strength begins in the core of the body. There's a strange body ideal for men to have big arms and ripped abs, but those are not achieved by just curling dumbbells and doing situps. Abs come not so much from exercises for the stomach but from core strength and, mainly,...

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Warming up and down

You don't just walk up to the biggest weight you've ever seen in your life and try to pick it up. Your body must be prepared for the stress. Mostly, this will come down to the body being warm, and muscles forewarned a little. Preparation on the day is also intrinsically tied to your body's flexibility; are you actually even supple enough to perform the lift you want to? Muscles can stretch and contract according to how they're used. If your exercises do not provide a full range of motion i.e. extending and contracting to the full, then you run...

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Ratio of lifts

I remember watching a comedy lifting video on YouTube that had a line in it like, "No one likes 'Leg Day'. 'Leg Day' is tough. Your last 'Leg Day' also happened to be your first 'Leg Day'." For those not yet well versed enough in the lifting sub-culture to get the joke, a lot of people who lift don't like squats, so don't do squats. They'll do some exercises every now and again to make sure their small pins are just about powerful enough to carry their enlarged torso and arms. If you've been sold on the idea of making...

3 min readRead more →
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Basis of strength

Moving from aerobic based exercises to anaerobic means not only changing the exercises themselves, but also how you approach and rest between exercises. The clue is in the etymology of the word: aerobic means 'with air'. Anaerobic exercises i.e. strength building weight lifting, conversely means 'without air'. You are asking the body to move things after you've expended all the oxygen your blood or lungs can store or provide. When training to run, cycle, swim etc. novices quickly hit a wall where their lungs are frantically trying to keep the body supplied with enough oxygen. If you're performing a power...

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