The University of Fitness

Bodyweight 101: Benefits of Ditching the Gym

One of the most versatile forms of weight training is bodyweight exercise.  As I already mentioned in Weightlifting 101, it is one of the most fullproof methods of weight training and has little to no drawbacks.  Whether your goals involve fat loss, gaining muscle, or increasing general fitness, bodyweight exercise can be tailored to your needs and scaled to your experience level.

No equipment necessary, imagination optional.

So what are the benefits of bodyweight training?

• No equipment necessary: This is perhaps a double benefit. A bodyweight workout can be done virtually anywhere, preferably outdoors, and you can find countless places to do things like pull ups or dips.  Better yet, all you need for a push up is the ground.  Aside from that, the absence of equipment also eliminates the possibility of being able to make excuses for missing a workout.  At some point, almost everyone is guilty of talking them self  out of a workout because they’re too busy and the drive to the gym is too far or the weather is too bad, etc.  With bodyweight workouts, there is no excuse.  Weather’s too bad to drive? You can work out in a hallway.  Too busy?  Everyone has 5 minutes for some push ups.  It’s that convenient.
• Best muscle recruitment: Bodyweight exercises involve the full body no matter what the main focus of the exercise is.  Take a push up vs. the bench press.  Instead of lying down on a bench and using only your chest, arms, and possibly abs, a push up requires the use of all of the above ass well as your legs, glutes, back, and countless other muscles to stabilize the body as the main movement is being done.  Similarly, a well executed pull up is a great ab exercise, as opposed to a machine lat pulldown.  Unles most freeweight exercises, using your own bodyweight forces you to use the body as a single unit, and that means the rest of the body can’t slack off while one part does all the work.
• Good for athletes: Very few sports involve moving large amounts of weight in a single direction.  They usually involve running around, being agile, and generally being able to maneuver one’s entire body.  As opposed to lifting weights, which makes a body strong but also grooves a 1 dimensional, unnatural movement, bodyweight movements have the best carryover to most sports.  They increase kinesthetic sense and get you used to moving yourself around.
• You can use it for any goal:  Since these exercises can be made easier or harder with just a little thought, they can be used in many different ways.  A fast bodyweight circuit is great for losing fat.  Push ups and pull ups are effective muscle building exercises, and if they get easy, a quick adjustment like elevating your feet for push ups or adding a weighted backpack for pull ups is a great way to increase the difficulty to keep the gains coming.
• It’s the best fitness benchmark: This may be my favorite part of bodyweight exercises, especially pull ups.  Absolute measures of strength in the weight room don’t take the body into account.  Someone can add 50 lbs to their bench press, but if they put on 15 pounds of fat in the process [gaining weight, even non-muscle, can make lifting heavier weights easier], then that strength gain is not very useful.  However, bodyweight benchmarks are the true test of positive progress.  If someone goes from being able to do 10 pull ups to being able to do 15, that’s a good indicator of an increase in fitness.  The person either lost fat, gained muscle, or both.  Even if in this particular case the person gained 15 pounds, the increase in pull up numbers means the weight gain was productive – if the weight was fat, the pull up numbers would go down, not up.  Conversely, if a person is trying to lose weight, and manages to shed 10 lbs but goes from being able to do 10 pullups to just 6 or 7 in the process, then the weight lost was most likely muscle, which is counterproductive to fitness.  In the long term, people who train gain and lose either fat or muscle at different times depending on their current routine.  Using a bodyweight benchmark is a great way to monitor whether you’re moving backward or forward in your training.
• And finally, it’s just really cool: Some people find the physiques of bodybuilders and other similarly built people impressive, and to each his own.  On the other hand, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t find the incredible mastery of the body displayed by a gymnast to be absolutely awe-inspiring.  The effortless ways in which gymnasts and others who excel at bodyweight exercises move themselves around in midair or on rings or on the ground is something that is just seriously awesome.  As a plus, these people are often built as well as bodybuilders, without even trying to train for aesthetics.  Form follows function, and it’s impossible to get that good at moving yourself around while having a beer gut and skinny arms.

How often do you use bodyweight exercises? Any unique bodyweight exercises you’ve come across? Any unique ways to do traditional exercises like pull ups or dips either indoors or out? Leave it in the comments.

Fasted Training for Fat Loss

One way to make your fat loss workouts more efficient is to do them fasted, when your stomach is empty or almost empty. The logic is obviously that without any or too many calories coming from food currently being digested, the body will use stored energy, making fat loss workouts more productive. When using this strategy, a common recommendation is to make sure the last meal is at least 4 hours prior to the workout. However, the body can digest meals up to 6 or 7 hours after eating, especially if the meal was large or had certain nutrients such as fat which can slow digestion. So what is the best way to optimize your fasted workouts? Introducing, the morning workout.

Also, a great way to catch a few more sunrises.

Morning workouts, before breakfast, are particularly effective fasted workouts since your last meal was presumably much longer than four hours ago.  This is the first benefit.  After a night of sleep, the body has switched from food energy to using stored energy, since the last nights meal was done digesting several hours into the night.  The body has already been using its fat and, to a much lesser extent, glycogen stores for energy.  Fat loss training in the morning prolongs this stored energy drain. Also, although most high intensity training will use glycogen (the form in which the body stored carbohydrates) more than fat, training in the morning can encourage the use of body fat due to the lack of food and, therefore, insulin. Insulin, which is released by eating carbs and protein, is a storage hormone, and it encourages the body to siphon away nutrients like fat and carbs from the bloodstream.  Without insulin, the body more readily releases fat into the bloodstream to be used by the body for work.

Along with releasing and using more fat during training, an intense workout raises metabolism for hours following training [anywhere from 8 to 15 hours depending on the study].  The benefit of getting this metabolic effect early in the morning is that it can last longer into the day.  Training later in the day, perhaps in the evening after work or school, will end up raising your metabolism but only for a few hours before you go to bed and the body winds down the metabolism as you sleep.  Training in the morning will ensure that the boost in metabolism last the full 8-15 hours.

Training in the morning is also beneficial for carbohydrate storage.  Glycogen, after being converted from carbs, is stored and used by muscle to do work.  When the stores are full, excess carbs are stored as fat.  However, an intense workout empties the glycogen stores, which means carbs eaten later in the day will go to muscle.  The body is also more insulin sensitive in the morning and after a workout, which means it directs carbs to muscle more readily.  Couple these two facts, and not only does the body burn more fat because of morning workouts, but it also makes sure nutrients and calories eaten later in the day are put to better use so they don’t negate the workout you just completed.  Generally speaking, it is best to get most of your calories for the day after your workout.  Training in the morning ensures this.

Training in the morning can have its drawbacks and restrictions. Most people are pressed for time in the morning, with school and work.  People hate the idea of waking up earlier, even when they go to sleep earlier to get the same amount of sleep.  A way around this is to keep workouts short and intense and to develop the habit of waking up earlier to train until it no longer feels like a pain in the ass (I know, easier said than done).  Resources can also be a problem, if you’re used to training in a gym.  However, simpler workouts involving running or bodyweight exercises can still be done.

Also, a note: in the morning, the spinal discs are filled with fluid because there is less pressure on the spine when lying down.  This enlarges the discs and can sometimes make the back stiff, especially with age.  It is important to warm up properly before training, and advisable to wait around 30 minutes after waking to do any exercise that loads the back.  This generally means heavy lifting, so things that don’t load the back heavily aren’t too much cause for concern.

Morning workouts are not a magic bullet that will burn 200% more calories or some such ridiculous figure.  It is simply a way to optimize the effect and effort of your workout.  However, if you already train, you may notice that changing the timing provides a little added benefit, and makes the effort more worthwhile.

Experiences?  Observations? Questions? Comments.

Focus: the Pitfalls of Being a Jack of All Trades

In my last post, I talked about New Year’s resolutions and how it can be easy to set a goal without laying out how exactly to reach said goal.  Another way to people frequently keep themselves from reaching their goals is by doing the exact opposite, and setting five endpoints and trying to reach them all at once.  As much as every single infomercial on television would like to have you believe, it’s not actually possible to simultaneously lose fat, gain muscle, eliminate those love handles, get a bodybuilder chest, and cure baldness, all at the same time.  Especially not with some stupid contraption that promises all of the above while sitting in a glorified beach chair for 20 minutes a day.  As the cliche-crazy Colonel from Avatar would likely say, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” [And yes, I'm still picking on him.]

The most tricked out pocket knife ever. And simultaneously the most useless.

The point I’m trying to make is, when people try to work towards too many things at once, they end up making little or no progress in either area.  It’s a pretty loose analogy, but that “pocket” knife up there can technically do 400 things but it would probably take 45 minutes and 3 Eagle scouts to whittle some kindling with that thing.  Instead, it pays off much more to focus on one goal, attack it aggressively for X amount of days, and then move on to the next thing on the list.

First of all, in the realm of fitness, trying to tackle too many different things at once is something not even trained professionals can pull of effectively with themselves or their trainees.  This leaves beginners or intermediates that are training themselves dead in the water.  Too commonly, it will result in a lack of direction and a training or diet program that looks like it was put together by a chimp throwing darts at a health magazine.

The lack of results effects the trainee negatively.  Psychologically, it is disheartening to put in effort and not see anything come of it.  This sets a bad precedent for how much it’s actually worth the time and effort to train or diet a certain way.  The realization that the wheels are spinning but the car’s not going anywhere results in the person either giving up immediately or trying even harder for a few days before giving up due to a continued lack of results.  Physically, the strain is not as great, and some training is better than none even if there is no visible or tangible progress, but there is still the matter of wasting effort and exertion without getting anything out of it.

On the flip side, focusing training and diet on one goal at a time has the exact opposite effect.  Concentrating solely on losing fat for a month, let’s say, and completing the process successfully and actually being able to see the fruits of your labor can be motivating for whatever future plans you have.  The task of putting on some muscle after finally shaking some of that fat seems like a much less daunting task after successfully completing a diet and making the first fitness checkpoint.  When it comes to getting in shape, it’s so easy to get used to efforts not paying off that finally reaching a goal becomes tremendously empowering.  I don’t mean to sound like Oprah, but one of the most common sentiments amongst beginners is the joy of hitting that first milestone and realizing that they can change themselves.  Busting your ass isn’t as hard when you know you’re being productive.

Trying to gain muscle and lose fat and cure cancer all at the same time may take years if you try to do them all at once.  But if you compartmentalize and separate different tasks, they can be accomplished much more easily and quickly.  Except maybe that cancer cure.

Closing on a side note: I know I haven’t directly addressed any training or specific diet strategies yet, but that’ll be coming up in the next few posts.  If there’s anything specific you would like addressed, reader [yes, for now it's just the one of you], just leave me a line in the comments and I’ll get to it first.

Resolution Time

First off, I hope everyone had the happiest of holidays. Also, apologies for being MIA for the past few weeks. You know, finals and all.

With 2009 coming to an end, we all know what time it is. December is a month of indulgence, and as soon as that’s over comes just a slight bit of regret for letting loose at parties and family dinners and allowing yourself to loosen your belt one notch [though there's no need for the guilt since it's good ol' homemade food]. So, either because of the indiscretions of December or because you put it off all year in 2009, January 1st is the time to make those resolutions to get into shape.

The point of today’s post isn’t to discourage you from making a fitness-related resolution because they’re either stupid, misguided, failures, or any combination therein. Resolutions can work, but you have to make them the right way. The problem with normal resolutions like “lose 10 pounds by February” or “have a six-pack by the end of 2010″ is that they focus on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’. I’ve been guilty of this for the past several years [yeah, that second one in the last sentence was my resolution 4 years running]. Inevitably, I got through a week of running on the treadmill or doing an hour of crunches a day, and then missed a few days and let it slide because, hey, I’ve got until the end of the year.

I like the third one.

The thing is, saying that you will accomplish X by the date Y seems fairly simple, specific and straightforward. But it’s a very deceptively vague way to set out a resolution because you just ignore all the real specifics. So, as much as I hate to use a tired old saying, failure to plan is planning to fail in this case. Speaking of tired old cliches, has anyone seen Avatar? I’m pretty sure the old, evil ex-Colonel talked entirely in them. He actually said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore” at one point. No shit, Colonel, it’s another planet. But I digress.

So how do you make a New Year’s resolution and avoid the pitfall of making a vague resolution that is riddled with ways to fail? Simple: forget the goal. It seems a bit counterintuitive to set a resolution without a goal, but it may be the easiest way to reach one. Instead, resolve to follow a behavior that will eventually get you to your goal for the first month of two of 2010. For example, if you want to lose fat, resolve to stop drinking soda and sugary drinks for two months. If your goals are a bit more ambitious, resolve to go to the gym at least 3 times a week in January. Then, set your actual goal at the end of the first or second month, AFTER you’ve completed your initial resolution.

Wait, what’s the point of that?

Resolutions fail because people start strong and put them off and give up on a plan early.  As dumb a strategy as doing an obscene amount of crunches  was, if I did it for a while it would likely have gotten me somewhere eventually.  But I put it off until “later” in the year because I could rationalize that I could still fulfill my resolution.  However, if the resolution is to go to the gym 3 times a week in January, you can’t really fool yourself into thinking you’re still following it if you skip a week.  This way, it’s more of a conscious decision to break your resolution so early in the year.

Also, I like this resolution style because a habit takes about two months to form depending on the habit and the dedication to forming it.  The idea is to form the habit of going to the gym regularly before you decide what you want to focus on once you have established that regular gym schedule.  The same thing applies to a dietary habit like not eating fast food or drinking soda.  Obviously you can make some headway on the goal that you’ve got in the back of your head.  If you cut out all your soda, you may end up halfway to that 10 lb lighter display on the scale.

Here are a few of my resolutions for 2010:

• Study twice as much as I did for the MCATs this time than last time
• Average 3 posts a week on here in the month of January
• Do at least 50 pullups a day [this is where doorway pullup bars come in handy]
• Only watch 2 hours of TV a day* [seriously, I'm an addict.  *Playoff football will not count toward this quota.]

So what are your resolution[s]? Any updates of past resolutions?  Or how did you update an old resolution to make it  more likely to succeed?  These adventures an more, in the comments!

Weightlifting 101: Best Tools for the Job

Stepping into the weight room first time can seem a bit daunting. Even if you consider yourself experienced in weight training, it can sometimes be confusing to pick out which tool will best suit your need. There are a bunch of different options out there, so it helps to know the pros and cons of each type of weight to make better decisions during your workout and maximize the effects of your weight training.

Decisions, decisions…

Here are a few basic types of weights:

• Barbells/dumbbells
• Kettlebells
• Bodyweight
• Weight machines
• Odd object weights

BARBELLS/DUMBBELLS: These are the most common weights in the gym, and pretty much the most often used by people who do any sort of weight training, and with good reason.   Using barbells [BBs] or dumbbells [DBs] allows a huge number of exercises targeting any muscle in the body with very precise amounts of weight.

• Pros: BBs and DBs are best suited for muscle growth and strength gains.   Barbells allow you to use the most weight, which allows for the best stimulation of muscles for strength and size gains.  Dumbbells can add another level of benefit, because even though you can’t use as much weight as with barbells, the added challenge of handling dumbbells individually activates more stabilizer muscles than barbells, and may come in handy for working some smaller muscle groups.  They’re also the most easily adjustable weights, and a steady progression of weight is key to gaining strength and muscle.  DBs and BBs are the most versatile tools, and can often be used in lieu of the other tools for other purposes, like conditioning, endurance, or fat loss.
• Cons: BBs require less stabilizing work than DBs and other weightlifting implements overall.  Though muscles can be worked with heavy weights, this type of lifting can sometimes be hard to carry over to real world application, especially if the wrong exercises/movements are being used.  For DBs, the common 5 lb. jumps between weights can be too much of a weight increase, especially for women or when working smaller muscles.

KETTLBELLS: Kettlebell training has become more popular recently in fitness circles, and it deserves the attention. Though it may have seemed like a fad, it is one of the few products that merits the hype it has achieved.  These have been used for ages by the Russians, and we all know those crazy Russians know a thing or two about training.

• Pros: Kettlebells are great for full body work, because many kettlebell exercises are explosive movements that use the body as a whole rather than just a part.  The explosive nature of exercises also creates a high workload for the body in a short time, making KB exercises great for conditioning and fat loss.  They can be used in place of cardio, which keeps workouts more interesting and engaging.  The unique shape of KBs also makes them less balanced in your hand than dumbbells, which works even more stabilizer muscles, imagine doing an exercise with a loaded suitcase, and activates the core.  The use of the full body coupled with the stabilizing function and large range of motion of KBs makes them much more applicable to real world strength than barbells or dumbbells.
• Cons: Kettlebells lose their comparative effectiveness if used as dumbbells/for dumbbell exercises.  They are also less available in commercial gyms, and more expensive to buy for a home gym since they come in set weights and can’t be purchased in variable weight units like adjustable dumbbells.  There is also a higher risk of injury with certain exercises if proper form isn’t observed since the heavy portion of the KB is not as highly controlled as a DB.

BODYWEIGHT: Regardless of where you are working out, you body is always there.  This eliminates the possibility of being limited by resources and, subsequently, allowing yourself to get caught up in excuses not to work out.

• Pros: Aside from convenience and availability, bodyweight exercise uses the whole body as a unit, much like KB training.  Unlike freeweights, using bodyweight never involves sitting down, so more muscles are used as the body is supported in some way off the ground.  Maneuvering yourself in different ways and controlling your body in space also teaches kinesthetic sense, or body control and awareness.  This is a huge benefit in sports and most other real world physical activity.   Bodyweight exercise can work any muscle in the body, requiring at most a sturdy branch and a nice hill, and it also tests your creativity by finding out novel exercises and routines. It’s also perhaps the safest mode of weight training.
• Cons: It’s hard to find fault with bodyweight training.  One of the few drawbacks is that after the initial beginner stage, it may not be challenging enough to increase strength and muscle without adding weight to exercises [like a weighted backpack once regular pullups are easy].

WEIGHT MACHINES: Now entering stormy waters.  Most knowledgeable trainers and coaches won’t even touch weight machines, and for the most part I tend to agree with them.  They aren’t pure evil, however, and we’ll see why.  This time, I’ll switch it up and start with the cons.

• Cons: They work less muscles because all the stabilizing is done for you, you only move the weight in one set path.  The “weight” you use is artificially high because it takes your weaker stabilizing muscles out of the equation.  There is no carryover to the real world, even less that with barbells, because of the grooved single dimension of motion.
• Pros: Cable pulley machines allow freedom in 3 dimensions, so they are exceptions to the above.  Traditional machines can be useful to completely exhaust a muscle – near the end of a workout after it has been already been trained hard by freeweights – to maximize muscle growth.  During a diet when muscles may be weaker, machines can be used safely instead of heavier compound exercises.  [Guys with big egos can't stand using less weight when they're weaker during a diet, and can hurt themselves by trying to lift a weight they can't.]

ODD OBJECTS: This category includes tools most likely not found in your gym.  Odd object training uses often homemade tools that aren’t traditional weights.  Sandbags, sledgehammers, huge tires, weighted sleds, heavy ropes: these are all odd objects.

• Pros: These tools are basically the definition of real world, so no worries about practical carryover there. They’re often much cheaper to buy or assemble than traditional weights.  These tools are FUN, creating a motivation to workout and a high adherence to a program that incorporates them.  They are also good for a variety of functions, such as conditioning, practical strength, and athletic carryover.
• Cons: They take a little extra legwork to track down or put together.  Also, the purposes and exercises for each object may be a little specific, so a combination is necessary since they can’t be the cornerstone of a program.  Sandbags can be messy, you need room to swing around ropes and hammers and push tires and sleds, you may need a tire for sledgehammer swings: means are a limiting factor.

I left a few things out on this list, but most of what you’d use for weight training is here.  You could find a tool for almost any job from the things mentioned above.   A good workout program should use a combination of weights, since using only one will neglect some of the benefits of the others.  A combination of two or more should be used to cancel out the disadvantages of using just one method of training.

Can you think of any other advantages/disadvantages to using the weights mentioned above?  Want to know more about something I may have left out? Share in the comments.