Over the last couple of years, Rollins College Men’s Soccer Program has become one of the most recognized soccer programs around the country. Two seasons ago they concluded their season at the Division II National Championship with a Runner Up finish. This past season season they were ranked in the top 5, and even held the number 1 ranking for some time before ending their season in the NCAA Super Regional Tournament. The Men’s Soccer team is one of the most year round, hard working programs at Rollins. Most importantly they are completely dedicated to becoming better soccer players, which is reflected in their work ethic in the weight room.

When Men’s Soccer reports to school for pre-season some time in early August, we begin the first day with testing. The team performs a variety of testing consisting of speed, power, agility and conditioning. We test at this time for several reasons. One, we want to know where they are in relation to where they were when they left in the Spring. Second, we want these numbers in case someone gets hurt. We want to know where we need to get them back to. The next reason we test is for a comparison reason. We want to be able to compare, match up and create competition (which with this team is never a problem). The final reason we test is that it gives us feed back on what we need to do to prepare for the season. If there is a conditioning issue, then we need to address it. If everyone is fit, we get to focus on soccer, prepare for the season, and emphasize recovery and injury prevention.

Workouts in-season were completely based around game schedule, difficulty of schedule and conference and regional play. Assuming additional fitness is not needed for the guys, most of our sessions are in the weight room re-emphasizing stability and mobility exercises with a focus on strength for injury prevention. I would argue that our Men’s Soccer team is one of the strongest and fittest in the country. They enjoy and buy into the weight room allowing us to continue to lift in season. Obviously, as we get further into the schedule volume, loads and intensity decrease drastically and we mainly focus on regeneration.

After the season the team headed into finals and then took a break for the holidays. We sent them off with a strength and conditioning packets, informing them that the Spring will be an intense, three months of hard work.

As in pre-season we began the first day back in the Spring with testing, and then heading immediately into our 4 day-a-week training program throughout the Spring. The effort and mentality of the team every training session is probably one of the most impressive I have seen since being at Rollins. For the first 4-6 weeks there was a strong focus on re-teaching movements related to speed and agility before they start the Spring season. Each session also consisted of plyometrics, Olympic Lifts and Med Balls, a ver (?wasn’t sure what you meant)y structured periodization of strength and conditioning. As the team started to include practices we reduced the amount of movement and conditioning in each session.

The Spring ends with post-testing to show the results of an intense three month training cycle. We conclude by going over their Summer Strength and Conditioning, and re-emphasizing the goals of next year.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will blog about the teams that I work with at Rollins College, our approach to each team over the course of a year and the teams’ recent success. For those of you that don’t know, SSP contracted with Rollins College back in 2006. I began with just three teams, and have grown that to somewhere around 10 teams. I have overseen and run the strength and conditioning program on my own since the beginning, and this past year have brought on a full time assistant, Eric McGinnis.

The idea of a strength and conditioning coach was not new to Rollins back in ’06, but integrating strength and conditioning on a full time basis was. Teams had not had a strength coach that was directly responsible for a year round program with customized in-season, off-season and testing programs. As you can imagine, with most new things or “change” there was some resistance from certain athletes in the beginning, but my training program has grown to be an integral part of all the teams that I work with.

My approach to running a strength and conditioning is slightly different than most. In fact, most people thought and still think that I am completely crazy and over the top. Intensity, attention to detail and work ethic are a few of the areas that I am very passionate about initially instilling into my athletes. Not speed, or power or strength. That will come. I need athletes to buy into the idea that when they come to workouts they are there to concentrate and make an impact on the outcome of their season. I want to win CHAMPIONSHIPS. Yes, getting stronger, faster and more conditioned will help, but I need the other components as well.

So with that said, you can see why I was recently introduced at the Rollins Sports Banquet as “The Most Hated Man on Campus.” I take that as a complement. And even more so, it is a credit to the coaches and athletes for completely buying into the systems and programs. Since coming on board with certain programs, we have won Conference Championships for the first time in certain programs’ history, achieved highest national rankings, final four appearances, national championship appearance, all-americans and we continue to see athletes move on and sign professional contracts.

Back out at Orlando City this morning. I started the day with Glute and Core strengthening exercises. We use minibands that either go around the knees, ankles, or both to help with glute activation. We used this tool in a series of lateral base walks, linear walks, and some sidelying hip abduction. The players then performed advanced “deadbugs” where they partnered up. To do this they were laying flat on their backs with their arms up in the air holding a single piece of resistance tubing between themselves and their partner. They then lowered one leg 2 inches off the ground while keeping the other leg straight up in the air and maintaining constant tension on the band they were holding. This not only helps create a strong pelvic floor, it now combines a rotary stability component to this challenging core exercise. They then switched legs multiple times and then we faced the opposite direction to work the rotary stability on the other side. After working the glutes and core musculature, we moved on to a dynamic warmup. The players then finished with some single leg stabilization, helping to integrate ankle, knee and hip stability through a series of movements. This stabilization work is a key piece to improving the players ability to get into and out of their cuts and turns quickly as well is help to create a more stable ankle, knee and hip joints which helps to minimize their risk for injury.

The players then went through a 45 minute practice with their coaches. After that, the players who played in the majority of their win on Sunday, were instructed to do a series of self myofascial release techniques (trigger point work and foam rolling). After finishing with the soft tissue work, they then spent 15 minutes stretching various areas prone to tightness in soccer players followed by an eight minute ice bath. The rest of the team finished with a combination of short, high-intensity sprints and some longer 200 meter runs for time. This group was focusing on keeping their fitness levels high so that at any moment they would be able to step on the pitch and perform at the same rate and intensity of a player who has been starting consistently. It was a good hard session for the team and their work-rate was first class.

ORLANDO CITY SOCCER PRESENTS: SSP DISCOUNT NIGHT, APRIL 15, 2012
[click here for discount tickets]

For more information on what SSP does with Orlando City, and for more pictures on training… click here

I’m back! Often times with topics of fitness and exercise, it is not so much an issue of learning, as it is an unlearning of what we have learned. Self-image, opinions of others, miss-informed articles, and a host of other hurdles keep many hindered from setting and reaching realistic, self-appropriate goals. Genetics, skeletal structure, proper nutrition, intensity of exercise, mindsets, work ethic, discipline, and exercise history all play a part in the molding of a specific physique. In order to achieve and succeed, we have to understand the science behind exercise adaptation, as well as understanding ourselves, individually. Here are a few more fitness related myths that I commonly run into with my experience in the exercise field.

1. The longer I workout, the more calories I burn.
Duration and intensity have an inverse relationship, meaning, the longer I workout, the more energy has to be persevered, and the less intense the session will be. I would simply define intensity as how hard you work during a session, using a mixture of different rep schemes, little to no rest between exercises, using big, multi-joint exercises, and various loads. To put it bluntly, if you can talk on a cell phone, read a Cosmo, and keep makeup intact, I would not define that as an intense workout. We have already established in my previous blogs that post-exercise calorie burn is critical when fat loss is the primary goal. To restate, post exercise oxygen consumption is the amount of time your body spends burning calories after an exercise session. Research brings out that the higher the intensity of the workout, the longer your body spends in this state, post workout.
In order to best utilize time spent working out, we have to look at not how long I spend in the gym, but how long I spend actually exercising. I can spend two hours in the gym, but when I account for water breaks, bathroom intermissions, resting, talking, etc. I could have only spent eighteen minutes actually doing work. So become more efficient! Commit to thirty minutes of exercise, yet spend twenty minutes actually doing work, incorporating as little rest as possible. In order to utilize HGH, a hormone responsible for protein synthesis and fat utilization, try keeping rest time under 60 seconds or less between exercises. Use a timer or a stopwatch and don’t just guesstimate! Go hard for less time and you will see more gains in the long run.

2. As long as I exercise, I can eat (or drink) anything I want.
In my profession, one of the most common frustrations I come across with female clientele is that the weight does not come off fast enough. “I workout so hard, but I hardly see any physical change,” I hear many tell me. Well, first we must dissect a few issues. First, how many times a week are you working out and how intense is the exercise session? As stated in the previous paragraph, if intensity is lacking, so does the post exercise oxygen consumption, which will lead to less calories burned at rest. Many people believe that if they just “show up” two to three hours a week that that pesky fat will melt away like butter.

Second , because one “works out,” he or she many times feels justified in cheating by ingesting more calories, consciously or unconsciously, especially on the weekend. However, if we look at this a little bit closer, there are 168 hours in a week, in which you devote anywhere from 2-10 hours to exercise in that week, depending on frequency. To put it another way, “In the 168 hour week, I am going to discipline myself 2-10 hours a week with exercise, but the other 158-166 hours are negligible.” When stated like that, the issue becomes a little more transparent.

Disciplining yourself and what you put in your body is key to finding real, lasting, fat loss. Just because I work out a few times a week, I can’t then eat multiple slices of pizza on Friday and make room for a glass (or four) of wine every night. If the calorie consumption is always beating the calorie expenditure over the course of the week, even if it is a little bit, you will never see much change from a body composition standpoint. Self discipline and a lot of consistency will inevitably breed change. You must commit to changing habits and behaviors, not just adding an extra day of exercise. Mark Twight, Owner of Gym Jones in Salt Lake City, Utah said, “Everyone thinks their diet is fine. Positive changes on a cellular level (due to nutritional influence) can take up to six months to occur. Red blood cells are replaced every three months. Eating a diet of organic foods and sound macronutrient ratios for a month, then declaring it doesn’t work is ridiculous. But its how most people behave. Without an immediate and measureable benefit they revert to old habits. They want a cure in a bottle.”

If you are not seeing change, you need to analyze first and foremost: what are you putting in your body? Take the next two weeks and journal everything that you eat; you might be surprised to see how much you really consume on a day to day basis. Stay away from calorie dense foods (i.e. fried chicken, processed foods, corn syrup of any kind, alcohol, and the like) and start incorporating nutrient dense foods (i.e. fruits, greens, nuts, seeds, mono & poly unsaturated fats, and the like). Stick with it for the long haul, allow your body to heal, and start seeing real change.

3. Because I do cardio, I don’t need to work my legs with weights.
False, false, and oh, did I mention false? Firstly, I want you to think of your legs as your best calorie burners on your body! The legs have the most muscle distributed on your body, meaning, the more the muscle, the more energy is needed to perform repeated contractions with those muscles. We must use them for more than just cardio!

Secondly, muscle on the body is made up of two different muscle fiber types: type 1 muscle fiber and type 2 muscle fiber. I want you to think of your type 1 muscle fibers as endurance based fibers. These fibers usually help first in activities such as walking, running, moving lighter loads, and are resistant to fatigue when not stressed exceedingly. When performing cardio for a long duration, the body will best adapt to the situation by recruiting these types of muscle fibers to get the job done. However, this fiber type does not do a whole lot for actually shaping your legs, butt, etc. This is where type 2 fibers come into play.

Type 2 muscle fibers are responsible for the firmer, more shapely image the muscles receive in response to resistance training. These muscles are recruited when the load is heavier and needs more strength to move it. Also, when running, if you went from a jog to an all-out sprint, your body would “switch” muscle fiber types for the sudden demand in speed. These muscle types fatigue faster, yet present the body with a far better alternative when the demand and intensity is high. Also, these fiber types respond to the hormone shifts resistance training stimulates, and adapt by becoming stronger, and give a more shapely appearance.

Make sure you don’t neglect your legs when resistance training; the legs are your biggest advocate in the gym!

Edited by Courtney VandeStreek

Sports help teach young athletes to set goals and take appropriate actions in an attempt to achieve them. We all know that success doesn’t always come easy, but sometimes we fail to understand the true difficulty of what it takes to get there.

My younger brother, Zach, wanted to be a great swimmer his entire life. By the time he was a freshman in high school our older brother, Matt, had a world championship gold medal and was an All-American swimmer for the University of Texas. I was a senior in high school and just signed a letter of intent to swim at the University of Kentucky. Zach wanted to be a great swimmer because his older brothers were successful swimmers and he believed he could be too. The only problem was, he was the only person who believed he could.

Zach didn’t show much talent at a young age, and compared to Matt and me he lacked the size we had been blessed with. Still, his plans never changed. He wanted to go to a big Division 1 University and experience the success Matt and I had. That kind of future wasn’t looking likely, however, and things got worse when he started experiencing shoulder pain the summer after his freshman year of high school. In December of 2006 he would have his first surgery for a torn labrum, only to be followed by a second surgery a month later for tearing his other labrum.

After 2 hours per day of rehab for 6 months, Zach was ready to get back in the water by July of 2007 and he was training full time by October of 2007. He was just in time for his junior season. He would be set back, however, by an immediate back injury upon returning. By this point there were many close to him trying to convince him to quit. Not because they wanted to watch him fail, but because they were tired of watching him fail. Unwilling to change his mind he continued swimming and began strength training with a personal trainer named Barry Bragg. Barry taught Zach more than strength training. He taught him lessons about faith and believing in oneself.

After not much time back in the water, Zach was already showing quite a bit of progress. However, when recruiting time came around for colleges there wasn’t much out there for him. The University of Kentucky (where I was swimming at the time) offered Zach a small scholarship and he accepted with enthusiasm. This was considered a “polite gesture,” but to Zach it was an opportunity for him to show everyone what he was capable of.

Fast foreword to 2012 and Zach had completed 2 college seasons having already swam faster than anyone ever thought. He transferred to Virginia Tech after his freshman year and quickly moved up the ranks in the 100 and 200-yard backstroke events in the Atlantic Coast Conference. At the ACC Championships in February of 2012, my younger brother shocked the college swimming community when he became the ACC Champion in the 100-yard backstroke with a time of 46.79. There were coaches on the pool deck for other teams that specifically told Zach he wasn’t good enough to walk on to their team just a few short years ago. Zach has turned a distant dream into reality, and this month he will compete in his first ever NCAA Championship meet in Seattle, Washington.

To me, the significance of Zach’s story goes beyond “feel good.” Too often we look at successful people on TV and think “wouldn’t it be nice.” The reality is we don’t know what it took for them to get there, or how hard they worked for it. This story wasn’t “feel good” to Zach when he was living it. He battled doubters, surgeries, and severe depression to get to where he is, and he wasn’t always making progress. I asked Zach what he would want people to take away from his story. His message: “You have to believe in yourself before anyone else will,” and “Never see limits.”

How many times did you fall down before you walked? The correct answer is, “Until I began to walk.” – Dave Tate

Edited by Courtney VandeStreek

Out at the fields Thursday morning with the Orlando City Soccer team. The team had a game on Wednesday night against Rollins College where they won 1-0. A handful of the players were on the field for 70 plus minutes, while numerous got anywhere from 20-30 minutes of time. My role today, help those players who played the bulk of the minutes recover and be ready for a game in two days. I took the whole team through a 15 minute warm up, getting everyone’s core temperature up, start flushing lactic acid, and get blood flowing to the muscles they broke down the night before. Those players not receiving a bunch of playing time had an hour-long session with their coaches. I had the rest of the players after the warm-up and we did a series of soft tissue work, dynamic stretching and static stretching. We utilized several tools such as tennis and lacrosse balls to start with some trigger point work. The idea is to help the muscles get back to their normal length-tension relationship through self myofascial release (SMR). After the trigger point work, we got on foam rolls to address the entire muscle. Our goal is to identify any areas of compromised muscle tissue, work on it for 2 minutes per area. If a player found an area of tightness or pain, they sat on that spot for :30 – :45. After the players finished these areas, I took them through a series of dynamic flexibility exercises designed to take their muscles through a range of motion, actively stretching the muscle. We then finished with static stretches to try and gain some additional flexibility and length in their muscles. At the end of the session, all of the players were required to sit in a waist-deep ice bath for 8 minutes.

Justin Clark found himself in a familiar situation on Wednesday night…at the Rollins Soccer field, celebrating a win from a goal that he scored off of his header. The only difference between this game and the games he has played the past four years….he was wearing a professional uniform and that win came against Rollins College. Justin had the only goal in a 1-0 win for the Orlando City Lions over Rollins College. It was extremely satisfying watching Justin score that goal and play well for Orlando City, especially because he came to SSP two summers ago as a sophomore in college with a single goal in mind: to play professional soccer. The difference between just stating that goal to someone and really pursuing it with direction and intent is why Justin is invited to professional teams pre-season and not thinking about what might have been. He spent three months of his summer before his senior year training 5 days a week. He focused on improving his quickness, speed, agility, conditioning, and overall strength so that he would be ready to compete at the next level. One thing we had to do with Justin was perform a Functional Movement Screen. He was already a good athlete, but we needed to identify areas of tightness, weakness, and compensation patterns he had developed. From this screen we identified several areas of tightness, which led to him compensating for that in his movements and made him less efficient. We spent a good amount of time correcting those imbalances and he spent an extra 15 minutes at the end of every session improving his flexibility and working on those weaknesses. Those three months of hard work further developed an already athletic player into a physically dominating presence on the field. His strength on the ball, his closing speed as a defender, and his ability to win almost any ball in the air made him an outstanding defender his senior year of college. He took 2 weeks off after the finish of his college season then got back to work. He trained at SSP all of December and January to prepare for the February preseason of Orlando City. In these two months we had two primary goals: be fit and peak his body for the best level of performance he was capable of.

Justin had previously been training with his teammates at Rollins with their strength and conditioning coach, Will Hitzelberger (founder of SSP). He had a head-start on the training and was extremely good at most of the movements we teach and work on. However, there is always room to improve and that is where his training was unique. Justin worked on the small details of his movements and refined his athleticism so that when it became reactionary or game-like, he would automatically utilize the most efficient way to turn, cut or accelerate to where he needed to go. As a performance coach it was fun working with him. Many times we work on basic movement patterns to help improve any player’s athleticism because that will give the biggest bang for buck. However, in Justin’s case, he had good fundamentals because he had been training with Hitzelberger for four years in a team setting so I was able to work on really advanced movements and power progressions. Improving technique goes a long way, but adding power to those movements is a real difference maker. That is where Justin was able to make some dramatic improvements. When asked about SSP’s role in making it to the next level, “Their training is excellent. They focus on the details, things that us players don’t think about… how tight my hip flexors and hamstrings are and how that can make me slower. Their knowledge combined with the intensity of their training helped take my physical game to the next level.”

Justin isn’t the first player to go this route, Dennis Chin, a former Rollins College standout also trained with SSP before making the Orlando City team in their inaugural season of 2011. He recently signed a new contract and has been playing consistently in their 2012 preseason matches against MLS teams, where he has netted a couple of goals.

If you’re like most people, you hate to warm up and you don’t do it well enough. I’m not judging you. In fact I totally understand. A warm up is the last thing I want to do when I’m mentally psyched up to go crush some iron in the weight room. But no matter how many times you tell yourself that a lion doesn’t warm-up before it attacks its prey, that’s not going to save your hamstrings from tearing off like a pair of break-away pants when you make your cold muscles take off into a full sprint.

Lack of motivation is only one reason we don’t warm-up. Everyone knows it’s important for both improved performance and injury prevention, so why don’t we do a better job of it? Lack of knowledge on how to implement a proper warm-up is the underlying factor. In this entry I’m going to break down how you can structure a simple, easy, and effective warm-up for an event or training session so that you won’t skip out on this important piece of performance.

STEP 1: SELF-MASSAGE

Self-massage (or self myofacial release) is an important step in the warm-up for a lot of reasons. Constant reoccurring stresses and static positions from our lives cause adhesions in our muscles and their surrounding soft tissue. This can create issues in range of motion and elasticity. It’s a good idea to use various massage tools such as a foam roller, tennis ball, lacrosse ball, or massage stick to help restore the muscles to their normal length. In order to get these knots to release you’re going to have to spend some time easily working into those tender spots in the muscle. Spend about 2-3 minutes prioritizing the areas that cause the most problems for you. Remember to keep the muscles relaxed while massaging.

STEP 2: DYNAMIC PREPARATION

The primary goals of this phase are to increase core temperature, lubricate the joints, and improve range of motion in the muscles. This phase can be broken down into 2 sub-segments: A general warm-up segment and dynamic flexibility segment.

The general warm-up should consist of 1 to 2 minutes of light jogging or non-impact cardio and/or some basic and easy core and body weight exercises to start waking up your muscles and push fluid into the joints. Pillar bridges to activate the entire core, glute bridges, body weight squats, walking lunges, jumping jacks, and push-up variations are all great. This doesn’t need to be fancy or time consuming. Pick 2-4 bodyweight exercises and perform 2-3 sets of 6-10 repetitions on each.

Tip for Athletes
When performing your pillar bridges and glute bridges in warm-up, think about actively squeezing your butt cheeks (sounds creepy, I know). Actively thinking about contracting your glutes (squeezing your cheeks) will significantly increase your glute activation during these exercises. This is extremely important, as a recent study in Australia found that a low load glute warm-up resulted in a significantly higher peak power output during a counter-movement vertical jump than both a whole body vibration platform warm-up and a control group (Buttifant et al. 2011). In other words, glute bridges can make you jump higher!

Pillar Bridge

Glute Bridge

STEP 3: DYNAMIC MOVEMENT

The final step in our warm-up is the dynamic movement phase. The purpose here is to prime our nervous system in preparation for the upcoming event. Have you ever felt like your body was strong and well rested but then when you went to lift or sprint everything felt heavy and sluggish? Chances are even though your muscles felt good your central nervous system was either fatigued or “turned-off”. Understand that our brain controls our muscles too. If our mind isn’t ready, neither is our body.

For our athletes this part of the warm-up involves specific marching and skipping variations to prepare for the movement we’re focusing on that day, followed by what we call rapid response, which involves over-speed footwork related to that same movement. This allows the athlete to establish correct movement patterns for the work ahead as well as prepare their central nervous system for high intensity work. For those of you non-athletes trying to put together your own warm-ups, try including some hand or foot drills for speed. You can use an agility ladder if you have access to one, or you can simply come up with movements to do in place or even with a light medicine ball that work on activating your muscles at a high frequency. Remember, the goal here is to EXCITE, not FATIGUE. You should finish this phase feeling stimulated and ready for your workout. These drills might last only 3 to 6 seconds at a time and for 2 to 4 sets with necessary rest in between. Quickness is a key element here.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

This was probably a lot of new information for some people. Don’t be intimidated by this. Make your warm-up the simplest way to effectively prepare for your needs. You only have 3 steps to follow, and even if you didn’t totally understand the exercises I mentioned, you should at least have an idea of what you should and should not do. It would take too long for me to go into detail about individual exercises, but I’m going to lay out a sample plan for you to show you how quick and easy this process can be. A little online research should explain any terms I use that you might not understand. Make sure you don’t try any exercises that you don’t know how to perform safely.

Sample Warm-up
Self-Massage (3 minutes)

Dynamic Preparation (6-8 minutes)

Dynamic Flexibility (2-3 minutes)

Dynamic Movement (less than 1 minute)

Total Time = 10-12 Minutes

It is commonly thought that if a little of something is good, then more must be better. When it comes to training for a sport, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Just like anything in life, training too frequently can lead to a syndrome known as overtraining. There are actually two types, over-reaching and overtraining.

Over-reaching is defined as:
An accumulation of training and/or non-training stress resulting in short-term decrement in performance capacity with or without related physiological and psychological signs and symptoms of maladaptation in which restoration of performance capacity may take from several days to several weeks.

Over-reaching is actually a planned event that can be beneficial if handled carefully. Common uses of over-reaching are seen during the pre-season stages of many sports, where teams will hold multiple intense workouts a day a few weeks leading up to competition. The result of all of this training forces the body to make several adaptations to accommodate the stress and can yield great results. The problem with this strategy is keeping the volume of training precise enough to make change but not push them over the brink and injure them. Tracking how much work the athlete is doing and letting them recover enough from the training to actually make the desired adaptations is the difference between a successful over-reaching cycle and pushing the athlete to overtraining syndrome.

Overtraining Syndrome is defined as:
An accumulation of training and/or non-training stress resulting in long-term decrement in performance capacity with or without related physiological and psychological signs and symptoms of maladaptation in which restoration of performance capacity may take several weeks or months.

Overtraining is where an athlete simply isn’t recovering as much as he is training. It is easy to forget that training is causing damage to the body and during the “recovery” time, which are all other hours spent outside of training. This is where employing recovery strategies such as proper nutrition/hydration and enough quality sleep is so vital to keeping the body from breaking down beyond the point of being able to repair fast enough.

The bottom line to preventing overtraining is monitoring the amount of training. This includes all time spend on the field/court/pavement during practice and competition. Using a structured periodized training program (including unloading/rest periods) is the best way to prevent overtraining. There are simple signs to monitor if you find that you or your young athlete are starting to become over trained, including:

Edited by Courtney VandeStreek

Knowledge is power, but wisdom is applying that knowledge to actually affect what you do. With the excessive amount of information pertaining to fitness, gaining muscle, and fat loss out there, what is true and what is just a gimmick? One could pick up five health and fitness related articles and get five very different answers, leaving the reader even more confused than when he or she first started. Can I believe everything I read just because it “says so,” by an apparent “expert” or does there need to be an exploring of what is really the truth? Just because we aspire to look aesthetically pleasing like celebrities, trainers, and athletes, are they really credible when it comes to selling us information to achieve that look? Much that is known in the fitness industry is based on misinformation, lack of research, and just plain assumptions. So with that in mind, let’s explore some of the common fitness myths and expose them by bringing them into the light of what science and research have to say about it.

1. Lifting Weights will make me “bulky”

Much of the female population is usually deterred from lifting weights of no more than five pounds because it is believed that by lifting, they will soon balloon like Schwarzenegger, causing unwanted girth, pulsating veins, and a voice that will drop three octaves. This is largely due to watching other women that they aspire to look like lift no more than a Latte. However, most of the women marketed in magazines, movies, and the like have always had that same physique since they were twelve years old and have had no need to properly train anyway. Also, many women will tend to stick to “cardio” activities because this is believed to burn the unwanted fat, leaving behind the highly coveted, goddess-like shape. Finally, with a small population of females into bodybuilding, this only furthers the belief that women who lift weights will soon morph into a man-like beast. This, however, couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Firstly, muscle that is stimulated and stressed through load-bearing movements, i.e. resistance training, with progressive loads, force that muscle to adapt to the excess strain, causing a huge metabolic response. A metabolic response can simply be defined as excess calories burned during rest to aid in the body’s recovery. So that means that if strength training is done on a consistent basis, the body will actually burn more calories at rest, causing a huge, internal shift, which will lead to tapping into fat stores to aid in the process. Also, from an aesthetic point of view, muscle is denser in circumference than fat, which will actually lead to inches lost and a more shapely appearance.

Next, research has brought out that just completing long, slow, cardiovascular activities for duration, does nothing for post-exercise, calorie burn. Yes, energy is burned during the activity, but when the activity stops, so does your calorie burn! Conversely, completing resistance training in a circuit like format, or high intensity intervals, can increase post-calorie burn up to 48 hours after one workout (refer to my Blog, “The War on Fat Loss,” for the specific study)!

Lastly, muscle growth is largely an endocrine response, or shifts in hormone levels in the body. One of the major hormones responsible for muscle growth is Testosterone, which is present in both male and female bodies. However, women have a much smaller production of this hormone, which makes it physiologically impossible for females to “get swole.” Specifically women who body build must take external sources of multiple hormones to receive the massive stimulation of muscle growth that give them that “man like” physique.
Don’t fear, resistance training will get you much farther than a body builder can run!

2. For best results, I need to stay in the “Fat Burning Zone”

In my experience, fat loss is the number one issue discussed among female clientele. The question always arises, “How do I burn the most fat in the least amount of time?” The fat burning zone has been largely utilized over the years, but widely misunderstood. This misnomer originated from taking too literally what we know about the body’s energy systems and metabolic processes. The body has to produce energy for any type of activity during the day. From driving to dead lifting, from cooking to cardio, and from sleeping to skiing, the body must decide the most efficient way to produce energy for the task at hand. It has been determined that fat is predominately used as the body’s main substrate at any low to moderate activity, including rest. So that seems logical, if I want to burn fat, I must stay in the “fat burning zone” during lower to moderate activity. Based on this, different fitness publications have stated that when performing cardiovascular exercise, one must maintain a range of 60%-80% of one’s maximum heart rate, thus assuring “fat utilization.” That means that in order to burn fat all I have to do is wake up in the morning, go about my day, and if I feel like it, spend 20-30 minutes doing a light, cardio session a couple times a week. If that were true, why is the obese epidemic higher than ever in this country? Guess what? Drum roll….It doesn’t work! Exercise science has brought out that the higher the intensity of the workout or cardio session, the more the body has to expend energy post-workout to recover the body’s tissues, water levels, energy stores, etc. We must really look at the overall effect of how the body responds to what type of exercise being performed, not just when performing the exercise session. A cardio session might burn 500 calories, but I would rather burn 3-4 x that when I am done exercising through an intense, interval session.

The fat burning zone has been debunked of course because in order to make the body a long term, fat burning machine, one must increase resting metabolism by increasing lean muscle and progressively challenge the body’s nervous, muscular, and cardiovascular systems, which will lead to more hormone shifts, aiding in overall fat loss. If you want to burn the most fat in the least amount of time, skip the recumbent bike and start looking for exercises and interval formats that will keep the body burning calories for hours on end.

3. I can spot reduce my body

Unfortunately, many women have been led to believe that if there is an area on the body that needs improvement, all that must be done is to work that specific area. I am still trying to figure out what one woman asked me to do when I started training her, “Can you get rid of my knee fat?” If I went into most gyms across the country, it seems that they offer specialized, shining, magic machines that all I have to do is sit down, move this handle back and forth a few times or push on this small platform for a few minutes and, bingo, firmer triceps and a more shapely rear end! Crunches, bicep curls, tricep extensions, and thigh Ab/Adductors tend to be the most popular. However, in order to see change over a period of time in a specific muscle, the body must learn to use itself in a coordinated fashion by engaging multiple muscles at once. Why? Because hormone response to exercise is one of the biggest components to fat loss and increasing lean tissue; hormones are utilized when many muscles are used at the same time.

Fat loss and tissue building occurs from a global response (full body) to exercise and not an isolated (single joint) one. When the body performs multi-joint exercises, research shows that hormone shifts occur, thus leading to physical changes in the body. For instance, if I want to make my triceps stronger, I need to perform pushups, presses (horizontal and vertical), dips, and the like that force those smaller muscles, the triceps, to help their bigger counterpart, the pectoral. Similarly, if I want to improve the appearance of my legs, squats, deadlifts, and power exercises such as a hang clean, can do wonders for the lower body and aids in an increased calorie burn.

Train the body, the whole body, and your problem areas will be glad you did!

Next month, look for more debunking and expelling of the common misnomer!

Edit by Courtney VandeStreek