Forced Adaptation: Making your Workouts Work!

Over at my Big Muscle Blog, I touched briefly on workout routines becoming "routine." Blame it on our highly adaptive nervous system. Our nervous system is at the front lines when we encounter the world in which we live. When I put a weight in a client's hand and show him/her a new exercise, it's their nervous system that's evaluating that new exercise, not so much their muscles. In fact, unless your nervous system gets on board with that new exercise, there probably won't be any muscle adaptation, let alone growth: Adaptation first, next comes growth!

There's a principle called forced adaptation whereas a muscle is given a new stress (a change in weight, a change in the number of reps, or a new movement) and the result is that muscle adapting to the change (growing). This translates into mixing things up in the gym. If you've been doing the same workout for several months, it's efficacy is probably on the wane by now. There's a simple solution: Mix it up or hire a trainer who will show you new movements that will keep your training sessions moving forward.

Ab Training: Balance is the Key

When you hear or use the word "abs," a lot of people visualize the muscles (or lack of them) below the rib cage in front of the torso. The most famous, sought-after, and elusive set of ab muscles, the 6-pack, are rectus abdominis and begin at the pubic bone (pubis), and runs up the front of the body and is inserted across the 5th, 6th, and 7th ribs.

Along with rectus abdominis, there are also the internal and external obliques, and the deepest, transverse abdominus, to name a few. They all have different functions but as a group, they're postural muscles that basically protect our spine and keep us up upright.

Think of your spine as a mast on a ship, except this mast is like a flexible fishing pole. The ship's mast is supported by cables (stays) that run from different areas of the ship and are attached to the mast adding support in all directions. Our abdominal muscles are just like the stays that support the ship's mast including, surprise, surprise, those muscles on the backside of our body. They work in concert to keep the spine balanced and protected...or they don't. Take for instance rectus abdominus Lets just say rectus abdominus is represented by the blue line in the illustration. Everybody loves (?) to train rectus by doing hundreds and hundreds of crunches, sometimes aided by machines with heavy weights. Now, imagine that rectus gets stronger, and tighter (everybody wants tight abs)...and shorter. That mast is no longer upright and the mast, which supports the sails (your upper torso), is weakened. That is, unless the stay's on the other side of the mast are just as strong and can balance and strengthen the mast. Good luck. Most people think no further than their 6-packs and the ab machines in most gyms are designed to train them to the point of imbalance. I've seen men and women sporting beautiful 6-packs that are postural train wrecks with bowed backs, sagging shoulders, and chins that jut-out over their chests.

Abdominal muscles mostly need to be trained the position in which they're used: Upright. You don't need your abs while laying in bed. You need them when that little kid at the grocery store, going 100 mph down the aisles, rams you with his shopping cart to keep you from flying into the display of tomato soup. Don't overlook or over-train abdominal muscles. Remember: They're for balance and they need to be treated in a balanced manner. Laying on your back and doing hundreds of crunches on an ab bench is not creating balance.

Eat to Meet your Fitness Goals

One of the biggest obstacles I face with clients during their training is food. While putting in 60 - 90 minutes a day at the gym can move you closer towards your fitness goals, proper eating is the key. I ask every one of my clients what they had for breakfast that day, and more often than not the answer is "a cup of coffee" or "nothing." Whether you're trying to loose weight or pack it on, neither of those responses will get you any closer to your goals.

One thing is for certain, your body doesn't work well on an empty tank of gas. When you wake up in the morning, your blood sugar is low and you need to fuel your body. Question: What organ is the largest consumer of carbs in the body? If you guessed the brain, you're right (your mouth is not an organ). So, let me rephrase this: When you wake up in the morning your brain is hungry. It's very demanding and if you're not going to feed it, it's going to feed itself. There's a fascinating process in the body called gluconeogenesis whereby the brain signals the liver to create glucose, food on which the brain operates. This happens in the liver by breaking-down amino acids to create this brainfood, or glucose. And where do you suppose those amino acids come from in your body? Your muscles: precious muscle that you've worked so hard to build, precious muscle that keep your body's metabolism purring along so nicely. Yes, in order to keep your brain going, it will break down your hard-earned muscle to feed itself. After all, the brain has the enormous task of keeping you going.

What's the solution? You need to eat in the morning if you want to lose weight or if you're trying to gain weight. It may be a bowl of oatmeal with fresh fruit and yogurt, a toasted bagel with nut butter, or a baked sweet potato. Eat something! Even better would be to make food plan for yourself - Breakfast, snacks, lunch, and dinner - and get to the grocery store. Like the saying goes, plan the work and work the plan!

Safe, Effective Exercise

A buddy in San Francisco is a bit of a curmudgeon. He's old-school when it comes to the gym: workout one, maybe two body parts a day; bigger is best; and avoid cardio (gotta keep that weight up). I love the look on his face when a trainer is having his/her client perform certain activities which he labels "Stupid Human Tricks" (that would be anything not involving weights, machines or cables). He'll sit there surveying the situation and then issue a whole litany of comments about what-could-go-wrong and why-it-looks-stupid while rolling his eyes and shaking his head. I'm sure my narrow-minded buddy, and I mean that in the nicest, possible way, didn't see the value in what this trainer was trying to accomplish with his client. I'm not sure that I did either. Not that what they were doing was bad, so to speak. But was this movement appropriate for the client?

As trainers, myself included, we like to mix it up for our clients to keep things interesting and fun. We take continuing education classes and workshops where we learn all of the latest moves with all of the latest gizmos (remind me to tell you the story about the Frisbees). We come back to the gym invigorated and renewed hoping to show our students something exciting. But again, are these exercises appropriate for our client's capability or are we as trainers, just showing off? I'm sure you've heard the saying, "you've got to crawl, before you walk." Personal Trainers have to be able to evaluate where there client's are in that process to provide safe and effective exercise. Then, and only then, can they transition their clients to more dynamic and difficult movements.

About the Frisbees? A class instructor came up with a brilliant idea to use Frisbees, or paper plates, for an entire workout which involved sliding all over the floor and dragging our butts along using these discs to make it easy. Needless to say my clients didn't get any of that action.

You're Sitting on Your Greatest Muscle-Building Asset

The glutes, quadriceps, and ham-strings burn a remarkable volume of gram calories while they are being trained. As a Palm Springs Personal Trainer I've directly observed the real-word benefits with clients: Those squats, lunges, and dead lifting sets take a substantial energy toll on the entire body but yield great results. Because your body works systemically (think about it functioning as a huge furnace), those tortuous leg exercises trigger an increase in your body's whole metabolism. That burn lasts long after the exercise is finished, too. It takes the body a couple hours to return to your typical metabolic state while still consuming gram calories at a higher than usual levels.

With these large muscles, you are sitting on your body's best fat-fighting resource: Your glutes and your legs – the two body parts that encompass the leading mass and fat-burning muscles on the skeleton. They're capable of fantastic bursts of energy but additionally call for sizable amounts of gram calories to make that occur. Muscle is vibrant, it's alive and needs to be fed. Fat, on the other hand, consumes very little energy. It is, after all, the form in which the body deposits excess energy, i.e., excess gram calories. By focusing on your large thigh muscles, you super-charge your body’s calorie burning capacity and also target those in which adding muscle-mass is easiest.

What's the implication? No excuses avoiding hard leg training. The possibility for muscular growth and transformations that leg training supplies for your whole entire body is too good to refuse. An effortless, twice-weekly training routine is to split your legs into front and rear. One day, focus the muscle in front of your legs, the other day, train the muscles on the rear of your legs. And if you're trying to develop a well-developed and shaped, beefy, muscular backside; do your lunges and squats! Try this training arrangement for 8 to 10 weeks and then switch it up.