Happy Holiday weekend to you!  I think one of my favorite things about the holidays are the leftovers.  Then again, I love leftovers, so anytime there's leftovers, you'll find a happy Mikey!

The one thing with some of the holiday leftovers is that they don't always make me feel my best.  Lots of joy foods, but not necessarily high performing foods.  I'm not going to not eat them, as they're not all the time, but I need to manage how I feel later.  

Today, I was moving slow, so opted to move fast.  I put on my winter cap, my base layers, my gloves, windbreaker and warmed up in the driveway.  I did some mobility exercises like leg swings, trunk rotations, ankle mobes and arm circles to get un stiff.  Next I did a long movement prep filled with lots of dynamic stretching and movement skills like high knee runs, skips, cariocas, etc...  Then I did sprints.  I sprinted from the manhole cover at the beginning of the street to the manhole cover at the end of the street.  They were slow.  About 40s/sprint.  I did a recover walkback that took 2m30s and repeated.  I did 4 sprints like this and then I did 5 sprints from manhole cover at the beginning of the street to the manhole cover in front of my house.  Those took about 20sec.  I did a walk back recovery for those as well (about 90sec).  

40s Sprint

walk back recovery 2m30s

do 3 sets

rest 2min

20s Sprint

walk back recovery 1m30s

do 3 sets

rest 2min

20s Sprint 

walk back recovery 1m30s

do 2 sets

40s Sprint

walk around the block recovery

I love me my weight training and getting stronger.  Today I wanted to do some conditioning.  Sometimes I like to combine them, similar to boot camp.  Recently as in the last year, I discovered personalized treadmill workouts and custom corrective cardio (C3).  I've been doing movement screens on clients as part of my initial and ongoing assessments (among others I've always used as a Certified and Licensed Athletic trainer) since back in my BSC days (over 10 years ago) and with the results and imbalances I'd discover I would program corrective exercises into their strength routines and the progress was good.  

Then in bootcamp I'm always seeing imbalances and tight spots and weak spots, and because it's group personal training you can only address it so much in a workout, so I'll let what I see influence some of the warm up correctives, dynamic stretching and exercise selection of future phases.  It bothered me that I saw problems and couldn't fix them, so kept, trying to figure out how I could help clients who signed up for group training more, and the only answer was to work with them 1-on-1.  

That's when I created the custom corrective cardio workouts.  All my clients have cardio goals.  If you want to see the scale go down and maintain that weight, the research shows what you need to do.  My colleague, Dr. Thomas Halton, built his Weight Loss personal training business around it and wrote The Weight Loss Triad to brand his system.  That book and that research are the inspiration for our own cardio minutes in Change Your Body Boot Camps.

The problem was asking clients to do corrective exercises outside the gym, was a big ask, if they already had to dedicate time outside the gym to cardio minutes.  How could they work on their imbalances to reduce injury risk, enhance performance and still work towards aesthetic goals?  Duh!  Why not combine them, was the answer.

I started to introduce them as a bonus to reward clients who renewed early, and their were a lot of hiccups.  My man, Pete K, got the 1st one and it was supposed to be a 45min workout and it took 90 minutes and I didn't even finish teaching him the whole routine before he had to leave.  Lucky for everyone who followed, that I quickly changed everyone's workouts and by the time I got to Julie and Stephanie at the end of the day, I had a system and a template.  

This year is year two and I've fined tuned it further.  I was able to retest people and track their results and ... not only was compliance excellent, but it worked.  Their imbalances improved.  They got more cardio minutes.  Their movement quality got better.  Double win!

I was having such fulfilling success with these C3 workouts, that I thought, why don't I introduce them with my private client.  The cool thing about my private client, is she has a nice little home gym with different cardio tools, so I could incorporate some form of sprint or burst on a machine, with correctives off of it.  Brilliant.  It made her custom cardio plan filled with high intensity anaerobic interval training, high intensity aerobic interval training, high intensity steady state training and low intensity stready state training even more personalized because we could incorporate the exercises off of it.

Sprinting as part of a strength training routine has been around a long time.  It's called circuit training.  It gained more popularity with the whole HIIT research and fitness wave that started in the late 2000's (Tabata's anyone?) and really became exciting to me when Martin Rooney, of Training for Warriors, wrote his book Warrior Cardio.  Martin was a D1 collegiate sprinter, became and Olympic Bob Sledder, got a Physical Therapy degree, and then was teaching speed training through the Parisi Speed School.  He found his niche in Mixed Martial Arts, when he partnered up with the Gracie's and helped their athletes win tournaments.  His guys won.  Lots of different guys and lots of wins.  He was one of the first that brought thoughtful strength & conditioning to the MMA world.  

So in this book, he had a chapter call Hurricane Training, based on the Hurricanes you'd find in weather.  Category 1 Hurricane, up to Category 5.  It's bad a**.  It's something I'd do, but I wouldn't do with most clients because its so intense it would be a cardiovascular risk, injury risk and the recovery would be great.  But the results.  How could I give my clients a more fun and challenging way to hit their cardio goals, that would help them to lose fat and build muscle at the same time?  Why not scale the workouts to my clients abilities and why not take it a step further and incorporate exercises that address their imbalances.  "BRILLIANT" say the Guiness guys!  

Then Mike C said, I should check out Barry's Boot Camp, so I did.  25 treadmills paired with 25 aerobic steps.  50 people.  25 doing sprints on a treadmill.  25 doing beach muscles.  Great workout.  Club like atmosphere with the lighting, sound, playlist.  So much fun.  Great workout for me because I have pretty good joint health.  Beach muscles as in split routines that consist of workout days in which you do chest & biceps, back & triceps, legs & shoulders and arms & abs.  (I might not have the correct split routines that Barrys' BC uses, but that's the general idea; body part routines).  But what if you have tight spots.  What if you have muscular or postural imbalances.  What if you have an injury?  What if you're stiff from sitting, driving, flying?  Then beach muscle training is a nice to have, but feeling and moving well become priority musts!  

So I saw an opportunity that isn't being served.  What do you do when you've built cardio minutes into your lifestyle and you're getting bored with just walking or running or ...  What do you do if you want to perform better in a sport?  What do you do if you want to move better and get leaner and perform better?

You can use a treadmill, elliptical, sprints, ... so may different burst type sprints and then you pair it with a couple of exercises that are specific to your goals and/or your needs.  You get someone to teach you the routine and then you do it consistently for a certain # of workouts and you should get better.  You go from o.k. shape and bored to energized and engaged.  You go from less strong and imbalanced to strong and more solid.  That's the general idea.  To help be the Catalyst to Safe and Effective Results!