Hi Friend!
Gorgeous day to you! Sure feels good to have such a nice day to wear seasonal appropriate clothing. :-)
Tonight and tomorrow we'll be doing the full workout without formal demonstrations. I wanted to write to you to help you understand the thought process behind your program so you can make the most of your scheduled self-care.
Q2 Theme Fat Loss, Muscle Definition, Beach Season #1 and Summer Sports. That's the aim for the quarter.
Fat Loss: we're trying to decrease your fat free mass by using heavier weights, doing more full body power movements, higher skill levels of exercise, doing more total work through density training in the time we have and compound sets.
The heavier weights help to build muscle. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism. The higher your metabolism, the more calories you burn and at rest the more fat calories your burn for energy. More muscle = more fat loss (or at least the chance to decrease body fat b/c its very easy to derail this math / plan with the wrong nutrition plan).
More full body power movements means DB Power Exercises like our DB Olympic lifts (DB Hang Power Cleans and DB Speed Snatches). Full body, compound movement, multi-joint exercises have the best chance for a hormonal response (testosterone and growth hormone). The exercises make you full body strong. They help you to exert more power and explosiveness in sprinting, jumping and reacting. They also help with decreasing body fat, because it's hard to stay slow, when you're doing powerful movements, so the more you practice them the leaner you get. The hormones are also associated with decreased body fat.
Higher skill levels of exercise either through 1-leg feet elevated TRX Rows, Band Push Ups, DB Push Presses, Pull Up progressions, double bounces or continuous bounces on your lower body plyometrics (hurdles and skaters) or MB shuffle step chest throws or diagonal chops with leg whip follow throughs, can all help to decrease body fat because their multi-planar, compound movement, full body, explosive, stressful or progressive resistance exercises. Some have greater time under tension, which helps to decrease fat mass. Its difficult enough to do and learn skillful movements, but its more difficult to do them in most cases with a higher body fat, therefore, the more you practice them, the leaner you'll naturally become as a byproduct.
The density circuits we do for med balls, DB olympic lifts and strength training, allow you to compete against your past workouts to do more work in the same time as you get more familiar with the movements and the workout and you get naturally stronger and more fit from practicing the workouts. This greater work completed is represented through increased total volume of training (weight x sets x reps). More work = more muscle and indirectly less body fat.
Compound sets increase the time under tension for secondary muscle movers of your first exercise. Take DB Offset Stance RDL's for example. That's a posterior chain exercise that works your back side (upper back, glutes, hamstrings, core) that we fatigue through accumulated sets in our training, and then once you've done 2-3 sets, we do an isolated movement, leg curls, for your hamstrings that are already pre-fatigued for as many reps as possible. If you combine the time for the last Offset Stance RDL and the Towel Leg Curls, you're looking at over a minute of time for the hamstring muscle group to be working. That's awesome. Plus the hamstrings often get shut off or turned down in their responsiveness because we sit on them, so waking them up can help to decrease body fat around the back of the thigh, bottom of the glute region and if you don't know already your hamstrings, glutes and core are big metabolic regions that can burn a ton of calories.
Muscle Definition is achieved because we're training your muscles with heavier weights, more skillful exercises, more full body power exercises, more work in the time you have (density training) and the compound sets. Especially the compound sets. This is staple of body building in which you pre-fatigue one muscle group and/or you train one muscle group to exhaustion, then immediately or almost immediately you follow it up with an exercise that works a similar movement pattern that's usually a secondary mover / muscle of the first exercise. This was a staple of most every guys teens and twenties and for most everyone who does body building and body transformation training, however in a group setting, it can be difficult to teach and coach, so it usually gets cut for more big bang movements and activities. I feel like our membership has enough accumulated knowledge that it was worth giving a shot last year and trying again this year. So far it's been confusing, but doable, and feedback has been positive.
Beach Season #1. It may or may not be important to you to feel confident on the beach as you simply may not care or you may not go to the beach / lake, but most everyone wants to feel good in their clothes especially summer clothes when we show off more skin, so that's what we're also working to do with your exercise selection and programming, to get your beach muscles ready for June (which is next week).
The 1st quarter has a big weight loss emphasis, that brings down the scale and overall size of the body and the 2nd quarter works to really shape the muscles and give it curves, lines and definition. Everything mentioned early in the article helps with this, like the heavier weights, the specific exercises selected, the DB Olympic Lifts being introduced, the higher skill levels of exercises, the density training and especially the compound sets.
Summer Sports. We're training for tennis, golf, baseball, softball, lacrosse, swimming, bicycling, running, rowing, paddle boarding, volleyball, triathlons, obstacle course races, kiteboarding, hiking, you name it. All of those sports provided inspiration into the design of your program, the exercise selection and the ability to reduce risk for common injuries associated with participation in those sports.
You hear me mention this every quarter (what sports we're training and preparing for) and I have an anecdotal story to share. I mentioned to Pete, because he plays tennis and had been playing tennis weekly with Ricardo until Ricardo broke his finger playing basketball, that I'd like to start playing tennis because it was a perfect compliment to the training we do in boot camp. I think subconsciously I thought it would be a fun way to play a sport again on my terms (early morning) and requiring few people to play (2), plus I'd obviously get sprint work in and cardio minutes. Well, Pete, gave me a bunch of suggestions and then life happened, so I hadn't yet started to play, until he invited me to play with him, got a date on my calendar and supplied the racket and beginner tennis balls.
It was awesome and everything we do in boot camp, complimented the movements and conditioning required to play tennis like I had thought. Now tennis is a sport and requires knowledge of how to use a racket and hit a ball over a net, which I had very basic knowledge in, so I loved it and could do it. I hope you find a sport you'd like to play and/or train for because it really gives you even more purpose to your training, after you check off the weight loss (health) and weight maintenance (body transformation) progressions you'll go through in CYBBC.
Performance in my opinion is the progression and lifestyle you'll want to live in most of the time because its the most rewarding, most fun and lets you eat the greatest variety of foods daily, not just weekly, however there are times, when life happens (job change, relationship change, location change, family size change, deaths & sickness, ...) where you'll have to taper back your intensity and/or time available for self-care to address more immediate concerns. In these cases, the weight maintenance plan (body transformation) is best because you practice minimal effective dose to keep what you have while keeping the scale the same and decreasing body fat. And if you have to do less than weight maintenance, when life stabilizes and you come back, to full on training, you go through the progressions again (health (weight loss) > body transformation (fat loss) > performance (muscle building)).
In the meantime, get ready to work today and tomorrow. We'll be doing Workout A tonight and workout B tomorrow. If you have make ups to do and can double up, lets do it. There's no class on Monday. We'll make that up on Monday, June 4.
Loving compound sets,
Coach Mike
p.s. Are you practicing your nutrition habit?
p.p.s. Are you being present and in the moment with your thoughts and attention and not multi-tasking?
p.p.p.s. Its not stay the same boot camp, it's CHANGE YOUR BODY Boot Camps!
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