Week two of our “Foundation” program is now underway. This program is targeted toward making you LEANER, more MOBILE and BALANCED. When I look at balance I look at a few things…
1) are they muscularly balanced?… common weaknesses are rotator cuffs, glutes, abs and hamstrings. We also regularly see imbalances side-to-side hence our use of the beloved split squat!
2) are they balanced across energy systems?… can you produce high power output in a short amount of time? can you sustain a steady output for a long amount of time? are these outputs proportional?
3) are the force vectors balanced?… this basically amounts to me making sure that I’m addressing ALL the different ways we move and interact with loads. Most “weightlifting” movements are all up and down. A balanced use of force vectors ensures that your body is better prepared to handle forces in whatever direction they come from – very applicable to sports and life!
This coming week you’ll see some minor tweaks to what we did last week… minor enough to keep things interesting while close-enough to the “same” so that you can try to improve upon what you did before…. which brings me to the topic of the week…
JOURNALLING
It is really important that you begin journalling your workouts. You can use a simple Exercise book from the dollar store, or download an app for your phone. Journalling will help you keep track of the progress you make on a week to week and month-to-month basis.
For example, your score on the 4 minute AirDyne test from this past week (don’t worry, you’ll get a crack at it this week if you missed it), is something that we would hope to see improve as your cardiovascular health improves and your ability to generate power improves. But rather than rely on your own memory, let’s write it down so you can prove to yourself down the road that your investment in training here has been worthwhile.
Clients keeping journals also keeps me accountable to making sure that you ARE getting stronger & faster. In that journal you might also track data points such as waist circumference, body weight, etc to see how those data points correlate with your performance increases.
Personally I use an app called Momento. I think it’s $0.99. It is a journalling app that lets me tag each of my entries making it very easy to pull up past workouts to compare my results. Apparently you can even record videos of your lifts to Youtube/Vimeo and link them to your particular workout day. Super cool for those of you who will be getting into olympic weightlifting!
Great work last week. Welcome to our new members. See you in the gym soon!
– Brendan