Workout Recovery 

Don’t Kill the Client

After running my own private functional training center for 20 years I am now training my clients in a very large, busy, commercial gym. It supports about 15 personal trainers.
Between the membership and the trainers I get to see all kinds of stuff. I get first hand exposure to a huge spectrum of training strategies, both good and bad and a daily reminder of the myths and misinformation that permeate the profession at this level.

I had the opportunity recently to watch one of the other trainers in the gym put a new client through his first 3 workouts.  Three pretty punishing and demanding workouts I might add. Although the client is a gutsy, aggressive guy and seems to be inspired by the challenge these workouts present, as an educator of personal trainers I am compelled to step back and look at this in a different light. These observations are certainly worthy of comment on what is accepted as appropriate standards for progression in our exercise programming. Hopefully this will produce a more astute and knowledgeable fitness consumer and a better informed and educated personal trainer.

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So going back to our example, while on one hand workouts like these may challenge some individuals, and these workouts are indeed great for someone who has the proper conditioning foundation, but for the new guy or girl they are in fact excessive, unnecessary and actually impair and delay improvement and progress.

The workload here is such that there is no way this individual is recovering normally from these workouts.

Training for Total Body Conditioning

So what is appropriate progression? If we utilize a periodized model, for an untrained individual Dr. Tudor Bompa, Romanian Ph.D and early pioneer and proponent of periodization recommends
4 - 6 weeks in Anatomical Adaptation (AA) or in other words light to moderate whole body activity. I would in fact concur with his opinion and at Workout America we favor a slow buildup in volume and intensity. The type of exercise we employ at Workout America however is eclectic and progressive from day one.

From day one we are complexing hybrid Olympic lifts and plyo’s with balance, reaction and traditional weight training. Our goal at Workout America is to produce a “performance body”, a muscular, ripped, athletic physique and an individual capable of handling anything you can throw at them. Run, jump, hit, climb, lift, whatever, no problem, bring it on. This is total body conditioning.

A deconditioned athlete who all ready trains functionally and is coming back after a brief layoff or Active Recovery phase may only spend a week or two in Anatomical Adaptation.
So our client in question has been weight training consistently for several years, why spend so much time in AA. If we look at the “SAID” principle or specific adaptation to implied demands and apply that to his training he has been exposed all most exclusively to a stabilized, machine dominant environment.

Rock The Core

We essentially take the core and the stabalizers out of these isolated movements so we can really rock the prime movers. In so doing we increase the magnitude of the disparity that all ready exists between the stabalizers and prime movers, putting this individual at even greater risk of connective tissue or stabilizer injury. When we take this client out of this machine dominant environment and throw him into a very high intensity functional training protocol he is without question untrained and ill prepared to handle it’s specific demands; dynamic stretch loading, controlling momentum and rotation in multi-planar movement, tolerance for loading in terminal ranges of motion and new positioning.

Whole Body Work and Anaerobic Burst Intensity

We also need to look at the dramatic increase in metabolic loading associated with functional training and with big dynamic whole body movements and anaerobic burst intensity. You just don’t condition up to this in one or two workouts. Further connective tissue is avascular tissue and while it does in fact adapt and hypertrophy and become more resilient, the progression for this is also normally estimated at six weeks for adequate adaptation.

In the same vein I treat any athlete or individual who is not conditioned in a multi-dimensional format, runners, bikers, golfers, tennis players, as essentially “untrained”.

Allow Your Body to Rebound and Recover

The body’s response to exercise is further described in the “GAS Syndrome” or General Adaptation Syndrome. We present the body with a new training stimulus and it shocks the system, actually knocks the system down and weakens it initially and then we rebound as recovery and training adaptation take place. We get stronger, we rebuild and then super-compensate, we put a little more in the bank as a defense mechanism; it’s like building a callous, that’s what hypertrophy is all about.

But if the initial training stimulus is too severe or the training progression too steep then the body cannot adequately recover. We just continue to tear the system down and normally either injury or some form of overuse or overtraining syndrome follows and shuts us down. This then usually requires a cessation of training and significant time off to recover fully.

Most individuals who begin with personal trainers who are bodybuilders or figure competitors usually start their training with muscle specific programs. This immediately demonstrates a blatant disregard and lack of education or concern for appropriate progression and adequate preparation. We start with leg day or chest day and the body is again ill prepared to tolerate an hour hammering against one small area of musculature.  We first need to establish a systemic whole body conditioning foundation. Again we would certainly want to start with at least 4-6 weeks of AA before ever facing the demands and volume required by muscle specificity.

Ever Changing Training Stimulis = Constant Improvement

So not only does periodization prevent injury it also insures that we continuously improve and that we prepare adequately to face the increased demands of each new phase. If we follow the GAS Syndrome to it’s conclusion, we present the body a stimulus, shock and initial weakening occur, we adapt and morphology changes to meet the demands and then if we continue to face the same stimulus we plateau and no further adaptation takes place. Eventually we even decline or de-condition. So periodization again instructs us to rotate the training stimulus to insure continuity of improvement and amplify the magnitude of change. Remember if nothing changes, nothing changes.

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