Stable Base Personal Training and Pilates

Great point. #covidsafe #paddlesports #vitamind #stayhealthy

Happy New Year.
Its that time of year again when people decide they need to be fitter and there is no shortage of information and options available to you.
Been told that you should walk 10,000 steps a day? 10,000. Nice round number. Do you know what this is based on?
Nothing. It was a number that was pulled out of thin air by the marketing people tasked with selling pedometers in the 1960s. And this is the problem with information about exercise. It’s very often, incomplete, lacking context or is just a sales pitch in disguise.
For most of my 30 years working in the fitness industry all focus was on the importance of low to moderate intensity, sustained exercise once known as aerobic exercise or more frequently referred to as cardio. Whilst strength training was grouped with Body Building and was considered to be purely for people who liked to spend lots of time looking in the mirror and had nothing to do with health or wellbeing. The pendulum has now swung the other way and you can’t look at social media, read a weekend newspaper or flip through a magazine without seeing something discussing how strength training increases muscle mass, improves bone density, balance, cognitive function, hormone function, body composition, general health and get you laid more often. Huzzah!
All those benefits attributed to strength training are real and achievable, unless you are ugly and or have a crap personality, then MOST of those benefits are realistically achievable.
Most of these articles then go on to tell you how to strength train. Do 30 squats a day, do planks for 60 seconds twice a day, buy a kettlebell and do these 3 exercises. However, these articles fail to discuss the fact that all the benefits attributed to exercise, both strength and cardio, are reliant on exercise being progressive. It’s the progressive aspect of exercise that is critical to achieving significant results but that’s often overlooked because we live in an age where everything is dumbed down and made quick and easy. (Ever heard of a guy named Charles Darwin? He explains this phenomenon more eloquently than I will).
Dumbing things down will not help people to flourish.
What do you mean by progressive? I hear those of you whose genes should be passed on asking:
Exercise is good for you because it triggers your body to adapt specifically to the stress placed upon it. Lift something heavy on a regular basis and your body will recognize that this is stressful and potentially dangerous. In response it will make the relevant muscles, connective tissue and even the skeleton stronger so that lifting that weight is no longer stressful and dangerous. BUT once that adaption has occurred, that’s it. You don’t then continue getting stronger. In fact, the opposite happens. Your body gets so comfortable and efficient at lifting that weight, the benefits you obtained start to regress and you can actually end up back where you started, even though you are now lifting that weight regularly. The initial adaptation can occur in as little as a couple of weeks and if you’re lucky you may plateau for 6-12 months before regression starts
The same happens with other types of exercise. Say you walk 5kms in 45minutes several times per week. Do this for a few months and you will become so good at walking at that pace for that amount of time it’s no longer stressful. Your fitness will plateau, then start to decline.
Hopefully, you are starting to see why the articles telling you to buy a kettlebell and do routine ‘Super Butt’ 3 times a week, which seemed too easy to be true, is too easy to be true.
Entre the principal of progression.
If you really want to obtain the benefits of strength training you need to regularly increase the challenge to your muscles, connective tissue and skeleton. The most obvious way to do this is to increase the weight you’re lifting. But other ways are to increase the complexity of the exercise you are doing, increase the range of motion you are using, play around with the tempo, or speed of the movements, and play around with the order in which you do exercises. Simply doing more repetitions of the same exercise, with the same load, isn’t the answer. More reps, with the same load improves your muscular endurance, which is fine if muscular endurance is what you’re after. But that isn’t the same as improving your strength.
Progression for ‘Cardio’ fitness. Once again, progressively increasing the stress placed on the relevant system is the key to getting the benefits of exercise. If you’ve been walking 5kms in 45 minutes on a regular basis and you want to continue getting the benefits of this exercise you need to up the ante. Walk further, faster, more frequently or on more challenging terrain.
Increasing the stress on your body carries a certain amount of risk. That’s why it works. However too much physical stress causes injury. Stress or load should be increased gradually, in a systematic fashion, followed by a few weeks to allow the body to adapt before the load is increased again.
How you move, or your technique, is the other critical factor. This applies equally to low intensity/high repetition movements like swimming, cycling and walking and to high intensity, low repetition movements like lifting heavy weights. Swimming with poor shoulder movement multiplied by 1000 strokes will produce an injury, just the same as doing a squat with too heavy a load will.
This is why it’s so important to concentrate, be present and put in the mental effort to learn how to do an exercise really, really well. Its only when your technique is almost infallible that it’s safe to progress it. And it’s only when it’s being progressed that the magic happens.

The rules regarding face masks and indoor exercise. They are pretty straight forward. Follow them. #readmore #talkless #exercise #facemasks @ Stable Base Personal Training and Pilates

Definitely worse ways to spend morning smoko. #beachisbest #mentalhealthpaddle #rehab