In the pursuit of fitness, eventually exercise turns into sport.  The main difference is how much risk of injury you endure.  While it’s my job to show you how to minimize risk, at some point you have to feed the part of your brain that thrives on “some” stress and you can use this system to get stronger than ever. 

Lets start with your inner Popeye.  So you can do 50+ pushups in a row, more than 60 sit-ups in a minute and the last time you touched your toes was yesterday not 1990? If you haven’t already it’s time to lift some weights, but first we need to establish some rules. 

Traditional weight lifting involves  some of the most dangerous moves in the gym…flat bench pressing and squats.  For 99% of us weight lifting is not a sport and these maneuvers carry too much risk. The short version is that they both involve large ranges of motion that compromise posture and expose us to injury.  The goal here is to stay in the gym long enough to access hard to get results then get out and live life with more confidence even when you can’t control all the elements. 

Here are some quick tips that you can use to clean up your weight lifting program today:

• On seated and inclined chest presses, always keep your elbows where you can see them using peripheral vision
• Focus on pull maneuvers but never press or pull behind your head
• Avoid squats and leg press, especially if you have had low back issues and focus on lunges and air squats instead

Whether you are an adrenaline junkie or you can’t turn away from a soap opera, there is a part of all of us that craves the tension of survival.  If you are reading this I’m glad you aren’t being chased by a Sabre-Toothed Tiger but you are more likely to have maxed out on chronic stress of commuting than having used your fight or flight abilities to save a life.  Chasing danger isn’t the message here but keeping this system sharp has more benefits than never using it at all. 

Interval training is the key to waking up the part of your brain designed for high performance.  Examples of interval training include the timed “Hill” program on cardio machines or doing sprints.  Both involve alternating a specific time or distance at a near all out effort (85-90% Max HR) with an equal time or distance of recovery (55-60% Max HR). 

The benefits of Interval training are immense as the sprint phases boost hormones and break up scar tissue while the recovery phase teaches your body how to break stress patterns quickly.   In order to get the most out of this workout, keep the total time between 25-30 minutes. 

Both of these workouts end up with a great opportunity to stretch as your body temp reaches it’s warmest.  There are great variations to all of the proposed workout principles in this series and they can be specified to training for many different sport goals. 

I hope you enjoyed this series and took home some tips to immediately improve your workout.  I take all my patients through this phase-based program with the goal of preparing them for whatever they want to do in life.  For me life would not be the same without some action, adventure and a little bit of survival whether dueling on a ping pong table or skiing trees in the backcountry.  I look forward to your feedback and the chance to help you reach your full potential.