Getting A Little Stale

As an adult who no longer plays any regular competitive sports, this is my first full year with some form of constant training. I've taken very little time off and have been happy with the results of my dedication. My commitment has been solely based on proper goal setting for myself. This is something that personal trainers do with their clients all the time but they may not utilize it to their full advantage for themselves. We are generally at the gym all the time so our workouts will take place at random times when we get a moment, and speaking for myself, it ends up reducing the ability to reach my full potential and ultimately see the results that I desire.

The first half of the year was dedicated to training for a Tough Mudder. The training was different, fun and intense and I performed very well out there on the course since I had put myself through worse situations in the gym and on the hills. This second half of the year has been incorporating a traditional Westside Conjugate System in an attempt to reach the 1000lb club (squat + deadlift + bench), which has taught me alot about my body and mental strength.

Utilizing this type of program with some variation, I've now reached a point at which I am not progressing like I would like. Ravenous hunger, lack of proper equipment, lack of hypertrophy, and lack of conditioning have been just a few barriers that I have to now address in order to continue make progress towards my goals.

Ravenous Hunger
For those of you that have lifted heavy on a regular basis (in my case, to max twice a week) you may have experienced this as well. The first half of 2012 when I was training for the Tough Mudder, I could do all the cardio, high rep work and conditioning as I wanted and I didn't feel like I wanted to invade the local cattle farm.


A little bit of BBQ sauce and I could have done a number on this guy.

Now I understand nutritional balance and proper diet and 9/10 I'm on point. Consuming a greater caloric intake will help build muscle and size but the downfall for me was that I allowed myself to fall off once or twice or three times a week and eat everything in sight, knowing that my goal was less oriented towards my looks but rather my strength. I actually don't feel like this limited my progress at all (because I wasn't overly strong to begin with and any program/regular diet would provide me with increases, within moderation). The problem was, as many other trainers and clients can attest to is that constant progressive overload can result in decreased muscle tone even though you are putting on more muscle. You are constantly eating and growing that you end up adding some extra fat. For example, 10 weeks ago I weighed 183lbs and now I currently weight 196 or so. Now I'm not crying myself to sleep and taking a Sharpie to my love handles to sketch out how I should look but I need to do something about it. I'm not a competitive athlete and I'm not a bodybuilder, but I am a guy who likes to feel good in his clothes and feel comfortable in his body, and I can say that I am currently just hovering around that point. At least a little less than the first half of the year.

Rededicating myself with a proper nutritional goal can help manage the hunger that I have. This is a great time to use Christmas as a date to stay on a clean eating path until. Like I said, I generally eat quite clean but I find for myself and my clients, that even a 2 days a week of poor eating can reduce your potential to achieve your desired results. So back to being dedicated and accountable to myself. A change in program can greatly help to pull yourself back together and re-evaluate what you want out of your workouts.

While re-evaluating my goals, I came to the conclusion that I need to re-evaluate my program. I'm no program jumper but small tweaks will allow me to see the results I desire. When using such a popular and well established program like a Westside Conjuagte, I found that I wanted to stray as little from the program as possible  in order to see all the same results that you hear about everyone else getting. This leads me to my next point:

Lack of Conditioning
Your traditional Westside Conjugate program contains no conditioning work. Why would it, you're whole goal is to get as strong as possible, not beat the guy next to you in a foot race. This second half of the year has lacked the necessary conditioning to burn the fat that I want and keep me in good "all-around shape". So what's my answer? The first half of the year I incorporated plenty of cardiovascular "workout finishers" at the end of my lifting sessions in order to keep my conditioning progressing and help me achieve new personal bests on runs and hills and so forth. So why not go back to those? It just so happens that one of my first personal training influences Jason Ferruggia has recently released his new e-book Renegade Cardio-52 Fast Fat-Blasting Finishers. So now, every workout (4x a week personally), without a huge time commitment  I will utilize a different finisher. I'm incredibly excited to get back to this as it is long overdue and I love testing how mentally tough I am. For $10 Jason has given a ton of information and ideas here so I strongly suggest you check it out.

Purchase e-book here: http://jasonferruggia.com/renegade-cardio/

Here are a few of my own metabolic finishers that I've done or utilized from some other trainers, over the past few years.

Lack of Hypertrophy and Lack of Proper Equipment
I group these two problems together because they both have the same solution. Currently my max squat=345lbs, deadlift=360lbs and bench= 215lbs Total= 920. My bench has always been bad due to some shoulder issues and never training it regularly but in the past two months, my squat and deadlift have made large strides. So although I'm no powerlifter, I still strive to get stronger with every workout.

Now as exciting and fun as the traditional Conjugate Program is, I've quickly learned that even with a few modifications, that it is too much for a person with my strength. In order to increase your lifting strength, you require hypertrophy in order to create more myofibrullar cross bridges to create a stronger contraction. With the maximal lifts I've been doing, I wasn't paying as much attention to this part of my programming as I should.

So what's my solution? I've made plenty of hypertrophy programs myself (lost alot during the Tough Mudder Training) that I have seen great results with but I find that I really enjoy the Westside format and do not struggle heading to the gym. So why not change the variables (rep and set schemes) as well as the workout density on my dynamic effort days (which I don't use chains or bands for anyways-hence the lack of equipment)? Thankfully, a program that I have used with clients and have suggested to friends was calling my name. Joe Defranco out of New Jersey has developed famous Westside Conjugate adaptation programs for "skinny bastards" which I can admit, I fall under. His third version of the series is called "Westside for Skinny Bastards 3". This address the two issues of mine that are the title of this section. This program doesn't use a ton of the traditional band and chain exercises that a regular Westside program might but rather utilizes some jump training and higher repetition work in order to induce explosive power and hypertrophy respectively. This provides me with some slight variation to what I already enjoy while keeping my regular workout schedule and I still get to get under a bar and push heavy twice a week. So why not try it for the next 3 months or so and then re-evaluate after that?



In summary, constant re-evaluation of your programs is essential to seeing continued results. Listen to yourself. I know the way I am and I know that if I went too long on the path that I was on, I would be completely worn out and discouraged, so why not change it up a bit in order to keep my interest and still work towards my goals. Utilize strong and challenging goals to get you where you want to go. Nothing comes easy but you will grow physically (in strength, endurance and size if desired) but more important you will grow mentally strong as you push past your limits every single workout. This article is not meant to come off in favour of being a program jumper (only utilizing a program for a period of time then changing it up because you got bored or saw something else) but rather an piece of advice on proper honest evaluations of what works for you and your clients. The same things don't work for everyone, you need to find what works optimally for you.

Keep training,

-Colin McAuslan
MHK(c), CSCS, CK

Go to the Source: How to Read a Fitness/Nutrition Research Article

Everybody is writing fitness articles nowadays. I know that I am currently only adding to it, but there is so much information available from so many credible as well as uneducated sources. Fitness magazines, YouTube, websites and blogs make all of this information readily available.

One thing that we don’t always realize is that people, writers, coaches and magazines have their biases. It is easy for magazines who have paid advertisers to have their writers encourage the use of their advertisers products. On the other side of things, popular blog writers are generally set in their ways and can make claims based on their personal practice, opinions and what works for them and their clients. It’s important that we don’t always subscribe to their beliefs and take the information with a grain of salt. Not that it is a requirement to have published/completed research before but plenty of fitness professionals are unaware of the process and breakdown of proper research.

If you have a medical illness, you wouldn't go and visit your trainer, your coach, your chiropractor or your physiotherapist. Rather you would go to a medical doctor. This is an example of going as closely to the source of information as possible. Why don’t more trainers and coaches do this with their approach to training and program design?

As I am currently completing my graduate degree in Exercise Physiology, I have a new found respect for going to the source. Understanding how to properly locate and read fitness and nutrition journal articles is the largest speed bump as to why a lot of fitness professionals don’t investigate this information further. Here are a few tips on how to find and decipher the research and free information that is available to us.

• ·         There are large search engines that everyone has access to.  Your best examples are Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.ca/). If you are interested in interval training, type that into the search bar and all relevant results will come up. Your local university or college will have access to greater search engines so feel free to look into utilizing their services.
• ·         Once searched, use the title of the article to decide if you would like to read further. Most researchers will make their title a good summary of what they are trying to convey as it is the first point of contact with the reader.
• ·         The more you read about specific subjects, you will begin to recognize the names of the researchers and the laboratories in which the information is coming from. I suggest that you remember these names because your familiarization with their writing styles and particular research interests will provide credibility to any new articles they write, which will likely be of interest to you. Researchers work in teams a lot of the time. So if they are not the first name on the paper, this doesn't mean that they do not support it as much, rather it was another person’s job to complete the majority of the work associated with that paper.
• ·         Look at the types of people used in the study. If they are athletes, elderly, adolescents, weight lifters or average joes may play a large role in the results. If sitting down and standing up improves VO2max in elderly populations, it may not mean that standing and sitting is the ideal exercise for your MMA athletes. This is obviously an extreme example but you get the idea.
• ·         Although the title is important, don’t completely make up your mind on the article based on that alone. This is what an abstract is for. This is basically the movie trailer of a research article. It will contain the main purpose of the investigation, how many people were involved, what variables were utilized, what the specific outcomes were, the statistics used to analyze the data and a concluding statement as to what the researchers found. This is usually the main points from the article.
• ·         Now, don’t always take the abstract for face value. If you like what the abstract has to say, dig a little deeper. A journal article will generally be made up of these sections : Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion.

Ø  Introduction: an introduction is generally where the researchers review the previous literature on the topic being investigated. This will provide you with a background to what has been done in the field and what areas may still need to be looked at. Take into account the publication year of that particular journal article. It is easy to read something from the 80’s and think that there is still much more work to be done. It likely has been done already or debunked, so search for newer articles to answer your questions.

Ø  Methods: this will describe what exactly occur in the investigation. How many people, what ages, what genders, what tests and when the occured, how long was the intervention, as well as any other pertinent information to the design of the study.

Ø  Results: for those of you without a statistics background, this is generally the hardest part to get through. Quickly look over it for percentile differences or average changes in whatever variable you are interested in. Feel free to avoid statistical terminology and don’t let that deter you from reading further. This is where researchers will include their graphs and figures to explain their points further. These are chosen carefully out of plenty of graphs that can be made. These are what the researcher believes to be the best representation of their findings. Take your time to look these over and what exactly they are saying.

Ø  Discussion: this is where the results that were previously mentioned are put into more comprehendible and practical wording and compared to previous literature. I highly suggest you read this area if anything. It provides a great perspective into the findings and how they compare to other previous investigations.

Ø  Some journals will have a “Practical Applications” section which will provide insight into how you can take away and apply the information presented in the real world. I suggest you read this section if it exists because this is your “take home message”.

Ø  Researchers will include great concluding paragraphs and sentences at the end of articles so that the reader feels like their questions were answered and that there were no loose ends. From writing these myself, I know that they can take hours and days to get just right, so read them, because they have a lot of information and thought go into them.

• ·        Review articles are commonly written on topics that have an abundance of research. They will present all the information in a summary format with no one investigation garnering the focus. I strongly suggest you seek these out (usually will say “Summary Article” in the title, abstract or in the top corner of the pdf). This is like an unbiased Cliff Notes of an entire subject area. If I could read one thing to get a good representation of an research area, I would start with a review article (although there are not review articles for every area of interest).
• ·         Research journals are categorized by impact factors. These are determined by the amount of referencing that journals receive in other journal articles. In order to bypass you having to dig into activity factors and decipher which journals you will be able to comprehend and actually utilize, I've listed some very practical and interesting publications below:

§  Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research

§  The Strength and Conditioning Journal

§  The Journal of Applied Physiology

§  The Journal of The International Society of Sports Nutrition

§  Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise

§  Journal of Sports Sciences

§  The American Journal of Physiology

§  The Journal of Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism

·         So in summary, I suggest that you use PubMed and Google Scholar. Read all the titles available and then read the abstracts of the ones that you find particularly interesting. If you aren’t ready to make a concluding argument based on the abstract alone, dig deeper and read the introduction and discussion for further information on that topic and how the findings of the current research relate. Pay attention to concluding statements as they help summarize the findings and their practical implications. Don’t stop at one article alone, dig deeper and become an expert on the topic. I would rather be familiar with the actual research completed in the field then be an expert on other people’s interpretations of it. Be an educated leader, not a regurgitating follower. There are too many of those.

Keep training and keep learning,

Colin McAuslan

MHK(c), CSCS, CK

Windsor PT Summit

This past weekend, I had the honour of once again speaking at the annual Windsor PT Summit. This is my third year running and I have enjoyed it every time. This year was by far the most credible due to the number of top notch speakers that were brought in. Nick Tumminello (http://nicktumminello.com/), Bret Contreras (http://bretcontreras.com/), Bob McAtee (http://www.stretchman.com/) and Dr. Natasha Zajmalowski (http://www.proactive-healthcare.com/) were my fellow speakers. I couldn't have been more excited to speak along these great people.

If you haven't seen Nick Tumminello speak yet, I suggest that you seek out a venue that he will be at. He does a great job at teaching the practical components of program design without the gimics and quick fixes. Check out http://www.strengthcruise.com/ if you are interested in listening to Nick and other fitness professionals in person, in a fun and relaxing atmosphere.

On this years Strength Cruise, Bret Contreras will be speaking as well. Bret is a PhD candidate who is interested in the functions of the posterior chain musculature, mainly the glutes, hence his title as the "Glute Guy". You will not find a more knowledgeable speaker in the fitness industry and he is great resource for understanding how to apply the most current research into your programming.

Bob McAtee is a stretching master. His hands-on sessions are second to none and he does such a fantastic job at making sure you can leave his seminars with tools that you can bring back to the table and begin using right away. I highly suggest you seek out his expertise, which is in an area that most of us neglect.

Dr. Natasha Zajmalowski is a local naturopathic doctor here in the Windsor area. Every year at the PT Summit, her sessions are raved about. Naturopathic medicine is an area of health that is particularly interesting to me due to my lack of knowledge of it and their is no better resource than Natasha. So if you are in the Windsor area, make an appointment and I guarantee her knowledge will blow you away.

On my end, I spoke about "10 Ways to Improve Your Training" and "How To Incorporate Unilateral Training Into Your Programs". I really enjoy the teaching aspect of what I do and am always looking to expand  my knowledge so that I have a unique and accurate message every time I speak. So thank you to Mike Bates (http://refinefitness.ca/) for another great conference and I highly recommend that for anyone interested in fitness and exercise or if you are a personal trainer, take advantage of such a high level conference going on in your area.

Keep training,
-Colin McAuslan

My 20 Favourite Workout Songs

This is a question that I get alot; "What songs do you listen to when you workout?" or "Any suggestions?". It has been scientifically proven that the beat of music can greatly effect the rate at which you move and are motivated throughout your workout. Hearing a particular song can give you the powerful urge to workout. Spinning instructors purchase music that is of a particular cadence in order to motivate their riders.

Being a huge music lover, I can not work out without music. There are lots of lists online to get some possible additions to your workout playlist from but alot of them have cool down music and mellow music for longer runs. This list is going to be a little different. These are songs to help you hit your last rep, personal best or get through that circuit better than the time before. A little heavier than I listen to in the car but you have to summon the beast!

So on that note, here are 20 of my favourites (the list started at 10, had to make it longer), with 20 being the best:

        1.       I'm Shipping Up To Boston- Dropkick Murphys (Just a classic)
2.       The Guillotine- Escape the Fate (Awesome guitar)
3.       Run This Town- Jay-Z, Kanye West & Rihanna (Great beat to push you through a workout)
4.       Bawitaba- Kid Rock (The beginning is the best part, helps with personal bests)
5.       Mama Said Knock You Out- LL Cool J (Old school song that will keep you pushing)
6.       Suck My Kiss- Red Hot Chili Peppers (Bass brings it)
7.       Break Stuff- Limp Bizkit (Heavy sound)
8.       Writing on The Walls- Underoath (Pushes throughout the whole song)
9.       The Abolition of Man- Thrice (Heavy song to help get the last set done right!)
10.     The Ascending- Lower Definition  (Starts strong right from the get go and never looks back)
11.     Bangarang- Skrillex (New song that is great to re-energize you after a set)
12.     The Past Should Stay Dead- Emarosa (Great vocals and pump up song)
13.     Dragula- Rob Zombie (Can't beat this song)
14.     1958- A Day To Remember (Boondock Saints anything should get you jacked up)
15.     Narcissitic Cannibal- Korn (First Korn song that I've liked in a while, made for exercising)
16.     Second and Sebring- Of Mice & Men (These drums will rattle your body)
17.     Lucifers Rocking Chair- Cancer Bats (Puff that chest out and do the damn thing)
18.     Sleep Now In The Fire- Rage Against The Machine ( Arguably the best workout song)
19.     Till I Collapse- Eminem (Wait till the beat drops and pick up those weights!)
20.     Whiskey Hangover- Godsmack (The lyrics kind of suck but man, get under a bar and this will        push you through it....guaranteed)

This is my two cents. To each their own but I'm telling you, you wont find me working out without this jams playing in my ears. Whatever floats your boat, but just bring it.

Keep Training!

-Colin McAuslan

Foam Rolling With Trigger Point Therapy

Try this routine. You don't need a hip replacement to benefit from this. We all have muscle and connective tissue that needs work. Try it before, and if you have time after your workouts.

Keep training
-Colin

Barefoot Running Research

You have to check this out. Barefoot running is becoming more and more popular with the introduction of barefoot shoes like Vibram Five Fingers. Harvard University research actually shows the stress placement on the foot when running with shoes and without shoes with a heel strike. They also compare that to no shoes with a forefoot strike. This is the proper way to run with less stress on the joints. I suggest that you check this out.

Check out this link: Barefoot Training

Keep training,
Colin

Extreme Core Killer

I'm proud of this one. For all of you ab/core fanatics, try this bodyweight workout at home.

Crunches are old news. They are dangerous to your spinal column and unsafe. Keeping the spine neutral and challenging all the core musculature is the most important aspect of a safe core workout.

So if you like the Ab Ripper from P90X then I dare you to try this workout. The video is short so here is the breakdown of all the reps and exercises. Try and let me know if you make it through.


Watch Extreme Core Killer HERE!!!!!