Performance Edge

Many women believe that lifting weights will result in them looking like men, bulking up, or stop burning calories. All of this is untrue! The women you see who look like men, with the grossly large muscles, in general are taking testosterone supplements and possibly steroids in order to look that way. They also spend an inordinate amount of time (3 to 5 hours a day, 5-7 days a week) in order to obtain that large size and muscle development. Don’t take those things and make lifting your everyday job and you won’t look that way! In fact you will look slim, sleek and fit. Instead of being skinny fat – you know where you look ok in clothes because you’re thin, but not so good in a swimsuit because you have no lean muscle – you will be healthy and look amazing in practically everything.

Okay so you want reasons to lift heavy weights instead of tiny dinky ones?

1. It builds muscle faster.
I’m sure you’re sitting there thinking “Well duh, weight lifting = building muscles, who knew?!” But I just wanted to reiterate that while lifting light weights can increase your endurance, it’s nothing more than weighted cardio. To build real muscle you need to lift heavy weights. You want to lift the heaviest weight you can lift for 8-12 reps, if you can’t lift 8 reps it’s too heavy if you lift more than 12 reps it’s too light.

2. According to The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, when you build muscle you burn fat continuously! 2 sessions of heavy lifting a week will burn 3% body fat in 10 weeks without cutting calories. You’ll also burn 100 more calories than if you did only cardio, even though your heart rate monitor and calorie counter may tell you that the cardio you just did for an hour burned more than weight lifting, throughout at 24 hour period weight lifting will continue to burn calories and end up burning 100 more than the “cardio only” counterparts. (Put cardio and weight lifting together for a fantastic continuous burn!)

3. In a study from the University of Alabama in Birmingham they showed that dieters who lifted heavy weights lost the same amount of weight as dieters who did just cardio, but all the weight lost by the weight lifters was primarily fat while the cardio ladies lost muscle along with some fat. That equaled smaller clothing sizes for the weight lifters compared to the cardio goers.

4. Lifting weights prevents osteoporosis and can even help build stronger bones.

5. Women who lift heavy weights lose more belly fat than those who don’t. Weight lifting targets intra-abdominal fat and helps you lose the pooch and enjoy a flat belly faster than cardio and more lean muscle than cardio.

6. Lifting heavy weights makes you feel amazing. Lifting heavy weights successfully can aid in building your self-efficacy, and leave you feeling like you can take on the world! A feeling of
empowerment, knowing that you aren’t some weakling walking alongside the road and that people may misjudge you and you could prove them wrong.

7. Strengthening your muscles can help with your cardio. If you are still a cardio lover, adding some weight lifting can improve your knees and joints so that your runs are faster and less painful. Muscles absorb the stress or impact that would normally be relegated to your bones, tendons, and joints! Stronger muscles mean injury reduction and less wear and tear on your joints!

8. You’ll reduce your risk of heart diseases and diabetes, “Muscle helps remove glucose and triglycerides from the bloodstream, which reduces the risk of type II diabetes, as well as hardening of the arteries,” says Timothy Church, MD, PhD, a preventive medicine expert at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

Cardio is still a great workout, but high impact workouts which can be hard on the knees and joints, and anyone who does both cardio and weight lifting will gain the most benefits.

How Are You Teaching the Squat?

You have a young athlete who walks into your weight room for the very first time. He has never participated in exercise other than his youth football games a few times a week, let alone any sort of weight training. You decide you want your athletes to squat today, so you grab a 25-pound kid bar, have the athlete put it on his/her back and instruct to squat down and come back up.

You notice it looks terrible. The athlete’s body flies all other the place, knees are caving in, and heels are no where close to the ground. What do you do now?

The real question is, what should you have done first?

At Performance Edge in Lansdowne, Virginia, Dave Mikel and his staff take each athlete (and adult) through an initial evaluation. Not every person moves the same, so why do the same thing?

As a strength coach, this assessment is key in observing how well athletes move, their training age, and knowledge base of training. Determining each individual’s strengths, weaknesses and deficiencies drives how we begin and progress each individuals programming. Simply sitting down and standing up may seem simple, but for an athlete who doesn’t have these patterns ingrained in them, you will need to figure out how to cue, coach, and progress and regress the squat.

Owner J.L. Holdsworth from The Spot Athletics, in Columbus, Ohio utilizes a very simple yet effective process in teaching the squat that we at Performance Edge believe in as well.

“The programing should adhere to the needs of the individual, not the individual meeting the needs of the program!”
J.L. Holdsworth

Wall Squats 

The first progressions that JL will have an athlete do are wall squats. These squats use an internal cueing method that makes an athlete conscious of keeping their chest up and sitting their butt back first to avoid “eating” the wall.

“Not all athletes need to start here, it is just a good drill to put them into if they are having trouble grasping the pattern.”
J.L. Holdsworth

Cues: What you will see with a lot of young athletes is that they break at their knees before the hips. Continue to tell them “hips back first” and “hips back”. Another big issue is that athletes often keep their chests down. Yes, you can say “chest up, look up”, but some kids still won’t understand it.

“Let me see your logo” is a great cue for athletes. This will keep their chest up by thinking about having to show you the “TROPHIES STACKIN” logo on their shirt (or whatever logo is on their shirt that day). “Knees out” and “spread the floor” are also some good internal and external cues to get kids to keep their knees out, especially when coming up from a squat.

Box Squat

Box squatting is an excelling squatting drill to get your athletes to think about “hips back.” JL starts his athletes here before they move on to a free squat to really engage that posterior chain when squatting. Coaching points for the box squat include a wider stance, toes pointing out, hips back first, knees should not come over their toes, nice controlled descent to the box, don’t “plop” on the box, and stand straight up without the knees shifting forward.

If an athlete is still unable to grasp the concept of controlling themselves to the box, build the box height higher. This means that their hamstrings and glutes are so weak that they won’t let them descend without falling down. If they can do a great box squat, load it goblet style with a dumbbell or kettlebell.

Getting to depth: Weak glutes or poor hip and ankle mobility will stop any athletes from hitting depth in the squat. So how do we fix this? One method is putting plates under their heels. This automatically puts them into a hinge, so it is a smoother transition into the squatting pattern. This also helps with ankle mobility as well.
Another good drill is to have an athlete put plates under their heels and stand in front of a box while holding a light plate out in front of them. Then they must squat down until the plate hits the box and hold. Make sure the box is an appropriate height, and keep the athlete down in that position to feel what it is like for their glutes to be working hard at the bottom of a squat.

Depending on your standards, proper depth is the most difficult aspect of squat technique to ascertain. As a coach, this simple fact is why the goblet, front, or even box squat is such a valuable progression and regression. Depth will be the most prevalent discrepancy when transitioning to the [back] squat.
– Mark Watts

Free Squatting

Box squatting is a great drill and very good for athletes, however, it still won’t make you better at the squat. Take away the box and move into a kettlebell goblet squat. JL recommends starting older athletes and adults with at least a 35-pound kettlebell to progress up to that 45-pound barbell. Young athletes will start with a 20-pound kettlbell, because his athletes will start with a 25-pound barbell.

Front Squat

Front squats are great because they force an athlete to use all of the cues that have been engrained in them by coaches. If they don’t keep their chest up, the bar will drop forward. If they don’t keep their knees out and break at their knees first, the chest will usually fall forward, hence the bar falls forward again. Just make sure you teach the athletes to get into a position of comfort, either rack position or the cross-over position. Elbows have to be up.

Teaching is Learning Twice

Teach your athletes to coach each other. The more you teach them, and have them to teach other fellow athletes, the better they will be. Tell them what to look for in a squat. When an athlete is squatting, ask an athlete watching, “what could you say to make this squat better, what do YOU see wrong?”

Adapted from a blog by ERIC CRESSEY, July 1. 2015 “How Much Work Are You Actually Doing?”

Something to think about (both for those who train and for those who don’t have time – read “maybe you do have time”): When you “work”…do you waste time? What’s “work”? Think about Force x Distance. Also consider your load and range of motion….make sure they’re both appreciable. Then take it a step further and work w/out wasting time. Do significant work w/out a lot of standing around.

In the general fitness industry, this is a more common problem than we realize. There are a lot of people struggling to make progress because they think that they train a lot harder than they actually do. No fault of their own, however, as a lot of them have never been taught how much volume and intensity is needed for progress, and even fewer have actually gotten into a training environment that forced them to take on a challenging training program.

So, how do you know if you’re working hard or not? Is it sweat on your shirt, or wobbly legs as you leave the gym? Sure, those are somewhat subjective signs, but they’re a good start.

Speaking more objectively, though, lifters should be able to get in warm-up work and then 20+ sets of mostly compound lifts in 60-75 minutes. And, in most cases (particularly beginner and intermediate lifters), the weight used on these sets should increase from week to week.

If you’re not able to get that much quality work in over the course of that much time, there is a good chance you’re doing too much waiting around between sets, or you’re getting caught up doing some other low-priority training initiative.

From time to time, it’s useful to do a “training audit” to see where you stand on this front. Review your recent programs to see if you’re getting in enough quality work to continue making progress. Even accomplished powerlifters do this and realize that with all the heavy singles and long rest periods, they were actually getting in very little total work in training sessions.

You may also find that you’re doing so much work that you could benefit from a back-off period. That might come in the form of volume, intensity, or frequency reductions. The important thing is that you are cognizant of the hard work it takes to succeed. And, even more importantly, you’ll understand where you are relative to that benchmark.

If you read this article and think it might pertain to your training, take better advantage of your training time…work harder – you’ll see the results. For those of you who don’t have time to “work out”….consider that maybe you do – but you will have to “work”! We’d love to help – it’s our passion!