Eat, Lift, Sprint, Sleep

A couple of days ago I was reading a friend of mines blog post about keeping it basic with your training and I couldn’t agree with him more. I’m sure many people out there are still training multiple hours in the gym with many  exercises per muscle group.

I used to train the same way because I thought more was better at the time, but later learned that it was doing nothing but hindering my progress.

It wasn’t until I got hurt when I started to listen to the body instead of doing what I wanted to do. Maybe this post will help you make that turn so that you can avoid the mistakes I’ve learned from. I would like to share four focus points I’ve always believed in.

Eating

Eating is the most important focal point when training. I say this because what you put in your body is what you get out of it. I’ve always hear sayings like, “eat like crap and you’ll be crap.” It’s true and you can’t have one thing without the sacrifice of another. Many people want to have their cake and eat it too. This is something that can’t happen if you want to have a great physique.

Do you eat for taste and fun or do you eat for performance and survival? Most of my nutritional habits are extremely boring, but I feel strong, and have large amounts of energy throughout the day. My sacrifice is giving up the feeling of comfort and fatty foods for performance gains and longevity of health. It’s a lifestyle and some will do it some will not. Keep it black and white and eat clean or gain unwanted weight and eat foods that are bad for you.

Lifting

Workout at least three days per week moving explosively. A huge pet peeve of mine is when I observe slow movements. Train slow and be slow. Train fast with controlled movements and you will be deadly.

Some of the best movements you can do are deadlifts, squats, cleans, sprints etc. I pick these movements because they hit large muscle groups at the same time do a couple other things for you.

1) They save large amounts of time for you so you can get in and out of the gym.

2) Allow activation of many muscles in one movement instead of training multiple parts of the body.

3) There are also many scientific benefits that I won’t dig deep into now, but save that for another time.

Sprinting

I used to be a sprinter in college. When the season would start I would loose large amounts of body fat. The stuff would fall off me so fast that I had to eat around the clock. My metabolism would go INSANE which was awesome, but eating became a job it seemed. The idea to understand is that sprinting burns large amounts of calories so if your trying to have a lean body —sprint.

Try this:

1) 5 – 10, 100 meter sprints with the walk back to the starting line being your rest interval

It’s important that you don’t go out and rip out ten sprints in a row, you’ll likely pull a muscle so make sure you build yourself up to it and get a really good warm up in. I’ve seen guys sprint without warming up and pull hamstrings. Not good make sure you hit those warmups.

Rest

After all this woking out and eating healthy your body’s going to need to repair everything you’ve been doing to it. Rest is needed for the repair of the working muscles of the body. If you avoid this you will get hurt. Many people choose to not stretch, roll out etc after workouts. I was there at one time with the more is better routine, but I assure you injuries will creep up.

Repetitive movements cause wear and tear in the body!

Sometimes I’ve taken a week off from training and come back very strong. Depending how you feel you may need to deload or take a week off of training. Don’t be afraid to do this if you feel it’s necessary. You’ll come back strong!

There’s something to be said about living to train another day! It makes no sense in trying to impress someone or lifting a ton of weight to feel more of a man or woman in any case. It’s about health and fitness not just strength.

Always good to remember!

Armed and Equipped

****Joe****