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Good Reads

10/27/2010

Here are a couple of great articles to read.

Five Resistance Training Myths in the Running World
This is a great writeup by Eric Cressey on resistance training and runners.

Ring the kettle bell. School's back in. Jillian Michaels Needs to Know What She's Doing Before she Makes Promises About her new Fitness DVD
This is a nice one about the misleading things Jillian Michaels does in her dvd's, etc.

I've been extremely busy with training and massage therapy school so I haven't had a ton of time to write. Things are rolling though. If you are in the Milwaukee area and want to train hard, come visit at Southridge Athletic Club.

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Who Says Females Shouldn't Lift Heavy?!

10/23/2010

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The proof and research is out there ladies. If you want to have a rockin body, you need to throw some weight around. Take a look at a couple of my clients doing some serious work here. Samantha weighs around 120, has a great body and trains hard to look like she does. In the videos shown here, she does 20 pushups (has since done 25), 8 pushups with chain and one arm push presses. She has squatted and deadlifted close to 200lbs. This would put a lot of guys in the gym to shame. When she started training over a year ago, she did about 8 pushups on a high incline. Guess what, she is not "bulky," is strong and has a great body.

If this doesn't motivate you other females to start lifting harder, I don't know what will.

You can also look at Jessica doing rack pulls like its her job. She lifts hard and has made amazing progress in her strength and body as well. I have plenty more vids to show, so let me know what you want to see and I'll put em up.

Those 2lb dumbbells, shake weights and 45 minute elliptical workouts are not going to give you the body you want. You must build muscle to get rid of fat and keep it off for good. There is simply no way around it. I have helped tons of females of all shapes, ages and sizes get in great shape and every one of them has pushed themselves with some hard strength training. Get to work!!!!

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Training For Runners Part One (Taken from SAC Newsletter)

10/13/2010

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Running can be a great form of cardiovascular exercise IF you are in shape to run. There are a lot of people who run that have no business doing so. There are also a lot of competitive runners and endurance athletes who do not supplement all of the repetitive activity that they do with the proper training outside of it to prevent injury and improve performance. Running is a very stressful activityon the body. Every time your foot strikes the ground, forces approximately 7-8 times your bodyweight go through your joints. Take one step and that’s quite a bit. Now, multiply that by the hundreds to thousands of steps you take during an average run and you have astronomical amounts of joint stress. To add to this, if you do not have sufficient muscular support around your
knees, hips, etc. you are pretty much asking for an injury. Furthermore, if there are any muscular imbalances, running pattern deficiencies or anything out of alignment in your hips , trunk,etc., there is even more trouble coming your way. This is why it is absolutely imperative that you are in shape to run and not the other way around (running to get in shape if you are overweight).

Proper strength training is a must to stay injury free and boost performance. Repetitive motions like running easily cause imbalances, especially in the hips. Strengthening the musculature around the hips (especially the glute medius and glute max) will ensure that knee position is
controlled and that gait patterns are ideal. Paying attention to the external obliques, lats, scapular muscles and quadriceps muscles (among other muscles) are all important as well. Any imbalances from side to side or between synergistic muscles have to be addressed.

The specific muscle fiber types that are being trained must be paid attention to. An endurance event like
running relies primarily on slow twitch muscle fibers. These fibers can be hypertrophied to improve their
performance without adding any real size or weight to the body (which you usually don’t want to do if you want to improve running performance). By using slower controlled tempos and specific time durations with exercises, these fibers can be focused on. While this will help, there shouldn’t be too much time spent on them as they are used so much as it is.

Training fast twitch fibers and nervous system output for max
strength and speed strength will ultimately help performance. The more force that you can put into the ground, the faster you can potentially be. Performing an exercise such as the squat for speed with lighter weight and for max strength with heavy weights will improve force output, which in turn will improve
running performance. This can also be done without too much size being added. Neglecting these specific factors will limit ultimate performance potential. In part two, I will discuss energy system development, hip issues and more specific exercise information.

This was taken from my last writeup in the SAC Newsletter. I have to narrow things down in there because of space limits so I will add more detail as soon as I get the chance. If you haven't already done so, be sure to read previous posts on runners and stay tuned for the next installment!

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Good Reads

Who Says Females Shouldn't Lift Heavy?!

Training For Runners Part One (Taken from SAC Newsletter)

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