Victoria Wellness Professionals

Unstable surface training. What is it? What does it mean and what are the pros and cons?

Unstable surface training has become very popular in the gyms and with personal trainers everywhere. Everywhere you look you see people performing balancing acts worthy of Cirque de Soleil.

Unstable surface training may involve equipment such as wobble or balance boards, bosu balls, stability balls and 1/2 foam rollers. I am sure that you can pick up any magazine on fitness or even sport training and come across a picture of someone squatting on a stability ball or standing on a bosu doing shoulder presses, or bicep curls.

However, you need to ask is it safe, beneficial or getting you closer to your goals.

There are certain times during rehabilitation when using unstable surface training is necessary and recommended. This should be for individuals who have suffered an ankle or knee injury. Working on an unstable surface such as a wobble board has been shown to help restore proprioceptive and nervous system reaction deficits. In other words, it helps re connect the nervous system and the muscular system to regain proper movement patterns.

Using unstable surface training in the hopes of increasing strength is not the most productive method. In a study done by Anderson and Behm, maximal isometric force output with the unstable chest press was significantly lower (59.6%) than in the stable condition. (1) What this means is that if you are going for strength gains, keep the exercise on a stable surface such as a bench.

Chest Press on a stability ball may be used to incorporate core stability work, but the weights used should be submaximal or higher rep range loads. Stability ball presses should never be used with maximum weights.

What about core muscles and their activity during unstable surface training? A study by Nuzzo, McCaulley et all concluded that activity of the trunk muscles during squats and deadlifts is greater or equal to that which is produced during stability ball exercises. It would appear that stability ball exercises may not produce a sufficient stimulus for increasing muscular strength. (2)

Everywhere you look in gyms and personal training studios, you will see a variety of equipment designed for unstable surface training. There are numerous tools in a trainers “toolbox”. All of them may be appropriate for certain clients at certain times. But, the question must be raised first – is it applicable to this situation? Is it beneficial to the clients’ needs or is the latest youtube creation.

You must ask what the purpose is of standing on a stability ball or bosu ball performing a weight exercise?

The goal of the bicep curl for example is to build strength or mass or both. Standing on an unstable surface will limit the amount of weight that is able to be utilized without losing one’s balance. If you are attempting to solicit a neuromuscular response with balance and stability, there are more appropriate ways to do that. Single leg training for example.

Unstable surface training may have some merit with untrained individuals and in some rehabilitative situations, but as with any training tool their application must be carefully considered and applied.

Till next time,
Narina

(1) Anderson K. G. and Behm, D.G. Maintenance of EMG Activity and Loss of Force Output with instability. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2004 (18) 637-640

(2) Nuzzo, J.L., McCaulley, G.O., et al Trunk Muscle Activity During Stability Ball and Free Weight Exercises. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, January 2008. Volume 22, Issue 1, pp 95-102

Uncategorized bosu balls, stability balls, strength training, unstable surface training, wobble boards

A comment or concern that comes up often during workout sessions is the feeling that is experienced in the muscle during the performance of an a exercise. Just what should you “feel” or is there anything to this “muscle pump” feeling that is often expressed. Also, just what is “going for the burn?”

To describe what someone might be feeling is almost impossible as each persons’ perception is very different.

I have often written in past newsletters or blog posts about the presence of pain during an exercise session. There is no place for pain in the gym. Never do you work through pain. Peoples’ perception of pain is also very individual, but either there is pain or there isn’t. That part doesn’t really differ from person to person. For that reason, if pain is present stop what you are doing and seek help.

But let’s talk about the “feeling” associated with weight lifting. Just what is happening to the muscle when you are weight training?

The muscle pump or “burn” is a physiological response by the muscles during resistance training.

The muscle pump is caused by an influx of blood into the muscles. This increased blood flow is to remove toxins and replace supplies of fuel and oxygen.

The burning sensation is the result of metabolic waste products that are produced by muscles in response to intense weight training.

The muscle pump or burn has little to do with increased hypertrophy or increased muscle size. Increased muscle growth comes only from heavy training which produces less or very little muscle pump. You may get an intense muscle pump or burn from doing very high repetitions with a lower weight, but you would not get increased growth or strength.

Going for the burn does not necessarily mean you have had a successful workout. A successful workout is based on progression. Lifting more weight, performing more reps is a good indicator of a good workout.

It is good to “feel” during a weight training workout and perfectly normal. You may not feel a burn, but you may feel that the muscle is “swollen” or that your skin feels very tight. These are perfectly normal feelings and are not necessarily to be avoided.

Avoid pain, embrace the “burn”. Work out hard, go for the intensity and you will reap the rewards of a stronger and leaner body.

Till next time,
Narina

“Monitoring, Mentoring, Motivation”

Uncategorized exercise, gym workouts, muscle pump, muscles, strength training, Victoria Wellness Professionals, weight lifting

Osteoporosis is a bone disease that results in fractures, crippling pain and hunched posture. It affects 1 in 4 women over age 50 and 1 in 8 men over age 50.

Osteoporosis turns the sturdy latticework of bone into a fragile lace that breaks easily during simple activity. Osteoporosis, which means “porous bones,” causes bones to become weak and brittle — so brittle that a fall or even mild stresses like bending over or coughing can cause a fracture.

Our bone is constantly changing – new bone is being made and old bone is reabsorbed. You reach your peak bone mass at around age 30. How likely you are to develop osteoporosis depends on ow much bone mass you attained in your 20’s and 30’s and how rapidly you lose it later.

Risk factors for osteoporosis that you can change are:

• Low calcium intake.
• Tobacco use.
• Eating disorders.
• Sedentary lifestyle.
• Excessive alcohol consumption.
• Corticosteroid medications. Long-term use of corticosteroid medications, such as prednisone, cortisone, prednisolone and dexamethasone, is damaging to bone.

Tips for Prevention:

Exercise can help build strong bones and slow bone loss. We do know that the best forms of exercise to help prevent osteoporosis are those that improve muscular strength, balance and coordination. The skeleton responds better to weight bearing exercises such as walking and lifting weights than aerobic activity without weight bearing (swimming).

Resistance exercise done with weights is of the best benefit to bones. The skeleton must be stressed with loads that it would not normally experience. The increased load (weight lifting) will put added stress on the muscles. The muscles respond to this stress by getting stronger. Through their attachments to bones, they will exert force on the bone and the bones will respond by increasing their mass.

Combine strength training exercises with weight-bearing exercises. Strength training helps strengthen muscles and bones in your arms and upper spine, and weight-bearing exercises — such as walking, jogging, running, stair climbing, skipping rope, skiing and impact-producing sports — mainly affect the bones in your legs, hips and lower spine.

Swimming and water aerobics have many benefits, but they don’t have the impact your bones need to slow mineral loss.

Osteoporosis is a preventable disease. Even if you are already diagnosed with early signs of osteoporosis (osteopenia), you can continue to build strong bone. Exercise has its benefits at any age.

Till next time,
Narina
“Monitoring, Mentoring, Motivation

Uncategorized bone health, gym workouts, osteoporosis, strength training, Victoria Wellness Professionals, weight lifting

Often when someone is first considering starting an fitness program, the hardest thing is trying to figure out what to do. A well balanced fitness program needs to have 3 major components: strength training, conditioning (aerobic component) and mobility/flexbility. Whether your goal is to play a better game of golf, lose weight, increase your endurance – all three of these components need to be included if you are to reach your goal. Let’s take a look at each individual component:

Strength Training - lift some weights – no way around it. Weights build strong muscles = leaner body = easy to maintain a healthy weight and ensures strong bones:

References: Dr.Len Kravits, PHD., Associate Professor Exercise Science, The University of Mexico

Uncategorized aerobics, cardiovascular conditioning, exercise, gym workouts, strength training, Victoria Wellness Professionals, weightlifting

Pain by definition:

Pain is the unpleasant feeling common to such experiences as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut and bumping the “funny bone”. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”

Pain can be very subjective and a persons’ pain threshold can vary greatly from person to person. What may be perceived as painful to one person may not solicitas much of a sensation to another.

We can all attest to pain in everyday situations such as described above. But, what is sometimes difficult to undertstand is the feeling or tolerance of pain during a workout situation.

Those of you that train at VWP are accustomed to the coaching staff inquiring how you are feeling, presence of pain etc. But what is sometimes confusing is just what is pain, is some pain okay or should anything be said at all?

The phrase “No pain, No gain” has no play in our facility. There is really only one answer to the presence of pain – yes or no.

During the course of performing an exercise, you may feel a burning or even a feeling of fullness in the area being worked. For example, walking lunges down and back the turf are sure to elicit some burning in the quadriceps (or thighs); a timed set of push ups may have your chest and arms burning as well. Sometimes the feeling of fullness may be a feeling of “tightness” to some people. Normally though, once the set of lunges or push ups is completed that feeling of burning or tightiness will disappear after a few seconds. This is completely normal and tells us we have generated a response within the muscles.

What we don’t want is any feeling of pain, especially close to a joint. This is not normal. There is no such thing as just a little pain. There is either pain or there is not – there is no middle ground.

When we talk about pain during the performance of an exercise, we are referring to sharp pain felt at any point during the course of performing that repetition.

The feeling of pain at any time is not normal and the exercise should be halted immediately. Sometimes it is as easy as re checking form or technique in order to continue pain free.

It is essential that all pain, no matter how minor it seems, be reported to your training staff.

At Victoria Wellness our motto is “Want Gain, Then No Pain” If you want to improve your health, train harder, run faster, enjoy all aspects of fun in life then learn to recognize pain, report presence of pain and train pain free.

Till next time,
Narina
“Monitoring, Mentoring, Motivation”

Uncategorized exercise, goals, lunges, pain, push ups, strength training, Victoria Wellness Professionals, weightlifting, workouts

I know a lot of people don’t consider golf a sport at all and I am sure there was a time when I really didn’t think of it as a sport either; but more a game. But knowing what I know now about exercise physiology, anatomy and the science of human movement, I realize that golf very much is a sport with a skill set that must be developed in order to compete and remain injury free. It is no secret that Tiger Woods takes his game preparation very seriously. Not only does he spend hundreds of hours practicing every facet of the game itself, but he also strength trains in order to develop proper movement patterns, correct muscle sequencing during movements,
increase core strength and remain injury free. It is fairly obvious looking at him that he is “in shape”. You just need to look at his biceps under his golf shirt to know that this golfer takes his conditioning very seriously. In fact, I have heard that he bench presses over 400 pounds. Not to shabby for a golfer, eh?

I think the professionals golfers have realized that it just isn’t more time on the driving range or putting green that will improve their game, but time spent in the gym improving their bodies will have a direct impact on the performance of their sport as well.

One of the most practiced and most frustrating aspects of golf is the swing itself. To perfect your golf swing, several components must be in place. One of the important aspects of your golf swing is thoracic mobility or the ability of your upper back to rotate freely and separately from your hips. To help improve your range of motion through your upper back while maintaining your hip stability I recorded a video on the Diagonal Plate Raise. Include this in your workout/gym sessions and you will see an improvement in your ability to swing more freely.

Keeping with the golf theme, there are two excellent web sites that are a gold mine of information. Bookmark and visit often to:

Anthony Renna “Better Golf With Fitness” http://www.bettergolfwithfitness.com
/better_golf_with_fitness/

The second site you will want to visit is The Titleist Performance Institute at: http://www.mytpi.com/

Enjoy watching the Masters this weekend and good luck with your own game!

Till next time,
Narina

Uncategorized exercise, golf, golf swing, Masters Golf Tournament, strength training, Titleist

The Academy Awards are over for another year. I rarely sit through the whole awards ceremony, but like most women I love to watch the Red Carpet. It is fun to see the beautiful gowns and jewels worn by the Hollywood stars. I remember a few years ago watching a special filmed the day of the Academy awards. One of the nominees had agreed to allow cameras into her world for the day as she prepared for the event. Her day started with the cameras rolling at 7 am. The day was a constant stream of people – her assistant, her publicist, manicurist – you know you have to have perfect fingers and toes for the day; make ups artist, hair stylists – all coming and going throughout the day to make sure she looked perfect. Her dress and jewels arrived later in the day and that started a whole other parade of people to help her dress, put on her diamonds loaned to her and naturally to touch up her hair and makeup. There was also a shoe lady there who came with several pairs of evening shoes so just the perfect shoe could be selected.

Once all that had taken place, she was finally ready to make her way out her front door to the waiting limousine and off to the Red Carpet. It was quite the day! So just remember ladies when you are feeling less than glamourous watching these stars that their whole lives revolve around looking good. Not feeling good necessarily, but looking good! They don’t have jobs to contend with – that is their job. For the most part they are not dealing with the demands of running a household – they have cooks, nannys, housekeepers. They don’t have to worry about driving kids to school in the morning, then going off to work or appointments for the day – then to rush off at the end of the work day to take kids to sports activities or dance classes, etc.

So let’s all keep the Academy Awards and the Hollywood stars in perspective. I think it is the men and women that have all the demands of real life and still make time to take care of their physical and mental well being that are the real stars – and that is you! So my hat is off to you – you are the real stars in my book.

Today’s topic came around because of a blog post I read last week from a strength coach in the U.S. The blog post was entitled, “Are You Making Your Clients Better or Just Making Them Tired?” That naturally got me thinking – oh oh……. So please excuse me as I step up on the soapbox for a moment or two.

This has always been an issue in this industry and one I have worked hard to change. I have also written articles about the issues within the fitness industry and my own stand on raising the bar on standards of excellence. With the explosion the last year especially, of bootcamps, training studios and the number of personal trainers in this City, you need to ask the question asked by the blog post – are they helping their clients or just making them tired?

It isn’t difficult to make people tired. Anyone can put together a circuit of exercises that tire people out, make them sweat and say uncle. It isn’t hard to make people experience extreme muscle soreness the next day. You often hear people comment about what a great workout that was, about how sore they are after or how close they came to throwing up during a workout. In fact, there is one gym chain with a couple of locations in Victoria, that pride itself on doing just that.

But, how are they actually helping people? And do the trainers even know why they are doing a specific exercise or using a specific piece of equipment? Is the exercise or program based on science or is it the latest exercise off the internet. With the rapid growth of various “tools” of strength and conditioning such as kettlebells, ropes, sleds, TRX suspension training; is there the knowledge by the trainers to support these tools. With Youtube being so popular, anyone can watch a couple of videos on kettlebells or ropes and call themselves an expert. The same can be sled about TRX training, sleds, complexes – almost anything.

Certain “tools” of the trade have requirements that the body must meet before they are ready to be incorporated into a training program. And when and how often they are used, is a whole other topic of discussion. And all of this will come back to assessment and judgement. If there is no physical assessment done prior to a workout regime being implemented then how do you know it is safe for the individual to participate. Bootcamps, group fitness classes, circuit training – they all should be carrying out proper assessments on all their clients.

Kettlebells for example require certain things to be in place before someone is ready to train with them. Assessment is #1 which involves a proper medical history, physical/muscle testing, ROM testing. A simple Par Q is not enough in my opinion. A “sit and reach test” tells nothing about the bodies ability to stabilize during movement, asymmmetries, ROM issues or all the other physical limitations that may or may not be present.

Whether it is kettlebells, sleds, ropes, dumbells/barbells or any other training there needs to be proper assessment, proper teaching and a system of regressions/progressions in place. With any of these forms of training you can make someone tired. You can make someone sweat and you can certainly make them sore. But, that doesn’t mean you are helping them.

Speaking of helping rather than just making you tired, we will be starting our new warm up protocols today at the gym. Please bear with us as we start to take everyone through the new warm up regime. The new warm up requires several new exercises to be learned, so some of the warm ups will be done on a one-to-one basis. Some may be staying on the current warm up for another day or two as we work through the group. Because a lot of these new protcols are put in place specifically to deal with hip and thoracic mobility in more depth, it is important that we learn the exercises correctly. To that end, we will be moving slowing with each individual to make sure that each movement is done correctly and to the best of your ability.

One of the things that I feel is essential to our ability to provide the best training services to you, our clients, is ongoing education. We have the opportunity the attend a weekend workshop with one of the most sought after speakers/presenters in the Industry. Eric Cressey from Massachusetts is a national and international speaker on corrective exercise and athletic performance. Kevin and I had the opportunity to hear him speak in California last year. He is the “go to guy” for anything shoulder related. Eric Cressey will be presenting a workshop “The Nuts and Bolts of Corrective Exercise – from Assessment to High Performance” in Vancouver. The workshop will be March 27 and 28. This will not affect the March 27 schedule at the gym, but March 28 (Saturday) the gym will be closed. For the Saturday sessions, please talk to me so we may reschedule that session for you. Thank you for your understanding.

Till next time,
Narina
“Monitoring, Mentoring, Motivation”

Uncategorized assessment, corrective exercise, kettlebells, strength training, workout

by Mike Mahony