Chopping Down Trees For Strength And Fat Loss

The great Abraham Lincoln is known to have said “If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six sharpening my axe’.

World-renowned fitness expert Alwyn Cosgrove refers to what I am about to tell you as ‘hacking your workouts’.

Whichever way you look at it, and whatever name you want to give your new-found approach to ‘training time management’, one common factor remains.

A large proportion of your training is likely to be a waste of time.

Often, people continue to bang their heads on the same brick wall in the vain hope that eventually it will work.

Unfortunately, one of the many legacies passed down from the traditional obsession with bodybuilding as the beast that spawned weight training for the masses, is the belief that high volume equals better results.

Surely if you just exercise more and do more cardio you will burn more calories and lose weight?

Surely if you just lift a sufficient amount of weights every day you’re going to see more muscle?

Surely if you run more miles each week, you’ll perform better in a half marathon?

Surely if you do as many reps as possible of as many abs exercises as you can think of, you’ll get a rippling six pack?

Judging by the complete lack of progress in people who do nothing but run with their spare time and the amount of desperate young lads who go to the gym everyday and do more straight-legged sit ups than a hyperactive zombie, but still don’t have a six pack, something’s not right here.

The fact is that at times, usually as part of a well-planned periodized training schedule, high volume has it’s place. However, eventually this will catch up on you either in the form of insufficient recovery leading to decreased performance levels, overuse injuries or just a complete lack of motivation to go and whittle away another two hours of your life.

What is needed most of the time is to take a step back, analyse the weak links in your armour and correct them. It may not be exciting or pretty at times but that one step back will usually results in plateau shattering, sound-barrier breaking acceleration in the right direction.

What our friend Abraham was trying to say was that when you have a task at hand, it is rarely the optimal decision to launch head long in to it with no plan or idea of how you will build along the way.

Here are some simple ways to sharpen your axe to get a lean, athletic body that PERFORMS like a lean athlete, finally allowing you to chop down those trees!

Fat Loss:

We’ve all heard it – you can’t out-train a bad diet!

If you trained for one less session per week and spent it perfecting your nutrition, the body fat would literally fall off.

Choose to do this once per month at least to refocus your diet as slips are always going to happen.

Similarly, take time to seek out the best help in getting a clear program which you can stick to without deviating just because another nice, new shiny one comes out.

Take time out to do this instead of launching in then give it 100%. Again the time invested getting the right program will bring much faster results once your axe is sharpened!

Strength and power:

1) If you want to bench more, first figure out what’s stopping you. If your shoulders feel unable to stabilize the bar, start working with kettlebells to strengthen your rotator cuff muscles and learn how to stabilize your scapulae (shoulder blades). Spend time in overhead lockout positions with the kettlebells and watch your bench press, military press, jerks and snatches improve. If the problem is a certain sticking point, use board presses to work the concentric and eccentric contractions in that range and soon eradicate the sticking point.

2) Stop just trying to run faster by sprinting more and more and adding more weight to the squat bar. Spend time releasing your hip flexors to allow better function of your glutes. Failure to dip into the power potential of your glutes is like trying to race a monster truck with the hand brake on.

3) Want to squat more? Try reducing the amount of sets you do and adding in 5 minutes of x-walks with a resistance band to strengthen the glute medius muscles which help stabilize your knees and pelvis. Once your body senses a stronger foundation on which to load your legs, it will allow you to push harder during working sets.

4) You may be troubled by back squats but can’t front squat due to poor ankle or hip mobility or a lack of flexibility in your shoulders or wrists. Again stop trying to force it, and take a few weeks to improve these areas. Once you give your body the ‘room to move’ the strength will take care of itself.

5) If you lack strength, sometimes it is not your maximal strength levels that are poor but your ability to recruit the muscles on demand.

Often we see glutes which are strong when the contraction can be achieved but getting that contraction to occur in the first place takes a real effort.

If it’s an effort to do it when you’re consciously thinking about it lying on a therapy couch, it is highly unlikely that the muscle will work properly, if at all, in a situation when it is called upon to fire in a matter of seconds or even less.

Take steps to address the neurological firing patterns and tap into the strength that lies within.

Endurance:

The cardinal sin committed by many endurance athletes is complete disregard of strength training for fear of slowing them down by adding muscle.

They want to complete a race faster so they run more and more and more in the hope of forcing the body to run faster.

Faulkner (1968) as cited by Siff (2004) describes how in comparisons between middle distance runners of the modern day and the 1940’s showed little or no change in VO2 max, the amount of oxygen the body is capable of processing at any given time. Yet, performances have proved dramatically over the years. How is this possible if their aerobic capacities are no different?

The improvements come down to the use of interval running and strength training. The truth is that if you find yourself unable to beat your running times because you lack the ability to maintain speed, more and more running will do little to solve the problem, if anything at all! Runners usually lose speed in the latter stages of a race due to decreased stride length. This occurs because of a lack of strength endurance in the working muscles not because their heart and lungs can’t cope.

Often you see people completing races able to talk quite freely but complaining of ‘nothing in the legs’. If this was due to lack of oxygen and due to poor aerobic conditioning then the lungs would be heaving much harder.

Reduce your running schedule by a third and replace that training time with focused strength, strength endurance and plyometric work.

“Paavolainen et al. (1999) found that substituting 33% of endurance training time with explosive activity (i.e., sprints, plyometrics, light resistance [0–40% of 1RM] exercises performed quickly) in elite male cross-country runners’ (orienteers’) programs….. for 9 weeks enhanced 5-km run time and RE without a change in V˙O2max. These findings indicate that explosive resistance training can improve RE and performance as a consequence of enhanced neuromuscular functioning.”

Include lots of ‘stretch-shortening’ exercises to train your body to decelerate your bodyweight and accelerate it again as you require on every stride of a run.

This includes:

-Depth jumps from varying heights. Focus on slowing the downward force of your bodyweight by absorbing the landing through your knees and hips before accelerating straight up in the air.

- Single leg hops over a hurdle. Do this forwards, backwards and sideways.

- Weighted partial jump squats. If barbells don’t sit well with you, use two kettlebells held in the rack position.

Work explosively for 4-6 weeks then move to reduced acceleration for longer sets of 20-40 reps.

These principles can be applied to any endurance event.

Where sportsmen and women have previously been warned off any form of resistance training, it is now clear that hacking away some of the slow, steady work in favour of explosive resistance training at certain times of the year will reap rewards.

There are many, many ways to sharpen your axe, and as always it is important to first workout what kind of tree you’re trying to chop down! Once you know this, you can then choose the right axe and get sharpening it. The immediate gains may appear slow but the long-term outlook will be much brighter!