experience

"I've seen you come in a lot, how long have you been here?"

"I've been working out for seven years."

"Excellent. How many pushups can you do?"

"A couple from the knees."

"I could give you a programme to strengthen that."

"I don't need a programme, I've been doing this for years."

"I know how that is, I was really good at high school, I stayed there eleven years."

This is a conversation I had with a gym-goer, except for the last part which I thought but didn't say. "Experience" is a funny thing, how do we define it? I asked my boss for a pay rise.

"Why do you keep talking about how many PT sessions you do? There are a lot of other trainers here doing much less PT who have been here longer, they're much more experienced."

"Who is more experienced, the person who has done 50 hours a year of training people for ten years, or the person who's done 500 hours a year for two years?"

"The ten year guy." 

Simple time spent doing something does not make you an expert at it, otherwise most 50 year olds could do stock car racing - they've been driving for 30 years, after all. As I noted in discussing PT apprenticeships, what's needed for mastery is deliberate practice - doing things which challenge you, and thinking about them afterwards. 

This applies to the gym-goer, too. If after seven years of training you have still not done a pushup, I would suggest that you have not challenged yourself seriously in that time. Your practice was not very deliberate.

Experience is demonstrated not by the sheer time spent doing something, but by accomplishments. These come with deliberate practice, with effort challenging yourself. Judge a PT not by how long they've been doing it or the letters after their name, but by their clients' results. Judge a gym member not by how long they've been doing it, but by their accomplishments in the gym. Results demonstrate experience.

Trainer or trainee, if you're experienced - what have you done? 

rituals

Rituals help in exercise. Sometimes the warmup is useful less for what it does physically, and more for what it does mentally, preparing you for the effort. 

In a talk at the SSCA, Kirk Karwoski mentions having rituals in his lifting, always taking the same number of steps onto the platform, always putting the right hand on the bar first, that sort of thing. 

Once the bar is in hand or on back, I always take three deep breaths, in through my nose and out through my mouth. I got the habit from shooting while hunting (though when I had to take a snap shot I was often just as accurate, hmmm). 

One thing I enforce on all my lifters is that they should only approach the bar when about to lift. I don't like it when people stand there in front of it "resting", staring at the heavy weights and their reflections in the mirror, psyching themselves out. Step away from the bar, have some water, talk to a friend, whatever. Let your work be work, and your rest be rest.

One of the people I train always approaches the bar during any workset, puts his hands on it, and just before getting under the bar spits out, "bitch!"

Rituals help, I think.

Edit 2013.01.10 - this article lays it out well, too. 

Making your workouts happen

90% of success is showing up, as Ned Kelly said the day of his execution. When you're beginning a programme of physical training, the truth is that what you're doing is far less important than that you show up and do something. But this is the biggest problem for people. After all, they have more important things to deal, like their jobs and their children and staying out late eating KFC and drinking tequilas.

Remember the "I want sixpack abs by Christmas" guy? He's still coming... sometimes. He's gained three centimetres on his waist, and 2kg. "In January, I will..." No, you won't.

I just tell people to schedule it in their diary, like a business lunch or date. What do you do if you can't make a business lunch or date? "I can't come today, bye"? I hope not, you'll be jobless and single for life. If you can't make it, you don't just cancel, you make a new appointment.

 

I have to do it this way myself. It couldn't be any more convenient for me, nor could I have much more motivation. I can wear a t-shirt under my work shirt, and at the end of a shift walk 2-10 yards to the rack and do my thing. I can get another trainer, my colleagues will be happy to leave me lying in a puddle of my own sweat after half an hour. I have a toddler, when he's 12 and wants to kick a football around I'll be 52, if I'm like the typical Aussie bloke of 52, no chance. And I have back and knee issues which if I train regularly are no problem, if I miss a week there's pain.

 

But still sometimes I won't do it. So each week when I'm planning the next week with gym shifts and PT and my son and friends and the rest, I sit down with my diary and plan the times I'll work out. I'm realistic about it. If on Tuesday I have someone at 0600 and 0630, then next at 0730, well physically I have time to do something 0700-0730, but let's be honest, it's not happening. I'll spend an extra 5-10' with the 0630 person, then go get a coffee, and relax for ten minutes until the 0730 client. But if I have 90 minutes free, okay, that's doable. And obviously if I'm working 0600-1800 one day, a workout at 1800 is not likely.

 

Something about writing things down makes them more likely to happen. There was a study of some university students. "For extra credit, write an essay about what you did on Christmas Day, essay due January 7th." Half of them they sent off like that, the other half they added, "... but before you go, write down for us when you're going to write the essay, for example "in my bedroom at 6pm on Boxing Day."" Obviously the researchers had no way of knowing if the person actually did it at that time and place, they only knew if the essay was handed in or not.

 

The half they just asked to do it, 30% did it. The half who were asked to write down when and where they'd do it, 70% did it.

 

Now, the essay was written and done and that was that. If they'd had them writing an essay for an hour in the library three times a week, I'd expect the numbers for both groups to be considerably lower. This is one reason people hire PTs, to help them be consistent, and have a useful effort over time. Consistent effort over time is so rare that when people do it, the results they get are declared unbelievable, impossible, must be poor measurements or steroids or lies or something. In fact I would say that the use of steroids is more common than consitent effort over time.

Incidentally, do it now. If you're waiting till New Years', it's not going to happen. What we find is that the New Years' rush lasts from around January 15th till Valentine's Day. New Years' Eve people make their resolutions, for the first week they do nothing. In the second week they start looking for a gym, spend a couple of days shopping around and then sign up. They wait a few days or a week for their first appointment. This brings them to at least the end of January before they've even done one workout. They go in once or twice more and then are never seen again.

Why? Because if it can wait till the new year, you don't really want it. Let's imagine things which are important to you, and whether you'd wait for them. Imagine we're back in October.

Brad and Angelina just split. Their children are all returned to their orphanages. Ladies, Brad asks you out. Guys, Angelina asks you out. "Yeah, we'll got out in the new year."

On a whim you apply for a job you think you won't get. You get it! It's twice the pay and half the hours you're working now, and with a bunch of people you really like. "I'll start in the new year."

You buy a lottery ticket, and win $40 million. "I'll collect it in the new year."

No. If you really want something, you do it NOW. If you're only going to a gym, or hire a PT or whatever in the new year, then don't do it. If you're not going to make use of it, then you should not join a gym. If you are, then -

1. Look at your schedule.
2. Make a time.
3. Show up.
4. Now.
5. Repeat.

Simple, not easy. I'm here to help you, not bullshit you.

postural correction

It's fashionable nowadays to diagnose everyone with "dysfunctional" posture, movement and so on. My PT school courses spent a lot of time having us critique one another's posture, and a host of obscure and corrective exercises and stretches and foam rolling and so on then got prescribed. Physiotherapists are also fond of this stuff, and at $150 a session I don't blame them. "Here is one exercise, come in next week and I'll give you a second exercise." 

Most of this is not very useful; it's certainly not harmful, but doesn't seem to do much. People do these little exercises for months, and they still look like Quasimodo and have sore backs. What I prescribe is to get stronger. Train movements, and the muscles will follow. Correct movement is the best corrective. . 

In short: someone with postural issues gets mostly the same exercises as someone without it, except they'll get one or two more exercises and stretches to address their particular muscle imbalances. The general exercises are squat, push, pull and hip hinge. As correctives, side braces are common, as is one-legged work. Everyone needs to do their exercises with the best posture they can manage, someone with a back condition just needs to be more conscious of it.

The exercises are not necessarily barbell ones. But everyone needs to do these basic movements correctly to function usefully in everyday life: compound exercises with good posture and bracing.

Long version:

In this I focus on scoliosis, because it is a condition I have, and while rarer than other postural issues, it has the most severe effects on quality of life. 

What you have to realise is that many chronic health conditions are effectively just what everyone has from time to time, the difference is how severe it is and that it's long-lasting, and as I note in weakness and dysfunction, often people's ordinary weakness will be worse than a diagnosed medical issue or disability; consider Colin in The Secret Garden. Chronic conditions are really nothing special, the person is not some delicate invalid who needs to lie in bed all day with medication being walked around quietly and talked to in a soft voice and given endless cups of tea. They just have a severe and long-lasting version of stuff that happens to everyone.

For example, anyone can get light-headed if they've had little sleep and not eaten or drunk anything before their workout, but someone with low blood pressure is going to be light-headed more often and more predictably, in both cases we adjust diet and exercises to suit.

Anyone could have a day where one arm is tired or bruised or sore and can't be worked, but someone who's an amputee is without use of that arm every day. In both cases, we adjust the workout to suit.

As to scoliosis, almost everyone has some postural issues. The body doesn't just adapt to what we do in the gym, but what we do day-to-day as well. Commonly we see increased thoracic kyphosis, elevated scapulae and increased lumbar lordosis, with restricted range of motion in the right shoulder and a stiff leftside back. That's a fancy way of saying that people who sit hunched over desks holding a mouse all day tend to get stuck that way. That's our seated lifestyle, they have muscle imbalances.

So their lower back muscles, their chest muscles, the muscles at the tops of their thighs, these get short and tight; their upper back muscles, glutes and hamstrings are relatively weak. This leads to soreness and stiffness, which makes physical activity harder, which means the person is more likely to get overweight, and because they're overweight moving their body is harder, which makes them more overweight, and then their back and knees hurt because they're hauling extra weight around all day like a soldier in the field, and before you know it they're spending $1,000 a month at Jim-Quack Holistic Reiki Aromatherpeutic Naturopathy and getting a knee replacement at 50. This is less than ideal.

The solution is to strengthen the weak muscles, and stretch the short and tight ones. Now, what routines do I give normally? The same as everyone else: squat, push, pull and hip hinge. Everyone gets to do a deep knee-bend, a deep hip-bend, to pick something heavy up off the ground and put something heavy overhead. Everyone has to do this with good posture and bracing.

As personal trainers or coaches, our job is to teach correct movement. Part of this is posture. When doing a squat, someone might hunch over and bring their knees together - everyone must keep their chest up to straighten their spine, and put their knees out. When doing a cable row, the person might hunch their shoulders - so we teach them to bring their shoulders down and back while keeping their chest up. If the person can do it while pulling 40kg, they can do it just standing around. Their weak upper back muscles become stronger, their tight neck muscles get stretched out. Having a good posture under load lets them have a good posture without a load.

Now, the typical hunched over desk worker, or the person who's a bit twisted to one side because they've done years of rowing, in this case the issues are purely muscular, or in technical terms, "functional." That is, the person's muscles have adapted to the stuff they do day-to-day - well, they can adapt to what they do in the gym, too. So the imbalances can be completely resolved.

However, some postural issues are not functional but structural. It's not just the way the person is sitting or carrying their bags or the sport they do, it's how their spine is structured. Put another way, in a functional issue the muscles are pulling the bones out of position, in a structural issue the bones are pulling the muscles out of position. We can resolve functional issues, but only mitigate structural issues.

Moderate and severe cases of scoliosis are typically structural. The spine is just built wonky. We can't resolve them by exercise. However, though we cannot resolve the muscle imbalances, we can mitigate them. We can't fix things up, but we can make them not so bad. As well, if the person is physically inactive, they will tend to lean to one side, and of course those muscles will get stronger and tighter - they're supporting the person's weight all day every day. And the other side's muscles get weaker because they're not being used. The short and tight muscles protest this by spasming and causing the person pain. Time for drugs.

If the person squats, pushes, hinges and pulls and uses the best posture they can manage, then the weaker side gets some work and the imbalance is mitigated. After hours in the gym being told "chest up! weight through heels! brace your abs! shoulders down and back, crush my fingers between your shoulderblades! push evenly with both feet/hands! you're leaning forward/sideways, stay straight!" and doing it with weight on them, doing it outside the gym becomes second nature.

Of course if the postural issue is big enough, the person may need specific exercises. Side braces are good for light and moderate scoliosis both functional and structural. And there are a host of others like clamshells, theraband side walks and so on, depending on the individual's particular issues. Lots of postural muscle stuff - or "core", as it's called nowadays, which is a word I hate because as Dan John says, the body is one piece.

It's important to remember that the "core" muscles are simply the postural muscles, the muscles that let us stand up straight without pain. Every exercise can be, is and should be a "core" exercise.. As I said earlier, the person who can squat with a straight back and 40kg on them will have a stronger "core" and better posture than the person who cannot.

Thus in general, the person with scoliosis - or increased thoracic kyphosis, or increased lumbar lordosis, or whatever - gets the same squat, push, hinge and pull exercises as someone without. Most people have to worry about their posture in the front-back direction, the person with scoliosis has to worry about it left-right, too. Lots of people will round their back when squatting or deadlifting, the person with scoliosis will lean to one side, too. In both cases the solution is to stand up as straight as possible. 

What I find is that while everyone has imbalances, after a few weeks or months of doing correct squats, pushes, pulls and hip hinges, a lot of the imbalances shake themselves out, or are at least strongly mitigated. Absent an acute medical issue like sprained vertebral ligaments or herniated disc, the long-term back pain the person had is greatly reduced or disappears after 3-4 weeks, they usually wait another 2-4 weeks before telling me about it, since when it's just a week or so it might just be a fluke. In other words, getting stronger in the basic movements helps a lot.

Note that past about 30 years old, very few people change the appearance of their posture. If you were hunched over or twisted to one side for those three or more decades, you'll probably always be. It'll be reduced a bit with exercise but basically that's the way you are now. The ligaments holding the bones together have stretched out, and as anyone who's had a bad sprain knows, that's that, they're loose forever. But the pain and hindered movement can be removed or greatly mitigated. And you can certainly stop it getting worse, which it would if you did nothing.

Given time and practice, everyone will get stronger and can increase their range of motion in exercises. Someone with a back or other condition will just take a bit longer to do it. A trainer's job is to teach correct movement, which is why we can't get bored with the basics. Correct movement is the best corrective.

PT apprenticeships

Some statistics for thought, showing why I think we need an apprenticeship system for PT. Most trainers simply won't get enough practice of their skills to be any good. As noted in this article on mastery, the practice must be "deliberate practice" where the person challenges themselves, and it must include study and reflection on the skills.

I have now worked at 4 different gyms, and applied for jobs or had a good chat with the managers of 8 more gyms. So I've got a bit of an idea of how things are done, this is subject to change of course as I learn more.

The typical fitness centre - gym plus group classes plus pool, etc - has at least 1 trainer for every 200 members, though since gyms are open 100 hours a week, about 8 trainers is the minimum you can get away with if you want the gym to be staffed all the time. A small gym has 1,000 members, a big gym 5,000.

On average around 3% of gym members are interested in having personal training. It can be as low as 0.5% if the trainers are real slugs and the team leader is a lazy moron, and as high as 6-7% if the gym has a few really competent and ambitious PTs and the management is very supportive of PT. But 3% is the average. Thus, 30 PT clients for every 1,000 members.

This doesn't sound like much, but most PTs will only need 10-15 clients for a full schedule. Remember that to pay for PT, people need jobs, and most are 9-5. Thus 80% of PT happens from 6-9am or 6-9pm. Working 5 days a week just mornings or just evenings, the PT will have 30 open slots. With the typical client doing 2x 30' sessions a week, that's 15 clients to completely fill the schedule. In practice some of the 20% of people available during the day will come a bit outside those times, and the 6-9 slot won't be full, nor would the PT want them to be since they'll burn out training 6 people in a row with no break. And some people might do full hours a few times a week, and so on. The PT could choose to work both mornings and evenings, but few do this for long before burning out.

Thus, 10-15 clients fill a PT's schedule, so that 300-500 gym members can easily sustain one PT. Those 300-500 gym members, around 100 of them will be gone 12 months from now, replaced by 100 new ones; 30-35 of these will do the initial appointments with the gym instructor/PT, only around 10 will stick to the programme, and 3 or so of them will take up PT.

 Most trainers working as general gym instructors won't have the opportunity to take an individual from being a complete beginner to achieving their goals - whatever that goal is. That's simply because someone joins up, does the first appointments, and usually doesn't come regularly, or if they do come regularly, they'll come at some other time the trainer is working, and not necessarily have that trainer check on their progress. Do the trainer's methods work? We don't know, the member didn't follow the routine.

 So the only way to see if the trainer's methods really work - the only way for the trainer to get deliberate practice in their working hours - is for them to get PT clients, those are the only people you can be sure will mostly do what you tell them over some months.

 Now, of all the PTs in a gym, you usually find that 2-4 of the 8-20 are doing half the total PT sessions with half the total clients in the gym, they'll usually have 8-20 clients each, basically 1hr training each client weekly, so 8-20hr a week PT, and 400-1,000hr annually.

The other 6-16 trainers are doing the other half, and have 0-3 clients each, thus doing 0-150hr PT annually.

Again, they're doing lots of hours of general gym work and should be learning something from that, but most trainers will be getting under 100hr a year of taking an individual from beginning to reaching their goals, that is less than 100hr of seeing if their training philosophy actually works. That's not enough to improve. If you spend just 2hr a week practicing the guitar or lifting weights or speaking a foreign language, while you'll improve from "ignorant useless drongo" to "novice", you won't go beyond there. 

Of course the PT can do their own study, going to seminars and watching other trainers and coaches, and so on. You find most don't. This is why you can get a PT working for a decade who can't coach a pushup or below-parallel squat, and who thinks properly-coached deadlifts are dangerous.

It's said that it takes something like 2,000hr of deliberate and mindful practice to become a competent practitioner of it, 4,000hr is enough you can teach others, and 10,000hr for mastery. Most trainers will never become competent, they don't have enough experience, or clients to let them get that experience.

 Much the same applies for lots of jobs, I know. But this is the one I'm interested in. So I think we need some sort of apprenticeship system for trainers and coaches, mentors and so on. It works for carpenters, electricians, plumbers - practical skills need practice. We need to put the hours in to find out if our ideas actually work. Because frankly most of us have no clue what we're doing. This is of course more than the typical gym-goer, who knows less than nothing, that is actually has some wrong ideas, so that even a clueless PT can help them.

But things could be better. It's telling that most PTs have themselves never even got a written-out routine from another trainer, let alone paid for personal training. 

PT income and the 80/20 rule

Most of you will have heard of Pareto's principle, that many things in the world follow an 80/20 distribution, especially that 80% of your income will come from 20% of your clients. This seems to be largely true, even if the numbers aren't quite right. As well, 80% of your headaches at work come from 20% of your clients, and those are never the clients giving you the 80% of your income. 

Obviously you have to look at this over time. If you have 10 clients, you will not find that 2 of them are doing 80% of your PT sessions. But over a year or two with clients coming and going you might find that a few who stick around for a long time end up spending a lot of money on you. 

I have some stats from my own training so we can look at the income part, see attached giving information from 2010.07.01-2012.06.30. 

• "Sessions" are those done from start to finish; this includes sessions the person never showed to but got charged for, but does not include any extra time I gave them but didn't charge for, eg if they came at 0600 and I had no-one at 0630 the session might go till 0645.
• "Months" are the months they worked with me for, though obviously this number goes up for those still with me.
• "Income" is simply the percentage of total sessions.
• "Income cumul" means the cumulative income of those clients.

For FY2010/11 and 2011/12 I did 1,549 paid PT sessions, where a "session" is 30 minutes. Some people did a full hour, and there were some sessions where people were absent without notice and so were charged for even though I didn't train them. I generally gave the training time to someone else like a current or potential client.

I trained 36 different people at least once each, not counting when I covered for some other trainer, gave out entirely free sessions to people who never signed up, etc. Of those, 12 remained clients till the end of the period, these are the ones highlighted in grey. 

• Client #1 by himself made up 14% of my PT income. 
• 6 of 36 clients (17%) made up 53% of my PT income.
• 12 of 36 (33%) made up 81% income.
• 18/36 (50%) made up 91%.

As for headaches,

• 8/36 (22%) of the clients I would classify as a "headache", in that if they showed up again today offering to buy 100 sessions up front non-refundable I'd turn them down
• These 8 headaches provided 7% of my income.

So it's not quite the 80/20 rule, but it's certainly true that a small number of clients provided most of my PT income, and none of these were those giving me headaches. In pure dollar terms, half (18) of the clients weren't really worth bothering with, since they provided only 1/10th the income of the rest. The time I spent training them I could have spent giving free sessions to my bigger-spending clients, planning their workouts, finding interesting articles for them to read, etc. 

The problem is of course that you never know exactly which clients are going to be the ones sticking around the longest. For example, 4 of the bottom 18 clients are still with me, if they're still around in a year or two then they'll look more important. However, generally speaking the clients giving me the most headaches are not among the big spenders. The exception would be #10, who was likeable and worked hard in sessions, but did nothing outside the PT sessions, had a terrible diet, and missed or was late to about 1/4 sessions due to sleeping in, being "sick", etc. 

I can make some general observations about what makes a client long-term.

• If they tell you how super-dedicated they are without your asking, they'll never last. Truly dedicated people are quietly dedicated; the others are trying to convince themselves.
• Those who are quick to sign up are quick to quit. The longest-lasting ones have generally been those who took 6 weeks to 6 months to sign up.
• Those given PT sessions by family or as part of a centre promotion never last; they perceive it as "free!" and so don't value it. If they want it, they'll pay for it.
• Physical training can change how you look, feel (health) and perform. Those who only care about looks never last. The health-oriented ones are the most dedicated.
• If they only plan to do PT for X sessions or weeks, they will eventually stop. Client #6 planned to do 6 weeks and did 12 months - but she stopped in the end. Most of the others stopped on schedule.
• If they last past session #30 they'll probably be around for 100 sessions or more. 30 sessions is after all a few months, enough time to get results or not. 
• if they miss more than 1 session in 10, they will quit by session #30 in most cases. This is different to a person who often reschedules their session because of work, family, etc.
• if they do no work outside your sessions, they will quit by session #30 in most cases.
• If they annoy you in some way, you probably annoy them in some way, and it won't last. You'll know this within 3 sessions with them, but may choose to deny it to yourself out of optimism and professional pride. If they communicate with you outside sessions, respond to your emails about stuff, they are likely to last.
• those you recruit yourself last longer than those given you by management; I recruited 27 and was given 9, and kept 11/27 and 1/9.

Thus we can paint a picture of an ideal long-term client. 

• You signed them up. They took a month or two to sign up for PT, and are paying for it all themselves.
• Quietly dedicated.
• Has good health as a goal, possibly overcoming some injury or illness. 
• Has made an open-ended commitment to PT. 
• Does workouts (even just walks to work, etc) outside PT sessions.
• Gets along well with you and communicates frequently by different means.

Most other trainers don't keep as detailed records as this, but they agree on the broad conclusions. 

Coaching movement

In the places I've worked, we often have trainee instructors come in. You're supposed to get your certifications and then do 20-40hr of placement in a gym to finish it off. Not very demanding, I know, but while some trainee instructors are very interested and do extra hours, most are bored, it's all too much of an imposition on their precious time. The intelligent ones learn to coach movement. This is important, since teaching correct movement is the most important part of our job as personal trainers. Most fitness instructors whether trainee or employed cannot teach correct movement.

Coaching movement is a three part process.

1. teach correct movement
2. over the fullest possible range of motion
3. add load

We first teach correct movement. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to be going on with. Next we ensure it's over the fullest possible range of motion for that person, given restrictions of flexibility, previous injury or condition, etc - most can manage a full range of motion if you know how to coach it out of them. Only after that do we add load.

Now, when we insist on a full range of motion or add load, the movement may degrade. The half-squat looks good, drop them into a deep squat and their knees cave in. Add load? If the person can't do a proper squat with no weight, why would you add weight? First we need the movement to be correct over that fuller range of motion, so having increased the range of motion, we return to teaching correct movement.

Once it looks good, we put a dumbbell in their hands - now it starts looking rough again. Back to teaching correct movement. After a few sets it looks good, next workout we'll add load again. 

And so it goes, round and again. It's a process with no end point, you are always going to be teaching correct movement. However, you must know how to teach those movements correctly.

Teaching correct movement
In any movement, there are 10-12 points that actually matter. But there are 3-4 points that if the person gets them right, the other stuff either falls into place or can be safely ignored until they're stronger and those 3-4 points are automatic. Give them 10-12 points and they'll be overwhelmed and learn nothing, give them 3-4 and most people will get it quickly. 

Considering the basic gym movements of,

• squat
• push
• pull
• hip hinge

there are two points common to each: weight through heels, chest up. 

Weight through heels comes about because it makes the exercise safer and more effective. When you have your weight through your toes, you're less stable but more mobile. That's why dancers, boxers, basketballers and so on put their weight through their toes. If you're going to chuck a bloody great weight on your back, you want to be stable! Weight through heels makes the movement safer. 

As for effectiveness, remember that our body doesn't just adapt to what we do in the gym, but to everyday life as well. We have a seated lifestyle, so our back, arse and hamstrings are all weak. When you put your weight through your toes, the movement is more calves and quads; through the heels, more back, glutes and hamstrings. Weight through heels makes the movement more effective.

Chest up simply means that the person will have a good long back, being in thoracic and lumbar extension. That way your nice big glutes can lift the weight, instead of your poor little lower back muscles. Standing tall you look better, feel better, and more importantly from the point of view of the weightroom, you can support a big weight better - if you're building a house, do you give it bent foundations or straight? 

If you can get "weight through heels, chest up!" into your head, that's two-thirds of the technique of the most useful movements in the gym. Usually there'll just be 1-2 other points to get the movement pretty good. 

For example, in the squat the third point is "knees out". All that "butt back" and "stretch out your hamstrings as you descend" sort of stuff just confuses people. The idea is to get the damn legs out of the way so the person can drop down between them. That's "knees out". If the person can get weight through heels, chest up and knees out, then that's the squat. 

To make it easier to remember "weight through heels", lift up your big toe. For "chest up", clasp your hands to your chest and keep them there - if you let them drift forwards, you'll probably hunch over. For "knees out", at the bottom of the squat put your elbows inside your knees and push out. Voila, goblet squat.

From there, you can have a dumbbell or sandbag or whatever in your hands, or a barbell across your back. And then we start getting into tweaks of whether to do high bar or low bar squat, and whether to use a full grip or a false grip, and so on. But the three points - weight through heels, chest up, knees out - well, that's the squat, pretty much. Get that right, practice it for 20 or so reps a few times a week for a few months, and you'll be squatting well and stronger. After that we can worry about the details. 

Commonly I'll have someone start with a goblet squat. If they can do 20 decent reps with no weight, then I give them a 5kg dumbbell. If they can do 10 good reps with that, 7.5kg, and then 10kg. Once they can goblet squat 10kg for 10-20 decent reps, I know they'll be ready to stick a barbell on their back. 

We start with the empty bar, 20kg. In the first session they might need as many as 5 reps for 5 sets to get the technique okay, the bar not wobbling around too much, not cutting the depth short and so on. Next session, 22.5kg for 15-25 reps total. Next, 25kg, and so on. The jumps might be 5-10kg for a healthy young male, or 2.5kg for a woman or older person, or even 2.5kg every 2-3 weeks for someone older and injured. 

Once they hit 40kg on the barbell back squat, it's time to bring in the front squat, which they can usually get 30kg with in their first session. We might alternate between the two now. Usually only around now will I mention their grip on the bar, whether the back squat has a full or false grip and the like. I might also talk about a tight upper back. When they're squatting 20kg they can do it with a loose back, and just remembering "knees out" as they come up out of the squat is enough for them to worry about, nor are they likely to hunch over much anyway - it's only 20kg. 

But once they get to 40-60kg, their upper back starts to matter. By this stage "weight through heels, chest up, knees out" has been practiced for 12-36 workouts, so it's pretty much automatic. They can focus on other stuff. And it progresses like that: first get the basics right, then when they're automatic and the person is stronger, add in the details. 

So, every movement has 10-12 points that matter, and 3-4 points that if you get them right, everything else either falls into place or can be safely ignored until the person has practiced the 3-4 enough for them to be automatic and is stronger. 

But what are those 10-12 points? And which are the 3-4 points to begin with? How do I describe them the most succinctly? If the person is struggling up from the bottom of the squat with their bodyweight on their back they can't listen to long explanations about good lumbar and thoracic extension, they need something snappy like, "chest up!" 

To learn those concise cues you can either spend 20-30 years being a coach or trainer and fucking things up and learning, or else you can follow some experienced coaches, see how they've done things. I've found Dan John and Mark Rippetoe the most useful. Now when trainee fitness instructors come into the gym, I try to pass that stuff on.

Most aren't interested so I just get them to wipe down treadmills, but some are interested, these are the ones who will have a productive career in training themselves and others. You don't have to know everything on day one, even the dumbest trainer knows more than most gym members and thus has something to offer them - but you do have to be willing to learn more about coaching movement. 

"Should I correct them?"

Too long ago Teri asked if it was a good idea for her to give people advice on lifting in the gym.  Today - and not for the first time - a gym member I'd given a routine to commented, "So many of the gym instructors just hang around by the desk and never correct anyone." For both general gym members and instructors, the question "Should I correct them?" is a difficult one. For Teri, the short answer is: probably not. The long answer is below. 

There are two considerations for any exercise, its safety and its effectiveness. Let's take for granted that anyone should speak up when something's dangerous. We'll just talk about whether to poke our noses in when something seems less than effective. 

Asked-for advice

Whether you're a trainer or a gym-goer, when someone asks for advice, give it. But bear in mind that just because they ask for advice doesn't mean they actually want it. Some just want a casual chat about life and are trying to find something in common to start the conversation with. "How do you do those lunges?" 

And some want a pat n the back, they want to be told their actions and plans are brilliant. The "sixpack abs by Christmas!" guy is a good example of this. He knew it was ridiculous, and he knew there was no way he was going to come and train six days a week, he just wanted to dream for a little bit - and I popped his happy balloon. Now you know why the gym doesn't have me doing sales. 

In the end, they asked for your comments, so go ahead and give them - but don't be surprised when they're unhappy with your response. 

Unasked-for advice from PTs

Why don't more trainers interrupt people's workouts to tell them they're doing it wrong? There are many reasons. These are the Sunday Drive, the Stubborn Idiot, and the Lazy Trainer.

Sunday Drivers

Many people are working out not training. That is, they have no real goals. They don't want to lose 10kg, to run a marathon, to squat 200kg or whatever. They have some vague notion that it's good to "get fit, lose weight, tone up," even if they have absolutely no definition of what any of those words mean to them. Working out is an escape for them, a chance to stop thinking about their troubles. In the middle ages people would put on sackcloth and go and sit in a cave, nowadays people put on lycra and their iPod and get their sweat on striding along on the cross-trainer. 

Imagine you're going for a Sunday drive. You're cruising along on your way to the countryside or beach, and you stop at the traffic lights. The passenger door opens and a guy gets in. "Hi! I'm a driving instructor, I'm going to help you drive even better!" The guy's advice may be brilliant, he might be able to make you the best driver in the world, but "Damnit, I don't want to drive better, I just want to go for a Sunday drive!" 

That's how many people feel when a trainer interrupts their workout. They don't welcome the PT's advice that cruising along at 4km/hr reading Runner's World is not going to do anything for them, or that half-squats with the pad on the bar are even less useful than standing on an upside-down bosu ball doing medicine ball slams. 

It's not hard to spot the Sunday Drive members. They're the ones with their iPods jammed in their ears, the ones who never speak to a gym instructor except to complain about the music volume or the lack of hand sanitiser, who never make eye contact when you pass right in front of them. Their workout is unproductive but they don't care, they just want to get their sweat on for half an hour or so and then leave.

Stubborn Idiots

Some people actually do want a productive workout, however they're a Stubborn Idiot. This is most gym-goers. As I've noted before, around 2/3 of new gym members refuse the instruction they've actually paid for in their gym fees. Refusing instruction when you join a gym is like buying a car and insisting they empty the fuel tank before you drive it out of the lot.

Of the remaining 1/3 who seek out instruction, only around half follow it past the programme introduction session. Generally speaking, the women flee to the cross-trainer and group classes like cycle and circuit, and the men flee to bench press and curls. So not more than 1 in 6 gym members are following a programme given them by a professional fitness instructor. 

Thus, if a PT approaches a random gym member, there's a 5 in 6 chance that the person has already been offered guidance and rejected it. If they didn't accept it a month, a year or six years ago, why would they start now? They're a stubborn idiot. 

It's possible that they're rejecting instruction since they know so much already. However, consider this: in a single strength-focused gym in my city, the top 5 strongest women have squats of 120-135kg, bench press of 67.5-77.5kg, and deadlifts of 135-142.5kg. They are overall stronger than any adult male training on his own at the three gyms I've worked at, three gyms which between them had some 9,000 members. Plenty of guys benched more than that, a few had bigger squats or deadlifts, but taking all three lifts into consideration, those women were stronger. I would suggest that if 5 women in one gym can be stronger than any of 4,500 or so males in three gyms, then perhaps these males could benefit from some guidance. Like totally, bro. 

The stubborn idiot is quite discouraging in many ways. When I'm working, usually if the person is completely wasting their time then I leave them to it. As the gym opens in the morning people flood in, a guy walks in, grabs the 20kg fixed barbell and starts curling. This bloke is so far gone there's no hope for him. 

Another bloke walks into the power rack, puts the pad on the bar, puts a 20kg plate on each side, and then does some quarter-squats onto his toes with his knees collapsing in. He's doing a productive exercise badly, there's some hope. What I want to say is, "What the fuck are you doing?" but my manager told me there have been some complaints and I must stop. Instead I walk over, "Hi, I'm Kyle, I see you're working pretty hard. I could give you a couple of tips to make it even more effective." They nod and say "sure" and ten minutes later they have a good barbell high bar back squat with 40kg. Two days later I see them again, pad on the bar doing quarter-squats, but with 80kg this time. 

Stubborn idiot. 

Sometimes people will claim, "Well, I would listen to PT advice, but I've met so many useless PTs I don't trust them at all." Maybe. Certainly most PTs are less than useful. But maybe you're just a Stubborn Idiot. Remember that part of incompetence is being sure you're competent - very competent. 

It should be added that some Stubborn Idiots will actually tell you to fuck off. As I'm not the manager, all I can do is leave them to it. Were I the manager, I'd throw them out. See above where I mention that I'm not involved in selling memberships. 

Lazy Trainers

Around 1 in 6 gym members are genuinely willing to accept instruction and will more or less follow it. We call them People Who Get Results, or Active Members. An active trainer knows how to spot these people. They talk to other gym members and staff, they may have a workout journal or programme card (pages torn from Muscle & Fitness or Oxygen magazine don't count), they make some effort to progress the resistance on their machines or free weights, or speed on the treadmill or whatever. 

A Lazy Trainer is unable or unwilling to spot these Active Members. The Lazy Trainer unable to spot them is often simply too lazy to learn these basic communication skills or anything else, they don't know how to coach and have never really tried. For example, PTs are required to do continuing education, you can do genuinely useful courses or some cheap and easy multiple-choice online test bullshit just to get the points.

Mostly it's the latter. For example, let's imagine that a PT certified as a kettlebell coach brings their kettlebells to the gym and invites other trainers to use them, offering them free coaching in the lifts. Half the PTs use them regularly in their sessions, none seek coaching from the certified coach. 12 months later, there's still only 1 certified kettlebell coach in the gym. This example is entirely fictional, of course, but if true would be a good example of a bunch of lazy trainers. 

But many Lazy Trainers were previously active (even if not good, at least active) trainers, after ten or more years in the gym dealing with Stubborn Idiots and the like, they've just had enough. Clueless or cynical and jaded, the result is the same: the Active Members are ignored. 

Don't be too quick to assume the trainers are all lazy, though. Probably around 1 in 4 trainers are active, the other 3 are lazy. Being generous, only 1 in 4 are truly lazy, and 2 in 4 are just passive - if someone asks for help they'll get it, but the trainer won't be out on the gym floor trying to find people to help. But let's be less generous and just say that 3 in 4 trainers are lazy.

A typical gym with 2,000-5,000 members will have 6-20 trainers, thus 1-5 active PTs. That's 1-5 active PTs to deal with 2,000-5,000 members. Or 1-5 to deal with the 300-1,000 active members who might actually listen to them. There's simply not enough time to deal with them all. 

Unasked-for advice from gym members

Most of what was said about PTs offering unasked-for advice goes double for gym members. People tend to respect you when you're in uniform, just ask Stanley Milgram. If you show up wearing a polo shirt with your name on it and "personal trainer" on the back, people will at least listen to you for a minute or so, usually. If you're just another chick in lycra or guy in a tank top, if you're hot they'll pretend to listen to you, if not then you're out of luck. 

Sounds depressing...

It often is. For the record, I don't claim to be a great trainer, but I do claim to be an active trainer. I'll be out on the gym floor talking to people, getting told to fuck off, shaking my head sadly at the stubborn idiots ignoring my advice, tuning up barbell squats and so on. 

I take my happiness and fulfillment at work from those 1 in 6 active members who actually listen and act, and those 1 in 30 who become PT clients. Because in a gym with 5,000 members, that's 800 or so lives being changed for the better, and 150 or so lives being radically changed for the better. There are 4,000 people wasting their money and time and spinning their wheels, but that's life. Each year I do around 100 health consultations and do PT with 20-30 different people. That's 70-80 people whose lives I helped be better. Not too shabby, I say. 

So go ahead, correct. But choose your targets carefully, and don't expect them to follow it all to the letter, take it as a bonus when they do. 

"I want sixpack abs by Christmas"

In physical training as in so many other things, it's important to have a long-term view. The short-term view is more popular but less useful.

A guy came into the gym recently, in his 40s, about 10kg of extra fat on him, mostly his belly. He was only half-joking when he said, "I'd like sixpack abs by Christmas." 

"14 months? Sure, you can do that."

"No, this Christmas." 

"It won't happen."

He looked genuinely surprised.

"It took you longer than ten weeks to get the belly, why would it be quicker to get rid of it? But you can have a significant change in your physique in ten weeks, if you eat and work very hard. Keep that up and you could have sixpack abs the Christmas after that." 

I suggested personal training - not with me, I'm full up, but another trainer could take him on. If someone has ambitious goals or big obstacles to their goals - run a marathon in six months, shoulder reconstruction operation, etc - then PT will be useful.

He said he couldn't do PT because of his business, he couldn't commit to a regular time. But he also said he was going to come to the gym and work out six days a week. I was a bit confused by this. "I can't commit... I will come every day." 

After doing a few hundred initial consultations with new gym members, I can say that generally the ones who say they'll come 5-6 days a week won't come at all. They usually don't even show up for their programme introduction the following week. Those who say they'll come 2-3 times, they're much more likely to actually do it. 

If people have the mindset of doing big things in a short time, they usually do nothing at all. If they have a longer view, they usually do big things. Most top athletes have at least ten years' experience at that sport. Most top bodybuilders have been doing it for a decade or more. Someone with a PhD has been studying their topic for at least ten years. Being a parent or buying a home is an even longer commitment. 

This is an age where electricity is available at the flick of a switch, water at the turn of a tap, information at the click of a mouse, and communication with someone on the other side of the planet at the press of a button, and where if those things do not happen as we want them to within FIVE SECONDS we become distressed or angry. It is thus natural for us to be startled to realise that if it took us two years to get a large gut, it'll take us more than two months to lose it.

But there it is. Consistent effort over time gets results. I've previously noted that when I started training I focused on the effort part, going hard, but now I think the consistent part is more important. I've always taken for granted the over time part, but apparently many people need this part pointed out to them. 

You will not get sixpack abs by Christmas, and if you think you will, you will probably never get sixpack abs, since your disappointment in your unrealistic expectations will make you give up and go back to beers and Bathurst. Nor will you rehabilitate your reconstructed knee, squat 200kg, or run a marathon in ten weeks. But maybe you can do it in a few years, if you stick to it. 

Patience, Grasshopper. 

Circuit training

As outlined in the excellent book Fit, the basic physical qualities are strength, endurance and mobility. Mostly I'm interested in strength and mobility, since most Westerners spend their lives sitting on their bums, their strength and mobility are overall atrocious, so improving these has a big effect on how a person looks, feels and performs, endurance not so much. Anyway endurance is trendy so plenty of other trainers deal with that, I'm happy to leave them to it.

But this doesn't mean I just whack a barbell on everyone's back the first day they come in. Often I'll begin with circuit training. This surprises many young trainers who've always been strong. "What's the point?"

Remember that each type of training has a primary benefit, but other secondary benefits. Aerobics will build your strength, low-reps high-weights will build your endurance, and so on. For example, if I get a deconditioned woman of 60-70kg doing barbell back squats, she might struggle to squat 30kg. If she has years of aerobics behind her, she might manage 50kg. That 20kg difference was the strength she got from aerobics; she wasn't trying to get stronger, and the improvement of her VO2max would be much greater than the improvement in her strength, but it did nonethless improve her strength. 

So circuit-style training will improve both their strength and endurance. Remember that our neat divisions of strength, cardio, muscular endurance, etc aren't really relevant to a deconditioned beginner. They're just shit at everything, they need to do something. If I can do 10 pushups with two 20kg plates on my back, or 60 pushups without them, you can assess my relative muscular strength and muscular endurance. If I can only do 3 knee pushups, the distinction is simply irrelevant. Whether I do pushups or bench press, high or low reps, this doesn't matter - I am going to improve all aspects of fitness. 

Commonly I will have people go to the Smith machine and put the bar at knee height. Away from the bar they do goblet squats, then some pushups, then under the bar to do inverted rows, with no break between the three. A short rest and then back to it. The progressions and regressions of each exercise ought to be obvious. This is "circuit" training, but it will improve their strength. 

Or we could do the same in the squat rack, they could do some heavy squats, then inverted rows under the racked bar (most women beginners will be unable to do inverted rows from the horizontal with their legs straight out, from the bar at chest height will be easy and they can do 10-20 reps), then some pushups. So this is a bit of strength work in the legs and postural muscles from the squat, then more muscular endurance with rows and pushups. 

I'll also have people do kettlebell work. A minute each of swings, rows, squats and presses, then a minute's rest, then go again. This will improve both their strength and endurance. 

Women especially tend to enjoy circuit-style training, they like to be kept moving and puffing a bit. That's another reason for aimless sessions. This dripping with sweat puffing puking tends not to happen with low-reps high-weight until the person gets quite strong. Even a weak person is not going to puff from squatting the 20kg bar, either they lift it or they don't, no puffing involved. Get them doing a minute of goblet squats and they'll be puffing, though - and still improving their strength.

Clients and gym members will sometimes question the PT's training methods, and so they should. A trainer should have a reason for every exercise, every set and rep in the session, and be able to explain where they expect things to progress to. Explaining to them the reasons for it all tends to make them more co-operative. I find phrases like "We train movements, not muscles - do you have to sit down and stand up? Then you need to squat -" are quite persuasive.

Do something!

"Doing something trumps thinking about a perfect program"

- Dan John

A while back in the gym I saw a great example of this. I had to show a guy through a routine someone else had written. Luckily I could subvert it a bit, the other trainer had written "BB squats" and I knew he meant "smith machine BB", but I took the guy five feet the other way to the power rack and he did his first ever below parallel squat.

Anyway, he had his old programs, and he'd just ticked each exercise each workout. That is, when he was shown the exercise, he found a weight he could do without trouble, and then did that for every workout, 12-24 of them over the next couple of months. 

He was in his 60s, 5 years past having had a heart attack and triple bypass surgery, and could without trouble do barbell squats, solid planks for a couple of minutes, and so on. To be honest he had more strength and bodily awareness than most healthy 20 year olds I meet in the gym. 

Simply doing the movement a few times a week with a load that wasn't terribly challenging, and doing this consistently over months and years - it'd done a lot for him. He was by no means an athlete, but he was stronger, fitter, with better joint mobility than the sedentary 20 year olds coming into the gym with some pages pulled out of a fitness magazine. 

Strength is a skill, and practice is practice.

I once trained a young woman called Swati. She came to me in November 2010 for a routine. She had poor strength overall, only able to do a few knee pushups, and not great bodily awareness, she could get a squat but not a hip hinge.

One of the exercises I gave her was goblet squats with and without a dumbbell. Over the next several months I saw her come in and work out pretty regularly.

Then in August 2011 she asked me for some personal training. I got her under the barbell. In her second session she said, "this 25kg is easy, I could do much more."
"Yes, you could. But there's the weight you can lift, and then there's the weight you can lift with good form and still walk tomorrow."

She insisted on trying out her max strength, so I added 5kg to the bar and she did a rep, and so on. She got up to 50kg and it was a bit rough but she did it. She could have lifted a bit more, maybe even 60kg, but I stopped her there.

Obviously, all those goblet squats had prepared her for barbell squatting 50kg, at a bodyweight of 63kg. But here's the thing: she never used more than 12.5kg in the goblet squat.

In PT school we were taught a lot of stuff about training at such-and-such a percentage of your 1RM to improve your 1RM. However you want to translate goblet squats to back squats, it's plain she was training at under half her 1RM for quite a while. According to all the official tables, this will not build strength significantly.

Yet she got stronger. She practiced the movement at a low load, and got stronger. Just like the recovering heart attack guy who never really challenged himself with his load and had less than ideal exercises (his previous routine had swiss ball wall squats and his new one had cable flyes).

I'm always in favour of slapping another plate on where you can, but... Consistent effort over time gets results. As I said about Rosemary, what I've learned is that consistent is more important than effort. This does not mean that no effort is needed, the little pink dumbbells, walking at 4km/hr on the treadmill, the quarter-squats, half-bench presses and the cheat curls aren't going to do a thing for you. It does mean that you don't have to go all-out in every workout. Show up. Do something. Keep doing something. 

Resilience Part II

Below is a guest post from Rosemary, the lifter I mentioned as developing resilience from her consistency. She gives a bit too much credit to her injury recovery to training with me, since before she worked with me regularly she did a lot of work on her own. What I really did was what I do with so many others who are injured or have been weak for most of their lives, I gave her permission to be badarsed. 

For the trainers reading, an important observation is that people who've been injured, or those who are older, will often be afraid of pushing themselves significantly during physical training. They may only have 10% function, pushing themselves might get them more, but if done wrongly might injure them, and they'd rather have 10% function than 0%.

With most workout routines, we only ask, "is it effective?" But the injured or older client or athlete will ask, "is it safe?" It can take time to convince the person that what you're coaching them to do is both safe and effective. 

To get and keep personal training clients we must demonstrate competence, establish trust and rapport. When working with someone with injuries, obviously competence matters - but trust is very important, and part of the programme must be things which make them mentally stronger as well as physically, so that they come to trust in the work and themselves. 

What follows is her writing, she gave it as a speech to over 1,000 students and 100+ teachers at her school. 

Resilience

Today’s reflection concerns resilience, its application and the need to develop our strengths as we live our lives. Within it, I will refer to habits which can be sustained to develop a sense of self fulfilment. In so saying, I affirm that it is necessary to reinforce positive habits to develop the values which allow us to face those things which we feel we can truly not cope with.

The inspiration for my reflection comes from:

The 2^nd book of Timothy 1:7: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”

The words within the verse have a broad application. They encourage us to take stock in ourselves and to develop a true understanding of our self worth. They require us to act on the positives we perceive within ourselves so that we can achieve our goals.

In the world of education, the concept reflects a need to understand the fundamentals of the way we approach our learning and our lives, to focus on the inadequacies that exist there and work steadily to improve, accepting responsibilities for any shortfalls which may exist. In a broader context we can make assessments concerning how we approach our lives.

To illustrate this, I would like to take you on a personal journey, one which I experienced early last year but which is continuing today. Imagine waking, on the first day of your holidays and merely trying to get out of bed. Strangely, as you attempt to place one foot on the floor, your leg and one side of your body is engulfed in excruciating pain, a pain that is so extreme you cannot achieve that simple task. Instead, all you can do is drag yourself to ask for help. Later, you are administered Pethidine as you are taken to hospital by ambulance, but even that does not diminish the intensity of your pain, neither does morphine. The process continues unremittingly through the day and increases as you are taken home by car. You face the prospect of an operation on the spine or of other intervention through a cortisone injection placed into the sciatic nerve root and into the offending disc, which is pressing on the already damaged and inflamed nerve, trapped in your spinal column.

Yes, this is an anecdote. Sadly, however, the anecdote concerns me, last year. You may remember me trying to move around the school with the aid of a walking stick. I was terrified that someone would bump me, rushing past. My fear was that I would fall and further damage an area of my back which I was told, by a specialist physiotherapist, would succumb to the same injury time and time again.

Self confidence, resilience and self belief can be a marvellous tool for us. We engender it through intelligent application. And while this concept is something we can refer to in terms of a physical context, it can be broadened to encompass other aspects of our lives.

After much work, swimming laps of the local pools, I improved enough to walk normally, and to cut out pain killers, such as Endone, (otherwise known as hillbilly heroin), which enabled me to meet my commitments reaching through the day. Increasingly, I adopted the belief that the key to developing any form of endurance and resilience at all was reliant on physical fitness

It was at this point that I met Kyle, my personal trainer. Distinguished by his four hundred meter stare, he has instilled fear yet equally, resilience in kids who were deemed at risk and were consequently recommended by the YMCA to bond by attacking the Kokoda trail. His approach was, and still does remain simple. As one of his trainees remembers - “it was cold, it was early, I had an ex-army officer staring me dead in the eyes and there was no escape.’ The trainee continued on recounting the first instruction given: “Hi guys I’m Kyle, I don’t care what your names are, get on the ground and do push ups.” 

Now this might not be something which reflects the way you have been introduced to subject matter in a particular area of study, but it does strike a chord with the urgent need to become physically conditioned to embark on the Kokoda trail in a relatively short period of time and does have relevance to the development of strength training.

Strength training....training with weights. After my injury this is what I do, once a week. Kyle is my trainer. After my training I will alternate days when I work out with weights with others when I will go for a 4 kilometre run, with my dog. This is a real treat, when you consider that15 months ago I could not walk. I took some photographs of my training recently. You will note that what I am doing is a considerable effort for me, but not beyond the bounds of my strength, concentration or the application of my intelligence

Since starting my weights training, I don’t think that I have physically changed a great deal, although I am certainly much stronger. I have now been working in this way for around eighteen weeks and for me it has been quite a journey to improving physical health. What I have found particularly interesting is the association of concentration and application of intelligence with achievement of my short term goals. There is a right and wrong technique which can be employed, and to persistently lift the wrong way can cause injury. If I were to do this, my back would be seriously damaged. As it is, it has been significantly strengthened. In this way, something which might be seen as an exercise has an application in terms of learning and intelligence.

Mark Rippetoe is an American trainer who has an interesting interpretation of this. A coach of some thirty years standing, he believes that:

"One of the lessons of barbell training is that you can in fact do what you intend to do 

if you just make yourself do it. 

It doesn't just make your body strong; it makes your mind strong as well."

This reflects that, as I have noted, actions which are employed in lifting are learnt with care so that different areas of the body are concentrated on to develop a focussed and fluid approach. Another reference we might consider is 

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general." 

Here Rippetoe develops the argument that by increasing our strength and I infer this means resilience in the face of adversity that the results are beneficial to ourselves and to the community.

Yes, a concentrated approach yields results. This has much to do with the development of power, self love and self discipline as a journey from fear and timidity, from acknowledging your weaknesses and focusing on them to make them strengths. Or stating to yourself as Kyle has so often told me: “you can do it.” Or when I say I can’t attempt a weight: “Yes you can.” How many times have I heard Kyle say this to me as I progressed to the weights I am now lifting, 10 kilo pull overs, 25 kilo squats and 60 kilo dead lifts? 

Ultimately I use my example as a message to you. Identify your weaknesses, know them as part of yourselves but more importantly, defy them work on a program to improve yourself, physically and mentally. By doing so, you will become a much better person and achieve something which to be proud of.