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.