Last weeks blog defined and explained the terms ‘health’ and ‘fitness’. With that bedrock in place now we can dive into some of the Richlife training philosophies. Why we train the way we do? Why we don’t do certain movements? The why gives us knowledge, the knowledge gives us understanding, the understanding gives us clarity, the clarity gives us focus, the focus drives our performance.
Programming
The main goal of Richlife programming is to increase strength and work capacity. Focus on these two elements will help to improve your performance in everyday life as well as your sports. Speaking of sports, Richlife programming definitely has an eye on mountain activities and at certain times of the year the programming will reflect the season we are in or approaching. We live in a mountainous area so training is designed to help with these sports, to increase cardio capacity when coming into hiking, biking season and to improve the lactate threshold of the legs when ski/snowboard season is approaching. While in season we have more of a generalist approach, touching on all 10 components of fitness (Strength, Speed, Power, Flexibility, Cardio/respiratory endurance, Stamina, Agility, Co-ordination, Balance, Accuracy) to keep us ticking over.
In terms of the components of fitness i believe that in the artificial gym environment some do take a higher priority than others. For example in class we will focus more on lets say cardio/respiratory endurance than balance. Why? Because it has more bang for your buck, also can we really simulate and test the balance requirements for skiing in the gym? I think not, i think doing one legged squats on a bosu ball has limited transfer into skiing, best to just go and ski to improve your ski balance. We have limited time in class so we focus on the larger elements of fitness like, strength, cardio, stamina, power rather than the smaller refined components that i believe are best adapted in the sport arena. Many of the smaller components of fitness are secondarily being worked in many of our movements. The main focus of jump lunges for example will be to improve the lactate threshold of our legs but they secondarily improve our balance, co-ordination, agility and accuracy at the same time.
A couple of my personal programming philosophies are:
Keep it simple, keep it hard
Train movements not muscles
Train for performance over aesthetics
Constantly varied functional movement executed at high intensity
Movements
I believe in functional compound movements. Functional simply means movements we use in everyday life. Every time we pick anything up from the floor we are either squatting or deadlifting. When we put a suitcase in an overhead locker on a plane it is pressing overhead. Taking your groceries into the house are farmers carries. Functional movements transfer into life and sport so we train them in the gym. Isolated movements like a bicep curl will improve our ability to fill out a T-shirt or achieve a side look at the pool but will they help us get up a mountain, or pick up our dog who refuses to walk any further?
Compound wins handsdown over isolation exercises in Richlife. Compound exercises are multi joint multi muscle movements and i believe they are way more beneficial in life and in sport than isolation movements. For example in a squat you are using the ankle, knee, and hip joints in combination with quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, core, etc while the lonely leg curl machine moves the knee joint and works the quads. I believe isolation movements have there place if you are rehabbing from injury or are focused on body building for aesthetics, but in terms of performance you can’t beat a good old compound movement.
Next week we will dive further into movement categories and the specific exercises i choose and we perform in class. Why free weights are more advantageous than machines and also why i believe that training for performance is more effective than training for aesthetics. Spoiler alert…you can have it all ;)