Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Stonewall Fitness: Keys to Mental and Physical Successes in Training

By David Smith

When it comes to training, it is important that we ready ourselves to accomplish our personal best, each and every session. There are days where we all struggle with motivation, sometimes our best is simply showing up. As they say… “Nobody regrets a workout when it’s done.” So if you can manage to make it to the gym, where do you go from there?

As an exercise professional and coach, I have always stressed the importance of a consistent, comprehensive and sometimes long warm up session. A good warm up set should consist of…

Dynamic Stretches  

Increase Range of Motion (ROM) with active movement within the muscle.

Full Body/ General Exercises
Exercises that engage multiple muscle groups at the same time, upper body, lower body and core. Even if session won’t utilize those muscle groups otherwise.

Specific Exercises as related to your goals of the session.

For example, if your set involves heavy squats, incorporating body weight squats for your warm up is a good idea.

​The warm up set should be consistent for every session, with slight adjustments to the “Specific Exercises” based on the goals of the session. Remember, you are not trying for any PRs or 1RMs during the warm up set. The goal of the warm up set is to get you into the zone, allow you to shed all the external stresses (work, relationships, general life stress, etc.) So when it comes time to start on your main set, you can exists solely within the moment, focusing only on the task at hand.

Mindfulness is the state of mind where you exist completely within the present moment. What has past and what has to come is irrelevant because you only focus on what is right now. Simply put, if you are climbing a stair case. You don’t focus on the steps behind you nor the steps above you. Your only focused on taking each step. Hence you “take one step at a time”.



​Your warm up should be designed to get you into “the zone”. In essence the warm up is really the hardest part of the workout. Taking a bunch of cold muscles and putting them to work while simultaneously taking all the distractions of the outside world and temporarily pushing them aside. It’s a lot to undertake and people generally skip the warm up as a result. When you skip the warm up, your body still has to “warm up” as it were, but you won’t necessarily see the kind of performance gains and improvements during those first few sets that you might otherwise hope. In addition for untrained/ deconditioned individuals might not see performance improvements at all.

A proper warm up is more than just about preventing injury. It’s putting yourself into “The Zone” where your body and mind work in harmony to accomplish the task at hand (set, lift, repetition, etc.) The “Runner’s High” is a perfect example of “The Zone”, yet it usually takes experienced runners a few miles of grueling, strenuous running before they achieve it (warm up). However once you experience the “Runner’s High” it’s like an endophin rush akin to getting high. (Hence it’s the Runner’s High). In this zone you feel like you can run forever, that it almost feels effortless. The sooner you can get into that zone, the more you are capable of putting in your 100% Best Effort and the more likely you are to reach PRs and ultimately, improvements and results. More advanced athletes can get into this zone much quicker due to the number of hours they spend training and practicing. The more time and effort you commit to training, the quicker your body will adapt and sooner you’ll find yourself in the same zone. ​Learn to “Embrace the Suck” as it were when it comes to warm up. Yes, warm ups should feel challenging, strenous and repetitively annoying. Yet it allows you to get all of that moaning and groaning out of your system first so you can get into your zone and accomplish what you are there to accomplish. Get it done.