Why Saying 'no' Matters in Your Gym Programme Too.
Throwing 10 exercises onto a whiteboard is easy. Effective gym programmes exclude more than they include.
Throwing 10 exercises onto a whiteboard is easy. Effective gym programmes exclude more than they include.
If Instabook is a social distraction and your colleague bothering you is a work distraction, then bicep curls and tricep kickbacks are the gym version of a complete waste of time. Don’t get me wrong, they have a place (if the uplighting is good and your beau is watching), but honestly, who has the time to waste 30 mins of their day on an exercise that garners 1% results?
Knowing what exercises to exclude from your strength training is the science. Afterall, no one has reinvented heavy things that I know of, and for the vast majority of us balancing a joyfully packed life requires effective use of our time and the biggest bang for buck exercises.
Of course some goals are highly bespoke, as are some athletes. If you are rehabbing or disabled then tailoring your prescription is important and this is where experts must guide you. And of course your intensity (loading) is dependent upon your expertise. For the most part however the human body is designed to move and load through three planes and full ranges of motion. So before you add in the isolated single joint fillers that are the gym version of celery, throw some better nutrients into your programme and make the most of the rare time you spend prioritising your own needs.
Squat: Utilise a Goblet hold to learn the pattern before progressing to Back Squats
Hinge: Your hips will thank you for RDL’s, Bridges, and Deadlifts
Lunge: Split Squats are a staple and challenge your stability with Forward Lunging
Pull: Work up to a Pull Up with assisted Lat Pull downs or a loaded Row
Push: Nothing beats a well executed push up. Brush your elbows past your rib cage
Rotate: Woodchop loading progresses effectively into landmine rotations
Walk: Engage your grip and shoulders with a heavy carry. Dumbbells work well.
None of the above is new and we will take no credit for any of their inventions. Rather, the skill of an effective programme is deciding what you leave at the door and how to best use your 18-25 sets of work today. Side note; if your programme is taking you longer than 45 minutes to complete and you are not a pro athlete, something is wrong. Set your alarm and get to work with effective loading not stocking fillers.
In the video below, Tom talks about the science behind our programming at Pinnacle. And why causing fatigue is easy, but creating adaptation on the least amount of work requires science.
What are your thoughts on programming? We’d love to hear from you. Comment on the section below!
Forrest Gump was just a story.
No one should just get up and run. Not even Forrest. Respect your movement by prepping effectively first
Driving a car towards a wall without testing the brakes at speed makes you foolish (politely). Dropping an egg and salt onto a plate and expecting it to be an omelet makes us wishful. Likewise we need warming up to be our best. Our joints, muscles, lungs, and circulation are not airbags.
If you climb out of your commute and hit the pavement you are creating a kinetic storm in the forces you expect your body to transfer. Equally, if you roll out of bed and demand your coordination to be ready for a pre breakfast match of Padel then your body will one day tell you that you should have primed some sporting shapes more effectively first.
There is a reason that high performing individuals rehearse their actions and ensure they nutritionally, physically, and cognitively prep. And there are lessons that we can all learn from the athletes, business leaders, and individuals around us who seem to effortlessly defy fatigue. Yes they might have a higher baseline of output, but more controllably they schedule a non negotiable window before crucial execution to warm up. They read their notes before a key speech, execute imagery skills before a big race, and always always always pay more attention to readying their performance than ignorantly expecting the mind and body to respond on demand.
So what can you do to best protect yourself before your next Sunday league training or park run? Respect yourself to add 10 minutes and activate the movement pathways and response systems of the body so that your output exceeds a cold engine.
At high specificity the exercises and techniques for warming up will vary. But for the other 99% of us the means to activate your muscles and rehearse for our sport will be similar enough to create non negotiable rules for anyone to follow;
Move your body through increasing ranges of motion that simulate the activity: Before running 5km move through a Runners Lunge to mobilise hips & ankles;
Gradually increase your breathing rate, lung, heart, and circulatory functions from their resting state to the activity intensity: If you expect a HR of 175 bpm on the football pitch, make sure your warm up identifies this with high velocity pitch runs and 30s small sided games;
Activate the specific movement patterns building to a competition intensity: Before accelerating, decelerating, turning, and jumping on the squash court, complete Side Lying Clams, Glute Bridges, Deadbugs, and IYT’s.
Follow our Runners Lunge flow as a generic primer before any activity to prep better than simply a Redbull on the motorway.
Why we believe in subscribing to your fitness.
Showing my maturity (read: age) I remember taping the Top 40 from the radio each Sunday so that I didn’t have to buy the CD. Cheap Yorkshireman certainly, but I would argue I wasn’t alone and we were all accepting of the world of musical and television subscriptions. Now in 2023, everything is at our finger tips in consumable subscription models many hundred of hours deep. Want to binge on Netflix? That will be US$ 11 per month please. Want to listen to music all day every day? That’s US$ 7 on Spotify please.
Stepping back from the dopamine entertainment hits to life and careers, raise your hand if your university charged you by the hour? Of course not. What about the schools your children attend? Public or private you still pay at the start of the year in taxes or fees. So why does all this matter and why has 99% of the coach led fitness world got it wrong? Why do most coaches charge by the hour?
Well fundamentally all the examples above and the reason Pinnacle prioritise subscription memberships is that it provides stability and projecting power for the business. The school that has fees confirmed can employ the best coaches and upgrade facilities. The streaming services with the highest number of sign ups can out market the competition and capitalise the industry. But as a consumer it goes deeper than that. We can all relate the wonderful meal that was tainted by paying the bill at the end or the hotel stay that was dwarfed by analysing the invoice and spending the final hour of your holiday in a queue to pay for the experience. Daniel Kahneman notes that the ‘Peak-End rule” is the realisation that memories store the best (peak) of the experience at the end; vis-a-vis, load up the costs and logistics before the event and you will enjoy it all the more by ending more enjoyably.
So in the capitalist world of attention marketing and uniquely also for our mental health, paying upfront is better for us. We agree and strongly advocate for your fitness being a lifestyle subscription instead of a transactional bill on your table!
“OK Tom, so you have made a case for why Spotify is better than individual CD’s and we all know the business model of Apple and crew, but why is this important to fitness?” Well put bluntly, fitness is the last into your schedule and the first out (sense the tone of frustration referring to the rate of cancellations in the industry when “a meeting has come up”). If you are willing to postpone a training session that is directly correlated to a better and longer life for a meeting about some paperwork crap that will be forgotten the moment you leave, imagine how big the barrier is to even commit to a plan that will have success. Put simply, every time you need to pay a bill for the expert fitness coaches you need you question it not based on a 20 year plan, but on a cash flow that day. Is your longevity and health at 60 really something you want to look back on and remember that at 35 a new iPhone was more important? We don’t believe so.
So why is the industry so backward? Why are the most readily available options for knowledge based fitness (coaches) transactional? Because the world doesn’t think fitness is a subscription commitment and something as important as your mortgage. We think it is a nice to have extra or something that 3 x 60 minute sessions will complete each week. Newsflash, it isn’t. If you view fitness as a costed extra you will put it last and miss the best opportunities to be your best self and achieve results when they matter.
But let’s be clear. We are not advocating for cheap, 24 hour unlimited access to a sweaty treadmill in the corner. No. We are advocating for a coaching subscription service that puts your commitment to your health first and combines the business needs for stability and forecasting at the top of the tree with your human emotions to avoid paying for things that take effort.
Regardless of the services and the fee pay, if the value aligns to your budget and fitness needs then you are literally off to the races. By budgeting for a fitness service to be part of your life every day for the next 10 years you are prioritising your quality of life and significantly impacting the results you will achieve and your enjoyment.
Subscriptions enhance utilisation. In entertainment they walk us down a line of lost hours and un-productivity. Flip that model to your benefit. Don’t stop at subscribing for your media diet, keep going and commit to your nutritional, physical, and mental diets. If subscriptions handcuff us into the 3rd hour on YouTube each day, imagine the power of that extra session or extra coaching consult that you have already enrolled to!! We promise that you will get out of bed for the habit you subscribe to instead of the one you pay to attend. Your body and your results will thank you for it.
So ask if you can settle the bill when you arrive next time you go on holiday and enjoy lying by the pool knowing you have paid for it instead of racking up a bill that is going to niggle you in 7 days time. And when you get back convert your fitness packages into subscriptions that commit you to a journey and maximise the brains power for using every bit of something you have already paid for.
Tom is the CEO and Head of Strength & Conditioning at Pinnacle Performance. He now leads a team of full time coaches having spent his coaching career with professional athletes from World Cup Cricketer’s and Footballers, to Sprinters and Triathletes.