The blog’s been quiet this last while.
It seems that August, a month that is usually quiet in gyms due to people being on holidays or taking part in outdoor adventures has actually been one of my busiest month to date!
And it’s not over yet.
In the last couple of weeks though I got an email from Hylete, a fitness clothing company to let me know that I was nominated in their FitPro of the year competition.
A photo posted by Dave Hedges (@dave_hedges) on Aug 13, 2016 at 11:31am PDT
Which was nice.
Thankyou to everyone who nominated (probably just my mum, but you never know……)
You can read about that here:
Anyhow, enough about me….
And more about this thing called fitness training….
Over the last few years the fitness world has moved further and further away from it’s roots of enhancing human performance in a holistic manner.
Much of this is driven by the marketing people taking over and trying to sell as many supplements, ebooks, tools and DVD’s as possible.
All of which is sold by using as much hyperbole and fear mongering as possible.
And all the things that we they can’t make money from, ie the shit that works, has always worked and always will work, gets slandered.
The biggest victim of recent years is Cardio.
Poor cardio.
While once the darling of the fitness world (thanks in part to Kenneth Cooper and his invention “Aerobics”)
It took a beasting after the infamous Tabata study which has been misquoted and misinterpreted ever since.
Lets get this straight, you CANNOT build high level fitness and work capacity in just 4 minutes. The athletes in the Tabata study did a LOT more than 4 minutes work during their training sessions, a lot of which fell directly into the box marked “Cardio”
So what is cardio?
It’s simply any extended period of work where the heart rate is elevated in around the 130 to 150 BPM mark.
Note the use of the word “extended”
That means going for time.
And there are many ways to acheive this, not just going out and running.
Although if you’ve read any of my eBooks, especially the ones directed at the martial arts community, you’ll see that I do recommend getting out and running at least once per week.
But you could use swimming, cycling, circuit training, shadow boxing, skipping or any combination of, so long as you’re keeping the heart rate within that 130-150BPM range. It doesn’t even need to be at the top of that range, it just needs to be in that space and kept there for time.
This will NOT make you weak This will NOT make you fat This will NOT make you injury prone This will NOT make you slow
It WILL improve you’re ability to recover. Recover between workouts Recover between sets Recover between exercises
And it will do a lot to keep your heart happy.
And that’s a good thing right?
While the weather is still pretty decent, why not head to the park this weekend and do some easy running, a few body weight squats, push ups, crawling drills ab work, agility drills. Stick on a heart rate monitor and get moving for anything from 45 minutes to an hour.
If the heart rate rises too high, slow down or rest. Just keep moving gently.
Not every workout needs to smash you.
In fact, you’ll be better if it doesn’t.
I’ll be following up on this as I am getting back on top of my writing.
See you in the gym
Dave Hedges www.WG-Fit.com
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