Live Long Fitness, West Ocean City, MD

This Weeks Show. Lisa and I were guests on Beer With Stangers Show. Really fun time, there really isn’t anything to be learned here, especially if you are a Soy fan. We hope to be on again and talk about fitness and Live Long Fitness.

After serving Ocean City for over 26 years Ocean City Health and Racquet club will be closing. The Furst family has been a great asset to this town and lent it’s time, energy and money to numerous causes. I lifted there on vacations in High School, and Lisa taught classes there for many years. We view the Furts family as friends who have gone out of the way to improve the health, fitness, and spirit of this town and do not find an ounce of joy ion their untimely closings. It seems to be in style in some circles to celebrate the closings of larger fitness facilities, but we will miss the club very much. I was able to teach classes there recently, as was Lisa and the staff and members there are great people.  Below is the resons, in their official form.

Gerry Furst and Family

Aches, pains, pulls and occasional injuries are all part of working out. Any exercise programs that has a zero injury rate is probably also going to have a very low success rate. We work VERY hard to reduce the risk on injury, but it is going to happen. So what do you do? R.I.C.E is a great start (Rest. Ice.Compression.Elevation)What about missing workouts? Doesn’t the deconditioning process begin after three days? The fact is, deconditioning can begin after 3-4 days and you will have to miss a few workouts if you are injured. The best things you can do is be vigilant in your prevention of injuries. How consistently are you stretching, warming up, rolling and taking fish oil? Everyone hits the roller when they are hurt, but the best thing you can do it roll out after every workout, and warm up thoroughly before. I have been plagued by injuries most of my adult life. It was often an issue of in proper warm up, but just as often an issue of “manning up” and working through pain. “No pain no gain” is an old phrase that has caused as much injuries as almost anything I have ever seen. PAIN and DISCOMFORT are two separate things and should not be confused. DISCOMFORT is the burning in your lungs while sprinting or trying to PR a 1000M row. This is where you need to dig deep and push through. Sharp stabbing pain in a joint or tendon is PAIN. Throbbing pain that wakes you up and causes prolonged discomfort is PAIN and is your bodies way of warning you TO STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING! If you are having pain, see a medical Dr. Do you stop working out? maybe, but you may also have to modify what you are doing. if running is an issue, can you row? What about jump rope? Swim? Squats an issue? Push Ups. Pull Ups…be smart!

Too many people think that they need to meditate to relax. Mediation can be great, but many people simply don’t like it. The good news is medicine seems to be catching up on what many already know; regular exercise reduces anxiety and makes you feel better. Regular Exercise Reduces Anxiety by 20 Percent and Improves Quality of Life. A new study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine further proves that exercise is directly linked to emotional well-being.

The results of 40 randomized clinical trials of nearly 3,000 patients with varied medical conditions showed that on average patients who worked out regularly reported a 20 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms compared to those who did not Read the entire article HERE

At least three times a week I will recieve and e-mail asking about different programs. Lisa and I have worked full time in fitness now for 10 years and are in the paper quite a bit, so it makes sense. The questions generally revolve around newer, or newly in the news, programs and are pretty tough to answer. I will take a few minutes and try to explain this. If you did not have success with P90X you will probably not have much success with Insanity. Why? For one thing they are both made by the same company, and they are basically the same ideas. So that being said, if you did well on P90X, you will probably LOVE Insanity. I have a friend who got RIPPED and in amazing shape with P90x but also know many who did not fare so well. What about Turbulence Training vs. High Intensity Training? The names are endless, but here is what no one is going to tell you—THEY ARE ALL BASICALLY THE SAME THING! This is not a bad, or good, thing. Here is the bare bones version of 85% of the fitness programs you will see advertised;

Work out hard, often and eat well. WHAT! Every one of the programs will have a recommended diet with it, and all results shown are when the exericse program was used in conjunction with the diet. What about “muscle confusion”? What about it? If you do the same thing over and over you adapt and no longer get the desired results. Hard work+clean diet will always equal increased performance and more desirable body composition. So to save you some time and money, here is a simple suggestion; figure out what you like to do and see if a program uses any of it. Like to row? There are workouts that use the rowers almost exclusively and are really good. Rowbics is fun as hell, and will give you a killer workout. Like biking? Try Spinning. This post is not trying to make light of anyone looking to get in shape. It is an honest attempt to clear a few things up. There is little new in the world of fitness. You can get is shape with a crappy trainer, and fail with a great one. Getting in great shape isn’t rocket science and it need not be a chore. There are new ideas around, but very few actual new exercises. The picture below is from a book published in 1866 called Athletic Sports for Boys: a Repository of Graceful Recreations for Youth

Body weight exercises in 1866? Yup! Rings, ropes, and pull up bars also. Science and academics can come up with some great ideas, but working out has always been about working hard and basic movements like running, jumping, squatting and lifting heavy things. Everything Old is New Again.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

It’s easy to train when things are going well. It doesn’t take as much motivation to train when you are making gains and gains. When you are on a cycle of winning and getting stronger nearly every work out, but what about when things aren’t going well? When you are injured or, hitting plateaus, it is hard to get motivated. It is hard to work harder and harder and not see the results right away. Where are you?

We have a very long history with conditioning kids, and we would not have it any other way. Some view kids as future clients, some as annoyances,or a way to get their parents training with them. For us it is a true mission. We work with elite level athletes and kids with special needs. Training to play Division 1 sports, training prior to summer or a prom and just training to have fun. There are a TON of misconceptions about youth training, and Lon Kilgore wrote a fanatsic piece on many of them HERE

We commend our clients that have braved the weather to get to their workouts!  We are trying to do our part by being there when SAFELY possible during this blast of  bad weather. That being said WE WILL NOT BE OPEN WENESDAY NIGHT!It is 2:30 now and blowing very hard. Roads are icey and temps are dropping. Check back for Thursday info. BE SAFE!

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of information out there about how to exercise, but far less information about the application of proper rest and recovery techniques.  I see more sub-acute and chronic injuries resulting from inadequate recovery from exercise (especially with high-intensity programs), than resulting from an acute or traumatic incident. The primary fault lies with inadequate or improper recovery from exercise, not the type or intensity of exercise. (To put it another way, it’s not that you’re hurting yourself doing pull-ups – more often than not, it’s because you’re not properly recovering from those pull-ups.)

Dallas Hartwig is a great trainer, who happens to be a Physical Therapist, and has written an unbelievable piece on recovery. I am reading more and more about older athletes who have come to the realization that they need to recover more, and smarter. I have had chronic injuries for years and this past year I began to more aggressively deal with recovery and injury prevention. The entire piece is HERE.