BUILDING A ROUTINE

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

 There are several factors that need to be understood when developing a successful physical fitness regiment; it is not simply exercising randomly until exhausted day in and day out. A steady state of progression, regularity, overload, exercise variety, proper recovery, balance and work related activities are the key ingredients of physical success.

Progression

 It makes no sense to begin an exercise routine with no specific goal in mind. The process of establishing an attainable goal, reaching it and reestablishing new goals is vital. This process can be applied to several specific tasks in a routine or in setting one overall fitness goal for an individual. An example of this could be one firefighter wanting to beat her personal 5 mile run time, number of push-ups performed in two minutes and amount of weight dead-lifted in the gym. Another firefighter’s fitness goals might be more generalized, such as scoring a new personal best on the fitness test or loosing a certain amount of weight in a reasonable time period safely.

Regularity

 The body adapts to the workload it is subjected to. If we understand this we then understand to achieve and maintain any respectable level of fitness you must exercise on a regular basis. If we stop exercising and become sedentary our bodies will adapt, becoming soft and weak.

Overload

In order to create a body that can lift more or run longer, for example, we must provide the body with the proper stimulus. This means pushing our bodies to become stronger and faster slowly over time in an educated formula. It should be obvious that if a person enters a gym facility and never exerts themselves with a selection of light weights, the body has no reason to start producing larger muscle. The same theory would apply to running or walking, if you don’t exert yourself your body sees no need to improve itself.

Exercise variety

 The human body has an amazing ability to adapt to its current environment. If we follow the same routine, order and intensity of exercise for any extended period of time our bodies adapt and stop evolving, it has met the expected requirement. This creates a problem since we are never content with “good enough” and follow the philosophy that we always want to be better tomorrow than we are today.

Proper recovery

While one hand we want to continually overload our bodies with a variety of exercise, on the other we want to ensure our bodies have plenty of time (and nutrients) to recover and rest. Days of heavy lifting, impact such as sprinting and jumping or difficult endurance bouts will generally require either a day of rest or a day of light intensity, low impact exercise (such as swimming or an elliptical machine). To skip these days risks overtraining and injury. A fine line has to be drawn between exercising enough to stimulate progress while also allowing enough time for recovery. One reliable barometer we have to measure over training is the human heart. To do this we first take our resting heart rate, our heart rate during a period of time we are not engaged in intense exercise. For our purposes here, say your resting heart rate (in the morning when you wake up) is 60 beats per minute. From this point on we take our heart rate when we wake up in the morning and write it down. We know we are risking over training when our heart rate increases by six beats per minute. At this time we undertake a period of light exercise and recovery until our heart rate drops to or below normal rates.

Balance

 In the fire service it is imperative firefighters train and progress in all aspects of physical fitness. This means following the prescribed formula of combining warm-up, heavy resistance, muscular endurance, heart and lung training, flexibility, movement drills, core training and injury prevention in a well thought out, realistic progressive schedule. Even further, a balance must be found within each category such as (for example) swapping between running, swimming or cardio machines for our heart and lung training. Or combining a continuous rotation of body weight exercises or weights (dumbbell or barbell) when training heavy resistance.

Training cycles

A training cycle is a period of time in which exercisers, typically sports teams, adjust workloads and volume of work to accomplish sports related goals by the end of a specific time period. These sports related goals may be a one month power training cycle or a two month long hypertrophy (muscle building) training cycle. The amount of work is slowly increased over the time period until the athlete’s bodies are overloaded. Then an appropriate rest period would follow to ensure proper recovery (say 2 weeks, for example) so that when the athlete enters the next training cycle he/she is at a higher fitness level, ready to start over again. This is repeated over time, slowly hitting all aspects of fitness in phases and ensuring that the athlete is improving and well rested.

 Within training cycles, we have two basic versions. One version is linear, where the athlete trains for _ weeks on hypertrophy (for example), then _ weeks on power training, followed by _ weeks of endurance training. One benefit of this is that we focus hard on each area we want to improve in. One problem is that you could go long periods of time without training certain physical attributes. Firefighters do not have “on” and “off” seasons, we need a high level of fitness in all physical attributes year round. The other training cycle version is called undulating periodization. In this type of training we hit all of our physical attributes week round. We slowly build our volume and work loads over the period of the cycle until we begin to overload our bodies, in which at this point we enter our rest period. This type of cycle allows us to change up our sets, reps, loads and distances constantly and remain active in all physical areas year round.

HOW TO USE YOUR PRINTABLE FILL IN THE BLANK STYLE EXERCISE CALENDAR

The printable fill in the blank style calendar is ment to be an easy way for firefighters of any fitness level and knowledge level to use. It is ment to be customized and ment to allow the firefighters to schedule a logical and continually progressive routine that is accountable. When you view your calendar you will notice "phases" printed on the top in bold print. This dictates the pace, time intervals, weight and types of exercise generally done. These paces, time intervals and exercise types are printed on the paper for each day. The only thing you as the routine builder need to do is fill in the blanks using the exercise library or any other source at your disposal such as crossfit.com, coreperformance.com, any exercise book or magazine (as long as these follow our basic priciples we have mentioned previously).

REMEMBER...

Some of our basic training principles, methods, and terms,

-Progressive resistance. Your muscles adapt to the work load put on to them. When we stress them in order to grow in size or strength it is referred to overload. Muscles will not grow bigger or stronger unless this key ingredient is used. Eventually the muscles will adapt to this new work load and you will stop seeing results. When this happens, the only way to make your muscles grow is by further increasing the stress or overload put onto them. This gradual increase of work must remain constant over time.

-Reps. This is a term for one single, complete, exercise movement. In other words, lifting and lowering the weight or yourself once. When a group of these are done together it is referred to as a set.

-Training to failure. This is when the athlete lifts the weight to a point in which he/she cannot do anymore repetitions in that set. It does not mean going to the point of absolute exhaustion, it just means the body cannot recruit anymore muscle fibers to contract before resting.

-Full range of motion. Generally (there are exceptions listed later) every exercise should take the muscles through a full stretch to full contraction. This is the only way to ensure every time we are exercising the muscle to the best of our abilities.

-Heavy training. In order to help keep track of progress and stimulate the muscles it is good every once in a while to lift for maximum strength. This information kept in a training diary will be enormously useful when looking at what in the program is working and what is not. It is suggested that once a week a different exercise is attempted at maximum strength and logged. Obviously, the use of proper warm up and training partners is mandatory.

-Breathing. An easy way to remember is exhale as you exert. As you push the weight out you exhale, as you lower it you inhale.

-Rest periods between sets. With as many different approaches to exercise principles as we have covered in this book it is suggested that you reread the strength chapter in entirety for specific times and rest periods if you still have questions.

-Stacking. This is the combining of a strength exercise and a movement to build explosive power. Examples are given in the plyometrics chapter of this book. Remember to keep repetitions low and there should be no pause between lift and movement.

-Forced reps. This is a method to overload your muscles by having your workout partner assist you with repetitions when you can no longer complete them on your own. This requires experience and a partner who knows your abilities. Another method that stresses the muscles in a similar way is stop/go training. You lift to failure, rest a few seconds, continue. The longer the rest, the more reps you need to do.

-Partial reps. When you have lifted a weight until failure it is sometimes still possible to partially lift the weight or your body somewhat. This is done to further fatigue the muscles and ensure all muscle fibers have been recruited in the exercise.

-Isolation training. When one specific muscle needs extra attention in rehabilitation or correcting a muscle deficiency we isolate it. For example, if we do pull ups we are exercising in a compound fashion. We are training the biceps and the latissimus dorsi (lats). If we want to specifically want to simply train the biceps alone, isolation training, we would do one arm curls on a curl bench. For the most part, the bulk of our routine is comprised of full body, compound exercises, though isolation training does have its benefits.

- Negative repetitions. This method is done with the assistance of a training partner and is another method of fatiguing the muscles. When the last repetition is completed without assistance the partner steps in to help lift the weight, the weight is then slowly lowered by the lifter alone. This process of assisted lifts and slowly lowering the weight is repeated.

-Cheating method. This is another tactic we can employ where we are trying to further fatigue the muscles beyond normal methods. When we are using strict form to lift a weight, standing shoulder presses for example; when we are fatigued we have to lower the weight. If we use the cheating method we can use our legs to “hop” and assist in completing another repetition.

-Stripping method. This method uses the removal of plates after every set in order to increase the amount of overall sets done. For example, we want to do squats and have the weight on the bar in 10 pound plates. After each set, we drop one 10 pound plate off each side before continuing. As we fatigue, we lighten the weight.

-Staggering. This method has the exerciser moving to different body parts or moving between pushing and pulling exercises to remain fresh for each set. The exerciser may move from a chest (pushing) exercise to a back (pulling) exercise. When the exerciser moves back to the chest (pushing) exercise again the muscles in the chest have had a chance to recover and lift to their full ability.

-Priorities when strength training. When we want to lift we follow a rule of “big to small”. This means when we put out a mental list of muscles we want to train we have to come up with an intelligent order that fatigues them equally. If we want to train pulling muscles, for example, we would want to do exercises that incorporate all the “pull” muscles first. As the routine goes we work into exercising secondary muscles. First could be pull ups, where all the back muscles and the arms get worked. After, we may do a set of curls to focus on the biceps. If we were to do curls first, the biceps would be fatigued when we moved to pull ups, preventing us from completing enough pull ups to fatigue the lats.

-Supersets. This means completing two exercises, at least, in a row. This usually is two different exercises working one muscle group. Squats followed by lunges would be an example.

-I go/you go. This partner drill has the partners facing each other. When one participant finishes the other completes the exercise. This is a great motivator, turning the exercise into competition, since no one wants to be out worked or out done by their workout partner.

-21’s. An exercise is broken up into halves, the upper and lower half. When we do the exercise we do the lower half for 7 reps, the upper half for 7 reps, then 7 full reps to finish.

-Hybrid exercises. The concept is easy, combine two or more similar exercises into one fluid movement. There is no set list of exercises, just use your imagination. Examples include but are not limited to combining push ups and pull ups. Perform one push up, stand, jump up and grab pull up bar and complete one repetition. Drop to standing position. This would be one repetition.