The first wheel: resistance training

The first wheel of my program is resistance training. At a fundamental level, this involves moving heavy things with your body until your body can’t do it any further (reaching a point of failure). The next day, your body repairs your muscles, and builds them up bigger and stronger than they were before.
After years of reading and research, and trying different types of resistance exercises and programs, I’ve come up with what I think is a very effective system. These are the principles I’ve used to devise the system.

1. Don’t overtrain. Rest and recuperation is vital; body parts need at least one day if not more to repair after training to failure. Overtraining slows your growth and increases the risk of injuries. Weights injuries are BAD.
2. Keep it short and sweet. Cortisol is your enemy; cortisol is a stress hormone that increases blood sugar and inhibits bone growth. Intense exercise for more than 30 or 40 minutes will trigger increased cortisol levels. Resistance training should therefore never go for more than 40 minutes, preferably less.
3. Always go to failure, and never past it. You need to perform the exercise until the muscles have simply stopped working, but do NOT try to keep going by “cheating”, dropping form, and pulling in other muscle groups to squeeze out “the last few reps”. This can lead to injury, and doesn’t help build strength. Drop sets are an exception (kind of).
4. Mix it up. Your body will adjust to routines and find ways to do more work with less effort. This is actually a bad thing. You want to be pushing yourself. Rotating which exercises you do will keep pushing your body and keep you on a good improvement curve.
5. Go for quality, not quantity. Rather than lots of bad exercises, do a few really good ones. What are good exercises? Ones that fit the “Crit-3 test”.

The “Crit-3 test” is a set of simple criteria used to evaluate an exercise. They are as follows:

• You support your own bodyweight
• Your body moves through space
• Multiple groups of muscles are performing work at the same time.

Not all the exercises I do fit all the criteria, but most of them do. The idea is generally, go for free weights instead of machines, go for “big” or compound exercises over “small” or isolated ones, and try to include exercises where your limbs and joints move your torso. If you stick to these rules, then your two main benefits are:

• You burn crazy calories, since you’re moving lots of weight, which means doing more work. You should be sweaty and puffed after a weights session. If you’re not, then you’re not doing the right exercises.
• You are continually “injury-proofing” your body, by working not only major muscle groups, but lots of smaller ones, ligaments, stabiliser muscles, etc.

The exercise that best exhibits these qualities is of course the Squat, considered by many to be the “king” of all weights exercises (closely followed by the wide-grip chin-up, in my opinion). It’s not the easiest to perform correctly, but anyone doing resistance training should be doing squats of some kind. If not, you’re doing it wrong.

More on the resistance training program coming soon.