If you’ve slipped on your fitness goals, don’t stress out. Thor shared some of his best tips for getting back on track.
Avoid Static-Stretching
Static stretching is exactly as it sounds. It’s any stretching movement where you’re not moving the joint across a range of motion in any significant way. We’re just putting pressure to continue to stretch but you’re not seeing any movement take place. Something that stretching does is that it activates something called the golgi tendon organ. The golgi tendon organ is located inside of the tendon where the muscle attaches to that tendon. The function of the golgi tendon organ is to inhibit contraction of the muscles. This is the opposite of what we’d be doing in a workout. We don’t want to send opposing signals; it will put us at greater risk for injury and not prime us for maximal performance. The alternatives I recommend are 1) 5-10 minutes of light cardio to get your body warm and your mind right 2) analyze the workout you have planned and replicate those movements with some bodyweight movements. Focus on dynamic motion and ditch the static stretching before your lifting workouts.
Tibialis Raises Shin Splints
Most people I run into use running as one of their major forms of cardio, whether it be on a treadmill or outside. If you’re one of those people that struggle with what they have been told are shin splints, there’s a great exercise to combat the issues you’ve been dealing with called tib raises. It’s important to contract the tibialis anterior (a muscle in the shin) because that muscle is typically underworked in runners. It’s not tight because you’re working it too hard, it’s tight because it’s trying to protect itself from injuries because of all the flexion you’re doing to your calves with your running routine. I recommend about 3-4 sets of 15-20, 3x a week.
Build Muscle to Burn Fat
Most beginners understand that it’s largely based on nutrition, whether you gain weight or lose fat. But what are the implications that it may have on your training? Regardless of if you want to tone (I hate that word), it’s not going to be through all of these metabolic circuits. We’re not here to demonize people’s favorite exercises. But if you have a specific goal of getting leaner, the fastest way to get there is to train your muscles like you want them to grow.
When you’re just doing metabolic circuits, they get your heart rate up, but they don’t create much of a stimulus for your body to recover from. However, if you’re training with real mechanical loading, real tension on the muscle, and putting your muscle through a lot of breakdown in the workout, it’s a more expensive stimulus to recover from. Expensive is a good thing.
In the long term this is more efficient for your fat loss goals. Even if you’re just getting started, weight training is going to be your best friend, even if you don’t want to get bulky.
Go Heavy on Lunges
We don’t need to look at the lunge as some bodyweight to do for high reps of 20 or 30. It doesn’t need to be done like that. You can get a lot out of this movement by loading it, the same way you do with some of your favorite movements like squats and deadlifts. You can do lunges with wrist wraps for 4 sets of 4 each rep with a slow negative or 4 sets of 6 with some heavier weight. That’s going to get you more out of this movement than you would have gotten doing higher reps. People often swoop the dumbbells forward when doing lunges for extra momentum, we want less momentum. It should look robotic and very vertical, plant your foot slowly, go down slow, up under control, and repeat.
Overload Your Eccentric Movements
Combine Unilateral and Bilateral Movements
As an example, on an exercise like the dumbbell squat you would stand up with two limbs and squat down with one.Use Momentum Selectively
To do this, you use momentum during the concentric portion of a lift and no momentum during the eccentric. It helps if you use this strategy when doing exercises on cable machines since it’s easier to control the eccentric portion.Training to Failure
Wait until you hit failure or fatigue on an exercise, where you can no longer do a positive rep. Then you help yourself up on the concentric portion and force yourself back down on the eccentric portion. This is something that I do while doing suspension weight training exercises.Thor’s Supplement Favorites
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