Towards the end of the workshop I talked a little bit about the so called Pareto Principle (commonly known as the “80-20 Rule” or the “Rule of the Vital Few”), which states that roughly 80% of the effects will be generated from 20% of the causes. This is a principle which can be generally applied in economics, engineering and every day life. Applying this to fitness and exercise is very simple. Simply list all the factors, methods, principles you can think of in the context of fitness/exercise in order of their relative effect towards your specific goals. I call this a Pareto Ordered List (POL). Once you have your Pareto Ordered List simply start from the top. Make sure you milk the top item on the list to its full potential before you move on to the next item on the list. This way you ensure your focus is always turned to the vital few which give you the most bang for your investment.

Eventually you reach the point when the next item on the POL no longer gives a significant return on your invested effort/time. This is where you make your cut-off. For a beginner, or a trainee which is coming back after a long hiatus (having been away from training for 2-3 months or longer), this cutoff point can be placed higher since a beginner will likely progress with very simple or generic methods. As you progress and become more and more advanced you simply move the cutoff point further in order to progress a few percentage points further towards your genetic potential. The only person who is interested in every item on the list is the elite athlete, for which that very last percentage point of performance can be the difference which brings him a medal instead of just ranking in the top ten.

Pareto Ordered Lists can also be used for time management. Time is precious to me and I obviously want to get as much out of my time in the gym as possible so for this purpose I order my selection of exercises in a Pareto Ordered List. I do the most important exercises first and check the time, if I have time left, I pick the next exercise, and so on until I run out of time, at which point I quit for the day. Regardless of how much time I have for the gym that day I know I am getting the most of it. How your list might look like obviously depends on your goals, especially if your goal is sports specific or rehabilitation. For generic purposes most people should have some form of squat (and I should note that I look at deadlifts as a variation on the basic squat), some pressing and some rowing at the top of their lists, everything else should be lower down on the list. If you do a split routine you obviously have two or more independent lists.

It sounds simple enough, but the hard part is actually coming up with this Pareto Ordered List in the first place. It requires quite a lot of knowledge and experience to be able to rank these artefacts relative to each other and the large number of myths and misconceptions in the fitness industry does not make it any easier. Still the participants in yesterdays workshop did relatively well with this task which indicates that people in general have quite a lot of knowledge about fitness and that common sense and practical reasoning can get you quite far. The important thing is not to get a perfectly ordered list, it is enough to get a rough divide between high-, mid- and low-priority items.

When we did this exercise in the workshop we could note that some words or sentences ranked similarly regardless of the given “goal” and some differed in their relative ranking quite a bit depending on the goal itself. For instance we could see that “strength training” and “protein” was ranked high on every list we made (even when the goal was to “become slimmer” or “loose weight”) and items such as “choise of a particular diet” ranked low on all lists. On the other hand items such as “cardio training” ranked low on the list which had the goal to “increase muscle mass” and high when the goal was “improved health”.

The above examples are pretty obvious but sometimes it was not as simple as many of the different artefacts I had chosen for the exercise were interrelated to other artefacts in some way or simply very difficult to interpret in the given context. These are in my opinion the interesting items, the once that can generate discussion and shows you were you have things to learn or study. Ideally you put these aside, so you don’t have to deal with them in your list until you have gathered enough information about them so that they can be re-insert in the list. Chances are, if you are in doubt about some facet of your training or diet, it is likely to be a low-priority item on your list and you should not spend too much energy worrying about it.

Les Mills was there with their new barbell. It’s a bit hit and miss. Mainly I like it for the fact that you can load up more weights and that the plates rotate on the bar. What I don’t care much for is the locking mechanism. The more complicated you make your design the easier it will break and the harder it is to fix it if it breaks. Nothing beats the simple snap-on locks in this regard, they are easy to use, and cheap to replace. One advantage of the bar compared to the previous revisions are the easy to hold plates, but most gyms have dumbbells anyway so I don’t see Sats replacing their existing bars any time soon…

I tried out “Sports Motion”, a class inspired by movements you would find in different kinds of sports. Every track had it’s own theme and we went thru sports such as basketball, ice hockey, skating, snowboarding, track and field, tennis, boxing and we even did some swimming! Very macho class as you could imagine but to me it felt thematically a bit scattered. Some movements were directly taken from the sport itself, some movements were sort of just lunges and squats. With burpees and pushups as filler and some step-touch to glue it together the choreography was simple enough, so most guys would probably enjoy it.

Highlight of the day was trying out the new Sats Power Step release (due for release in September). Another hit from the Finns, Jari and Silja. The choreography felt a bit tricky sometimes, and it felt like the pacing was a bit faster than previous releases so it will probably feel like a challenge when you try it the first time. But it was fun, and the flow was ok. The music selection felt good, lots of uplifting lyrics to tap energy from. Looking forward to teaching it. :)

1. Raining Diamonds by Ricki-Lee
2. Someone Like You (Kris McTwain Club Edit) by N-Finity
3. I Like How It Feels by Solitary Phase (Enrique Iglesias cover?)
4. Bring Me To Life (Hands Up Club Mix) by Jan Wayne
5. Bad Case Of Loving You by Secret Appendix (Robert Palmer? :-P )
6. Bottoms Up by Nickelback
7. Ecuador (Bad Behavior Remix) by Sash!
8. Be Cool 2011 (DJ From Mars Club Remix) by Paffendorf
9. Feel So Cloes by Calvin Harris
10. Time To Say Goodbye by il Divo

Alternative track 6: Gettin Over You by The Louder Forest (David Guetta cover?)
Alternative track 8: Airplanes (Kris McTwain Remix) by Groove Chasers

It has been a bit more than a year since I started. The goal was to become a Power Step instructor. It is almost surreal to think that I have now finally acquired every last prerequisite for teaching the class and that in a couple days from now I will be team instructing the class for the first time.

My journey started out with Bodypump. The three days of training were intense and fun but it did nothing to prepare me for my biggest fear in life: to perform in front of a group of people. I remember the first few months felt like an emotional roller-coaster. On one day everything would click and the response from the class would be an absolutely amazing energy boost. The next day at another gym the response could be the complete opposite and the class would just die the minute I walked in thru the door. It is really true what they say about first impressions. If you walk into the classroom with even a hint of anxiety, you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle the whole class. It took me half a year just to get my timing and queuing down to a level where I would not get complaints about the timing after each and every class. In retrospect I learned a lot from teaching Bodypump, and I learn new things every class I teach. Even though it is pre-choreographed every class is different. I find myself having to deal with all kinds of unexpected events and this has helped me become more secure in my role as a leader/teacher, something which has helped me tremendously in my other professional career as an engineer and in every day life as well.

My journey then brought me to SAFE (Scandinavian Academy of Fitness Education). I had to attend the Aerobics and Step Aerobics courses as they are mandatory if you want to sign up for the Power Step course at SATS. So I spent a large portion of the autumn dancing, dancing, dancing until the blisters on my feet bled. And then I danced some more. I discovered that all the small muscles that control my ankles were very weak and so I spent the winter with a constant pain in both my feet. But just like they sing in one of the tracks of the latest Power Step release: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and this is probably the case with the muscles in my feet as well as the pain has finally now started to ease off.

It was painful, but the worst pain and humiliation was the times when I stepped into a class where the choreography was on a level I just could not handle. This improved a bit but I obviously didn’t become an amazing dancer with the SAFE education, nor was that ever the goal, but I did progress tremendously as a group training instructor. Having spent a lot of time there at the other end, experiencing both the feeling of being lost in a situation where everyone but you are moving perfectly synced with the instructor, and just from watching many more instructors instructing, both the good and the bad once, has helped me understand what is essential for a good group training experience. When I “step outside myself” in my classes now and observe myself from the participants viewpoint I see a much more technically competent instructor, one that I can trust will deliver a safe and efficient workout, demonstrate a role-model technique and maybe from time to time also explain some curious details about why we do the exercises the way we do them. In short, I see myself becoming the instructor I myself would want leading me when I attend a class.

In retrospect I feel that both of these two preparatory steps, the practical experience of instructing Bodypump for over a year and the SAFE courses were indispensable components in order for me to be able to get my Sats Power Step license. On the first day of the course, I stepped up to the challenge with self-confidence, inspiration, determination. And just like how your first impression when you step into a classroom can determine the course of the whole class, I felt already there when we did the class in its entirety on the morning of the first day that I was going to make it. In fact, I was so surprised to think to myself that I was actually just having fun, going with the flow, just enjoying a great workout in the form of a Sats Power Step class held by Silja Silvanto.

And the rest of the journey was simply put: magic. I have enjoyed every minute of the past month. I took the Sats Core Pulse license in parallell and even with the added mental overhead of having to learn two new choreographies and not having proper rest between the two courses, it was all a lot of fun! I even enjoyed the licensing-process itself, where I had to get together a bunch of friends for an event class and film myself instructing two tracks. And last week I got my license! The final piece of the puzzle.

So here I am at the end of my journey.

But as they say, the end of one journey is the beginning of another. And like I always say, you don’t become something simply because you passed a course. So let this be my next journey: to become a great Power Step instructor. Maybe I will blog about it, maybe I will not, it all depends on how busy I will be. If the past year is any indicator, I would say the chances for more frequent posts here is slim to none. I have this idea about tying the blog to my classes, like once a week I might take up some theme and talk about it on my classes and then write an in-depth article here on the blog to go more into the details. Blogging is not currently on the top of my list of priorities, but it’s something I enjoy doing, and if there is something I have learned from all this is that the best things in life tend to happen when you do the things you love doing.

1. Resusciate Me – September
2. The Edge Of Glory (Glory Mix) – Red Beans & Rice
3. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Ninth Immortal
4. The Tide – Twilight
5. Till The World Ends – Britney Spears
6. Eye Of The Tiger – Altiyan Childs
7. Fading Like A Flower (Club Radio Mix) – Dan Winter
8. Hands Up! (Sample Ripperz Remix) – Jens O
9. Rolling In The Deep – Colourbox
10. Fade Into Me – David Cook

This round we mark 20 years of BODYPUMP with Release 80 – what a milestone! So to celebrate, we brought the programme back to where it all began: Aotearoa, with an all-New Zealand presenting team and a whole lot of innovation to celebrate the past two decades and welcome in the next!

This release is a great mix of high-intensity aerobic training to get you fit and burn calories; isolated strength training to tone and shape your muscles; and circuit training to push your body to the limit. Time to load up your bar and get working!

You’ll enjoy short bursts of high-intensity training in Tracks 2, 4 and 7 which will lift your heart rate, increase your fitness and burn calories. You’ll be on The Edge Of Glory in no time.

To complement the high-intensity work, there’s pure strength training tracks spread throughout the release to ensure you get a balanced workout. In Tracks 3, 6 and 9 we isolate a particular muscle group – chest (Track 3), biceps (Track 6) and core (Track 9) – to build pressure in the muscle, work it to fatigue and create change.

We’ve got a BODYPUMP first in Track 7: the Propulsion Lunge. It’s a hugely effective power training move where you leap into the air. You may not love these at the time, but you’ll love the results they help you achieve!

Tracks 5 and 8 are circuit-style tracks where you let rip for short bursts of intensity before enjoying a quick recovery. This is where change happens when you push yourself to the limit. Track 8 also sees the debut the Rotator Overhead Press; it’s a total shoulder-conditioning move that will really get your Hands Up! and your shoulders toned.

BODYPUMP 80 is a great release – trust us on this one; you don’t make it through 20 years without learning a thing or two!

But the big news here is that I am now a licensed Bodypump instructor and now work part-time as a group training instructor at one of the big mainstream gym chains here in Sweden. What originally started simply as a personal challenge has turned into a second career path.

Instructing has opened up a whole world of new interesting challenges for me. Learning the pre-queuing for a new release in one weeks time is only scratching the surface. Instructing involves so many things with which I have very limited experience with, such as acting. Big fluffy topics with seemingly infinite challenges and possibilities. And I have a long way to go before I can master even a fraction of all this. So I take it one small step at a time. Lately I have focused on musical interpretation and body language.

On the minus side I have been neglecting my strength training. Last time I went to the gym a couple weeks back I had lost about 10% of my strength in the 6-8RM range. I hope to get back on track soon enough though.

What surprised me was how unbalanced it felt front-to-back. For the chest track it felt like I could handle another 10kg on the bar while the back track absolutely killed my lower back with the starter weights. I’ve had a bit of a break from my strength training while focusing on Body Pump so that could explain it but I shouldn’t have developed an imbalance of this magnitude this quickly. Could be just lower-back fatigue combined with too much office work this week. Hopefully it’s not an injury about to happen… My technique deteriorated to a point where I simply had to put down the weights.

They included a slow moving Clean & Press movement in the “arms and shoulder” track which I think can be confusing to a lot of people who are used to the more fast-paced Clean & Press in Body Pump class. I’m guessing the idea here is to work the front and side of the deltoids by essentially turning the movement into a sort of Upright Row followed by a grindy Push Press. But that is what makes it weird. Clean and Press for me is a power movement, you are supposed to do it explosively to develop power output. That is why it’s a Push Press at the end where you utilize your legs to power thru the movement and not a regular Press. It’s counter-intuitive to use leg-drive with no real speed or power to actually help push the weights up. When you do it slowly it just becomes a regular Press with a lot of unnecessary movement involved.

Ideally you do the real Clean & Press as early as possible in the program, explosively and with very few repetitions as maintaining good form is crucial. Curls on the other hand are a typical auxiliary exercise for me. Something you throw in at the end of a program to please your macho ego. You can simply grind the curls and fatigue your arms completely as you know you’ll be done with the workout after the curls. So to me these two exercises do not belong together. I realize the idea here is to fatigue the biceps to put more emphasis on the side delts for the Upright Row. But then, in my opinion, it should be simply that, curls plus rows.

It’s odd that we even do curls in Power Step class at all, seeing how little time we spend with the bar in the first place. But of course, if you cut back on arm and ab work people would complain, so I see how this can be tricky to program. They got it right about a year back with the Close Grip Pushups + Upright Row superset. It doesn’t get much more streamlined than that. That is what I want to see more of. Quick transitions, simple, safe and efficient compound exercises. Keep the complexity to the step/cardio parts of the class where it adds to the fun aspect of the class and keep it simple in the strength based parts.

Lets talk about energy needs for building lean muscle mass. Besides protein, you also need an excess of energy to produce muscle. Read that again please. An excess of energy.

Many people seem to think all you need is protein. Because muscle is made up of protein right? Eat protein and your muscles will be happy and grow “hyuuge” right? Well, that is sort of half-right. What is missing from that picture is that muscle doesn’t consist entirely of protein. There is a bunch of other stuff you need to build up muscle tissue.

Imagine that you are building a house and all you have is a pile of bricks. But you don’t have any grouting (Swedish: murbruk). So you can’t really build the house with what you have, you are missing some vital building material. See where I’m getting?

But, ok, lets say you do have the absolute minimum of grouting (the vitamins, minerals, fat and whatever else is needed to build muscle) then you are set, right? Well, lets look at our building. There’s the pile of bricks and there’s your grout. But there is still one thing missing, because the house won’t just magically build itself up. You need a construction worker to come in and lay the bricks and the grouting in the shape of a building! It’s a silly example, but what I want you to realize is the keyword here, which is “work”, which is equivalent to “energy”. So looking at what happens in your body, besides the ingredients, the process that builds up muscle also requires an excess of energy. There’s that word again. Excess. So in order to grow muscle you need an excess of calories/energy.

But this is where you might think; wait a minute, don’t we have excess energy stored in the form of fat in our bodies already? Doesn’t the body use that stored energy as a fuel source for building muscle? So we can use the fat in our bodies as fuel for muscle growth and loose fat simultaneously! Right?

Well, it might work to some extent if you are an obese beginner, but for the rest of us advanced beginners or intermediate trainees, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that is not how it works. When you restrict your calories, the hormonal state in your body will be very far from ideal for building muscle.

The hormonal state in a leaner individual is also a lot different from that in an individual with a higher amount of body fat. So while you may be able to build muscle in a deficit when you are still an overweight beginner, the leaner you become the harder it becomes as your hormones will signal the body to become more restrictive with what the stored energy (fat) is used for.

So this brings us to the interesting question, how much excess energy do you need for optimal muscle growth? Unfortunately it is a very difficult question to answer. Eat more and you’ll potentially gain more muscle but also very likely store more fat, eat less and you will make smaller gains of both muscle and fat. What is actually interesting is what the ratio might be. According to Lyle McDonald, for the average Joe, and the vast majority of the population, the ratio is roughly 1:1 of muscle to fat. If you are a genetic freak or assisted by drugs (steroids) you might have a better muscle to fat ratio, but if you don’t know, you can safely assume that you’ll gain one kg of fat for every kg of muscle.

The second question then is, how much muscle can you expect to gain in a given time period? And that is also a difficult question to answer. It depends on how advanced you are (as in how close you are to your genetic potential), how old you are, whether or not you are assisted by drugs, your genetics and gender and a lot of different things I’m not going to get my head wrapped around.

But let us not over complicate things, a surplus of about 500kcal above your maintenance (the amount of calories you need to eat in order to stay the same weight given your average amount of activity) is a good starting point for natural beginners and intermediate trainees. It’s a good starting point because 500kcal is a large enough chunk of energy so that after a couple of weeks you should see a result on your scale. 500kcal per day equates to roughly half a kg of weight gain per week, which should be about as accurate as you can measure your weight with a typical bathroom scale. Measuring your weight with a higher precision than that is pointless because the variation is already at least twice that as discussed in my previous article.

Do note that the above applies to beginners, it is not realistic to assume that you will keep adding 1kg of muscle every month for an eternity. 1kg might not sound like much, but keep doing it for a year and it equates to potentially 12kg of muscle. That is a lot of muscle. As you get stronger and bigger, the progress tapers down and an advanced lifter who is close to their genetic potential would be happy to add 1kg of muscle per year, if even that.

Women should expect about half the gains in the same amount of time so 0.5kg of muscle per month (a target of 1kg of total weight gain per month) is probably a good starting point. Again, that is for beginners.

Also, I should mention since it also came up, that there is no way to “over-consume” protein. Some people seem to believe that if you consume more than say 30g of protein in a meal, the excess protein is “lost” somehow. This is a myth which is likely constructed by the supplement industry in order to promote their “recommended portion sizes”. Does it make sense from an evolutionary perspective for our bodies to reject nutrition when we have passed some arbitrary threshold? I don’t think so.

I had already written a lengthy article about a month back about macro-nutrients, protein intake and such, but then Børge Fagerli (Blade) published his “Advanced Concept Diet” (English translation) which summarizes and expands on everything I was going to talk about so I guess I sort of lost track of the reason I was writing all this bullshit and so I put this article in hibernation for quite a while.

But now I remember why I do this. Looking back at the year and my fitness blog I realize some of the things I wrote about a year ago were quite naive and misinformed, and I will probably think the same about these articles when I look at them again one year from now in the future. I’m not a fitness guru, I’m not really saying anything new or revolutionary here but that is sort of beside the point. Before the human race invented the horrible word “blog”, this type of thing I have here on my website used to be called a “diary” or a “journal”. And that is exactly what this is. It is a part of my training diary. What I record here are the learning experiences I have made. Training is all about learning what works for you, and you learn from every mistake you make, but if you don’t keep track of that somehow you will forget. And then you will repeat your mistakes. So this actually ties quite well with my “Tracking the right things” articles. Because one of the most important things you need to keep track of is what you have learned, experienced and felt throughout your journey.

Tracking the right things, part 2: Food

In part 1: Tracking the right things: Weight I talked about how important it is to accurately and reliably track your body weight. Today I will highlight two equally important things you need to keep track of. How much protein and how much total energy (calories) you consume on a daily bases.

First of all, what I want you to understand is that I don’t really believe in specific diets, and especially not the kinds that exclude some arbitrarily chosen food items or nutrients like the recently popular Paleo diet. And this article isn’t going to detail a specific diet either. If you want a good starting point for learning about diets I suggest you start by reading Børge Fagerli’s “Advanced Concept Diet”, have a look into Martin Berkhan’s Intermittent Fasting or buy one of Lyle McDonald’s books on the subject.

Why you should track your macro-nutrients

To summarize what Børge talks about in the Advanced Concept Diet, for bulking, you’ll need roughly 2g or protein for every 1kg of your body weight in order to ensure that you have enough protein for optimal muscle growth (typical recommendation given by Lyle McDonald and others). So a guy weighing 75kg would need to consume roughly 2×75=150g of protein every day which can easily be achieved by eating a lot of meat and dairy products. I do not believe nutrient timing is as important as some will have you believe, but generally speaking it doesn’t hurt to make sure you get the majority of your protein in after your workout. Protein synthesis peaks right after the workout and is usually elevated until the next day. But that doesn’t mean that after a certain amount of time protein synthesis stops completely, you won’t waste any nutrients from any meal regardless of when you eat it.

Furthermore, in the Advanced Concept Diet, Børge mentions that an even greater amount of protein is required when you are in a deficit in order to minimize muscle loss. The recommended amount of protein in a deficit is about 2.5-4g of protein per kg body weight, which for our example 75kg man equals roughly 190-300g of protein every day! This can be difficult to achieve without protein supplementation. Both Whey and Casein are good protein sources. I like to get both by mixing my whey protein powder with milk. However, I don’t drink just protein shakes, 80% of my protein still comes from the food I eat. Supplements are just that, supplements. They are there to “top you off” not to act as some “miracle medicine” that will magically give you ripped abs.

So to summarize, you need protein, lots of it, how much is up to your needs, but taking myself as an example I easily eat about 160-200g of protein every day.

So when you are tracking your calories, which I will get to soon enough, it is important that you also keep track of your macro-nutrient breakdown. Specifically, it is the amount of protein you need to keep track of. And if you are counting and keeping track of your calories, keeping track of the macro-nutrients should be fairly easy. It does add an extra step to the process, but don’t skip it! Keeping track of your protein intake is an absolutely vital requirement if you want to succeed with your training and fitness goals whether you are bulking or cutting. Count your protein in absolute numbers, in grams. And do count the protein from every food source you have, not just the “typical” protein sources such as meat and dairy, it all adds up and the quality of the protein from one dietary source is as good as that of another source.

What else do you need?

Besides protein, you also need energy and this can come in any form (carbs or fat). I tend to eat about 300g of carbs every day on a bulk, considerably less on a cut, and while I do track that as well, it’s not something I spend time thinking about. I just eat whatever is at hand. Sandwiches, pizza, whatever. A moderate mix of both carbs and fat is probably a good starting point for the average trainee. Once you learn more about nutrition you can try finding out what works for you. But whatever you do, do not cut back on protein!

You also need vitamins and minerals. Generally speaking, tracking these things is not really all that important as you’ll get plenty of essential nutrition from simply eating a varied diet with plenty of vegetables, fruit and berries. However, to be on the safe side, you can take some supplemental “multivitamin pills”. Personally I make sure my multivitamins contain Zink, Iron and vitamin-D. But don’t spend too much time worrying about that. It’s a multi-vitamin, it has multitudes of vitamins in it. Nuff said? How much they should contain is not really important as the pills are just to “top you off” remember? Generally those pills contain enough to give you your full daily requirement according to the “Recommended Daily Intake (RDI)”, but if you exercise a lot you will probably need more. And sometimes much more. Omega-3 is a good example of this. Usually the fish oil capsules contain 200-500mg of fish oil, but Lyle McDonald recommends around 2-3g of fish oil every day! Thankfully, there are some brands that package the oil in huge 1g capsules.

Tracking your total calories

First of all, is it enough to “guesstimate” how much you are eating? A banana is roughly 100kcal, a glass of skim-milk is roughly 40kcal and so on? Well, it might work if you have the experience to make these kinds of guesstimations. Most people do not. I used to think it was enough to guesstimate and I see a lot of people still think that. The truth is that you will unknowingly build up many small errors which over time can grow significant enough so that you do not actually know if you are on a surplus diet or in a deficit. I made an experiment where I found that my guesstimations lead to a margin of error of roughly ±300kcal per day. For the average guy who exercise that equates to a ±10% margin of error which is completely unacceptable. Try it yourself, go get yourself an apple or some such and estimate it’s weight in your hand, then put it on a scale and weigh it. Chances are your guess is off by more than 10%. If you have such a large margin of error you are pretty much in the dark when it comes to telling wheter or not you are hitting your target. The only way guesstimations would work is if you are extremely strict and eat the same food every day in the exact same serving sizes.

There are no shortcuts. You need to measure your food. By the gram. The only way you can actually learn to make these guesstimations is to spend at least 2-4 weeks measuring every single thing you put in your mouth and logging everything in some kind of log (I recommend a spreadsheet, but there are a lot of online tools you can use as well).

In order to make this work you need a good scale. It should be accurate and reliable and easy to use. Digital kitchen scales are pretty good these days. It needs to have a 1g precision. Just make sure you get a model that boots up instantaneously, as having to wait 3-4 seconds for every time you use it gets annoying very quickly and chances are you will not measure that fruit you grab with you in a hurry to catch the train if you have to wait for the scale to boot up, even if it’s a matter of seconds.

A lot of people discount the counting of calories because of how tedious they think it is. Yet at the same time, these same people will tell you you need to eat 5-6 small meals per day or you will “destroy your metabolism” and other stupid things like that. Let me ask you, what takes more time? To plan, in advance, 6 meals per day to fit within a certain amount of calories? Or to simply eat whatever you like and continuously keep count of a single total figure and just stop eating when you reach your target calories for the day?

The answer may not be completely obvious but the truth is nutrient timing and meal partitioning is a very minor issue compared to the fundamental principle that energy in = energy out. If you keep track of your calories you don’t have to worry about anything else, eat 2 hyuuge meals per day on a bulk, eat 10 small meals in a day on a deficit, who cares? Your body certainly does not. What it cares about is how much energy it is receiving over time. Just add up the calories. So forget meals, forget having to plan what you eat. Just eat until you hit your target. After you hit your target, you stop eating for the day. Very simple. If you worry about protein, start by filling in your protein quota, then keep eating whatever you like until you hit your calorie quota. This is my approach. It works for me. It may not work for you, but what I’m saying is, it doesn’t have to be very complicated to work.

The obvious challenge when you are in a deficit is to stop in time and if you simply keep track of your calories, it’s very simple, you just need the discipline to stop even though you are still hungry. Unfortunately I can’t teach you discipline over the internet. Drink a lot of water. :-P

The challenge when you are on a bulk is to eat even when you are full. You can’t really auto-regulate a surplus as it’s hard to tell when enough is enough. So once again, continuous tracking of calories becomes very useful. I make it a rule that I’m not allowed to go to bed until I’ve hit my minimum quota for the day. So before bedtime, all I have to do is check my total calorie count for the day. And if I’m say 300kcal short off target, I simply go into the kitchen and make myself a sandwich and a glass of milk or whatever. No planning required. If I’m missing a very large amount of calories, say more than 1000kcal for skipping a meal that day, I just pick something energy dense like nuts or ice cream or candy, chocolate or whatever really and just jam it down.

The bottom line

So you could summarize and say that by being a bit OCD when it comes to the counting of calories, it allows me to be less strict when it comes to other aspects of my diet. Fact of the matter is that even when I’m on a deficit I occasionally eat pizza and other so called “junk” food. I just eat less. By focusing on the fundamental principles and forgetting everything about the minor details that do not matter in the bigger picture, I ensure not only that I stay on track towards my fitness goals but also simplify the whole process. If you still don’t get it, read this: Lyle McDonald: Fundamental Principles Versus Minor Details.

Finally here are some practical tips I picked up during the year:

• Try to use the nutrition information on the packaging if it is possible, and be wary when using online databases and tools as they can differ in many ways (the data might be for cooked/uncooked food, special brands, etc).
• If you use online tools such as “Fitday”, never use generic nutrition data such as “one normal sized egg”. What is “normal sized” in one part of the world can be very different from what is “normal sized” for you.
• Be clever when measuring your food. Instead of measuring everything separately and getting tons of dirty dishes, just place your plate on your scale, start the scale (it should normalize to 0g) and add one food item at a time, noting down the weight. If the scale allows it you can reset the scale between each measurement, but if it doesn’t, it’s easy to calculate by subtracting the previous weight from the total. Have a pocket calculator handy next to your scale so you can quickly do the calculations.
• Another way to be clever when measuring food is to measure the weight of the container before and after a meal. For instance, if you have jam with your french toast, measure the weight of the entire bottle of jam, before and after the meal and just subtract the new weight from the old. This way you don’t have to measure and keep track of every spoonful of jam separately and you don’t have to messy up any other dishes than your plate and utensils. This is very useful for anything that is sticky and/or used in small quantities such as butter, oil, jam etc.
• Measure only what you eat, if you eat fruit that contains large seeds, measure the fruit before and after eating the meat of the fruit and subtract the weight of the parts you didn’t eat (the seeds, peels etc).
• For beverages, such as milk, it’s easier to use standard serving sizes based on the size of the glasses you use in your home. Measure up exactly how much a glass of milk weighs and how much an empty glass weighs, subtract and in the future always make sure you always pour up the same amount. Then all you need to record is how many glasses you drink and multiply with the standard serving size.

In the concluding part of this “series” I will talk about how and why you should track your training progress.

Group Training has really grown into a true passion of mine over the past 3 years. Yet at the same time it felt as if I had gotten to a point where mere participation in the classes wasn’t challenging anymore. Sure, you can always add resistance or whatever and make your training physically more challenging, but mentally it felt like a sort of dead end for me. For quite some time I had been thinking about what it might be like to take the leap over into the instructing role so I guess it wasn’t very surprising that I would become a group training instructor eventually. The other instructors have told me quite a few times that I’d be fit for the task. At least in terms of form/technique and physical fitness.

And so it happened about a month back that I woke up on a Saturday morning with the resolution to become a group training instructor. The decision wasn’t really triggered by anything in particular, I just woke up with that carpe diem attitude that morning. And after a bit of research and after consulting with the other instructors at my gym I found myself booked on the next Body Pump instructor course with about three weeks lead time to prepare.

The course spanned 3 whole days interleaving practical exercises with theory sessions. I knew the course would be physically very challenging, especially from an endurance perspective so I prepared by gradually increasing my training volume so I would be able to handle at least two one hour group training sessions back to back. In three weeks, that is about all the adaptations I could realistically handle. And looking back I think it did help me a bit. Though it was still very very tough. I’ve never been as hungry as I was during that weekend. In the course of 3 days we had to do the entire Body Pump choreography five times, go thru a very tough circuit training session and on top of that do a ton of technique work.

Body Pump was what got me started with group training about 3 years back and I have to admit that I had grown quite bored with the class already. But this course really re-ignited my love for Body Pump. Looking at Body Pump as a form of cross training makes so much more sense to me now. In fact, I find it to be a better cross training session than, well,… Sats Cross Training. Yeah, I went there. Suck it. :-P

As a guy who is maybe not the most comfortable with talking in front of a large group of people, this past couple of weeks have been quite challenging. But it has also been incredibly rewarding. Instructing is really heaps of fun but it can also be absolutely terrifying at the same time. But somehow, the more I practice, the less nervous I become and the more I can focus on the fun parts. Overcoming this weakness has made me a stronger person.

Anyway, I’m now in the process of memorizing the choreography so I can do my assessment video as soon as possible for my Body Pump instructing license. I’ve team instructed the class a couple of times now and that has also been a great learning experience. When you are there in front of the class, inevitably you are going to screw things up, and learning to deal with that is a lot of fun I think.

This is the ninth redesign of my blog. I have to apologize for the lack of design inspiration this time around. I lost a lot of my old design in the conversion from WordPress 2.1 to 3.0. The upgrade was not smooth. grrr >_< Let’s just leave it at that. I gained some neat features but lost some at the same time, hopefully it’s for the best in the end.

Anyway, I should get back to posting some content soon enough. December has been a bit busy so I haven’t had any time for writing. I still have my “Tracking the right things” series of articles in the pipeline but I might sidetrack a bit with some other stuff for a while. We’ll see…

So be prepared. This is going to be a long one.

I set a goal this summer to increase my lean mass by 3kg before the holidays and set up a program focused on muscle hypertrophy using Lyle’s Generic Bulk and a 3300kcal/day diet which put me at roughly 500kcal above my daily maintenance calorie requirements. Today, 14 weeks later I have managed to gain roughly 6.5kg of weight and if we assume roughly half of that is fat, then I should have reached my goal by a slight margin. If this actually holds true or not we’ll see in a few weeks when I’ve dieted off the excess fat.

What I do know for certain is that during this time I have done a lot of hard work in the gym, eaten a lot of protein, consistently gained weight, gotten stronger and added weight to my previous personal bests. And this illustrates the key factors that you need to keep track of in order to make sure you are on the right path towards your fitness goals. Your weight, calories consumed, maybe a rough macronutrient breakdown, and your training progress. Potentially you could track a ton of data related to your training, such as caliper measurements, but their usefulness can be debated.

Weight measurement pitfalls

I can now see how easy it can be to become discouraged early on when you have less than a couple of weeks worth of data points to look at. This is because your weight tends to vary a lot during this time-frame. You might initially be on the right track, and then all of a sudden your hard earned results are gone and even reversed seemingly magically over night and you might wonder what you did wrong.

The mistake a lot of people do is to assume that this sudden jump or drop on the scale is all due to fat-gain (or muscle loss). As you can see from the graph below, my weight can vary by as much as about 2kg from one day to the next! What is going on here?

My body weight (in kg) as it has varied over the past 14 weeks.

The thing is, in order to store 2kg of fat over night, I would have to eat an excess of over 15000kcal in one day, which is very unlikely to happen without me knowing about it! So thinking rationally, it can’t be fat or muscle varying this much over night. A more likely explanation would be that I was dehydrated the day before and then I ate something that made me retain a lot more water than usual. A combination of sodium (salt) and carbohydrates can have this effect. This is because when you eat a lot of carbs, and those carbs are stored as glycogen in your muscles and your liver, they will bind four water molecules for each glycogen molecule. That is a lot of water. There’s nothing bad about that, both the glycogen and the water is in fact still considered “lean mass”, roughly 2/3 of your body should be water anyway. However, that slight excess of water can make you look a bit “bloated” when you look at yourself in the mirror the next morning. Typically this happens during the weekend binge when you go out for a few drinks/beer and eat junk food high in sodium and carbs.

But a lot of people seem to loose track of rational thought and just panic. All they can remember is what they’ve been told that “junk food and crisps and beer is bad mmkay?” and so they think they’ve just ruined a couple weeks worth of dieting progress with that one binge. And then they either give up, or do something stupid, like dropping all the fat or carbs from their diets and increase the amount of cardio they do in the gym to an unsustainable level and burn out.

What is interesting is that this goes both ways, not just to people wanting to loose weight. Skinny guys wanting to gain muscle might see a sudden jump on the scale, see those hard earned abs dissipating under the ugly bloatiness they observe in the mirror, panic, and draw the conclusion that they are eating way too much and decrease their calorie intake or increase the cardio in the hopes to reduce the perceived “fat gain”, effectively also making it impossible for themselves to gain any appreciable amount of muscle. Spinning their wheels forever and ever.

So how do you deal with this?

You can try to eliminate some of this variation by always measuring your weight at a fixed time during the day. The best time would be directly after you have emptied your bladder after waking up in the morning. But this won’t help much as witnessed by the graph above. You’ll still see these seemingly huge variations from one day to the next.

The most common recommendation however seem to be that you should not measure your weight daily, but rather measure your weight only once per week. But I feel that this is exactly opposite of what you should do. You should in fact measure your weight daily simply because then you can learn how much your weight fluctuates on a daily bases. If you measure once per week you might actually encounter something called “under sampling” and be tricked to believe that your weight has gone linearly from one data point to the next while in reality it may have not. Plotting a graph in a spreadsheet or some online tool is in my opinion a very good thing to do, it makes it much easier to see the overall trend if you are patient enough to keep tracking your progress for a couple of weeks and don’t panic. As you can see in my example above, my weight has varied up and down a lot, but the overall trend is clearly linear. In fact, I would claim it’s as close to a perfect linear weight progression as you can get. And that is what you want to look for. If the trend is linear and the rate of gain/loss is as you had expected, you are on track and don’t have to panic when the scale jumps up and down on a daily bases.

If you are not seeing any progress after keeping up your diet and training program for two weeks you need to change something and usually the easiest thing to change is your diet. For those wanting to loose weight, it is much easier to subtract 300-500kcal from your diet rather than trying to increase your calorie expenditure by the same amount. This is especially true if you are already doing tons of cardio. It might even be that you are doing too much and need to reduce the cardio even in a fat-loss program. If you on the other hand have trouble gaining weight, the first thing I’d look at is how much cardio you are doing, and reduce it if it exceeds 2 hours per week. If you are already low on cardio, then I’d add 300-500kcal to your diet. After the change you keep up your program and diet for another two weeks before you make any conclusions about the effects of the change. If you do this iteratively you will eventually find that sweet spot where you are gaining or loosing weight consistently.

And that is pretty much what I have to say about weight measuring and tracking. Later this week I will continue and write about how and why you should measure and keep track of your daily macronutrients (which once to actually care about) and calorie consumption (how to measure and keep track of the food you eat).

It was fun to throw some punches, even the catching part was fun for a while, but after about half an hour of doing pretty much the same thing over and over it started getting a bit old. Obviously I realize the class might be more fun if you are really into boxing but for my tastes the class was a bit too basic and repetitive. I’ve become too much of an aerobics nerd I guess…

Overall the class felt a bit similar to cross training, even down to how the exercises seemed randomly picked by the instructor. In between the short punching sessions she would have us do some random burpees or jumping jacks.

Though I must say I was quite impressed by the instructor. She was probably around 7-8 months pregnant from the looks of it and still able to instruct the class! She was obviously holding back on the jumping and such, but she seemed quite capable of throwing a mean punch…

I had a long talk with my sister yesterday and this time it was my turn comforting her. We both cried. I’m crying right now. We are so much alike my sister and I. We feel the same pains and frustrations, and when she is hurt, I share her pain as if it was my own. I hope that by sharing that pain I can lift some of that weight of her heart.

I’ve always imagined the pain that you feel when your “heart is broken” is kind of like being stabbed thru the chest with some kind of huge needle or pike. For days on end. It’s weird how real that pain feels. It’s so physical and tangible, you feel it right there in the middle of your chest. And it never gets any easier to endure. Having felt that pain a few too many times in my life I imagined my heart in a pretty terrible state by now.

But even a broken and tormented old heart can still become the seed bed of something wonderful I imagine. All you need is a seed. And some nurturing.

The Core Pulse playlist is the best I’ve heard in a long time. Unfortunately, as always, they re-use tracks they used in other classes in the past year.

Spotify playlist for Sats Core 2010 December

Spotify playlist for Sats Core Pulse 2010 December

Spotify playlist for Sats Cycling 2010 December

Spotify playlist for Sats Energy 2010 December

Spotify playlist for Sats Power Step 2010 December

Spotify playlist for Sats Step Pulse 2010 December

Please do correct me if I’m wrong but I only count to one Lady Gaga track in the above playlists. That’s gotta be some kind of new record.

Two presses, two rows and a few extra sets for the arms.

Lower

The focus is on the quads, glutes, hamstrings and the lower back with a few sets for the calfs and abs thrown in.

Next week I will get started on my second cycle of “Lyle´s Generic Bulk”. I’m not making any big changes as this setup seems to be working quite well for me. The exercise substitutions are primarily to adapt the routine to the equipment that is available at Sats Telefonplan. Substituting the regular weighted crunches with the cable version is a sort of experiment. Hopefully I can advance easier with cable crunches than with free weights.

I have managed to increase my body weight by 6kg since the summer, which means I have reached the target I set for myself at least a month ahead of time. Hopefully I can add another 2kg in the next month to follow. I also set some new PR’s, most notably 8x100kg with the Romanian Deadlift.

I’ve been thinking about changing the reps but I don’t see any need to make this type of changes yet. If it works, don’t change it, as they say.

I might go down to a 3 times per week approach ABA/BAB style on occasion to account for “real life”. I noticed very quickly in my previous cycle that while it is possible to get a good upper body workout in after a cycling/spinning session, it is not very comfortable as it means doing the routine soaking wet and freezing from sweating so much.

In my opinion a strong instructor who can take on a lot of weight and still keep their form in check is a lot more inspiring than one that is holding back for whatever reason. If you want to be stronger you need to surround yourself with other people that are even stronger. Their motivation and focus will inspire and drive your own. I find it interesting how the people working out in the free weights area at Sats Telefonplan seem stronger, more focused and better motivated than the guys that work out at Sats Jakobsberg while the roles seem reversed in the aerobics classroom.

On the plus side the instructor at Sats Telefonplan had really good “just in time” queues/commands so it was very easy to follow along without the need to remember the choreography. At the end of the day, Power Step is one of those classes that doesn’t rely as heavily on the instructor as some other classes (most notably spinning/cycling) so I still got a good workout out of it.

Wow, third post for the day! I’m on a roll here. :P

To recap and to add to what I said about over training/reaching in a previous post: Over reaching and over training are essentially the same thing, the difference being how they are defined. By definition, “over training” takes longer than 3 weeks to recover from, anything that you can recover from in less time is called “over reaching” in the literature. With this said, most people never experience true over training which can take several months to recover from.

Typical symptoms of over reaching/training include, but is not limited to, a weakened immune system and an increased risk of injury, lethargy, depression and a lack of mental focus. Typically, for me, my ability to recover will suddenly drop and my workouts will start feeling more and more difficult even when I reduce the intensity/duration/resistance etc. Going to the gym is suddenly not as “fun” as it used to be and you might wonder what went wrong. This can happen very suddenly, often straight after a period with good results and new records which makes it all the more confusing when it does happen.

Do note that if you feel fatigued after an intense training session, that is not the same thing as over reaching, it is when that fatigue start becoming chronic, that is, it persists for a longer period, say a week or two, and builds up over time, that is when you might start suspecting over reaching. While it may feel like the end of the world when you are in this weakened state of mind, it is not as serious as it may seem. Give yourself a week off from training, do something else for a while and you might even find that when you eventually get back to the gym you feel stronger than ever!

Naturally, once you have experienced over reaching a couple of times, it becomes easier to recognize the symptoms, and this is when it might be tempting to act preemptively so to speak and take a break too soon. By doing so you may end up “spinning your wheels” by not daring to push yourself beyond your previous levels. Elite athletes over reach on purpose as a means to break thru plateaus. I have also found that my ability to recover from an over reached state has improved over the past year. Even this “ability” is trainable it seems. So contrary to what I said before, I no longer think of over reaching as a “problem”.

A very important point that I want to highlight is that over reaching is the result of the total physical and mental stress on your body and mind, not just what you expose yourself to at the gym. When you look at your training program, and what you want to achieve with your training, you have to consider the real world factors which affect your life situation and program your training accordingly. When the circumstances in your life change, you need to adapt your training to match these new stress factors. If you don’t, you will risk burning out.

So looking at what has happened in my life lately, with many new stress factors such as starting a new job involving the usual frustrating IT and administration problems, long commuting times and traffic delays resulting in very long exhausting days, …a broken heart… etc etc… it becomes even less surprising that I experienced over reaching in the last couple of weeks.

But now that I have taken a few extra days off from my training and gotten some rest I feel that my body has recovered somewhat. Some muscles obviously need more time to heal, such as the heart, but at least it seems my right shoulder and elbow has healed back to normal performance.

My conclusion is that the improved recovery not only allows for full adaptation to take place but it also means that I actually have the energy to push myself to my limits when I do my cardio which means that I can produce a large enough training stimulus to actually trigger super compensation in the first place! In other words, if you do too many interval sessions, you will burn out and get so fatigued that your subsequent workouts will be a waste of time unless all you want to achieve is to burn calories and become weaker!

What is even more surprising is that it seems to work just fine to place the bulk of my cardio on the weekends. The logical assumption would be that spreading out the two interval sessions evenly to allow for 2 to 3 days of recovery between each session would be the superior approach. However, the way I am thinking, If I am going to limit my group training, at least I can make sure the classes I choose are the best possible once. Both in terms of how fun the classes are and in terms of how hard/intense the classes are. It just so happens that they managed to schedule my favorite classes on the weekend.

But this “compromise” doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on my endurance, on the contrary, the five day “resting window” seems to be just long enough for full recovery and adaptations to take place and just short enough so that detraining doesn’t seem to be a problem. I obviously get some cardio in during the week when I warm up for my strength training sessions or when I walk to the bus or whatever, but I’m talking 5-10 minutes of very low intensity cardio per session here.

Another benefit of this setup is that I have more energy during the week for my strength training. One of the worst things you can do when bulking is to do too much cardio and burn the calories your muscles need for growing stronger and bigger.

SATS Telefonplan has a squat rack.

The number one thing that has been holding me back lately is my fear of getting pinned under the bar when doing squats. With a squat rack I’ll be able to work closer to my max and closer to failure so this change of environment might prove to be a very good thing for my progress.

I have to say Sats Telefonplan is a well organized gym. Everything from the locker rooms to the sauna and shower rooms to the floor layout and equipment is just several levels above that of Sats Jakobsberg and you have three mirrors to monitor your technique in when doing deadlifts and squats which is a huge plus.

The dumbbells have some weird handles but I guess I’ll get used to them eventually. On the other hand the dumbbells increment in steps of 2kg instead of 2.5kg which might make incremental progress slightly easier to handle. They have fewer benches and dumbbells overall which means it might get crowded on National Bench Day. The elliptical cross trainers are also sort of funky, but I guess I can learn to run on those treadmills instead. What I use for my 5 minute warm-up is really not that important.

I haven’t tried any of their classes yet but I can at least note that they actually have some head-room in the aerobics classroom which is nice. Who knows, they might actually have working air-conditioning in there as well?