Although only 34 years old, Canadian personal trainer and exercise physiologist Dean Somerset has not only been working out for more than two decades, his massive client list ranges from those recovering from joint replacement surgeries to Olympic gold medalists to everyone in between.
It’s clear he knows the ins and outs of weight lifting, conditioning and movement, and how to use those skills effectively to reach specific goals. Here are 9 surprising training do’s and don’ts that he’s learned:
- Strength workouts require an investment in focus.
Working in a commercial facility, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen someone reading the paper or a book or talking on their cell phone while using a machine with an incredibly low amount of weight. Others might read a chapter in between their sets of flailing chest presses, losing pretty much any kind of cardiopulmonary or vascular benefit to their workout.
While these activities could be done while doing some low-intensity steady-state cardio, it’s not really beneficial to anyone to have this little focus when strength training. There has to be an investment in caring enough about what you’re doing. Nothing else can take precedent.
- Training to (and past) fatigue may not be that beneficial.
When I started out, I got a good deal of my information from magazines that focused on bodybuilding. A lot of them talked about training a muscle to fatigue or past fatigue with things like drop sets, forced eccentrics, and other stuff like that.
So I tried the techniques and it worked to help gain some muscle. But I’d always feel as if I couldn’t use those body parts for about 3 or 4 days afterwards. There’s a fine line between feeling your arms are kind of toasty and looking like a damn T-Rex until Sunday.
Generally speaking, most people tend to see solid benefits from training to about 80-to-90 percent of their capacity before failure. They’ll see improvements in their physique, weight loss, movement quality, strength, and any other department they want to shop in. It may take a little longer, but it comes with considerably fewer side effects.
- Warm-ups are always important—but more important as you get older.
With age, connective tissue develops less elastin and more collagen, and becomes notably stiff and somewhat more brittle than younger connective tissue. Hydration is a major component of this, and a lot of movement quality issues can be mitigated with enough water consumption.
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But that doesn’t fix everything. You still need to mechanically pump the fluid into the target tissues, which is one of the benefits of a warm-up. The spinal discs only adjust hydration with mechanical action, so just thinking blood flow will get more water into the discs isn’t entirely accurate unless you’re actively moving the disc through some small rotation, compression, and distraction movements.
You need to do some active preparation for the movements in your upcoming workout. This will your mind and body connected and focused on the work to come. For instance, training some body weight or goblet squats prior to hitting up some barbell squats can be massively beneficial to your tissue health during and after the work, and your performance during the workout.
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- Fitness shouldn’t have a time limit.
Too often, people go hard on a concept or in a class and then do nothing to recover from it for a couple of weeks. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s rarely ever as productive as people would like.
In many ways, fitness should be viewed as a long-term concept, much like saving for retirement. Going hard and putting all of your money into retirement savings for a few weeks or months, and then stopping, will only be mildly productive. Plus, it’ll leave your current bank account empty.
You could also say the same thing about nutrition. Instead of looking for a 10-day detox or cleanse, just eat right for about 90 percent of your meals for the next week or two. You’ll be at or ahead of any point that a cleanse would get you to, and you won’t get all hypoglycemic and wear out your toilet in the process.
- Neural efficiency is the first quality to be detrained during a layoff.
When you don’t work out for a little while and then come back to it, your strength and work capacity will be a little lower. This isn’t because you’re in worse shape—it just means that your nervous system saw a short-term down regulation to accommodate to your new altered activity levels.
The good news: You still have the same muscle and aerobic environments as before. Once you get one or two workouts in, you’ll be back up to where you were before.
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- You need less variety than you think.
One of the worst concepts brought into the fitness lexicon is “muscle confusion”—the premise being that your muscles will adapt to a workout and then hit a plateau so you won’t see any further improvements after a few weeks of doing a specific exercise.
Variation in exercise comes with a couple of benefits. First, it makes you think about an exercise differently, which makes you more mentally engaged. Secondly, it gives a chance for new neural pathways to be laid down in your brain. These pathways can help to strengthen and complete the ones that currently exist for a specific movement. (Throwing in some new movements every now and then can be fun, too.)
Rehearsing and practicing a skill can go a long way to development of all of the components of strength. I’ve been squatting for 20 years, and I’m still finding ways to make myself better.
- Symmetry is myth.
Everyone is built differently. In fact, most people are asymmetrical. Some people will have one hip more anteverted or retroverted than the other, one scapula could be broader in the posterior glenoid than in the anterior, or vice versa, and they could be developmental asymmetries depending on what sports or activities they’re involved in. So trying to maintain the appearance of symmetry while beginning an exercise could actually be causing issues and imbalances that the pursuit of symmetry is meant to fix or reduce.
You’d actually be better off having a mildly asymmetric set up on a lot of exercises. I have a lot of clients find success with their squats and deadlifts by turning out one foot to a slightly more externally rotated position versus going with their feet either parallel or with a symmetrical turn out. Similar things happen with pressing and pulling movements, too.
- Training through pain rarely produces benefits of any kind.
There have only been three times in my career where I have advised someone to continue training while in pain. And each time was an extreme case. They had a major championship coming up in a very short period of time that they had worked their asses off to get ready for. They likely wouldn’t have another opportunity to do it again. Two were world championships in different sports, and the other was the Olympics. In each case, they managed to make it through, but then had to take a few months to do some rehab on the injury to help them recover. Since their championships were over, they were more than happy to do this.
If your job is to play your sport, you’ll likely have to push through the odd bit of discomfort here and there to get the job done. If your sport is just a hobby or passion, pushing through pain will never be worth it. Sure, maybe you could win your event. Enjoy your $50 check. But you won’t enjoy the 3-times weekly physiotherapy appointments at $80 a pop for the next three months.
- There’s a definite ceiling to the benefits of balance training.
Once you can stand on one foot on solid ground, the ability to control positioning and balance on unstable surfaces tends to be maximized. And sure, you can spend time mastering movements on shifting, changing, or fluid surfaces. But once you master it, you won’t get any more benefits from it. You won’t get any better by adding more instability or fluctuations. Instead, you just increase the risk of falling.
Curated article from DeanSomerset.com
