Hi and welcome to another week,

I have really enjoyed the ‘old school Round 1’ style sessions in the last couple of weeks – and we will keep them rolling again this week as well.  Push-up variations, heavy bag work, high-intensity cardio efforts, lots of abs all add up to great results.  When you couple the work you are doing in the classes with an extra lifting session (just run through the full-body workout on the whiteboard upstairs or the strength workout on the board downstairs!) and you will be in great shape faster than ever.

We have some cool stuff happening in the gym at the moment.  On top of the ‘In the ZONE’ challenge and the 3-month ‘Beach Bodies’ program, this week we are kicking off the new runners club in preparation for the 12km City to Surf event at the end of August.  I am quite proud of the team at Round 1 for putting together/managing all of these programs simultaneously – it is a lot of work trying to manage the various levels/layers of programming to help everyone meet their own individual fitness goals.  To help support this, you will probably see the trainers lugging some iPAD’s around the gym with them.  We have converted/are in the process of converting all of our client programming onto the cloud via Google Docs – this change will enable everyone to easily ‘see’ a record of what they have been doing in their PT sessions (the files can be shared with them) and for the trainers to accurately record each persons achievements as they occur rather than via the ‘hit and miss’ method of trying to remember exactly what weight someone used 2-days ago.

Going back to my comments at the top about our recent ‘old school’ programming, it is probably worth answering exactly what I think that is?  Essentially, when I think ‘old school’ I think of minimal equipment and easy to perform activities that allow everyone to focus on their ‘EFFORT’ rather than leaving them trying to figure out exactly what it is that they are supposed to do.  We walk a pretty fine line at Round 1 – because we commit to changing our class plan every day, sometimes we (well, actually it is ME) add levels of complexity into our sessions that probably isn’t really required.  Sure – our most regular of regulars probably appreciate the constant challenge of doing ‘something new’, but many people just want a challenging, honest workout that is set up to enable them to go ‘as hard as possible’.  I then think back to how classes at R1F ‘used’ to be programmed and they were ‘Old School’ by necessity…we basically didn’t HAVE any gear.  We had to do pushups, abs and sprints on the bikes because we didn’t actually have any barbells, kettlebells, sandbags, deadballs, dumbbells, sleds, power ropes etc…I mean, we have a LOT of stuff these days.

I got started back on this ‘Old Skool School’ path a couple of weeks ago when I read on the Ross Training site about an 80-year old former marine who posted a video of himself doing 500 pushups in 30-minutes (the link is here).  Whilst I am not super happy with his push-ups, when you consider he is 80-years old and still strong and active just through doing ‘simple’ movements, well – there has to be something to it.  So – what if we try to ‘simplfy’ some of our classes, make them a little more ‘consistent’, restrict ‘complex’ movements to one per class….what if we make our own training a little more ‘old school’?  What would happen?

Part of the problem is that these day’s we have tonnes of equipment in the gym – and as a coach I just have to resist the urge to use ‘all of it, every day’.  Part of this comes from our feedback survey as well – we have people telling us that despite the time spent doing the demos (and the trainers are trying super hard in this area) they still get to a station and aren’t sure ‘what to do’.  This isn’t right – we want everyone feeling confident as they go through the class.  We want them confident, working hard and getting the absolute most out of their time spent in the gym.

Our plan moving forward is to add some scaling and exercise alternatives to our classes – this wont be happening this week, but will be in place by the end of June (just working on changing my planning templates to support the changes).  The scaling will work in a similar way to our ‘fence pulls vs pull-ups’ arrangement on the rigs but will be in place for ALL of our stations…the risk of course is that people will take the ‘easy’ option at every station ‘forever’, but I guess at the end of the day we need to take a bit of a ‘your workout, your results’ approach and just encourage people to ‘move up’ whenever we think they are ready!  We want to re-establish our classes with an old-school training theme whilst adding ‘extras’ for people to do as they feel/become more competent.

I guess this is all part of the continued evolution of the gym.  I am lucky (we are all lucky I hope) that we can continually reassess/revise/renew our programming to ensure the best outcomes for everyone…hopefully this newest initiative will really hit the mark.

Good luck!

See you in the gym,

Michael.

p.s.   Looking for a couple of member profiles – if you are interested in sharing your training journey with others, please let me know.  As I have said before, our member profiles are the most viewed (and to me, the most inspirational) part of our website.  I often have a trawl through a profile or two if I am looking for a reason to hit the gym myself and based on the number of hits on the profiles site I am not alone.

Gym Update #1 – City to Surf Training          

The City to Surf is coming up soon – 30^th August is GO TIME.  For anyone interested in running the 12km event, we will be starting up a running club on SATURDAY mornings at 8am (immediately after TANKS).  The program will go for 30-minutes for the first 4-5 weeks and will then extend to 45 minutes.

In the past with running club, we have gone to some ‘different’ venues to mix things up – this time we will be primarily based at Round 1 but will add in two extended runs throughout the program.

No need to book – all you need to do is ‘show up’ at Round 1 at 8am this Saturday and we will be hitting the road (and park!).

Please note that the Running Club program is for Round 1 members only.

Gym Update #2 – June Challenge – ‘In the ZONE’ – Half Way Home

Two weeks in and everyone should be well in the groove of eating their ‘blocks’ by now.  It is also time to ‘take stock’ of where you are at.  Are you feeling tired all the time?  Start by moving one of your blocks to ‘earlier’ in the day – maybe from dinner to lunch – and if that still doesn’t work, maybe even ADD another block per day.  If you are just feeling ‘chubby’ or think that you aren’t getting the body composition changes you are after – well, maybe take a block away.

As with all things related to your food and training – the same inputs can lead to quite different individual outcomes – so take responsibility and monitor your OWN outcomes.  Then adjust the inputs accordingly.

Gym Update #3 – Beach Bodies 3-month Program – Week 3 is go.

Week three (3) programming is up and we are continuing our linear progression – if you are finding the weights ‘really’ easy, I don’t mind you going up by 5’s rather than by 2.5’s – but remember, we are linear progressing for NINE weeks so if you are worried about not lifting ‘enough’ just do a mental calculation – add (2.5kgs x 7) to your current weight – and that is what you where you should finish…hopefully that number is suitably impressive such that you don’t want to go up ‘too early’.  When it comes to getting stronger, it takes time and ‘pushing’ it before you are ready doesn’t mean that you will end up with a bigger number at the end.

Remember to keep your training log UP-TO-DATE.  This means, update it EVERY SESSION.  We are in a linear phase at the moment and in order to progress you actually need to know EXACTLY (EXACTLY) what you did in the sessions previous…store the info IN GOOGLE DOCS and ON YOUR PHONE and reference/update it when you are training…don’t wait until two days later and try to remember.  Further, as of now I want you to SHARE that training log back with me so I can look at it whenever I like.  Right click on your log, select the ‘SHARE’ option and enter my email address – mpratt@round1fitness.com.au – and in that way I can check your progress.

Footy Tipping Results for Round 11

Good week of footy with no real upsets (well, Geelong over Port I guess).  As such, most people have done very well with their tipping (not me of course, I still managed to get 3 wrong).  Winning the week this week were Amanda Dixon, Shelby Pickers and Ben Coates who each picked 5 winners out of 6.

On the ladder, Michelle Howley leads the way by one-point from Dani Elsum, Shelby Pickers and Chris Peclaris.

Dream Team Results for Round 11

Hard to comment on Dream Team with all of the missing players because of the byes – and for a lot of us ‘WA-based’ players who have multiple Dockers/Eagles in our teams, the next two weeks are actually WORSE! – but we are still playing so it is worth just touching on it.

A good score is usually anything about 2000 – which works out to an average of 90-points per player.  This week we a maximum of 18x scoring players, so a good score (using the same formulae) would be 1600 points.  So…on that basis, players who have topped the 1600 milestone included:

Link of the week

Calisthenics for girls!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=77&v=agGluK1YNQ8

Amazingly strong – not strong for a girl, just strong full stop.  For everyone doing beach bodies who has been struggling through a ‘skin the cat’ progression, you will watch the video and think everything is ‘beyond you’ – but then think how much improvement you have made in the last 2-weeks.  You probably wont achieve all of the movements in the video – but it isn’t about that.  It is just about getting a little bit stronger and more capable than you were yesterday.