Happy Sunday Everyone,
Thanks as always to everyone who got along to the gym this past week. The sessions have been really amazing – BOTH Boxing and Funky (we seem to have ‘finally’ been able to consistently hit the right notes in our boxing programming post gym “renovation” during the COVID outage) and I am excited for more of the same this week.
One thing though – let’s remember to book in to classes! Somehow last Friday morning I had 33-people booked…and of that, 4x people no-showed. So – we should have had a class of 29. Yet somehow we had 41x people in the class. Which means 13x people who hadn’t booked were training. We are still in the midst of a bit of a COVID crisis (and whatever your opinions on the matter, half of the country is in lock-down right now and I really don’t want to be forced to join them) and we all need to do the right thing. If you haven’t been able to book online (the link to book is ‘Round1Fitness.EzFacility.Com’) then you can simply book in as you arrive at the ‘check-in’ computer. It literally takes 10-seconds…if you aren’t sure how to do it, ask for help when you arrive.
This week also marks the final week of our ‘Summer Bodies’ challenge – 4 weeks of veggies, water, classes and extras (the video for the final extras workout can be found here: https://youtu.be/gxhT5MG41lk) and our weigh-ins are scheduled for next SATURDAY. The booking sheet for challenge weigh-ins will be released on Thursday morning…It’s been an awesome challenge – I know it’s been just the thing for me and I’m pretty proud of remaining alcohol free throughout the month – and hopefully we all have some awesome results when we jump on the scanner.
Right before this ‘Summer Bodies’ challenge, I participated in the ‘pushup’ challenge that Tracey organised. In this challenge – the ‘PUSH for BETTER’ Challenge – each of us who participated had to complete a preset number of pushups each day for 25 days. The most we had to do in a single day was 220 – more common was around the 120 mark – and by the end if you completed them all then you had done 3318 push-ups. 3318. Which was a lot. And it sucked. But it was freaking AWESOME…’cos it “greased the pushup groove”.
Essentially I did a heap of pushups every day for a month. Which had the benefit of really, really improving my pushups. It also drove my bench press numbers up – which in turn has enabled me to progress that lift significantly since the ‘Push for Better’ ended.
This experience has made me remember ‘back in the day’ after we had first installed the pull-up bar between the ‘office wall’ and the side wall (about 7.5m long) of the gym – right in front of where the treadmills are located now. Until this bar had been installed (we didn’t have the training cells you can still see today where the rowing ‘cells’ are let alone the strength gym) we didn’t really have anywhere to do pull-ups. So we weren’t that good at them. So myself and a couple of the trainers instituted a ‘rule’ that every time we had to walk UNDER the pull-up bar we would do 3x strict pull-ups…’amazingly enough’, our pull-up numbers increased quickly and we became a LOT better at pull-ups with a few of us soon able to complete unbroken sets of 20-strict pull-ups (those were the days!).
Side bar: For anyone who can’t actually do a SINGLE pull-up yet, this obviously isn’t a solution – you can’t “grease the groove” by doing multiple reps if you can’t do a single rep. So to get from ZERO pull-ups to getting started, you need our ‘Pull-up ZERO to Pull-up HERO’ video series which is on the YouTube machine here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnjegEBzRp7gKg9BJU2_UP6v0Q1vpU3uh
‘Greasing the groove’ is all about doing an exercise regularly – like 2-3 times each day – to really develop strength AND a clear pattern of movement. Since the end of the push-up challenge I have been trying to do 3x sets of 20 walking lunges each day to start moving ahead with an exercise I really battle with…I mean, they hurt my dodgy as knee AND make me want to fall-over and I would like both of those things to ‘get better’ and it somehow seems to actually be working.
Call it ‘DENSITY’ training. Called it structured repetition. Call it greasing the groove. Call it PRACTICE. Call it whatever you like. But nothing is surer in life than NOT doing something will not make you better at it. And whilst practicing doing something badly is probably not going to make you much better, small but frequent doses of an exercise WILL help over time…
See you in the gym,
Michael.
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