Perform Better Functional Training Summit - Day 2

Day 2

Thanks to my man Gustavo, I downgraded from the pretty swanky hotel I was in, to a tiny little shed about 20 minutes away from the seminar.

To be fair though, the cost of one night in this place was less than my breakfast at the hotel, and since I’ve got another 5-7 weeks left in the States, I thought it would be wise to save a bit.

From here:

To here:

So, now that I wasn’t a 30 second walk from Long Beach convention center, I had to be up nice and early ready to roll with the sunrise. However, Gustavo, a personal trainer from Brazil who I met at the FMS the week before and who was also attending the same event in Long Beach, had a much more relaxed attitude so we left 5 minutes before the start of the first lecture.

I can honestly say this was the first time I have been late for anything. Ever.

Rachel Cosgrove – Creating breakthrough results with your female clients

This lecture concerned some of the challenges personal trainers face when training female clients, most notably, the lack of a desire to lift weights and train like an athlete.

One goal of the personal trainer can be to create a breakthrough moment, such as being able to do press-ups on the ground or even chin-ups. Usually, when a female client does these for the first time, they will be so impressed that they’ll never want to leave you. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever have a client get angry at you for making her stronger.

It’s very common for female clients to have ‘yo-yo dieted’, which will result in muscle catabolism and therefore a decrease in metabolism. So it’s essential that a female client trains with the intention of building muscle.

Lesson 1 – You have to be the solution to the female’s problems

Lesson 2 – If you have a beginner female client, you know what? You CAN ‘tone’ muscles i.e. mirror their language and don’t belittle them (you can tell them that there’s no such thing in a month or two).

Nick Winkelman – Athletic Profiling: Choosing aperiodization system to maximise individual performance

This was the first proper strength and conditioning lecture that I attended and concerned different models of periodization to be used with athletes.  It’s important to understand that the different models reflect different athlete requirements and their training age.

For example, team sport athletes compete weekly, thus need to train in a different manner from an athlete that may have 10-12 weeks of uninterrupted training followed by one single event. Furthermore, a beginner athlete will have a much greater opportunity for improvement and can keep doing the same thing for several weeks at a time, whereas an advanced athlete may need weekly changes to their programming.

Nick first pointed out that there are several different definitions of periodization, and that whilst none of them are wrong, they should be combined in order to really understand what it means. From this, the strength and conditioning coach should use periodization for the following reasons: 

1) To enhance recovery 

2) To see a progressive improvement in training 

3) To make the athlete better at their sport

Unfortunately, the research on periodization is scarce and many of them have only studied the effects of short term training with beginner athletes. Therefore, relying on research for optimal periodization programming isn’t always the best strategy.  

Lesson 1 – Following a strength training phase that lasted 3 weeks, strength will not peak until 3 weeks following the cessation of the strength training. This is an extremely interesting point and shows that athletes may need to wait longer before being re-tested in order to reveal their true 1RM (or whatever bracket is used).

Lesson 2 – Combining extensive (volume) and intensive (intensity) themes together during a training cycle will elicit better progression that just concentrating on one element alone

John Beradi  - The compliance solution

A lot of people came to see this lecture and were not disappointed. The lecture as introduced with the following statistic:

“Only 55% of people take the life-saving medication (for cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc.)  that they have been prescribed.”

Faced with this statistic, how can we expect our clients to follow our advice when it comes to nutritional programming? Fortunately, Mr Beradi had the solution (I’m kind of glad he did – otherwise it would have been a pretty pointless lecture).

The way to get compliance is to not overwhelm the client and give them advice one piece at a time. It’s also important to make sure that the advice they are given is something that they can adhere to. I have also heard, that if you give a client advice slowly over time, they may get so frustrated with you not giving them it all at once that they’ll start making huge improvements in their diet – without even being asked. 

Although this method can take time, the results are outstanding – as revealed by the many before/after photos shown to us.

Lesson 1 – If a client isn’t complying with the advice you’ve given them – then it’s your fault and not theirs. Tough one to swallow, but it’s true.

Lesson 2 – There’s no need to fire clients that don’t comply. If they really aren’t going to try and change their habits, then they’ll probably ‘fire’ themselves and quit.

Brian Grasso – Long term sports training development models

At this point, I was unsure of which lecture to go to. I stuck with my guns and went for this one – and I’m glad I did. Brian spoke passionately about his work he has done with athletes – most notably youth athletes.

He told us the most appropriate way to train the different age groups. What was most interesting was that when you have kids younger than 10, the best way to train them is to let them do what they want. I did this with a couple of kids I used to train, and at times felt bad for not having proper structure. But the key thing is that at that age – the kids must be having fun. I knew I was doing the right thing when their mum would tell me how much they enjoyed the sessions the next day. Swish.

An interesting fact in the research was that 11 of the last 14 research studies since 1967 have shown that daily physical education shows a huge improvement in academic performance. Therefore, kids need to be doing something every day – ideally non-competitive and movement based.

Lesson 1 – The best improvements for strength is when the athlete is 15-16 years old: Immediately following the peak height velocity phase

Lesson 2 – The human body ‘knows’ mechanical efficiency. The body will therefore recognise an incorrect movement and provided that there’s no structural issue, it should be able to automatically correct itself. This is most prevalent with kids and demonstrates the importance of not over-coaching the athlete. Once the movement has been attained – it will be there for life.

Alwyn Cosgrove – Fat loss programming

The big one. The main event. The one guy everyone wants to see – and he knew it!

Alwyn Cosgrove’s lecture about how his gym (Results Fitness) programmes fat loss clients and achieves results was outstanding. He used research to smash out-dated thoughts on aerobic training and justify his style of programming, including research that was less than a month old.

It is true that there is research showing that exercise doesn’t stimulate weight loss any more than a change in diet, thus confirming that you ‘can’t out-train a poor diet’. However, when good dietary practice is combined with exercise, the results are far greater than diet and exercise alone.

Every part of his programming is justified by research i.e. using strength training, using supersets, training explosively and using interval training. All of these methods have been shown to increase metabolism and maximise fat loss at rest.

Results Fitness has a large number of before/after photos of successful fat loss clients and provides a perfectly good reason to listen to them.  

Alwyn was funny, full of energy and probably the highlight of the seminar. He was also the only presenter to receive a standing ovation (although he did ask for one. Twice.)

Lesson 1 – If you want to get better at being a trainer – go and find people more successful than you and copy them (kind of why I’m in the states…)

Lesson 2 – One hour of aerobic training, six days a week, for a year resulted in a grand total of 3.08lbs weight loss for women and 3.96lbs weight loss for men. That is an abysmal pay-off for 312 hours of exercise. Stop relying on aerobic training for fat loss!

Lesson 3- Use self-limiting exercises in your programming i.e. exercises that can’t be done with bad form and therefore a low risk of injury

Lesson 4 – If a trainer asked you to hop 750 times on your right leg and then 750 times on your left leg, you’d think he was mad and probably leave him. But what happens when you alternate 1500 hops between left and right legs and move forward – it’s called jogging for a mile and there are many trainers out there still prescribing this useless training modality.

Following the final lecture, everyone was invited to the main room for a Q&A session with the presenters. Here we learnt the presenters favourite books, how to break into the corporate world and a few other things that were sitting in some peoples' minds.

I went to the pub over the road to let all the information sink in. Not long after, Alwyn Cosgrove happened to walk in so I thought I'd go over, introduce myself and tell him how brilliant I thought he was etc.

He smiled politely and nervously and then turned away.

I think I have perfected the art of scaring off strength coaches……