Overtraining

We set goals. We badly want to achieve them. We train, we sweat, we overtrain, then we crash and land back at square one again. Sound familiar?

I’m sure we’ve all experienced it sometime in our lives. Whether this is for study, working to deadlines, big weight loss goals, and of course weight training, we all have pushed ourselves over the edge.

Today, I’m going to talk about the physical signs of overtraining.

In my experience as a trainer, I’ve seen clients show incredible focus towards goals and have also seen obsession. People want to get to their goal so desperately, they start to ignore the warning signs their body is giving them. This leads to fatigue, injuries and huge amounts of stress to deal with as they fail to reach their goals.

Not only have I seen this with my clients but I have also found myself in this situation. I would like to draw from my experiences to help you avoid going down the same path that I took.

The main thing that lead us to overtrain is thinking that we need to train everyday and as much as we can. It’s all well and good to train every day, but if you don’t have a plan, you’ll just keep going until you either plateau, wondering why you’re not getting any more results, or cause injuries and push yourself to exhaustion. I’m not telling you that you have to take a week off and do absolutely
nothing, but a great idea is to decrease the volume and add in a week of de-loading every 3 to 4 weeks or so to give your body that time to recover.

Let’s now look at the physiology to get a better idea of what happens when we overtrain. By depriving yourself of rest, you’ll throw your hormones out of balance. A major player in overtraining is cortisol: this is a stress hormone that is secreted into the bloodstream during the body’s fight or flight response to stress, and is responsible for several stress-related changes in the body. Some of these changes include a quick burst of energy when in survival mode, increased immunity, lower sensitivity to pain, and helping maintain homeostasis in the body.

The body’s sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of flight or fight response, is activated when cortisol is in overdrive. When this is on constantly, like anything it will get to a point where it will burnout. This then causes higher and prolonged levels of cortisol in the bloodstream and has been shown to have negative effects, including:

Impaired cognitive performance – can’t think properly, struggling to make decisions;

Suppressed thyroid function – which maintains the human body’s temperature, metabolism, immune strength and hormonal balance; the texture and quality of your skin, hair, and overall well-being; not to mention sex drive, mood elevation and emotional balance;

Blood sugar imbalances such as hyperglycaemia, leading to high insulin levels and/or insulin resistance;

Decreased bone density – weaker bones;

Decreased muscle tissue – breaking down muscle;

Higher blood pressure – can lead to things such as a heart attack, stroke, kidney failure etc.;

Lower immunity and inflammatory responses in the body, slowed wound healing and other health consequences; and,

Increased abdominal fat, with other health problems.

So, as you can see,  including a good amount of rest in your plan is essential for growth and getting the gains that you are looking for. Slow and steady wins the race. It’s always about a balance and control of whatever you are doing, and also listening to your body.

If you would like further information or any help with programming, please contact me.

How to stay motivated and achieve your goals

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal – a commitment to excellence – that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”

The reason that I’ve decided to talk about this topic is because I find that a few of my clients and others around me have trouble with sticking to their goals, maintaining the focus and consistency. No matter what the goals are, exercise, work or financial, I believe that consistency and prior preparation and a bit of discipline are much needed for successfully achieving any goal,

I have a short term goal I am currently working on so I thought I would share my thoughts.

I have my next amateur fight coming up in May, So in preparation, I have decided to drop to a lighter weight class. As per my height and build, I am hoping to have an advantage over my opponent with this cut. In order to do this I have to drop from walking around at 85 kg to 77 kg, a grand total of 8 kilos to lose.

In a lot of cases, changing your body whether it’d be to gain muscle or losing fat or cutting weight in my case is not an easy task. It requires vigorous training, consistency, and a strict diet. Although this may seem like a hard thing to do, it is achievable.

I believe that there are 4 main points that are essential for us to achieving our results.

Planning, Preparation, Consequence and Outcome.

1.Planning: With out planning like anything, there is no order or focus. This can then leave you in no mans land feeling like there is no direction. Another problem is not having a clue where to begin or where to progress once you have started. Start out with a definite outcome in mind.

2. Preparation: This comes into the same as step 1. “planning”, but doing the small things,  preparing everyday, every 2 days, or for the day ahead. Without this, it can easily lead to being disheartened, losing motivation and consistency when stress arises or other tasks might come in and disrupt your schedule.

3. Consequence: Here’s the interesting part, the word consequence does sound a little negative or even harsh but can be a great thing to work with.

I believe having consequences helps one to stay determined, no matter what it is. If its a competition, losing a bet, don’t like being humiliated, make a point that it doesn’t matter, What I’m trying to say is that you need to be hungry and want it bad enough. Put anything at the top of your value list you’ll do anything to get it!

At the end of the day, I find that people love the easy option and are too easy on themselves or are too quick to make excuses these days. “ I can’t right now, “I’m tired”, “I ate too much at lunch”, “I didn’t get enough sleep”, “I’ll do it later”. etc. These are the things that will let you down, the more excuses you make the further and further away from your focus you will be and eventually you’ll start back at square one feeling even worse than you started because you made a poor attempt.

No one gets to their goals by making excuses. GSP isn’t the World Welter champion 2 times running because he made excuses.

This is why there are short and long term goals. To build anything you need the foundations (the smaller things). Once they are built, the bigger picture (the long term goal) becomes more clearer and it will take care of itself.

Another belief I have is that if you have a goal, and want to conquer it, its best to keep it to yourself and be the quiet achiever.  As you’ve probably heard many of your friends or family say things like “Im going to start doing this” or I’m going to lose this, gain that, stop doing this etc. Then a few months later they haven’t changed, and people will think you’re full of shit and just be like “ there they go again”, which won’t help your confidence.

Outcome: The big picture, the end result. With out this you don’t have anything to be reminded  by or keep you on your toes. The reason you started this journey or this project – put this up on your wall at work, at home, your bedroom, watch a motivating clip every day even if its the same one, get a routine, ritual! Have it on your phone constantly reminding you, look at this and tell yourself how bad you want it before you go to sleep plus the preparation should keep you in focus.

At the end of the day, have that dream constantly in your face. Consistency and perseverance are the keys to conquering and achieving your goals!

This has helped me train everyday and keep going to achieve my goals. Hope this can do the same for you.

Chris

My first MMA fight!

Hi everyone,

Just recently I had my first MMA fight. It was an amazing experience and the culmination of a dream I have had for the past 3 years.

Me getting ready to go!

The journey to the fight was one with some pretty major physical, emotional and mental challenges. What I want to talk about today, is some of the physical and training lessons I  learnt and how these lessons can be applied to improve the quality of your training and maybe help you if you decide to step in the ring one day!

One of the most important qualities for a fighter to develop is an appreciable level of maximal strength. Now this does not mean you have to compete in a powerlifting competition but it means you have a good solid strength base to work off. I found that by developing my maximal strength in a few key lifts (dead lift, chin up and front squat) it helped improve my conditioning by making each movement a little bit easier. The increased strength in the chin up helped with clinch situations, the dead lift helped with hip drive and power and the front squat was useful for improving my ability to fend off takedowns.

The next quality I really focused on was my anaerobic conditioning. An actual MMA bout is a combination of all energy systems (ATP-PC, anaerobic and aerobic) and there is a huge build up of lactate and other metabolic products during the match. My conditioning work allowed me to deal with this very effectively. Some key exercises I used were burpies, clubbell barbarian squats, kettlebell clean and jerks and jump squats. Performing these exercises in a circuit fashion, for timed reps and other methods really developed my conditioning to a really high level. In some future posts, I will publish and film some of my sessions so you can follow along if you dare!

The third quality focused on was single leg strength and stability. I felt this was important as a fight takes place in an uneven stance and it is important to maintain balanced strength levels in both legs. The main exercises I used were weighted pistol squats and bulgarian squats.

The last quality I will talk about is speed of movement and rate of force development. A fight requires a high level of explosiveness and our fast twitch type IIB muscle fibers are ideal for this purpose. I took a leaf out of Chad Waterbury’s book and used his system for performing my strength exercises – terminate each set when the rep speed, range of motion or quality of form deteriorates. This emphasizes the recruitment of all muscle fibers and does not allow our explosive fibers to fatigue. The other added benefit of this repetition method allowed me to not to work to exhaustion and recover quicly. This was a key element with my other training (stand up, BJJ, flexibility, mobility and conditioning).

I hope this post has given you some ideas to improve your own training and also has helped give you an idea of what someone goes through when participating in the sport of MMA. Good luck!

Life is a game of inches

This speech is a speech I listen to when I don’t feel like training. Needless to say, it changes my motivation pretty fast!!

Hello world!

Hi and welcome to my blog!! Looking forward to writing and helping you achieve your goals!!!