Exercise Programming
Today we had "exercise programming", with scenarios from the manual.
"Susan" was a 38 year old woman who wanted to lose 8-10kg and "tone up tummy, hips and thighs" and said "I don't want to get too big and muscley." Susan was played by Noodles, which made for a strange experience - she had remarkably low bodyfat and narrow hips for a woman, and seemed embarrassed to be there. My first thought was having her do squats, deadlifts, and so on, but of course I want her to come back, so I figured, you have to balance what is actually good for them with what they'll actually stick with.
So I assigned her machine bench press, dumbell bent over rows, dumbell lunges, and crunches, followed by some time on the stepper. Really she needs a more resistance work than that, but what I've noticed around the gym is that the women doing both resistance and cardio in the same workout, if they're pressed for time or tired... they drop the weights and just do cardio. And if they're given just resistance work they don't do
any, they drop it all and do cardio.
So you have to keep it short and simple. And the lunges and stepper would give her a bit of a burn in her bum and thighs and make her feel she's worked out.
The other scenario was Anthony, a 34 year old bloke who'd played lots of football and wanted bigger chesticles. Well, easy there, big compound lifts, he'll enjoy that. After I wrote up the full-body workout she wanted me to write up a split routine. "What for? Can he bench his own weight for reps? Squat double his weight once? Pointless."
"No, it can be useful for him."
"Why? It says he's not done much gym work. The point of split routines is that you've worked that part so hard, it won't have recovered by the next workout - so you work something else instead. So you bring in splits when the person can work with really great intensity. That's not this guy. Maybe after his first year of training, but not now."
"Well, not necessarily. Lots of people do splits early on."
"Yes, and lots of people get no results."
"Well it's a useful exercise to design a split programme anyway."
"Okay."
The workouts I wrote up and the reasoning behind them were good, the teacher said. Again, all this is with the idea that you ask them their goals, write up the workout, show them through it, and then leave them to it. It's very different if the instructor is there supervising the whole time, you can get them to do all sorts of useful stuff then.
This is an idea that was new to Soviet Boxer, too. He was saying that these were all basic exercises, what a 7 year old could do. In the former Eastern bloc countries, every school has a gymnasium - with vaulting horses and rings and everything, gymnastics is a part of every day. We had to explain that this isn't so in Australia, we're a country of lazy cripples, so we have to keep it slow and simple
And again, in these gymnasiums the students would be constantly supervised. This is very different from mainstream gyms. It's a different approach.
Teachers
The place has apparently hired a new teacher to replace the one or two who've bailed on us, and this one sat in on us - they've not decided timetables yet.
Two... um, "remarkable" comments I heard from teachers today:
"What are 21s?" [described by Fadi
here, for those who don't know], and
"You can't deadlift? Doesn't matter, deadlifts are overrated anyway."
I didn't pursue this second one, but I will in the future. So I'm not surprised a PT didn't know what Crossfit was. It's as I've said before about the class: some people run off as soon as they can, others hang around to ask questions and further their knowledge.
I see now the purpose of the Continuing Education Credits required to keep membership of Fitness Australia... to try to minimise these strange little gaps in people's knowledge.
