Speed, Strength & Conditioning, Personal training & Fitness Class Training Video Montage 9/2-9/8

Another great week here at the Spot Athletics!  As the summer winds down, our clients are still training hard, because they know there is no off season!  Also, we are gearing up for our open house on Sept. 19, so bring a friend and come on by!

Understanding the difference between speed, agility and quickness - The simple explanation

Speed, Agility & Quickness

In our field the shorthand for this is SAQ training.  As I talk to people that are not strength coaches I realize that most people don't even know what a strength and conditioning program encompasses, no less what SAQ training is.  I often get asked if we work on speed in our strength and conditioning program.  Well, that is what a strength and conditioning coach does, makes athletes faster, stronger, more explosive and durable.  It's funny, most people need to hear the word speed to think that the training is making an athlete faster.  The fact is, and taking a line from Tommy Boy, "I can crap in a box and mark it guaranteed, I got spare time, but we all know the guarantee is only as good as the person writing it".   The same is true with speed training, just because someone slaps the word speed on what they are doing does not mean that it will make an athlete faster.  Again, the program is only as good as the person writing it and if they are just haphazardly having kids run around cones and through ladders, we call that babysitting, not training.  So when we talk about training for sport, in order to truly build a better athlete a running program must address speed, agility and quickness.  The problem is when it comes to SAQ training I realized that people only really care about the word speed.  To most people speed encompasses all movement aspects of sport.  The fact is that this could not be further from the truth.  In this blog I will help everyone understand the difference between speed, agility and quickness in a very easy to understand way.

Speed - The ability to run 30 yards or longer in the shortest amount of time.

Agility - The ability to run back and forth or laterally from two points that are relatively close together in the shortest amount of time.

Quickness - The ability to explosively start which allows one to run for the first few yards in the shortest amount of time.

So how do I explain this in the easiest to understand format, easy, let's use your house for an example.  If you are standing in your living room by the couch (which happens to be right by your back door) and the TV is across the room, Speed is your ability to run out your back door to the end of your block in the shortest amount of time, Agility is your ability to run from the couch to the TV and back to the couch the in the shortest amount of time and Quickness is the ability to get from your couch to your TV in the shortest amount of time.

So there you have it, next time someone talks about an athlete having speed as they make a great cut, you will be able to say, they showed agility there, not speed.

The Secret to locking out your deadlift!

Have you been struggling with your lockout and no matter what you do you can't get a new PR?  Well our Owner and Head trainer JL Holdsworth may have the secret cure for you.  Being strong isn't all about strength, it's about technique too.  Every Friday JL will be tackling different technique issues and sharing his vast knowledge with all of you.  If you have a question on any lifts or a technique question then just give us a comment on our blog or drop us a line on our Facebook page and we will try to get to all of them.

The Gluten Free Phenomenon

 

When it comes to eating clean, there are hundreds of varying opinions on what is best. The newest craze these days has been eating the gluten free diet. What is Gluten you ask? Gluten is a storage protein found in the grains of wheat, barley, and rye. Some people develop a sensitivity to this protein which leads to a variety of health issues (mainly digestive). For people with this gluten sensitivity, turning to a gluten free diet works tremendously in improving their overall health. This is where problems arise as food companies have twisted the gluten free idea and turned it into the latest lose weight fast diet.

Food companies are very smart. Why not just start taking gluten out of everything and start marketing it as “gluten free”. It doesn’t matter if the food happens to be a box of cookies or a bag of potato chips, as long as its gluten free, people will think its good for them. I see it all the time from people on social media posting recipes for their nutritious “gluten free” cupcakes or other deserts. A cupcake is still a cupcake, whether there is gluten or not and this should not be misconstrued as healthy eating.

I am not saying I  think gluten free is a bad idea. On the contrary, I see a lot of potential benefits from cutting down the amount of gluten in your diet. I get asked all the time by clients if going gluten free will help them lose weight.  The simple answer is yes, cutting out gluten from your diet will help you lose fat, but you need to look at the bigger picture of what being gluten free means. We as a society need to be careful not be caught in the marketing trap food companies put out there just to make a profit. Our society is just now realizing that the more fiber and more whole grain marketing tactics are inaccurate, lets not get sucked into another one.

If you are trying to lose fat and are unsure whether to be gluten free or not here is a great tip to help you get started, Stop worrying about whether something has or doesn’t have gluten just cut out as many processed sugary foods as you can from your diet. Eliminating or limiting these foods will dramatically improve your overall health and well being and you will be surprised at how “gluten free” you are actually being.

 

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Weekly top 10 articles from The Spot staff 9/4/13

Life's lessons.

http://articles.elitefts.com/features/iron-brothers/utb-strength-and-resolve-needs-formatted/

 Get your grip on.

http://breakingmuscle.com/strength-conditioning/more-insight-into-developing-grip-strength-your-hand-digits

How about strength goals instead of how much you want to weigh?  A journey to getting their brain off their scale and onto a blackbelt.  This is a little long so take your time.

http://ironbodybyartemis.com/2013/08/15/strength-goals-trump-the-scale/

Should women training differently from men?

http://www.romanfitnesssystems.com/blog/should-women-train-differently-than-men/?src=featured

 Staying fit tips while traveling.

http://www.romanfitnesssystems.com/blog/travel-fitness/

Diet

There are no short cuts to reaching your goals.

http://articles.elitefts.com/nutrition/dont-be-a-sucker/

Not reaching your goals? This could be why.

http://articles.elitefts.com/training-articles/goals-weight-loss-and-motivation/

Mind and Body

How do you approach your mistakes and why?  I little insight into perfectionism.

http://tinybuddha.com/blog/one-thing-need-know-overcome-perfectionism/

How to get better sleep.

http://breakingmuscle.com/health-medicine/9-all-natural-tips-for-better-sleep

A solution for being bloated.

http://www.girlsgonestrong.com/digestion-101-4-tips-for-a-healthy-gut/

 

Nutrition 101

Everybody gets caught up with diets and macros and micros yet nobody really knows what a carb is or what fat really does in the body. They just read what the internet gurus say and consider that to be the truth. So What I am going to do for you is break everything down nice and easy in weekly segments for you. You can look forward to reading about food energy, metabolism along with what protein, carbs and fat really are.

In todays blog I will discuss food energy & metabolism.

First lets discuss what energy is. Energy takes on many forms from kinetic, to mechanical to chemical to magnetic. The energy we are most concerned with as a living organisms is that of food. Most living organisms, if not all, rely on external sources of energy. As humans we get our energy from food which includes carbohydrates, fats and proteins. All of which play an important role in your diet. Therefore we will call this food energy. The amount of energy obtained from food is expressed in kilojoules or the infamous food calorie.

What is a calorie? Well I’m glad you asked because most look at a calorie as a bad thing when they don’t even know what a calorie is.  There are two types of calories a small calorie and a large calorie. The small calorie is also referred to as a gram calorie.  A gram calorie is, is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree celsius. A large calorie or kilogram calorie is, is the amount of energy needed to increase 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree celsius. Therefore one large calorie is equal to 1000 small calories or one kilocalorie. The calorie is an expression of the amount of energy per unit of mass or in other words calories per gram/serving. Your diet is usually based on your nutritional requirements and will be expressed as calories per day. Understand that the actual SI unit of food energy is the kilojoule for all of you that like science. A large calorie is equal to 4.184 kilojoules and thats where I will leave that. Please keep this paragraph in mind for the weeks to come when I discuss what macronutrients are.

Next on the topic of discussion is metabolism. Everybody loves talking about a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism yet have no idea what a metabolism is. What is a metabolism? Well, all the word metabolism does is describe all the chemical reactions involved in maintaining the living state of the cells and the organism. Now we can further break down metabolism into two categories. The first is catabolism which will actually use energy to breakdown a molecule to obtain energy. The second is anabolism  which is the term used to describe the construction of components need by our cells. So catabolism means to breakdown and anabolism means to build. Simple. Thats all you need to and should worry about metabolism. Also you cannot speed up your metabolism with meal frequency. There is no evidence to show that you stroke the metabolic fire by eating more or that you need to eat more frequently to loss fat. If you have the evidence please share with the class.

Any questions, comments, concerns, limricks or one-liners leave them in the comments below.

Coach B

 

Speed, Strength & Conditioning, Personal training & Fitness Class Training Video Montage 8/26-9/1

Another great week at the Spot Athletics!  Our Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fighters were tossing around some stones and then went to Atlanta and brought home gold!  Our Metcon clients and personal training clients are still working hard as always, and our coaches Luke Rose and Zach Gallmann are getting ready to compete themselves.  Zach will be competing at New Jersey's strongest man and Luke will be competing in a powerlifting meet in Columbus, OH!