Let’s break the false link between building muscle and becoming less feminine.

Women have muscles, it’s a physiological fact, and if we want to do anything useful or impressive with them and look sexy to boot, we’d better start training them!

Here is an incident that happened to me recently. I was talking to a bloke in the gym about the fact that I was training for strongwoman and I happened to mention that I would like to put on a couple of pounds of muscle.

He said, with a grimace, “Really? But you don’t want to lose your femininity, do you?”

So putting on a couple of pounds of muscle is going to make me lose my femininity, is it? This is typical of the casual ignorance displayed by many people about muscle building. I’m an athletic-looking size 10, I weigh 136 pounds. What difference is a couple of pounds of muscle distributed around my body going to make to my appearance? I doubt most people would even notice.

Me (right) and Caroline Pearce, aka ‘Ice’ from Gladiators. Note the tragic loss of femininity experienced by these two strength training females. Don’t let this be you!

I’m not trying to dictate what men or women find attractive. Long hair, cute bob, big tits, curvy, athletic, muscular, long legs, nice bum, spiky hair and tattoos, tanned and outdoorsy, pale and interesting… there are so many ways to look sexy and feminine.

A powerful woman needs powerful arms! I bet POTUS isn’t complaining…

Muscle, whether you realise it or not, plays a huge part in looking feminine. Pertness of bum? Gluteus maximus, baby! Shapeliness of calf? A toned gastrocnemius, of course. ‘Michelle Obama’ arms? Bi’s and tri’s my dears, not to mention the delts.

And you can’t build muscle using 3lb pink dumbbells. Your handbag weighs more than that! The weight’s gotta be heavy.

(Not convinced? Read Why lift weights? for a simple answer to that question.)

The truth is that for some people, any mention of muscle building is an automatic no-no. This merely reveals ignorance about the human body and the importance of muscle.

Although we can use muscle to scuplt particular parts of our bodies into nicer shapes, this isn’t the primary role of muscle.

In fact, everybody needs to be concerned about building muscle, since we spend most of our lives slowly losing it and becoming more and more frail.

Even this poor girl has muscles, but wouldn't you agree she could do with some more?

We all have muscle in the first place and we all need it in order to lead active, healthy lives. From the way some women talk, you’d think they didn’t even possess muscles!

But they do, and they are neglecting them because of this pernicious link.

For most people, building additional muscle doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be done deliberately (especially after your early twenties). What we do build automatically is fat. It’s very easy to get fatter, more difficult to build muscle.

But building muscle helps us to lose fat. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so the more of it we have, the more we can burn excess calories. Muscle also takes energy to be built in the first place, energy that would otherwise be stored as fat. This is true for both men and women.

These days most people want to look lean and athletic, with less fat. The way to do this is to build muscle but still in the eyes of many people this is only deemed acceptable for men. No wonder so many women spend years dieting unsuccessfully or acquire dangerous eating disorders that keep them weak, malnourished and either too skinny or too fat.

Why do guys like this picture?

So back to the guy who so baldly expressed his opinion on my femininity. Of course, we know what’s really going on here. We know that the image he has in his head is of a female pro-bodybuilder on stage under the lights with all the fake tan, dehydration, flexing and so on. He has equated this snapshot image (which doesn’t even reflect the everyday reality of a pro-bodybuilder, let alone anyone else) with general weight lifting of any kind undertaken by a woman – and moreover has decided that this is not what he finds attractive.

(Incidentally, there is an issue about people associating weight training with bodybuilding but not other sports. You might be talking about strongwoman or weightlifting, but it is the bodybuilder image that immediately appears in people’s minds and not, say, the slim and athletic Marilou Dozois-Prevost who graces the top of this post.)

What’s odd is that Random Gym Guy is quite admiring of my figure as it stands at the moment – a figure which has been developed over several years by muscle building and heavy weight training.

So there’s a serious disconnect between the evidence of his own eyes and his preconceptions and prejudices about ‘muscle building’ and ‘femininity’.

Apparently I have reached some mysterious boundary where I look good at the moment but if I build a smidgen more muscle I will suddenly turn into a she-hulk!

Two female bodybuilders: the difference is DRUGS, not lifting weights

With pictures like the one on the right, I guess it is not surprising that people get hugely distorted views about women and muscle. The media love to dwell on the ‘freak’ aspects of any activity but it is drugs not weights that are the cause. Just say no, kids.

(The original female bodybuilders still looked feminine. Read more here about what went wrong. Clue: it wasn’t lifting weights!)

Ironically many men will find particular bodies attractive that have been built by careful dieting and weight training – but they don’t realise it. This is about education, about breaking that seemingly automatic link between the desire to build muscle  – for health, looks, performance or whatever – and loss of femininity.

Allyson Goble, trainer at Bodytribe Fitness, tackled this thorny subject in our recent Women’s Strength Symposium. She comments that if masculinity is defined by strength and muscle building, does that mean that femininity must be the opposite: weakness and fat? Femininity = weakness? Surely we are past that in the 21st century.

The truth is that you can look very feminine (whatever that means to you) and also build muscle, lift heavy weights and generally enjoy yourself.

Here is some of the positive testimony from Allyson’s discussion.

Katydid: “As a person who has gone through challenges with eating disorders and body image for a very long time I’ve found weightlifting and being a powerlifter, and the resultant strength to be the best medicine in the world.”

Louisa: “Until I started weight training, with fantastic results (not only because my body shape improved but because I felt more confident and got a buzz out of it), I really didn’t believe how good it would be for me. I have never really worried about getting bulky. I know I look better and feel fitter than I have for over 20 years. However, people around me do ask if I’m not worried about bulking up. And I have struggled to get my husband to understand that I’m not going to end up looking like a female body builder on steroids.”

Allyson: “Girls deserve to have strong muscles and bones and ligaments and tendons, etc. AND look good in their undies too!”

The beautiful and be-six-packed Allyson Felix

Men care what you look like – they are visual creatures after all. But men also care what you think you look like.

Lack of confidence in your own looks is not sexy. Obsessing about whether your bum looks big is a real turn-off.  If you have a nice bum from squatting, be proud of it! If you have a great six pack from training and dieting, show it off. I am a big fan of the female six pack myself, I think it is super sexy!

So back to where I started. You might be wondering, ‘why do you care what Random Gym Guy thinks anyway?’

Well, I don’t, as he’s just some random guy down the gym. But what about the men who do matter in our lives? I know from discussions on the Women’s Strength Training Network that many women do have these issues with their other halves. We can’t just say ‘well I don’t care about your feelings’. But a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Louisa, who was quoted above, says “I have struggled to get my husband to understand that I’m not going to end up looking like a female body builder on steroids.” Time will prove Louisa right, and perhaps her husband will get used to her having a bit more muscle than before.

I know that my perception of muscle on both men and women has changed, the more I have been around it, seen it, and most of all, experienced the amazing things you can do with it!

This is why I am committed to changing perceptions, and why I believe that eventually a cultural shift will occur and women will no longer be considered less feminine because they have muscles and can use them.

More from gubernatrix

Girls and Strength Training: Are We Able To Shift Our Perceptions? How Else Are We ‘ABLE’? By Allyson Goble

Women’s Strength Training Network

Strong is beautiful

The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to weight training

Squat workshop by gubernatrix (Photo: Kate Pankhurst)

Strength. It’s 99% about how strong you are.

I don’t know whether it’s the circles I move in, but I tend to meet people who are more concerned with how good their technique is than how much they are lifting.

These well-intentioned students of strength are the opposite end of the scale from the idiots in the gym who load the bar up with more weight than they can handle and then proceed to invite maiming with appalling technique and absolutely no understanding of basic safety. But as far as I know, none of those people reads this blog (though they should!).

I’m known for being generous where technique is concerned, not a stickler for the perfect position so long as people are reasonably safe. I am willing to entertain other opinions but I tend to think not ‘is my technique perfect?’ but ‘is my technique good enough’?

When I teach workshops, such as the squat workshop pictured above, I focus on technique and strength. When you’ve got the basic movement, it’s time to stick some more weight on the bar and challenge yourself.

I didn’t get into strength training to do pretty moves, although that’s part of the fun. But I got into it to lift ever heavier things – that’s my own personal buzz. Will I sacrifice technique to lift something heavier? Yes, sometimes. Not all the time, not every day. I’ll train sensibly and then go for it on the platform, for example.

And before you raise the hydra of injury – yep, been there. In fact I picked up an injury just a couple of weeks ago while deadlifting in a strongwoman competition. Am I annoyed I got injured? Yep. Do I regret going for that weight? Nope.

Strongman is an interesting sport since many of the events are performed using what most people would think of as bad technique – rounding the back in the atlas stones, hyperextending the lower back for the log press and so on. But strongmen train specifically to perform the events like this. It’s in the nature of odd object lifting. It’s part of what it means to be a strongman – being able to lift in some very awkward positions.

And for you functional fitness fans, this is vital. In an emergency situation, are you likely to be presented with a finely crafted eleiko-bar-shaped object to lift? Or is it more likely to be some awkwardly-shaped heavy bastard of a thing?

Try telling Laurence Shahlaei he should lift with his legs not his back

In a very technical sport such as olympic weightlifting, technique is vital in as much as it allows you to lift more. If you can’t snatch properly you’ll never snatch very much because there is a limit to the amount of weight you can get from the floor to overhead by just muscling it up there. If you don’t have the technique in olympic weightlifting then you just miss…and miss… and miss…

But can great technique be an aim in itself? Maybe, if that’s what turns you on. Maybe you want to have the most beautiful moves in the gym and you don’t care how heavy the weight is.

But you also have to think about how you are applying the technique. Are you applying it with confidence? Are you diving under that bar with complete commitment? Or did you start lifting and think ‘christ, that feels heavy!’

In other words, having perfect technique with a light weight may not mean jack shit once the weight gets challenging.

How much mental energy should you spend worrying about technique? What would happen if you stopped worrying about technique and put some more weight on the bar?

Many people seem to think that they are not ‘ready’ to add weight until they can perform a lift perfectly. It’s a combination of fear of injury, fear of the weight and the desire to practice with something easy. I know these feelings all too well!

But adding more weight teaches too. Adding more weight can in some circumstances actively improve technique (a big heavy weight can force you into the correct position) and in other circumstances simply make you work harder to get it right.

With sub-maximal weights, you can sometimes make adjustments during the lift to compensate for deficiencies in the technique – for example, not having quite the right starting position, or not catching the weight in exactly the right place. With a maximum or very close to maximum weight, if you don’t get it right, you’ll probably fail the lift. So you’ll know damn well when you do get it right.

There are some lifters who are known as good technicians. These are the jammy bastards whose technique is exactly the same, lift after lift, never really deteriorating (eventually the weight just gets too heavy). Realistically, most of us won’t have this talent.

So as with most things in life, there is a balance to be struck. You probably don’t want to end up on the wrong side of either opinion.

If you agonise about your technique, take some time out and just think about lifting more weight. Don’t forget that all that time you are spending on perfecting your technique is time that you are not spending getting stronger.

Conversely, if you chase the numbers every day and you are just desperate to put an extra few kilos on your lifts, consider that taking time to work on your technique might actually improve your numbers in the long run.

For the vast majority of us, our technique could always be better but in strength sports, you don’t get points for style. If we allow this thought to paralyse us, we may not make progress or get stronger.

So where do you stand on the technique debate?

More from gubernatrix

gubernatrix on squat technique
Paralysis by analysis
Mystery of the squat

The problem with most of us – the people reading this blog – is that we want to do too much. We don’t, on the whole, spend all our free time lounging on the sofa stuffing our faces. Not unless we’ve done a hundred burpees first. So we’re less likely to die from heart disease, which is nice, but we want more than simply not to die from a preventable illness.

How many people have read (or written) a post on a forum like this:

“I want to lose fat, gain muscle, run a marathon, get a triple bodyweight deadlift, do twenty pull ups, become a competitive Olympic weightlifter and play football with my mates at the weekend…”

I have a lot of sympathy with this; I want it all too. But here’s the problem: often such goals are listed as if they are all achievable in around the same timeframe with around the same effort. But this is not the case at all. Here’s how I think it breaks down:

Fat loss
This is actually one of the easiest goals there is (and weight loss is even easier). It is also one of the quickest to achieve. The problem for most people is that they are not prepared to do what needs to be done to achieve it. Dan John showed in his Velocity Diet experiment that you can drop a lot of fat in 28 days if you go at it with complete focus. Whereas no-one in the world can master the Olympic lifts in 28 days.

You might choose to lose your fat nice and slowly, but you can lose half a stone of fat in 4-8 weeks without too much hardship.

Playing football with your mates/running a marathon
I’d put these in the same category even though they sound like vastly different challenges. In fact you can train for a marathon in around six months, less if you have some fitness background. You probably won’t post an elite time but we are built to run long distances very slowly. Getting fit to play football (soccer) is similar – we’re talking a few weeks or months of conditioning.

Competitive weightlifting
Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about qualifying for the Olympics, I’m talking about entering a local meet. Even so, mastering the lifts to the extent that you can do something reasonable in a local meet will probably take at least a year or two. Powerlifting is the same; it’s not as technical but it takes time to build up the strength needed. I have seen people go into their first meet and lift very light weights; there’s nothing wrong with that to gain experience, but if you want to be close to competitive even at a local level, you need at least a couple of years of training behind you unless you are naturally gifted.

Triple bodyweight deadlift
I admire your ambition but is this even a realistic goal? Most people will never achieve a triple bodyweight deadlift and even for those who do, it could take years.

Doing all of the above in the same year

This is where people lose the plot (including me, all too often). Have you ever trained for a marathon? You can’t do anything else! You have to spend so much time out pounding the roads that you can barely fit in life, let alone other training goals. So that is six months, at least, where you will be doing extremely well if all your other abilities are simply maintained.

The same applies to maximum strength goals. If you want to get very strong, you may have to consider not doing anything else. That means no jogging, no Frans, no playing rugby on ‘off’ days….

The number of times I see people who want to get very strong saying that they still want to play football twice a week. Yeah, right. There’s no problem lifting weights and playing football, but if your deadlift is at 2 x bodyweight, the chances of you getting to 2.5 x bodyweight are very slim.

Of course there are goals that don’t take quite so much effort. Getting 100 push ups non-stop for example. You can train for that doing 10 minutes three times a week.

So there’s an issue with what it takes to achieve a particular goal. Sometimes you just have to focus on one thing and get it done, before moving onto the next thing.

Crossfit is an attractive system to many because it offers an opportunity to gain competence in a variety of cool-looking exercises while dropping body fat. For many people, this is perfect. But once you get seduced by particular movements and want to start competing, then you need to take a different view. You are training a sport now, and that means making choices.

Read Dan John on goal setting

Louise Fox deadlifting 3 x bodyweight in competition

Strength standards

It is always useful to know what a decent standard is in a particular lift. Perhaps a triple bodyweight deadlift is beyond most of us, but we’d like to get “good” at our lifts. Have a look at these strength standards. They were designed for women but they all work equally well for men apart from the bench press standard (where ‘good’ would be 100%, ‘very good’ would be 150% and ‘excellent’ would be 175%).

Here’s something else to bear in mind. I know this might shock you, but people on the internet don’t always tell the absolute truth about their lifts. Reading internet forums, it might seem as though there are millions of people in gyms up and down the land pulling over twice their bodyweight off the floor – so it’s strange when one doesn’t actually see this happen very much.

Often what happens is that people generously ‘round up’ their lifts. So perhaps they are 10 kg off their target but they think that 10 kg isn’t very much so they feel comfortable rounding up. This is like someone buying a dress that is a size too small thinking that they will definitely fit into it in four weeks’ time. Neither party has any idea how much effort it will take either to increase their deadlift by 10 kg or drop a dress size in four weeks. In my case, it could take me a year or more to increase my deadlift by 10 kg – if I’m really lucky!

Here is another shocking fact, folks. Many people who quote their maxes are quoting something they achieved ten years ago, not something they achieved yesterday. What really matters is how strong you are today.

I’m saying all this because it seems to me that many people’s ambitions are based on what they read other people on the internet claiming to achieve. If you want a reliable source of information, go and look at competition results in your chosen sport or activity. You don’t need to look at the world records, find the results of a local competition. See what people are achieving who actually turn up to an event, perform and are judged by their peers, not what people achieve in their own heads and then post on the internet.

Serena Williams

Sport strength standards

If you are training to support a particular sport, it is a good idea to have a set of standards that adequately reflect the needs of your sport. As a rugby player, say, or a martial artist there are going to be diminishing returns to increasing your strength and conditioning. It’s not that you can be too strong or too fit, but getting there can impinge on your ability to play your sport.

Coaches like Will Heffernan or Dan John, who work with athletes all the time, have evolved their own set of standards. Getting strong for sport is not about going in and hammering the power lifts to get as high a number as possible. It’s more about developing a well rounded athlete who doesn’t have glaring weaknesses.

As an example, here are Will’s strength standards:

• Trap bar deadlift 2 x bodyweight
• Bench 1.5 x bodyweight (1 x bodyweight for women)
• Push ups 50 in 1 minute
• Inverted rows (chest to bar) 30 in 1 minute
• Pull ups 12+ (if under 100kg – will be less for women)
• Pull ups 8+ (if over 100kg)

The point is to be able eventually to achieve all of these standards as a way of maximising your capabilities for your sport. If you can cane 50  push ups in 1 minute easily but you have trouble getting more than a handful of inverted rows, you have an imbalance that would benefit from being sorted out, since it is probably having an effect on your game.

Of course, testing well won’t instantly make you an elite athlete. If you achieve all these standards and you’re still not very good at your sport it simply means you can no longer blame your lack of strength.

Read more about Will’s testing philosophy

Setting expectations

Generally for any sport or activity improvements are initially made quickly but slow down over time. You will not usually make the same progress in the second year as you made in the first six months. There may be exceptions – you may be introduced to an astounding new methodology that causes a great leap forward – but you can’t bank on it.

Similarly as you adapt to a particular movement or activity, it becomes harder to improve it. So it is not wise to base your expectations of getting your mile under 6 minutes on the period it took you to get your mile time from 8 minutes to 7 minutes.

This might sound painfully obvious but I see people do this all the time. Technique also plays a role here. The better your technique, the harder it is to improve, since you can no longer make those easy gains that come from simply doing the movement better.

In fact the longer you have been training the further you have to extend your training horizon. After years of training, I’m now starting to feel like a year is not long enough to plan my training because I’m now aware of how much (or rather, how little) progress I am likely to make in one year.

Here’s an example from powerlifting: I put 5 kg on my competition squat in the last year. To people who are relatively new to lifting that doesn’t sound like much at all. I have a long term goal of double bodyweight squat. If I continue to improve at the same rate, I will have a double bodyweight squat in five years time. I will be 39 years old. Actually, that sounds pretty cool. Five years seems a long time, but I know enough to understand that for this particular goal, we are talking years not months. A year ago, I wouldn’t have understood that.

The next thing to think about is whether I want to continue training powerlifting for the next five years in the way that is necessary to continue putting 5 kg on my squat. If I get distracted by running a marathon next year, then that five-year timeline will be retarded. How important is a double bodyweight squat to me? Is it cool enough to spend five years working on it? Obviously only I can answer that question but these are the sort of things we need to be asking ourselves. If a double bodyweight squat isn’t that important to me, I’m not going to do what needs to be done. I’m not going to be able to “keep the goal the goal”.

Conclusion

I’ve made every mistake in the book when it comes to goal setting. I’ve chosen incompatible goals, unrealistic goals, too many goals. These days I’m trying to apply to my goals a philosophy similar to what I apply to my life: fewer, simpler, slower.

The emotional involvement in training goals can take its toll. It is common for motivated individuals like us to put a lot of pressure on ourselves, to start out with high expectations and grand schemes. So it is correspondingly tough not to meet those expectations. You may think you did something wrong, but perhaps all that was wrong was that your expectation of progress was too high in the first place.

More from gubernatrix

• Strength standards for women
• Testing your one rep max
• Are you having a training experience?
• On not making progress

Christmas has come early here at gubernatrix.co.uk! Coach Dan John answers your training questions below. We got some interesting questions from people with a variety of needs and goals – from military personnel to bodybuilder to rugby player. So even if you didn’t ask a question, there is plenty to think about, try out and inspire.

Carolyn W from Sioux Falls, USA asks:

I’m in training for the USMC Officer Candidates Course for summer ’10. As a female, I have to do a 70-second flexed arm hang, 3 mile run and 100 situps. However, I’m having trouble gaining the upper body strength I need to hang on the bar (I can only hang for about 40 seconds now) and survive OCC. As a former varsity D1 athlete, I learned a variety of lifting techniques, but my progress/gain is so slow I’m frustrated. I need/want to be stronger and I also have the goal of being able to do 25 pullups before I ship in May. How can I accomplish that?

Dan says:

First, focus on what you HAVE to do versus what you want to do. If OCC wants the hang, the run and the situps, that is what we are going to do…now. So, I want you to hang for twenty seconds in groups of five sets. Easy as you can…no stress. Try to do that up to five times a day. When that becomes so easy you can’t believe you are wasting your time doing it, sneak up to 35 seconds. Same plan…lots of submaximal attempts. Then, after about a week or so, test again. I’ll be amazed if you don’t nail the test easy, but if you don’t just keep doing the submax attempts. The situps should be a breeze, but try to do some every day. I suggest sit up “races” where you pound out as many as you can in ten seconds or 15 seconds. That’s how we groove push ups at our school. Once a boy can get twenty push ups in ten seconds, we know he is good for 100.

Running? Well, run. Same idea. Submaximal…easy breathing…don’t get crushed. From here, you can add some pure strength work. If you have the background, do the powerlifts. Learn to stay tight. For the pullups (25?), you will do what I do: whenever you can, you do some easy pullups. I’m up to dozens, if not 100s a day, simply doing 1-5 at a time whenever I pass a bar. But, goal one is goal one.

John Heaton from Wakefield, UK asks:

Hi Dan
I am a Natural Bodybuilder but I am heavily into functional athletic training as opposed to isolated aesthetic exercises. Do you have any good tips for incorporating Olympic lifts and kettlebells into my weekly programme to not only imporve my strength, but also enhance my physique especially hamstrings which is my weak area?
Thanks. Loving the seminar DVD series.

Dan says:

There are thousands of options. Here is a simple one: the first part of your training is ALWAYS going to be an O lift (or variation). Press, Snatch or Jerk. Then, do the “other stuff.” At the end of the workout, use the kettlebell swing or snatch as a finisher. Then, do some Get Ups and go home!

Damien Murphy from Edinburgh, Scotland asks:

I’ve spent nearly a year trying to snatch properly. I’ve tried teaching myself, I’ve been to olympic lifting courses but all I end up doing is having a sore back and stiff shoulders. Do you think some people just shouldn’t do some exercises and if so what would you suggest instead of it?

Dan says:

Damien, you might be on to something. This is going to sound repetitive, but, first, what is your goal? I knew that I HAD (!!!) to learn the O lifts so I was sore and beat up for two years to do it. For others, it is like a cool bar trick. So, maybe the ‘want’ is there, but not the ‘need.’ As much as I love the O lifts, few of the people I work with do them. Few. We can get you from here to there with easier methods, whether kettlebell work or other basic lifts.

Instead of snatches: Vertical and Standing Long Jumps. Kbell swings and snatches (done right). Front Squats with the bar or Double Kettlebells. That’s a pretty good list!

Charlie from Dover, UK asks:

Dear Dan,

I only have time for one gym based strength session per week. I love my powerlifting and squat, deadlift and press every week. How can I best use this one session?

My goal is to be strong and get stronger for rugby.

Dan says:

Well, Jim Wendler would tell you to do all three, but why don’t you just be sure to Bench (as it is really hard to mimic that in the real world) and alternate DL and Squat each week. I strongly suggest (strongly!!!) that you do Goblet Squats with a dumbbell or kettlebell each day or as often as you can to keep the movement and that you do organize a home gym or whatever to make sure you are doing something. You can get damn strong on one or two workouts a week, but rugby is going to demand more than minimal work.

John from Stoke on Trent, UK asks:

How you would advise someone when wanting to improve over head pressing strength as mine sucks?

Dan says:

Well, John, (beautiful name) you are one of many with bad pressing strength. The good news? There is a fix. The bad news follows: you MUST press overhead every workout or, better, every day. Pressers press. It doesn’t have to be much…a total of 15-25 reps each workout. So, 3 x 5, 5 x 3, 5 x 5, 2-3-5-10 (my favorite), or any other variation is fine. Go heavy, go less heavy, go medium, it doesn’t matter. The key is to press, press, press. Give it about six weeks of multiple sessions of pressing and get back to me. It should be MILES better. Or, in your case, kilometers.

Mild attempt at international humor…humour. Ah…comedy lost a great one when I decided to go into coaching.

Dan Coats from Suffolk, UK asks:

Two questions – I just brought your excellent DVD which is actually three DVDs in one [this one - ed].  If you were training three times per week would you organize your training like this ie a workout of cleaning and snatching, a workout of pressing, a workout of carrying movements. Alternatively is it better to combine elements of all three lifting movements in one workout.

Secondly I do judo three times a week.  From your work with wrestlers what movements are particularly worth training and how do you ensure they are still fresh enough to grapple?

Dan says:

Wait, a question from a “John” and now a “Dan?” I’m getting set up here. Do a carry EVERY workout. If you want to do it as a warm up, it works very well. We do the Waiter Walk, the Suitcase Walk and the Farmer Walk every day. We used to do the Crosswalk, but the numbers make it hard to have enough equipment. You can snatch three days a week, and probably press three, but the Clean and Jerk, for most non O lifters, is best done once a week.

So,

Day One:

Carries for Warm ups
Snatch
Clean and press
Some kind of squat

Day Two

Carries
Snatch
Press
Serious Farmer Walk as a finisher

Day Three

Press
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
Serious drag, pull or whatever as a finisher

For fighters and wrestlers, you have to really push them to get stronger. They tend to always want to do conditioning stuff, but they will do 10,000 pushups and not be able to Bench 200 (90k). So, I work with them in a different way: get stronger and use the mat for insanity. Again, they can bench 100 for 100 and 115 for a single. It’s odd stuff.

Chris L from Shropshire,England asks:

You mentioned in your review of mike boyles functional training book that “He demands “Olympic style” Front Squats for the same reasons I do”, would you expand a little on this. Reason i ask is that i dont have any power rack or squat stands at moment [money tight] so just have a bar and some of these so front squats are all i can do. You may mention the reasons in your book [which my brother currently has installed as his toilet book].

Dan says:

Well, I beat this question to death in my live presentations, but the Front Squat “insists” on a proper, athletic body position, depth is easy to regulate, and flexibility is a must. As a coach, I teach the squat in this pattern: Goblet Squat, Front Squat, Overhead Squat, Back Squat. I actually don’t teach the BS, I just tell them that is in today’s workout and the kids explain it to the new kids. The FS is one of those lifts that if you improve on it, you tend to improve on what you are doing in the real world. Not always true with the BS…

Gubernatrix from London, UK asks:

I’ve been self-coaching for years, in powerlifting and general strength training. Sometimes I know that in order to progress, I need to do something different, since the old routine or method slows down or stops completely. But I don’t often know what. How would you approach this? How do you know what to do next?

Dan says:

Good question. I approach this one of two ways, either with concentric circles or Pareto’s 80/20 rule. The question is this “what is core?” The inner circle. What is the 20 percent that gives you 80 percent of the stuff?

From this question, it gets simple. I think “core” is this, that and this. So, we can’t ignore that EVER. The outer circles, that is what I switch in and switch out. Okay, inner circle stuff: a squat movement, a snappy full body thing, a push, a pull and a carry or drag. I always keep those. Bizarre little cool ab move? Hmmm, let’s toss it in for six weeks and give it a go!

That is literally the thought process. I’m going to keep Front Squats, Bench Press, Pull ups, deadlifts and some kind of snatch or clean in the program…well, always. The other stuff, we can bring in, test, throw out, keep, whatever.

So, the “science” is knowing what to keep, but the “art” is knowing what to tease in and out of the program. The core stuff is what really works, but the other stuff supports and gives your brain some excitement.

More Dan John stuff

• Dan John DVDs
• Review of A Philosophy of Strength Training
• Review of Everything’s Over My Head

A reader suggested I write about staying focused over Christmas. It’s a great idea and so I shall.

At this time of year there will doubtless be many magazine articles suggesting ways in which you can navigate the demands of the festive season, ‘survive’ the office Christmas party and all that nonsense.

My take is different: I say sod all that, why should Christmas be any different from the rest of the year?

It’s basically a big, fat excuse to be lazy about your health because you’ve got more shopping to do than normal. If you see Christmas as an opportunity to let it all hang out, you probably need to re-examine your motivations for better health and fitness.

Dan John tells a harsh story about a woman who was on a diet and in the last few days of her diet she said she was looking through cookbooks, presumably planning all the indulgent meals she was going to have once her diet was finished. As Dan says, “she failed”. Because what’s going to happen the day after she ‘finishes’ her diet? Or the month after? Or six months later?

If you’re looking forward to Christmas as a time to eat, drink and be merry excessively before knee-jerking into detox mode in January, then you’ve failed.

The ideal situation is to evolve a diet and training regime that can take the odd indulgent meal or party in its stride, and cope with the demands of family life, especially around holiday times. If you really can’t keep strictly to your usual routine – and I realise we all have people in our lives who simply don’t get this concept – then here are some things to think about:

Short, sharp workouts

Have some short, intense workouts ready that can be done in 10 or 15 minutes a day. If you can’t find 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week, you’re just not trying hard enough.

Burpees with a push up really get my heart rate going, so any routine incorporating burpees works a treat. Mix them up with push ups, air squats, swings with a kettlebell or dumbbell if you have them, some kind of overhead press and you’ve got a great circuit. Do 15-20 of each as many times as you can in 10 minutes. Or make up your own combination.

More workouts from gubernatrix:

• Bodyweight or bust!
• Deck of cards
• Workouts using a gymboss interval timer
• Quick and dirty push ups

Be inventive

You don’t have to have a kettlebell or a dumbbell. An overhead press with a bag of compost or something else from the shed (nothing sharp, people!) works just fine. Go crazy and make it a clean and press. Then add in some windmills or turkish get ups – which again can be done with many different implements if you haven’t asked Santa for a kettlebell this year.

Christmas parties/drinks

I’m not about to preach to anyone about alcohol but if you are serious about your health, diet and training, you gotta keep a lid on the drinking. Really. There’s no way around it. Drinking is detrimental to athletic performance, fat loss, muscle building, recovery – you name it.

It’s your choice how many times you drink but Christmas should not be an excuse for guzzling more alcohol than you do the rest of the year. I meet plenty of people who say that they are ‘not prepared to give up’ their drinking, or most of it. That’s fine, but they will find it much more difficult to achieve their health and fitness goals than those who do.

Get outside

I always go for a run on Christmas day before lunch. Not because I’m a huge running fan but because getting out in the fresh air on a national holiday is just nice. People smile more, the kids are excited. It freshens you up before lunch. If you can’t get out on Christmas day, Boxing day is always a good option. It’s generally the day when everyone gets up off their arses and goes out with the family, so make it an active one!

Start healthy Christmas traditions

My Christmas day workout/run has been a part of my Christmas tradition for a few years now and when I have kids, this will be part of our family tradition too.

It could also be a great way to keep the kids entertained after they have broken all their new toys. ‘Honey can you bench press the kids while I’m putting the roast on?’

In the UK countless families have evolved a ‘tradition’ of huge, belt-popping meal, followed by falling asleep in front of the Queen’s speech, followed by heading to the pub if they haven’t already passed out. Don’t let this be you!

Have a goal for the festive season

It’s easy to let goals lapse over the festive season. We tend, sometimes subconsciously, to plan for December to be something of a black hole where normal routines are concerned, knowing that we can ‘start again’ in January.

Be different this year. Have a plan that starts now and takes you right through the festive season. This will keep you on track better than that nagging voice telling you that you need to do ‘something’ to stave off disaster.

Have a goal for mid January, whether its fat loss or skill based or an increase in your lifts. You can achieve a lot in a month.

Need a bit more help to stay focused? Want a new toy?

A goal to be ready for your goals?

If you’ve let things slide recently, how about having an interim goal to be in shape for purusing your longer term goals?

So instead of starting off your new programme in January feeling fat and unfit, start it feeling reasonably good and ready for more. If you want to drop fat next year, perhaps have an interim goal to maintain over the Christmas period. If you want to improve your lifts, have an interim goal to work on some of your weaknesses in preparation. If you don’t want to push the heavy weights, use these few weeks to learn/improve a skill – the olympic lifts or leverage clubs perhaps.

I’m planning something along these lines myself. I’m refining my diet to get it in shape for the new year (I find it’s useful to ‘practise’ a new diet before getting into it properly), I’m getting in some practise on key skills that I want to develop in 2010 and getting outside for some short sharp workouts. Perfect!

What are your experiences of getting through the festive season unscathed?

I’m just recently back from the World Drug Free Powerlifting Championships (sounds cool, huh?) in which I lifted more or less what I did at the Nationals seven months ago and ended up with a total which was 5kg less than in April.

So in seven months, my lifts haven’t improved – not on the day, not in competition. And so I muse upon why that might be.

Here are some of my favourite excuses, see if you recognise any of them.

“I’m two weeks away from a massive breakthrough!”

Yeah, just another week or two and I’d have had strength beyond my wildest dreams. I’ve had that feeling before – that great things are just around the corner, if I can only x, y or z. But it rarely happens. However, at least this time I have the chance to test the theory since my next meet is on 6th December, only a couple of training weeks away.

“I was away from the gym for too long”

Well I was, but I’ve still managed to fit in 3-4 months of training so I am not convinced that this really is the story. Maybe one of those little sub plots that peters out after a while.

“I have reached my genetic potential”

This the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night – what if I never lift any heavier? In truth, I don’t think that this is it for me, but I may have reached the First Great Plateau on Strength Mountain. This is where the easy gains cease, when you’ve reached your easy genetic potential. After this point, gains take a lot of hard work, effort and soul searching and you have to ask yourself whether you want to spend five months increasing your deadlift by 5kg. If you’re a competitive powerlifter, the answer is probably yes. But if you’re not, you might want to consider developing in another direction.

“I screwed up on the day”

I didn’t have my best ever day but I can hardly blame nerves or the lights or the bad eighties soundtrack (well, apart from Power of Love – who doesn’t like that?). There were some technique issues that needed fixing but I knew before the day of competition where my training had got me and I wasn’t expecting greatness - just maybe a weeny PR or two.

Do something else

So none of the excuses above really ring true for me. What is true, is that my programme didn’t work. There could be all kinds of reasons for that but ultimately it didn’t do the job it was supposed to do, which was to increase my powerlifting numbers.

I put together my programme, it was lovely, I was very fond of it. But I need to let it go. This is the great thing about doing a sport like powerlifting. Your programme either works or it doesn’t in terms of your sporting goal. If you are training for general health and fitness it is probably harder to tell what is working and what isn’t. I probably gained in other ways on my programme – I can feel it – but it didn’t make my numbers go up, which was the main aim.

“There is no perfect programme. If I could give one piece of fitness advice to most trainees it would be to stop doing what you are doing and try something else.”
- Dan John, Never Let Go

In fact, there are loads of things to try and this doesn’t just apply to powerlifting but to all kinds of strength training for a variety of goals. If your programme isn’t working, try some of these solutions:

1. Try something else

As the man said, do something else. If you don’t know what, buy his book or watch his DVDs for plenty of ideas. I tend to go on a combination of instinct and knowledge, but sometimes you just have to try stuff to know what it does in the first place. Not sure whether higher volume will work? Only way to find out is to try it and see. Think you need more max effort lifting or more assistance work? Do it for 4-6 weeks and see if your numbers go up.

2. Get some coaching

The best lifters rarely work alone. Everyone can benefit from some good coaching, and if things are not working for you and you are all out of ideas, share the problem with someone else. A good coach can tell you what’s really going on in your lift, suggest cues to fix problems, bring more discipline to your training and be brutally honest if necessary. Good coaching is something I’ve been missing and I will be trying to fix this.

3. If you haven’t done, find people who are better than you are and train with them

Being the strongest person in your gym is not a good receipe for progression, unless you are Andy Bolton. Working with or alongside people of a similar age, weight and perhaps the same sex, who are better than you is both inspiring and motivating. Sometimes you just need your ass kicked. One reason I like competitions is the kick up the butt I get from watching lighter women outlift me!

4. Get your recovery, nutrition and supplements sorted

This may or may not be the primary cause of any problem or plateau, but how many of us with real lives can honestly say we’ve got this stuff dialled 24/7? As far as I’m concerned my recovery can always be better. There’s always something I’m not doing, whether it’s getting enough sleep, stretching and foam rolling, rehabbing my shoulder, proper active recovery and so on.

5. Be positive but determined

Don’t ignore the fact that things aren’t working well but don’t be downhearted either. Most people in the gym are guilty of the former, and I’m usually guilty of the latter. Neither are particularly healthy. When you look back on 40 years of strength training, periods such as this are going to look like small blips, the basis of dinner table anecdotes (if all your guests are fellow lifters, otherwise just talk about house prices) or inspiration for future blog posts. What’s important is what you did next. Saddle up and keep moving forwards.

So the adventure continues and let’s hope it leads to a New Chapter in which our heroine manages to bust some PRs.

Postscript

I’m adding this a day after I posted the original article because it occured to me over night that I am not telling the whole story and maybe a bit more context would be useful.

After my last meet in April, for which I was tired because I peaked too early, I felt completely knackered and jaded to the extent that I didn’t step into a gym for two and a half months afterwards but spent the early summer rock climbing, surfing and generally having a good time without any iron.

I wanted to avoid the same thing happening again, and it seems that I have. I don’t feel like I’ve been hit by a 10-tonne truck and I’m not jaded – so much so that I’m doing a strongman competition this weekend, something I would not have contemplated after my last meet.

I would also say that I was a better all round athlete now than I was in April. I’ve got stronger in some minor lifts, I’m more mobile, my squat technique is better. If you got points for style in powerlifting, I’d probably have done better this time round!

In other words, I’ve gained on my current programme in different ways and I’ve coped better with the training programme. So I am not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What I’m struggling for is a way of training that can acheive the main goal and some of the sub goals too. For those of us who do this stuff as a hobby, this is a really difficult task – like trying to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. So, a challenge to ponder for us all.

A typical surf lesson lasts 2 hours. In that time, people go from never having touched a surfboard before to standing up in a wobbly sort of way in two-foot deep white water ‘riding’ a wave.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is way cool. I know, I’ve been there. Managing to get to your feet on a surfboard while being propelled along by a tiny white wave is the biggest stoke!

My first surf lesson, spring 2007

But it is about as close to real surfing as London Zoo is to the Serengeti. Getting even to the point of being able to paddle out beyond the white water, catch a real wave before it breaks and actually ride the thing can take years to master properly.

The majority of people will never get past the wobbling-in-the-white-water stage. They will go in the water a few times over the course of the weekend or week they are on holiday. They will have a whale of a time and then they will go home. The next time they come down, they won’t have had a chance to build on what they learned in their first lesson so they will basically be at the same stage they were before.

They haven’t been surfing, they’ve had a ‘surfing experience’.

This is analogous to the majority of people’s attempts at training. Typically someone will go to the gym for a few weeks with a not very clearly defined goal in mind (“lose a bit of weight”, “get fit”), they will perform a bog standard programme given to them by a fitness instructor and after a few weeks they’ll get too busy or lose motivation or get distracted by something shiny and they’ll stop going.

Will they see any changes? Yes, of course! If you go from doing nothing to going to the gym a couple of times a week, even if doing the most basic perfunctory things, you are likely to see some changes. This is very exciting, like your first experience of ‘surf stoke’. But really all you are doing is learning how to hold a surf board the right way up and clamber onto it without immediately falling off again. It’s fun, but it’s hardly the stuff of legend.

People in this situation aren’t training, they are having a ‘training experience’, which gives them a taster of what real training might actually be like.

It’s a great feeling of achievement – but really you’ve only just dipped your toe into the water of what you can achieve if you pursue training properly.

A typical surfing experience

So what is it to pursue training ‘properly’?

This goes beyond simply teaching you what training feels like, getting used to the equipment and so on. It goes beyond those first few exciting results when you need relatively little effort to achieve relatively significant changes – although the effort may feel big because you are not used to it.

Training properly means working towards a clearly defined goal in a sensible and systematic way. That doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated but there has to be some logic from session to session that works towards the goal.

Consistency of effort and prioritisation are very important. What you do outside the training session (eating, recovery etc) becomes almost as important as what you do within the training session.

You also need to push yourself and regularly move out of your comfort zone. Sometimes you may have to step back to fix a problem – progress isn’t always linear.

That said, the big picture must show progress.  Things need to change over a period of time and stay like that. The biggest mistake made by most people is that through the wide angle lens, nothing much changes. Training periods are like holidays; in between times, all the progress is lost and they must start over again.

Training modalities

Something similar happens when you change training modalities. If you go from a typical hypertrophy gym programme to a boot camp-style, high intensity group training session, you will be blown away. It will almost kill you but you will be so stoked you can’t wait to come back for more!

Again, not to take anything away from this experience, it is great fun and very motivating. But after that initial euphoria wears off, where will you be? I have seen people at boot camps simply coast along at a level where they are reasonably comfortable. The training stopped working months ago but they feel good so why do anything about it?

They are turning up for the ‘experience’, the social side, the feeling that they are doing something useful with their evening. But they are still just messing about in the white water.

When you do something new, you appear to make lots of progress in a short space of time and it is natural to be stoked by the experience. But this is a taster, it’s not what training looks like over a consistent period. I’m not saying you can’t have fun (in a way) every time you train but it’s useful to recognise when you are going for the training ‘experience’ and when you are simply training.

Constant excitement, constant buzz can lead to false expectations. In real training there are long periods where nothing much seems to be happening and you have to keep faith with yourself. Sometimes you might feel that you are going backwards.

But you need to keep in mind the big picture. Have a goal, do sensible things to try to meet it and be consistent. Try not to dabble in a plethora of new experiences in search of a new workout ‘high’. Work hard, eat right and then as Dan John often says good things are going to happen.

That said, we might also harbour a notion of a corporeal geometry, a desired shape or look that bespeaks the things we want to project about ourselves.

Looks are important for two reasons, neither of which need have anything to do with vanity:

1. They are part of how we present ourselves to the world
2. They are often the first sign that something might be awry

It might seem noble not to care at all what you look like to other people, but turning up to someone’s wedding, for example, unwashed, unkempt, in your oldest jeans might be disrespectful to your hosts. So, on some level it does matter what you look like.

Likewise if you notice you are gaining a little extra podge, this might be a useful signal that you’ve let your discipline falter on your diet.

The great thing about training is that if you do it right (and that includes the recovery and eating part too), you’ll look better. But often it is helpful to have the visual signal to tell you how well you are doing…or not.

Body composition

Being sensitive to changes in your body, whether or not they are easily visible, is important in measuring and understanding progress. It’s not as simple as picking a number.

Take me, for example. I am stronger, fitter and hotter than I was ten years ago. As it happens, though, I am heavier in terms of scale weight and my body shape is different (hips are smaller, shoulders are bigger).

So if I’d said to myself back then that I wanted to be x weight and fit into x dress, I would have needed to take a different path. Frankly I probably wouldn’t look as good – and I probably wouldn’t be as strong, fit or happy about my physicality.

In other words, rather than picking a number, I just got on with it (“it” being getting fitter and slimmer) and used the changes I saw in the mirror as feedback with which to refine my tactics.

For me, visual feedback worked and it taught me a lot about body composition along the way. How did I truly comprehend, for example, that adding muscle mass actually makes it easier to lose fat? Because I saw the results in the mirror.

Visual indicators

I remember the first time my abs starting showing. I hadn’t been aiming for this as a goal and it took me by surprise. I’d been working hard (I was doing a lot of break dancing at the time) and counting my calories and suddenly there they were. So then I had a marker for what it takes to get to that point.

I’ve got a similar marker with diet. I wonder if any of you experience this? I can draw a conceptual line, a meridian if you like, where on one side I’m happy with the way I look and on the other side I am dissatisfied.

This meridian isn’t in an unhealthy place; it’s a place where my weight is normal and my dress size is normal for my height. It’s even in a place where several bits of me aren’t exactly how I’d choose but I gave up those battles long ago.

This meridian denotes a place where I feel happy enough to walk tall, to dress up if I choose, not feel inadequate in social situations, smile, laugh and generally be relaxed in my own skin.

Staying on the right side of the meridian isn’t difficult but it does take some concentration and discipline. It requires the embedding of good habits to maintain.

Do you know what you need to do to stay on the right side of that meridian, without taking it to an unhealthy extreme? Do you know what your diet and training look like to keep you there?

Body image

There are obvious dangers to relying on visuals to tell you about yourself. People who become unhealthily obsessed with body image can end up with eating disorders or body dysmorphia.

There are some people who end up on the extreme side of the issue, like there are some people who exceed the speed limit, or train to exhaustion. There has even been a new disorder coined, orthorexia, for people who are obsessed with eating healthy food.

Obsessive-compulsive behaviour is rarely healthy, whether it manifests itself in how we eat or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement.

But a healthy interest in how we look can alert us to issues that might turn into health problems later. If my dad had been more concerned about his weight earlier in life, he might still be here instead of shuffling off this mortal coil at the age of sixty.

Grace

So how do we do it? How do we maintain a healthy relationship between our bodies and our psyche? Something written by Dr Steve Bratman, who coined the term ‘orthorexia’, caught my eye:

Orthorexia begins, innocently enough, as a desire to overcome chronic illness or to improve general health. But because it requires considerable willpower to adopt a diet that differs radically from the food habits of childhood and the surrounding culture, few accomplish the change gracefully [my emphasis]. Most must resort to an iron self-discipline bolstered by a hefty dose of superiority over those who eat junk food. Over time, what to eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and greater proportion of the orthorexic’s day.

That notion of accomplishing it gracefully is an interesting one. Whether it is health, body image, athletic performance or something else that motivates people to start paying attention to diet and training, if you go at it desperately, violently, guiltily or angrily, you might well become unhealthily obsessed or at least piss everyone else off in the process.

To follow the path with grace means both to accept yourself now and the better you that you want to become. We need to have patience with those around us who don’t understand what we’re trying to do and try to explain our actions while not imposing our views.

We need to be fair to ourselves too: it’s tempting to beat yourself around the head when you screw up, but that doesn’t seem to help in the long run although it relieves a bit of frustration at the time.

There’s also a need to accept the learning process. You probably won’t get it right first time and there’s no reason why you must. What else comes that easily in life? So learn, use feedback, keep an open mind and try things out. Over time you find out what works for you, and those things gradually become habits and are embedded into your life.

More from gubernatrix

• How to be a better version of yourself
• Is it really about looks?
• What’s your food personality?

Inspiration and motivation in neat little packages!

• A philosophy of strength training – Lecture DVD by Dan John
• Strength Rituals – Training methods and movement philosophy DVD from Bodytribe
• Everything’s over my head – Training methods DVD by Dan John

Olympic weightlifting from the Elite Fitness Manual

Specific vs general is a popular argument in fitness circles and can often get quite technical. But I think that for anyone who isn’t a professional athlete, it doesn’t matter terribly whether you train for something specific or for general fitness. Which mode you choose depends on your personality.

Some people respond to the challenge of training for an event, or acquiring a new skill and will therefore thrive on specificity. Some people train because they want to feel fit, look good or have fun and thrive on variety and balance.

Some people do a bit of both: train for an event some of the time, and train for fun the rest of the time.

I’m in the first category. I like to train for specific sports and skills, but I like to do several at a time. It’s multi-specificity, if that makes sense.

I know that by training several sports at once, I lose out on some of the benefits of dedicating myself to one sport. But I also gain from the crossover of benefits between one activity and another. For example I am better at indoor rowing because of my powerlifting background. My endurance is not as good as that of the other girls but I have a more powerful leg drive. Sometimes this difference results in me winning.

You could say that all things being equal, an athlete will do better in one sport if they dedicate themselves to it. But all things are not equal, not for most of us who aren’t professional athletes. We have a relatively small amount of time to train and how we use that time most effectively will differ from person to person.

It is not just time, we also have a certain amount of will, patience, tolerance, mental energy and belief. How we apportion these things, in training and in life in general will significantly affect what success we have in our chosen sports or activities.

I can’t be the best powerlifter I can be by only doing powerlifting. It doesn’t work like that for me, even though it might for someone else. It is part of my personality type to enjoy learning new skills and to thrive on making connections, so restricting me to one skill isn’t going to stimulate my abilities. To another person this might seem like madness!

I also think that one’s goals and ambitions are very much shaped by personality; whether, for example, you have clear idea in your mind of where you want to get to (in which case, specificity might work for you) or whether you are more comfortable living in the moment and being ready for anything (in which case a general programme could be ideal). Of course, living in the moment doesn’t mean being directionless. But it might mean that your goals evolve more gradually and organically.

Yoga by listenmissy

What does this all mean for training? It means that an understanding and acceptance of what kind of person you are helps you to make better choices when it comes to training aims and programmes.

It is easy to beat yourself up because you can’t follow someone else’s programme or emulate their dedication. This is not meant to be a get-out clause for the lazy. A bit of soul-searching should tell you whether your failure was down to not being bothered or whether it just really didn’t suit you.

It’s like being a parent struggling to find that thing that will unlock their child’s imagination or abilities. You can apply this process to yourself and when you find it, it will be so exciting!

What do you think? How important is personality in training? Is it something you take into account?

Further information about personality types

More from gubernatrix

• What is functional fitness?
• Boost your motivation
• How to be a better version of yourself
• What’s your food personality?

Photo credit: Murdoch

The one thing that all the good training manuals say, but all the magazines don’t say, is that diet and training programmes must be individualised. We all start from a different basis of genetics, experience, capacity for work, personalities and lifestyles.

Magazines would prefer you to think that a celebrity’s diet or training programme can work the same way for you as it sells more magazines, but this is complete rubbish.

Some celebrities can seem to be more successful than so-called ordinary people at losing weight or getting ripped. But this is not because they are using some magic programme, this is because they are able to afford a highly individualised programme and have the energy and motivation to devote to it.

The fact is that you can also enjoy the same success if you employ these same principles: a programme designed around your needs and goals, a diet based on your lifestyle and approach to eating, plus the motivation to do it all properly – which comes from within you.

There are many ways to obtain these things. You can get expert help, by hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist. You can get support and advice by joining a diet or fitness club. You can design a diet and training programme yourself, by doing the research and teaching yourself the principles.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each route. You might think that hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist is the best route if you can afford it, but this is not necessarily the case. Learning it all yourself, while it might take longer, could be better for you in the long run. Over your lifetime, the knowledge that you have gained can be accessed for free at any time because it is in your head!

Celebrity culture

This is one of the most insidious and destructive aspects of modern (mostly) Western society. Celebrity culture can destroy people. It is vitally important that people stop wanting to look like celebrities and start wanting to look like a better version of themselves. For Christ’s sake, even celebrities don’t want to look like themselves! How many celebrities have you seen with wildly fluctuating weight, cosmetic surgery and drug use?

No-one could deny that looks are important to the majority of people but you should decide what you think looks good.

I believe it comes down to having respect for yourself as an individual. There is nothing wrong with wanting to change; in fact, this is often a very positive desire. But the focus must be on yourself and how you want yourself to look. Don’t picture a celebrity, picture a better version of yourself.

Can anyone lose weight? Yes. Can anyone put on muscle? Yes. But it may not happen in the way you think it is going to. You will learn a lot about yourself while going through the process and sometimes you will have to be realistic about your goals.

This is another reason why it is dangerous to have a celebrity as a model for your ideal look. It simply may not be possible for you to look like that. You may look great but in a different way. Always focus on the way you look.

Cutting through the crap

Not everyone wants to spend hours learning about training and nutrition in order to be able to create their own personalised programme. But you have to take responsibility for these things to a certain extent.

It is like healthy eating. You don’t have to go back to school and get a nutrition qualification but you should learn the basics and be able to make good choices when you go shopping. You must immunise yourself against marketing claims. Read the nutritional information but do not take any notice of unquantified and vague claims like “low fat” or “whole grain”, which mean nothing.

Trust your instincts. This is part of having respect for yourself and your own capacity to understand what is good and what is bad. I see people all the time getting terribly confused about what is the ‘right’ training programme or the ‘right’ type of food to eat. This is because they are desperately trying to remember what they read in a magazine or what someone told them they should be doing.

If you find yourself in this position, stop trying to remember what someone else said and try to work it out for yourself. This is not as difficult as it sounds.

Here are some simple questions to ask yourself:

1. Are outrageous or unrealistic claims being made? Come on, you know you can’t achieve anything worthwhile in 10 minutes, right? If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it and everyone would be showing amazing results.
2. Do the numbers add up? Often one particular number will be trumpeted, but check all the others to see if it actually makes sense. For example, 1% fat – but how much sugar? Unless it is a raw ingredient, too much of anything is likely to be suspect.
3. Is it adaptable? Anything that is not adaptable to the individual should make you pause and consider. Very few things in life work in the same way for everyone. If adaptability is not built in, you can’t be sure it will work for you. It may be perfectly acceptable for matey over there but not for you.
4. Is the product or service playing on your fears or uncertainties? Be suspicious of anything that plays on your fears or depicts disastrous scenarios if you don’t partake of it. This is usually marketing rubbish.
5. Don’t assume that if something is right then everything else is wrong! This may sound unintuitive but it comes back to taking an individualised approach. For example, some people say you must eat breakfast, others say you don’t have to eat breakfast. There are scenarios where these are both right! So how do you tell the difference? Well, just be careful of absolutes. There are very few absolutes in life. If someone is telling you that you absolutely must do something, this may not be true. You are under no obligation to accept this without question just because someone chose to use strong language!
6. Be suspicious of claims of “best” and “only”. The truth is that lots of things work. This is great news, it means that you can choose a method that works for you. Ultimately the only thing that is important is that it does work.

You’ll probably catch 90% of the crap just by going through this simple thought process.

The breakfast example

Let’s look at this more closely because it is an interesting one. If two seemingly opposite things are both right, how do you work out which is right for you?

The most thorough way would be to do a controlled experiment of both methods – but we don’t all have time to do that!

So you can take a shortcut (oh,  and be suspicious of anyone who offers shortcuts!) by finding out the reasons behind the methods and deciding if those apply to you; in other words forming a hypothesis about which is more likely to be best, based on your knowledge of yourself – a topic on which you are a world expert.

In the breakfast example, the conventional wisdom is that eating a healthy breakfast is better than not because it stops you snacking and eating unhealthy food later in the day because you got hungry.

However there are also people who say it doesn’t matter what time you eat and how many times a day you eat, so long as you are eating healthy or ‘clean’ food and you are getting the right amount of calories or macronutrients in a given period of time. These people are often following an ‘intermittent fasting’ style of eating.

In each method, the desired outcome of controlling overall calories is the same and the principle of eating healthy food is the same. It is simply the tactic that is different. One tactic to avoid overeating is to eat at regular intervals, the other tactic to avoid overeating is not to eat for long periods of time.

In either case, eating unhealthy food or eating more than the required number of calories would constitute failure.

So you need to pick the tactic that you think would work for you, given your circumstances. Or try both and see which is best.

What I am saying is that there is nothing inherent in ‘breakfast’ that makes you healthier or thinner. This is why you need to find out what is behind the claims that people make. Remember, there are very few absolutes in life.

Conclusion

Photo credit: burntfilm

At the risk of sounding like a self help guru I believe the key to success is: learn, aspire, believe.

If you want to be slimmer, fitter and healthier, learn about it. What else in life did you achieve without any learning? You had to learn to read, drive your car, play your sport and carry out your trade.

Aspire to be a better version of yourself, not to be someone else. Aspiration is important because true aspirations generally start with being honest about yourself. Aspiring to be better comes from an understanding of where you are now. People who have no aspirations are perhaps kidding themselves about their current situation.

Believe in your ability to cut through the crap and make decisions for yourself. Believe in your ability to carry out a programme of work and get the outcome you want. Right this moment I am watching the Williams sisters playing in the Wimbledon final and I can see right in front of me the difference made by belief. They are both brilliant tennis players – you can’t choose between them where ability is concerned. But Serena has more belief right now and she is winning.

So go on, make it happen!

More from gubernatrix

• Are you self-conscious?
• What’s your food personality?
• What lengths do you go to for your training?
• Boost your motivation
• Life’s too short