Part 5 of 5 - Fundamentals of Fitness Series
By: Jason Bungo, CSCS
When we think about measuring our fitness, where would you start? There are many ways to determine where our fitness levels are at. We can look at how much total work we are completing each week. We could also look at "Benchmark" efforts/workouts to see if we are improving or not. With "Benchmark" workouts we could also look at how we are stacking up against others, but this is generally only going to be used for competitive athletes, athletes looking to earn a scholarship and elite/professional athletes expected to win. But, the majority of the time, and even for these competitive athletes, we are just trying to see if we are little bit better than we were before. Individuals underestimate the power of the small wins and 1% gains. They are cumulative. I often often joke, clients underestimate that "5" pounds of extra weight on the bar each week we experience at the start; but if this continued, we would all be deadlifting "1000" pounds.
How do we quantify how much work we are doing each week? I like to view this from the perspective categories of movements and amount of time and effort being dedicated to each. Examples of these categories would be strength, endurance, core, explosive and even mobility/flexibility.
In order to quantify our strength training efforts, I like to look at how many workouts we are completing each week. Whether these workouts are full body, upper, lower, push, pull.... And to dive deeper, how many sets to or near failure, we are completing each week in each of the categories of movement. I will generally break this down into number of sets per fundamental or compound movement split into pushing, pulling and leg categories. Also, we will look at number of sets to or near failure for isolation movements and categorize this into their respective pushing, pulling and leg categories as well based on which movements they assist.
This is where trainers can help many individuals. If we are experiencing pain, we may look at even more depth than this. Looking at the ratios of those categories in their individual movements total work. As we progress in our strength training, I will also look at number of sets in our movement categories based on rep ranges/intensity zones.
Strength Training Examples Workout to Quantify:
Box Jump 3x6
Medicine Ball Slam 3x6
Bench Press 3x5
Squat 3x5
Pullup 3x5
Pushup 3x15
Suspension Row 3x15
Dumbbell Deadlift 3x15
In this sample workout we have "2" Explosive Movements, the box jump and medicine ball slam. "1" is lower body, "1" is pulling focused upper body. We then have "6" more exercises, all of them are fundamental/compound movements and we have "2" in each category of pushing, pulling and lower body/legs. Of these in each category, we have "1" strength focused rep range and "1" endurance focused rep range. Now to extrapolate this further, if we completed this workout "3x" each week we would end up with:
9x Lower Body Explosive Sets
9x Upper Body Explosive Sets
18x Pushing Sets (9x Strength Focused)
18x Pulling Sets (9x Strength Focused)
18x Leg Sets (9x Strength Focused)
(PER WEEK)
This would represent our total volume of strength training work each week.
Another way we track progress in strength training workouts is with "benchmark" efforts or workouts. This could be "maxing" out on a given movement or even just doing a very heavy "maximal" effort at 3, 6, or any number of given reps. We do not always need to do this, as often we can simply tell our regular sets are increasing in resistance, reps or any other progression method we are using.
To attempt to quantify our endurance/cardio training we look at many factors as well. Obviously we will look at the types of movement we are doing such as running, biking and swimming. As well as the total time or distance we are covering each week. For most individuals, we will track types of movement, total time, and time by training zone.
For my endurance athletes, we will often delve a little deeper. Many of them are also training the same type of endurance movement in different environments. Take running as an example, many of them are training on a treadmill, outside on the roads, but also hitting the local trail. Therefore, in addition to time and type, we will also look at factors such as elevation gain and loss, and time spent training on different types of surfaces and try to mirror this to our goal events. Many of these endurance athletes will also have more than the basic "3" zone system, but in reality, if we look at the given types of workouts. They are just broken down in to multiple categories within each of the "3" zones. For instance recovery and endurance runs will be Zone 1, steady state, tempo and threshold will be in Zone 2, and running intervals/VO2 efforts will be in Zone 3.
Benchmarking is also used with endurance athletes. This could be efforts like a "2" mile time trial, other race distances, or even sections of runs you normally complete to see if we are improving. At this level, we also look at the speed/pace sustained during intervals as being similar to resistance in our strength training. Are we running the intervals in the workout faster than we were previously? Is our heart rate lower than it was previously over a given effort?
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