The arguments for or against sit-ups and other various spine flexion exercises have raged on for some time now.

In light of this current battle, I found an article published in a recentMedicine & Science in Sports & Exercise to be rather interesting – Effects of Sit-up Training versus Core Stabilization Exercises on Sit-up Performance.

This study evaluated the effects that core stabilization training would have on the traditional sit-up test utilized by the armed forces.  1467-subjects, ages 18-35, completed the 12-week training program and final testing.  Of the 1476-subjects, 761 were placed into a core stabilization program and 706 were placed into a traditional sit-up program used to prepare soldiers for their physical fitness test.

The Exercise Groups

Traditional Exercise Program

The traditional exercise program group performed sit-ups, sit-ups with trunk rotations and abdominal crunches in their training program

Core Stabilization Exercise Program

Those in the core stabilization exercise program performed a variety of stabilization exercises such as side-bridges, glute bridges, bird-dogs, woodchoppers, and abdominal crunch draw-ins.

Results

As expected, both groups significantly improved their sit-up performance after the 12-week training program.  Interestingly, the sit up performance was not significantly different between the two groups, even though the core stabilization group did not even perform sit-ups in their training program.  In fact, the core stabilization group demonstrated a significant improvement in sit-up pass rate by 5.6% compared to the traditional sit-up training groups 3.9%.

Researcher’s Conclusions

“Incorporating a core stabilization exercise program into Army physical training does not increase the risk of suboptimal performance on the Army’s fitness test and may offer a small benefit for improving sit up performance.”

My comments

One of the arguments that those in favor of spine flexion exercises make is, “Athletes go through this movement in sport, and so we need to make sure they train it so that they are prepared for it when it happens.”

Who is not prepared for spine flexion?  Seriously!  I haven’t done sit-ups in years, but I know that I can get down and bang them out if I absolutely need to.  This study clearly demonstrated that 12-weeks without performing sit-ups had no negative impact on sit-up performance.

In addition, we spend most of our days in flexion (seated).  Why do we need to train that movement more in the gym?  Shouldn’t we try and break that pattern in the gym and do something else?

Obviously, there are some people who can go through life and do sit-ups everyday and never have a back problem.  As well, there are those that may do all the stabilization training in the world and still sustain a back injury.

I think of it like smoking – some will get cancer and others will smoke 2-packs a day until they are 80-years old with no ill effects (I call those people cockroaches).

At the end of the day, you need to evaluate your exercise menu and determine if this is a movement that you want to program or not.  Whether we are talking about sit-ups, back squats or bench press, everyone will have a different risk vs. reward when it comes to training and as long as you have a good reason to do what you are doing, then go for it.

I dropped the sit-ups a long time ago and I feel very confident about my decision based on the things that I have read.  Having a strong core goes way beyond sit-ups or plank exercises.

Serving too many masters is an issue that most people have with their overall training programs.

I often get emails from individuals looking for program design assistance and find that they are trying to do everything all at once.

They want to be fast, strong, lean, and muscular, have good anaerobic capacity and be a great olympic lifter all at the same time.  Their program looks like a huge mish-mash of lots of different training variables with no consistent theme or concept.

The problem with this is that you become a “jack of all trades, master of none.” 

Concurrent Training

Concurrent training is a training concept, where the individual attempts to train all of their qualities at the same time – strength, speed, endurance, etc – typically without a clear focus on one specific quality during a given training cycle.

While training all of these qualities at the same time is not an issue when one quality is trained at a higher volume/frequency and the other qualities are trained at more of a “retention” volume/intensity, to prevent them from becoming de-trained.  Training them all at the same time without a clear focus or theme leads to less than desirable results.

A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Researchevaluated the results of concurrent training on the endurance performance of well-trained cyclists.  The athletes were placed in two groups for the duration of the 6-week study:

1. Control Group – The control group performed their usual cycling training
2. Resistance Training Group – The resistance group performed a lifting program, in addition to their usual cycling training.  The program was a nonlinear periodization program, where each of the three training days, separated by at least 24-hours, had a different focus

Day 1: Power – 3 sets x 6 reps

Day 2: Hypertrophy – 3 sets x 12 reps

Day 3: Strength – 4 sets x 5 reps

While the resistance-training group improved leg strength (1RM squat), they did not improve on markers of endurance performance, endurance cycling, or sprint performance when compared to the control group.

There are several potential reasons why the resistance-training group did not show a favorable outcome with regard to cycling performance; however, based on the results of the study, the researchers concluded that:

“Although concurrent resistance and endurance training in well-trained cyclists enhanced 1RM strength, it did not improve overall cycle time trial performance and in fact was shown to reduce 1-km final cycle spring performance compared with a control group performing their normal cycle training.”

The researchers noted that the cyclists in the resistance training group may not have tested well because the post test was conducted immediately following the 6-week training period, and it may take 7-14 days for the elevated fitness levels that one may achieve from a training program to manifest themselves (allowing the fatigue they also gained through the training to dissipate).

One issue I see in the program is the potential for over-training the lower extremity.  The athletes in the resistance-training group were asked to complete a strength training program in addition to their normal cycling program.  While the strength training group did end up decreasing their cycling training slightly (3%), there is still a relatively high amount of training volume taking place, especially when you consider that the entire resistance training program was comprised of lower-extremity exercises (many of them being single-leg exercises).

Additionally, you get what you train for!  While the resistance training group lowered their cycling training (3%) to accommodate for the extra resistance training workouts they were doing, the control group ended up increasing their cycling training by 8% during the 6-week testing period.  If you want to be a great endurance cyclist, you need to have time in the saddle, especially as a competition (or in this case a testing day) draws near.  This is the basic concept of periodization.  Perhaps the resistance-training group would have done better with only 2-days of resistance training, or maybe a more balanced resistance training program?

Furthermore, perhaps the results would have been better if the program was periodized to target specific training objectives.  I understand that 6-weeks is a relatively short period of time for doing something like this, but ideally the 6-week phase leading to the competition (or in this case the testing) should be highly specific to what the athlete hopes to accomplish.  Perhaps this sort of concurrent program would be more beneficial in the offseason when the athlete is performing less cycling and devoting more time to cross-training and/or improving other qualities (strength, power endurance, etc) that may be a limiting factor in their performance.  In addition, a concurrent training program may have more benefit for an inseason athlete who participates in a sport that has many competitions over a long period of time (IE, baseball, basketball, football, hockey, etc).  In this case, the athlete has less time to devote to training due to the intense competition/travel schedule and increased number of practices.  So, concurrent training can be a great way for the athlete to work on the necessary things in the gym, without worrying about doing too much and overtraining.

Conclusion

Training can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.  At the end of the day, the program just needs to make sense and it needs to get you to where you want to be.

Training is a highly individual process and what works for one may not work for another.  Use the research as a means to develop ideas/concepts on how you structure your training and then tweak things so that they are specific to your situation.

Reference

Levin GT, Mcguigan MR, Laursen PB. Effect of Concurrent Resistance and Endurance Training on Physiologic and Performance Parameters of Well-Trained Endurance Cyclists. J Strength Cond Res 2009;23(8): 2280-2286.

Today I have a guest blog from Joe Bonyai.  Joe is a great strength coach and the owner of Empower Athletic Development in Scarsdale, NY.

Joe was nice enough to contribute an excellent article offering parents some practical information regarding their young athletes and ways to incorporate after school physical activity into their daily lives.  If you are in the Scarsdale area and have young athletes, I highly suggest checking out Joe’s program as he offers a top-notch service and brings a strong science based background to his training philosophy.

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Bring Back the After School Athlete
Joe Bonyai M.Ed., CSCS

Kickballs have gone flat, fence posts are no longer field goals, and mailboxes are home base no more. Instead, kids nowadays are specializing at the expense of free play. As strength and conditioning professionals, we have the opportunity to provide a safe, structured replacement for decreased variety in after school physical activity. Here are some of my ideas on training youth athletes.

Train the Person First

Your coaching style and program design should take into consideration a child’s psychosocial preparedness as much as their physical capacity. Training groups can be difficult, but the ability to react and treat different personalities while implementing a team program is called coaching!

Make it FUNctional

Youth training programs must be enjoyable. However, regardless of your creativity, exercises and games should involve functional, developmental movements. Crawl, squat, lunge, step, catch, dip, dive, and dodge. Training kids should be fun for you as well.

Train their Strengths

No kid wants to feel weak, slow, or uncoordinated, especially in front of their friends. Find ways to target weaknesses without spotlighting them. Train what they CAN do well, as much as what they need to work on.

Think like a Parent

My mom was always correcting my posture, telling me that balance and moderation was the key to success, and mixing my vegetables with mac and cheese. Moms know best. Train posture, use your “tools” in moderation, and find ways to mix challenging and fun exercises.

Make it Sport-focused

Sport-focused training is a rational middle ground between what we do and what parents want. Youth training shouldn’t be sport-specific insomuch that exercises mimic sport movements; however, youth training programs should make kids feel like athletes!

In a Field of Gurus, Find the Expert

Researchers like Dr. Avery Faigenbaum are leading the charge in the field of youth strength training and athletic development. Do your homework! Don’t guess with a child’s physical development.

Bring back the Afterschool Athlete

Empower young athletes to run, jump, climb, roll, swing and do the things “we used to do”. Building faster and stronger bodies is secondary to developing young minds that look forward to training.

Joe Bonyai is co-director of Empower Athletic Development, located in Scarsdale, NY. Please feel free to send questions or comments to jjbonyai@hotmail.com.

Theme is defined as a unifying or dominating idea; a motif.

While many remember this term from English/literature class in grade school, it actually plays an important role in the overall training process.

There are two themes to consider when designing a program:

1. The theme of the training cycle
2. The theme of the training day

Training Cycle Theme

The theme of the training cycle is basically telling us what we are attempting to achieve in a given period of time – 4-weeks, 8-weeks, 12-weeks, etc – however long your mesocycle is.  Several mesocycles typically make up a full program, with an emphasis on being fully prepared and ready to compete at the end of the program.

Typically, this would take on names like:

– Work capacity or anatomical adaptation
– Endurance
– Strength or max strength
– Power
– Peaking
– Offseason
– Restoration

Obviously the type of quality you want to express in a mesocycle will be dependant on your goals and what you need to achieve.

As I have talked about before, you wouldn’t want to focus one quality (IE strength) at the expense of not even trying to maintain another (IE power or work capacity). This is where understanding the theme of the training cycle becomes important. Planning your training out, you want to consider what the dominant quality is going to be in each phase of training and then how much volume of the other qualities you are going to perform in an attempt to maintain those qualities and not let them just go down the drain. Obviously, the dominant quality will be trained with great volume than the secondary qualities, but they should still be in there somewhere. A way to ensure that things are staying on track is to establish a theme for the day.

Theme for the day

Much like a theme for the training cycle, a theme for the day tells us what the goal/objective is for that day.  The same typeof themes listed above could be applied to each training day to help us decide what we want to accomplish.  When combining this with the theme of the training cycle, we can then get an idea of how to plan the mesocycle, as a greater amount of training days will be devoted to the primary quality, while a lesser amount of training days/volume will be devoted to the secondary quality.

An Example

Training with a strength emphasis:

Monday – Lower body strength work
Tuesday – Tempo Runs/med ball circuits
Wednesday – Upper body strength work/moderate conditioning
Thursday – plyos and speed/acceleration training
Friday – restorative training
Saturday – Sprinting workout/Full body workout (low volume power training/strength work)
Sunday – Off

In this example, strength training is performed three days a week – Day 1 is a lower body emphasis, Day 2 an upper body emphasis and on Day 6 we do a full body lifting session.  The secondary qualities are power and work capacity.  Power is trained using med ball throws, a low volume of plyos and sprinting and some low volume power work before lifting on Saturday (this could be med balls, plyos, olympic lift variations, etc), while the work capacity is trained on Tuesday with tempo runs, Wednesday with some moderate conditioning, and Friday.  Friday is restorative training, which can be anything from active rest to easy body weight circuits that emphasize any limitations the athlete may have and are done with an emphasis below 70% effort so as not to be to taxing on the nervous system and conflict with the Saturday’s training or delay recovery from Thursdays power training.

This example is just one week.  Typically, I would write out the theme for the day for all of the weeks in the given cycle and then plan from there.  I’ll use the following abbreviations of terms in the example below:

S = Strength
P = Power (this can be sprinting, olympic lifts, med balls, speed agility quickness, plyos, etc)
W = Work capacity
R = Restorative

If two qualities are written on the same day, in means that the first quality is the main focus and the second quality is at a low volume and can be dropped if need be depending on how the athlete is performing that day.

Note: If power training is a secondary quality on a strength day, that does not mean that it is trained after the strength training.  Train your power exercises or sprinting prior to your actual lifting, so that fatigue from lifting does not break down form and decrease overall power.  The volume should be low for power training prior to lifting anyway.  Another option would be to perform one workout in the morning and another later in the day.

The themes for each day in week 1 posted above are:

Week 1
Mon – S
Tues – W
Wed – S/W
Thurs – P
Fri – R/Light work capacity
Sat – S/P
Sun – Off

I would then carry out this type of concept for the next 3-weeks (assuming this is a 4-week cycle of training) and have a strength workout at least ever 2-3 days, with the secondary qualities fitting in between:

Week 2
Mon – S/W
Tues – P
Wed – R/Light Work capacity
Thurs – S
Fri – S
Sat – P
Sun – Off

Week 3
Mon – S
Tues – W
Wed – S/P
Thurs – R
Fri – S
Sat – P
Sun – Off

Week 4 – Unloading Week (lower volume on everything and back off intensity)
Mon – S
Tues – W
Wed – S
Thurs – P
Fri – R
Sat – S
Sun – Off

That is just the general theme of everything.  From there you would have to plan out the workouts and the intensity and volume and decide on where to take the program – this would be different for each individual, as some individuals have better recovery and work capacity than others.  Cookie cutter programs yield undesirable results.

In addition, you need to remember that a template is just a guide.  It is not etched in stone.  If an athlete walks in and is not ready to train or under-recovered from previous training, then you would need to make sure you have a lighter workout to fall back on or just allow the individual to take a rest day and come back the next day ready to work.  You should also evaluate your training program to make sure that the athlete is able to tolerate the volume/intensity of training you have prescribed for them.

As you can see, the above template rotates around the three strength workouts of the week, to ensure that other qualities are trained in the desired training period.  One could have a set template that is followed each week and change the variables as needed for the individual.  There are many ways you can put together the program and this is just one possible example for one phase of training.

No matter how you slice it, establish a theme for the training cycle and a theme for each day.  The theme should reflect your needs and your goals.  Work towards your goals, attain your goals, and destroy the competition.

Defining Training

Exercising vs. Training is an interesting debate, as I find most people just ‘exercise’ without thinking about what they are doing.  Before continuing, I should define the two and detail their differences:

• Exercising is about going to the gym and working out.  There isn’t really a rhyme or reason to what you are doing.  It doesn’t build on the last workout.  There may be a goal in mind (IE, fat loss) but the workout is more just a collection of “stuff” rather than something specific.  Typically exercisers just love to sweat and know that they are working hard, as a “hard workout” and “being sore” justifies the “stuff” they did the night before – whether it was beneficial or not is an entirely different story.

• Training on the other hand is about specifics.  There is a goal, the program reflects that goal, and each session plays a distinct role in helping you move closer to that goal.  Rather than doing “stuff”, the trainee goes to the gym with an objective in mind, or as I say a theme(I’ll talk about this in another article).  They have certain things they want to accomplish that day and they make sure they take care of business.  In addition, those that are “training” are very processes oriented and know that if today doesn’t not feel like a great day, they can back off of the intensity a bit, because the objective is to be there at the end of the program and not just destroy yourself in one session because“if you don’t work really hard and get sore after each workout it is a waste of time.”

With those two definitions in mind, it can be pretty clear to see exactly where you stand.  Are you a person that heads to the gym and does a bunch of “stuff”?  Or, are you a person that heads to the gym with specific information to guide you in the training process?

Fitness for the masses

I can’t tell you how many times I am asked questions about things like Crossfit, P90x, Insanity, or the poorly thrown together bootcamp workouts that have been popular of late.

These types of things (in my opinion) fall into the category of “exercising”.  They have little to do with the training process and more to do with just giving you are hard workout.  Whether or not that workout is beneficial to you (the individual) is moot.  Rather, what is important is that you sweat a lot, get sore and perceive the workout to be hard.  I emphasize perceive because these programs are nothing more than marketing hype.

I have talked to a few people who are satisfied with their results on all three of these exercise programs.  They lost weight – which was their main objective – and they were excited about that because for the first time ever, they actually stuck to a training program.  This is obviously excellent and one of great things about these programs is that they actually get people up and exercising and moving.  However, upon further inspection of what they are doing, you find that their exercise technique is really poor.  They haven’t learned anything because the program is constantly changing, and there is no time to build a foundation and adapt (Muscle confusion is idiotic and is nothing more than a marketing scam.  Yes, the body adapts to training and yes you need to change things.  But, you don’t need to change things from workout to workout and you don’t necessarily even need to change exercises, as any variation in training stimulus – repetition number, rep tempo, sets, rest interval, sequence, etc – will provide a enough of a change to force an adaptation without performing a totally different workout and not taking the time to learn how to properly train.).  Finally, their results are usually accompanied by some sort of ache or pain that has either (a) been there before the program – meaning the program didn’t address this issue or (b) is totally new – meaning the program helped to create this issue (or the issue had already been created, but the inappropriate exercise selection caused the individual to be more “aware” of the issue).

Obviously there are going to be people who come back and say, “I got great results and feel fine!”  There will be outliers with anything and programs developed for the masses will be appropriate for some and less appropriate (READ not appropriate at all) for others.  One of the limitations is that there is no way to tell if this program is appropriate for you because there is no one there to assess you and get an idea of what a good starting point may be.  The programs are simply designed to make people do work, and don’t address anything more than that.

Fitness for the individual

Training is an individual endeavor.  The training program should address your limitations, your starting point, your goals and your needs.  Most of the exercises in the programs I mentioned above are fine.  In fact, I use a lot of them – squats, lunges, plyometrics, olympic lifts – in my training programs.  It isn’t the exercise that is bad, it is what you bring to the exercise that is the problem.  If you have limitations and restrictions in mobility, if you are weak and unable to perform those exercises at the intensity that is being shown on the DVD or in the class, or if you don’t even understand how to properly perform those exercises, you are asking for trouble!  This is where the training program needs to stop, back up and say, “Wait a minute.  This may not be right for you AT THIS TIME.”  You then need to determine what IS right for you at this time.  Where is your starting point and where are you training to get to?  This is the training process and this is how training should take place and evolve.  Rather than just doing the workout of the day and throwing you to the wolves, we need to get down to the “nitty gritty” and come up with something that is specific to you.

I talked to one guy that told me his back has been hurting for 2-weeks since his last Crossfit workout, where they were doing an ungodly number of hang cleans in a specific amount of time (this in and of itself is a foolish application of a great exercise).  He asked me what he could do for his back pain and one of the things I told him was to stop doing silly workouts.  He said he loved the training because it was hard and best of all, he could go on the website and get the workout of the day FOR FREE!  To which I replied, “Back pain, FOR FREE…AWESOME!”

I can’t tell you how many people we have seen come to our facility after going to bootcamp for months and yet they have general aches and pains from training and extremely poor exercise form.  I guess exercise technique is only a minor detail when the real objective is to make people sweat and get sore?

Conclusion

Working out is fun and important.  There is nothing wrong with intensity (when it is appropriately applied) and I applaud several of these training programs for getting people up out of their seat and moving.  However, the program should address your needs.  Shy away from fitness programs designed for the masses and seek out something that is specific to you.