STARING INTO THE ABYSS: HAVING THE COURAGE TO TAKE THE FITNESS ROAD LESS TRAVELED

As owner and head trainer of They Abyss High Intensity Training LLC., I couldn’t be more excited to have this opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with others. Beginning a personal training business has been a dream of mine since I was in high school and helping to train friends and other athletes from my school. The main reason I haven’t pursued that dream until now is that I wanted to make sure I had the best, most effective information available to share with others. In short, I didn’t want to offer any personal training services until I knew I had found the most effective, safest and scientifically validated exercise techniques around.

I have spent the last 15 years or so pursuing that elusive goal. During that time I have experimented with and researched nearly every major fitness craze that has become available. From Body for Life, to Bowflex, to P90X, to CrossFit, to plenty of methods you’ve never heard of and probably never will hear of. I have put my body through the ringer experimenting with every approach that made claims to being the best around. I have done strength training on every apparatus from traditional barbells and dumbbells, to machines, to simply using my own bodyweight.

And what I found was something that goes counter what most of the fitness “experts” out there are telling you. What I found is so counter-intuitive, so conflicting with what we all hear on a day to day basis, that I didn’t believe it myself until I saw the results.

This was a depressing and deflating development, because it meant I had a daunting task ahead of me. How was I going to go out into the world and tell the world that just about everything they knew about exercise was wrong? How was I going to sell services to people when those services literally sounded crazy? I felt as if I had wasted 15 years of my life. I had found what I was looking for, but I had no idea if others would recognize the value of what I had found.

I still don’t.

Be careful what you wish for.

Still, I began The Abyss H.I.T. because even though I have no idea if the world is ready for these ideas, I still feel the need to try. So I’m writing today to share with you the basic framework of what I have found.

First thing’s first: some of the things I’m about to share with you are going to sound too good to be true. But do not be deceived. I am going to promise you great results with a minimal time requirement, sure, but what I’m going to ask in return is a major investment of effort and energy. There’s a reason why it’s called High INTENSITY training. The trade off for a smaller investment in time is an increase of effort during the time when you are working out. One of the primary reasons for naming my business “The Abyss” is because there are going to be times during the workouts where you’re going to feel as if you’re lost, blind, unable to continue. But as Nietzsche stated (and as what’s described on the website), heroes must gaze into the Abyss from time to time in order to become heroic. During our workouts, you will stare into The Abyss, and you will come out stronger because of it.

With that out of the way, here are the basic tenets of true-blue, scientifically suppported High Intensity training.

(Each of the following will be examined in greater detail in later posts)

1. It matters far less what kind of equipment you train on, than on HOW you train. Do not be fooled or deceived by those who tell you barbells or machines or medicine balls or whatever are the best way to train. Each type of equipment has pros and cons, but each kind of equipment can be used INTELLIGENTLY. Your choice of equipment is less important than how you use that equipment. Do not ever forget this.

2. Working out more often does not necessarily produce better results. In fact, the stronger and more advanced you become, the less often you will need to work out. It is INTENSITY that matters, not duration or frequency. In fact, there is a direct relationship between intensity, volume and frequency, and as the volume or frequency of exercise go up, the intensity must decrease. And as the intensity of exercise increases, the volume and frequency must decrease, otherwise over-training occurs. The reason for this is because your muscles and your immune system (yes, that’s right, your immune system) need ample time to recover from exercise. The harder you work your muscles, and the more micro-trauma you induce, the more time is required for the muscle to heal fully. And a healed muscles equals a stronger, bigger muscle.

3. Strength training and conditioning should be done in a manner that  minimizes the risk of injury. In fact, proper strength and conditioning training should make one more resistant to injury, it should not cause injury. One should leave an exercise session stronger and more resilient than when they entered.

4. “Cardio” training is not necessary or even desirable to lose fat and get that “ripped” look. “Cardio” as most of us understand it, doesn’t even exist. The details are too intricate to go into in this post, but just know that in 1975 Dr. James Patterson performed an experiment with West Pointe Cadets and Football players showing that High Intensity Strength Training improved the athletes’ cardiovascular conditioning significantly more so than those athletes who had been placed on more traditional means of strength and cardiovascular conditioning. Those findings were supported by a similar study in 2003 at Phillips University in Marburg, Germany, wherein, Dr. E. Baum, one of the lead scientists of the study, as well as family phsycian at the University stated, “A 6-month structured Nautilus weightlifting program resulted in improvements in cardiocirculatory fitness to a degree traditionally considered obtainable only through endurance exercises such as running, bicycling, and swimming.”  (Maisch B, Baum E, Grimm W. Die Auswirkungen dynamischen Krafttrainings nach dem Nautilus-Prinzip auf kardiozirkulatorische Parameter und Ausdauerleistungsfähigkeit (The effects of resistance training according to the Nautilus principles on cardiocirculatory parameters and endurance). Angenommen vom Fachbereich Humanmedizin der Philipps-Universität Marburg am 11. Dezember 2003).

The best way to burn calories is to build muscle. You build muscle best through strength training, i.e. High Intensity Training. Most forms of “Cardio” exercise, as we know them, actually destroy muscle tissue, as those forms of training require the body to tap into the muscle cells for energy.

4.  And this is the one nobody wants to hear, but: to change your body, most of the time you have to change your nutrition. Exercise is important, but to see major changes in the least amount of time, you need to change the way you eat. This doesn’t mean going on any extreme diets or diets that are going to be difficult for you to follow for the rest of your life, because, yes, lasting results require a lasting change to the way you eat. Most diets don’t work because they’re basically impossible to stay on forever. So it’s important to find a diet that is both effective and manageable. Do not listen to the claims of whatever fad diet is hot at the moment. Nutrition is complicated, because our bodies are complicated and this actually works in our favor.  Despite what many say, you do not have to give up carbs, for example, and, in fact, there are plenty of studies that show that the body needs sufficient carbohydrate intake in order to maximize its use of protein as a muscle-building agent. Too little carbs means that the protein you eat is being used as fuel for the body instead of as a means of rebuilding damaged muscle tissue caused by exercise. The key is finding that balance of carbs, proteins and fats that works best for each individual, because each individual is different.

Those are the 4 main points that are the backbone of our training philosophy. They inform everything from how many reps we do  per workout, to how many times we work out in a week. As I stated, I will go into further detail for each of the tenets in later blog posts, but if you have any burning questions at the moment, please feel free to ask them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading.

And continue to Be. Heroic.