By David Ozor

Get Your Head At The Right Place

Forget about all the things floating around in your head distracting you when starting your session, your crappy job, annoying girlfriend, or whatever. Not even working out when being angry works; you may feel like you’re having a good work out because you’re just going at it with great strength, but if your mind is somewhere else and not in the work out, then little to no progress is made. Leave these things at the door of the gym. Focus on getting the best out of the session. When you concentrate on the work out (or any other task for that matter) you make the most out of it, so leave the cluster behind and focus. If music or connotations help you, then use them too. If they distract you, don’t follow the trend and do what works for you.

Turn Off That Phone

If there is one thing that grinds my gears at the gym, it’s people talking on their Mobile phones. There is absolutely no need to have a mobile phone with you at the gym! At the very least, turn it off or silence it. Unless you’re a stock broker or a doctor-on-call please refrain from doing this. It’s annoys everyone else that is training hard and trying to stay focused, furthermore it distracts YOU the most. We don’t think about it too much but any distractions – especially phones – break our pattern of work out and as a consequence, we lose focus and effectiveness.

Dress To Sweat

This is key. It might seem silly to spend a little bit of money on training gear, but this is one of those few little things you can do that will really give you a big return of investment. Don’t go to the gym in your cotton T-shirts and baggy tracksuit bottoms. You came here to run/cycle/lift and sweat. I don’t see too many 400 meter runners or Olympic weightlifters in cotton T-shirts and baggy tracksuit bottoms. Dress like a pro in matching top and bottoms and you’ll start to train like a pro. Appropriate footwear is also extremely important; if you’re lifting you must have flat shoes without Gels, shocks or whatever else. For running these things are an absolute most have. Having the right gear for your work out will enhance your performance, not because it will help you stronger, but because it will enable you to feel the urgency to work out and back up the image you project.

Warm-Up Fast

Get a quick warm-up under your belt and perform some static/dynamic stretches. Don’t be that guy that pulls a muscle on the treadmill or while picking up a pen. This is imperative. Inappropriate warm-up and stretching could seriously damage your work out in both, short run and long run. For example, if you don’t warm-up and stretch properly, you can get tired easily or pulling out of muscle because you started too strong too early. The warm-up is as important as the work-out. Give it importance.

Stay Focused

Keep focused on your goals through the session, whether they be to gain muscle, lose fat or increase fitness level (Remember that you must know exactly what you want). If you don’t see results right away even when you pour your heart into it, don’t panic. This is a marathon not a sprint, you’ll get there eventually. Don’t give up or get frustrated due to small set backs. Just pick yourself up and smash through it next time! Don’t worry about what the other meat heads in the gym are lifting; it is not your concern. You aren’t training to impress other men. Don’t even waste your time looking. Focus on your own needs and goals.

Quit Your Gibber-Gabber

Don’t go to the gym and start irrelevant conversation. If a conversation with other gym folk is unavoidable make it short and to the point. The last thing you want is some gym friend who will just distract you from your session (as harsh as that may sound). You can always talk after your work out is over, not during it. If someone gives you advise, critique or praise for your efforts, that’s another thing. Pay attention, but don’t take everything that other gym rats say too seriously. While some people may actually know what they are talking about, it’s not the same for everybody. Therefore, be very selective and very careful with the things you listen.

Keep Up The Intensity

One thing I’ve never understood is people that go to the gym and never break sweat, and never show any signs of physical exertion. Don’t act like those overweight people that walk on the treadmill while reading the newspaper, or lift ridiculously light weights for 20-30 reps. Your training must be intense whatever your level of strength or fitness. It’s the only way of building muscle! Lift heavy and fast, most people have no need to do more that 12 reps of an exercise (Crunches, Pull-ups, etc are excluded). When I step off a treadmill I feel like someone has poured a bucket of water over me. How can you expect results if your intensity is below the required standard? There are no excuses for poor training intensity. Go hard, go fast or go home. If you aren’t naturally physically strong or fit, you will need to push yourself outside your comfort zone. It may cause you pain and discomfort, but that pain is not there to make you quit, it’s there to make you stronger.

Write everything down

Make sure you note what you’ve done for that session: distance ran, time, Avg Heart rate, weight lifted, reps/sets etc. In order to see where you going, you have to know where you’ve been. Plus, this will save you time, you won’t be scratching you head wondering what weight to use. I can look back for up to 6 months and see what I did for a particular session and how much I weighed. That’s how professional athletes train, and you should be doing the same. Bodybuilding.com is an excellent resource for writing down your progress. If not, a simple document or a journal will do it.

Warm-down & stretch

Take a nice and easy warm-down and stretch after your session, it’ll help with your recovery and may prevent any DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness. Warming-down and stretching after the work out is as important as warming-up and stretching before the work out. Give it equal importance!

By David Ozor

I’ve always been crazy about sports, whether it was Rugby, Basketball or Football (Soccer, for my American readers!) I wanted to play, and I played to win! The vast majority of the training I performed for Rugby was Anerobic because that was in line with the nature of the game, lots of short sprints, the occasionally 40/50m+ sprint with some recovery time. But during all this time playing Rugby I never really developed a good aerobic base, I was always fairly good at intervals and short sprints but any continuous running was a real problem for me. A rough definition of your Aerobic Base is the fastest pace your body can run/swim/cycle while breathing Aerobically (i.e. Using Oxygen and being able to breathe easily)

Aerobic Base Building is progressively training your body to perform at faster and faster speeds while still breathing aerobically and maintaining heart rate – this is one of the main training methods that endurance athletes use in the off-season or when injured to maintain or increase their fitness levels. I can hear people shouting already “Who wants to be a triathlete or compete in the Tour de France?” But whatever your level of fitness, a better Aerobic base is most definitely an advantage for a number of reasons:

* It will help with your Anaerobic training, if you can run faster while breathing normally you won’t burn up so quickly with your Anaerobic training.
* Your body uses mostly fat for fuel while training like this.
* It’s less stressful and demanding on the body, so it’s brilliant for people starting fitness programs or recovering from injuries.

Getting started:

The first thing I suggest you get is a Heart Rate Monitor (HRM). I own a polar F4, and it’s at the center of all my training sessions. A basic HRM will work just as well for measuring heart rate but it might not have as many features. I wouldn’t advice breaking the bank just to purchase a top the range HRM, but it’s nice if it provides an estimate of calorie expenditure and a review of the training session.

If you do purchase a HRM you need an estimate of your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR), there are lots of formulas and tools on the net that can give you a value of this by taking into account your age,sex, and weight. For me the best thing to do is just strap-on a HRM and find out what it actually is. If you can get access to a treadmill you should run as fast as you can for 3mins solid, rest with 2mins gentle jogging, and then start running again for another 3mins at a pace you think you can sustain. When the 2^nd run is over, note the maximum heart rate recorded, this value might actually be observed after you stop running, so wait a 30-60s after running before stopping the measurement. (You may wish to repeat this test a few times just to get a more accurate measurement, or you could also do it over the course of a few days)

Training:

In order to exercise Aerobically we need to make our hearts beat at between 65-80% of our MHR. (Above 80-85% we reach the Anaerobic limit and the exercise is now Anaerobic). I normally try to work at 80% of my MHR i.e. after performing a Max Heart Rate test, my Heart rate goes as high as 179BPM. Which gives a Aerobic zone of roughly 144-115BPM. So when I’m at the gym using the treadmill I’m trying to keep my HR at exactly 144BPM.

It‘s tricky at the start to keep your HR at the Aerobic limit, it will rise during exercise. Just start slowly maybe even at hard walking pace or try to jog as slowly as possible. Concentrate heavily on breathing in a slow and controlled manner. Your HRM will give good feedback on this. Take short sharp breaths and your HR will increase.

It may not initially feel like you are doing much exercise but eventually you’ll be able to break into a decent paced jog/run. You may need to vary your speed/incline of the treadmill during exercise to keep running at a good Aerobic rate. After a few runs you will need to increase the pace of your run in order to maintain the same heart rate, increasing your pace roughly once every 2 runs.

To increase your Aerobic base you need to run for a reasonable length of time, I think 30-40mins should be more than enough. While starting out build your mileage slowly and sensibly, maybe target 10 mins jogging for a first session and increase that by 5mins or less after every run, slowly working your way up to 30+mins over a periodic of a couple weeks.

Summary:

* This is a great fat burning exercise that is a good start to any fitness regime.
* Aerobic exercise is less stressful on the body when compared to HIIT, or Anaerobic exercise.
* It’s a good way to stay fit when injured.
* By building a solid Aerobic base you’ll be able to run distances faster and for longer.
* The beauty of this type of training is that you can use the same HR ranges for a variety of different exercises: The treadmill, cross trainer or bike.
* Try it!