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S.A.N.E. Exercise Demo

So as we covered in the last segment, there's just like with eating is really about quality rather than quantity we see that with exercise again, it's all about quality rather than quantity don't make one thing really, really clear hundred you asked a really good question at the end of the last segment, which is what if I have other activities I do and I'm training for how does this exercise play into that in one of our wonderful viewers asked a question online, which was I like doing zoom bar you saying I can't do zoom but anymore I want to be very, very clear that what we're covering here from an exercise perspective and what I'm going to show you what we're gonna do together right now is not the exercise routine you have to do it's an exercise routine that applies the principles we've learned today and what just like with eating what I want everyone to be able to do is to understand the principles understand the science, understand the why and do smarter marathon training if that's ...

what you want to do smarter rock climbing if that's what you want to do smarter zoom ba if that's what you want to do right? We all have different goals and different objectives and all we're trying to do throughout these two days is provide you with cutting edge science that will enable you achieve those goals and your objectives as easily and safely as possible. So everything we talk about here, remember these are just examples and then see how you can apply them in your own life. But if you want to do exactly this routine, you absolutely can, and it will help you quite a bit. So as I mentioned to get started, we have two options we have at home exercises as well as exercises we can do at the gym. I wanna start with e centric to begin with, and then we'll go into smarter interval training. We can't do all of the gym exercises here because, frankly, we're not in a gym, but you will understand the basic principles and premises and then be able to do whatever you want in the gym. So remember, when we talk about e centric exercise, we're just talking about adding more resistance? Well, you're lowering rather than when you're lifting, so focusing on that portion of the movement. But that is easier said than done often because let's say, for example, let's take an exercise like a bench press. So for folks who are familiar with exercising, we'll have some stuff in this segment for you. We'll also go very basic for folks who aren't familiar with exercising so try to do it for both audiences here but a squat so basic squat movement we've all squatted if you've ever used the restroom or sat down you know what a squad is it's just this movement right here right so when we talk about moving east centric lee you might wonder well jonathan how how can I use more weight on the way down such that okay well now I'm down but if it's more weight I won't be able to lift myself back up right so like how does this e centric movement work how can I use more resistance on the way down how can I maximize force on the way down so there's two general approach is to actually theirs three general approaches to increasing the force required during an exercise the first and one of the most common is speed so you can perform an exercise faster right sprinting is just jogging with more force right when you jog your legs hit the ground with a certain level of force when you sprint that's just jogging with much more force the only challenge with using speed to make your muscles generate more force is it carries with it increased risk right the faster you move the more likely you are to get hurt obviously sprinting up stadium steps is a much different scenario for example than doing a leg press with just more weight on it adding more weight to an exercise is also a way to increase force it's often much safer than doing an exercise faster and it is the preferred method for increasing force when exercising smarter so to be very clear if there are people that already do sprints sprints are a fabulous form of exercise but not all of us can sprint and if someday you get injured and you could no longer sprint we're going to show you ways to increase force not through speed but through resistance the third way to increase force is actually similar to the first its speed but it's actually going slower what I mean by that for example is if you were doing a squat movement and you wanted to increase the challenge of the e centric portion what you could do is just lower the lower the wait in this case the way it is just my body very, very slowly like you'll notice that I mean you could try this at home right now sit down quickly like ok that's not too bad try to sit down very slowly you'll notice it's much, much more challenging so before we get into a little bit more advanced techniques on how to train eccentrically or how to just overload your muscles on the negative or extension portion of a movement just understand that if there's any exercise you're already doing from a resistance training perspective you can make it more e centric simply by more slowly lowering the weight so that's like a takeaway for anyone, you could make your existing resistance training routine smarter by slowly lowering the weight and what you might find it. You're going to get a lot more tired a lot quicker because the way most people exercise is they just they just ignore the e centric portion. Now I want you to focus on it so again, you'll notice this isn't a stop doing what you're doing it's just do it slightly differently. Do it smarter but let's say you don't have on exercise routine. You need a new exercise routine and let's say you want to do the center training at home, let's say you don't have a lot of fancy equipment. How do you do that? Let me show you how to do that. I need a chair. Could I get a chair? So they're reaching, so I'm going to show you how to do it. East centric squat at home actually bring up some of the lovely audience members to help demo this as well. So I'm going to put a chair behind me just for safety, but depending on your experience level, right, we're talking about a squad we're talking about a basic squad movement so basic squat movement, and I'm not going to get into all of the kinesiology of positioning because we just don't have enough time. But as a general rule, you want to make sure your feet are about a little bit further than shoulder width apart. You know, make sure your toes aren't really flared out or really pointed in, but at approximately neutral, and you want to do everything in your power to squat down and back, people naturally do this. I don't mean to be crude, but when they sit on the toilet like you will notice that when you sit on the toilet, you naturally like lead with your butt and you go down and back. That's, what I want you to do when you squat down, I don't want you to do this, right? Do you see how my knees air breaking the plane of my toe? They're going up further than my toe make sure you do not do that try to squat down and back, and the most effective way to do that is to make sure you got your shoulders back, chest out, head up, but back. And then you squat slowly down, pushing through your heels so that your knees are approximately even with your toe. Okay, so in a traditional squat, you'll notice that let's say let's, just use two hundred pounds, I weigh one ninety, but let's use two hundred pounds, and obviously, I'm not lifting my legs here hypothetically let's say that I'm squatting down with two hundred pounds, and now I'm coming back up with two hundred pounds, right? I'm using the same amount of force concentric lee and eccentrically, we've already talked about one very basic way I could make that movement more effective and smarter is to go more slowly on the way down, so you could imagine trying to slowly squat down for let's, say, ten seconds that even trying to hold a bottom position, the bottom position of a squad for most people is going to be right around parallel so where your legs are parallel with the ground as you're just getting started, your achilles is probably not going to flexible enough to do that, so you may end up right here, but your goal should be to eventually be able to develop the flexibility to squat to about parallel, if not lower, so you're going to squat down nice and slowly, approximately for ten seconds, and then once you get to the bottom come back up at a natural pace so that right there is going to cause you to have a more effective squatting movement then you naturally would with wall squats but now let's say you want to dial it up even more so you want to add more resistance before we get into this there's one way you could do that immediately and let's actually do it over here as you start adding you should generally always practice things in the safest way possible so a way to increase the safety of any sort of squat movement is to make sure you have something in front of you but you can grab onto should you happen to lose balance and something behind you so that if you do lose your balance you could just sit down easy enough so when you want to increase resistance on the way down we already talked about you're going to go slower on the way down then you are on the way up also you'll notice that when you squat the lower you get, the more challenging it isthe so if you want to challenge yourself even more, you could imagine squatting down nice and slow and then at that bottom at that most challenging moment just try to hold that just right there hold that movement this is called an isometric contraction and it's a great way to increase the intensity of your exercise without increasing any risk one thing that's great about everything we're talking about here is you'll notice this is all very slow. This is all very controlled. This is all very methodical, it's, very difficult if you do this correctly to injure yourself because safety is priority number one right there's no better way to make your exercise routine completely ineffective, then to hurt yourself so that you can't do anything. So please always put safety as priority number one that's a good rule in general, if you hear about a new exercise strategy or a new exercise technique, just ask yourself like what's the likelihood that I'm going to get hurt because especially as we get older and I can tell you this from experience when you get injured, oftentimes you never get completely better, right? Like if you blow your knee out like me on my knee out three times, it ain't getting better by me is broken, we really want to ensure that we don't break ourselves during our effort to heal ourselves, right? We don't want to experience that ironic moment, so we squat down, we come back up, we can hold our balance by holding onto something in front of us, and we've got a chair behind us to ensure we're staying safe, we can increase the resistance by going down slowly, pausing at the bottom. And then popping back up but as you get stronger that's not even going to be enough for you you're gonna need even more resistance so how do you add resistance on the way down but not on the way up because if you do it on both ways you're going to stuck down and won't be able to come back up well here's how you do this you have two limbs you've got your two legs so what you can do is on the way down for example take one leg maybe step it a little bit forward or just consciously put less weight on one leg so I'm going to focus on working my right leg a bit maury centric lee on this movement not so much my left leg the way I'm going to do that is when I squat down I'm going to naturally push less through my left leg then I am through my right likes you could imagine that instead of one hundred pounds sitting on this leg and one hundred pounds sitting on this leg I'm actually gonna have let's say one hundred fifty pounds sitting on this leg right? So I'm I'm holding on to this for balance because I'm slightly off balance because I'm putting more weight on this leg than I am on my left leg and I'm going to do everything we talked about before go down slowly hold the position at the bottom and this leg was able to slowly lower one hundred fifty pounds because it is strong reset quickly than is concentric lee. If I now tried to stand up doing that same thing, I wouldn't be able to that's ok? Because I don't need to to stand up, I'll just use both legs equally. So the general principle to applying more resistance e centric lee with body weight exercises in addition to going slower in addition to pausing at the most difficult moment, is to use your various limbs to change the balance of weight, right? So if you were really advanced, really advanced, you could do a complete one legged squad, so you could say he centric lee, I'm going to squat down and of course you want to hold on to something. I'm going to squat down just with one leg, ideally for about ten seconds, trying to hold it at the bottom, you might not be able to lift yourself up that's ok, use both legs, right? And when you think about how cool this is, like you can now take almost any exercise, and with these three principles of first going slower, holding at the most difficult moment and then using your limbs to spot you or rearrange resistance, you can make any body weight movement smarter, another great and easy example, our push ups can I borrow that pad right there, right? So push ups are a great example of being stronger east, centrally versus concentric lee it's also a great example of how training smarter can unlock an entire category of exercises for people that they may not be able to do otherwise so let's, consider a push up great way to activate your shoulders, your triceps in your chest muscles so how is it push up done? Traditionally, the way a push up is done traditionally his people lower their self down, so they approximately have their nose touching the ground. They push themselves up. A lot of people are actually not able to do that movement, but actually they're able to do half of it aa lot of people are not able to do the concentric portion of a push up, but they could actually do the e centric portion of a push up so they could slowly lower themselves down for approximately ten seconds if it all possible, hold the most challenging position put your knees down, push yourself up right? So I'm using my full body weight on the way down. I'm moving very slowly, I'm holding at the bottom position and then I'm using maybe half my body weight and pushing myself up gradually now, of course, if that's too challenging that's no problem, we can completely adapt it right you could just say start in a more basic position to with your knees down so you're using less resistance slowly lowering yourself down my hands or too far front, slowly lower yourself down and if you can't push yourself up even in this case that's okay, it's, no problem, just get up any way you can. So if you need to roll yourself up that's no problem, because now you're still able to do this movement that you've never been able to do before. Why? Because you're using your muscles in the way that they are strongest, you're you're you at your strongest, which is cool, and if you think about it, that is truly the opposite way most of us resistance train we focus on lifting the weight, and if we can't lift the weight, we stop. So we talked about squats, we talked about push ups. What about our back muscles, for example? Well, one of the most effective exercises in the world for your back is a pull up or a chin up, probably pretty familiar with these. They're very common in the military and you can buy the good news is you don't you don't need a contraption like this, as nice as it is and is as scary as it is, what you need is you can go on amazon or any sporting goods store and you can buy a door pull up bar or if you have an I beam or something like that now I know a lot of people watching her life you're going to tell me to do pull ups like I can't I can't do pull ups that's not going that's ok, I'm not going to ask you to do pull ups you're gonna do let downs and it's cool because by doing these letdowns, you're gonna be able to develop the strength that will allow you some day to do a concentric pull up, whereas previously you couldn't even get darted, which is exciting so a traditional pull up and make sure this rights or a traditional pull up is just done like this, right? You pull yourself up and you want your frequently sees people just dropped themselves down obviously you don't want to do that right? But if you can't do a regular pull up, this movement isn't off limits for you, right? Get a chair behind you obviously have something sturdy and then it's good to share forward there we go so just like we did with our squats right, you're going to use your legs to counterbalance some of your weight, so what you can do is just imagine you're trying to hold this top position and then like slowly take some of the weight off your legs and put them into your back right, so that you are trying your slowly like what your conceptually doing is slowly lifting your feet off the chair, but if you're not, don't don't just do that right? Because you have to evaluate your strength levels, but conceptually you're transferring weight from your feet to your back in arms, and you're going to do that until despite your best efforts to hold yourself up here a the top your muscles start to get tired and you just like your I'm coming down right? Like despite your best efforts to hold yourself up, you're coming down, you can't pull yourself up that's fine, because just stand up so now a movement again that is so profoundly beneficial for your biceps again your shoulders, your back, your trapezius muscles, which a lot of us could never do before you can now start to do. When you work with your muscles and their strongest motion and you use other muscle groups in your body do essentially spot you, so you're slowly lowering yourself down. You're not using your entire body weight you're counterbalancing with your legs when you get to the bottom you like there's? No way I could lift myself up that's okay, you don't need to you could even step off the chair, just get back up and do another let down, and then as you start to build your muscles, you will eventually believe it or not, get to a point where soon you can slowly lower yourself down so your muscles will be strong enough e centric lee to handle your full body weight and then eventually you're full body weight on the way up. So squats are a great option for at home leg exercises, pull ups or more appropriately, let downs are a great way to work. You're back at home, push up through your chest and then for your shoulders, and I know dr kathy's gonna help us with a few different versions of this shoulder press is a great general movement and just like anything else, so if you're familiar with the shoulder, press it's basically like a push up but it's just above your head. So it's just a movement like this, and the reason I'm not spending too much time on form is not at all because it's not important, but because you can go on youtube and watch a million videos and how to do a proper push up to do a proper squat, to do a proper pulled up, how to do a proper shoulder press or you could get a free personal training session at any local gym, right? They all offer one free personal training session. These exercises aren't new it's how we're doing them that's new so make sure to perfect the form and learn the form from an expert some qualified expert but then just do what he centric lee so a shoulder press right traditionally would be done in this case I have five pounds in either hand we're going five pounds up each arm five pounds down each arm how could we increase the resistance? E centric lee we already talked about two ways right? We could take it up lower it slower than we took it up we could also do things like spotting ourselves with our arms so let's say I wasn't able to lift five pounds with one arm it's conceivable that I could lift five pounds with both arms and then I could spot myself on the way down where this arm again it couldn't lift five pounds but it conceivably can lower five pounds so again always using one limb to balance the other limb out now before we get some of the awesome students on stage to help demo these, let me explain why this is so exciting from a muscle activation perspective so let's take the squad example because the math is easy let's say that when I'm doing the squat let's say I weigh two hundred pounds let's say that each leg would traditionally do one hundred pounds traditionally if you do resistance training when would you stop if you were just doing squats, you would do squats, and then you would stop when you could no longer lift yourself, right, so you would stop when your leg muscles each leg could no longer lift one hundred pounds, right? But, you know, you and I both know that just because you're like muscles can't lift one hundred pounds, that doesn't actually mean your muscles are completely fatigued because they could probably lower one hundred pounds so let's say instead, you're doing assistant e centric squad and you squat down with one hundred fifty pounds on your right leg. But then you, when you squad up your only lifting one hundred pounds because you're evenly balancing the weight between your two legs. Now, when do you stop? You stop when you can no longer lower one hundred fifty pounds, right? So you're stopping at a much further points in terms of muscular hypertrophy or actually working and causing healthy damage to the muscle you're activating more muscle fibers, you're requiring more force, and you will get more results than you ever have, and again, the cool thing is. Let's say squats don't work for you because you have a preexisting condition or let's say you really don't like push up because you feel like you're going to fall and break your nose where there's really no way for you to do pull ups in your house or you don't like shoulder press because you have a torn rotator cuff, you don't have to do those for exercises there, just for examples of how you can take a body weight exercise you can do at home and do it e centric plea and get better results. Does that make sense for me at home? E centric perspective? I think it totally does way do have pixel frau, who says, I don't know if he's ever tried to do was pull up in a rickety old english house but would pull the house down around them. Do you have any suggestions for people who might not have somewhere in their house that they can do that? Absolutely so generally. So this is we're going very, very general here, right? But like a pull up is just a rowing motion above your head. You could do a rolling motion in front of your body as well and an incredibly inexpensive way to add resistance to a rowing position in front of your body or these resistance bands so you can grab a set of really good resistance bands on amazon dot com for maybe fifty bucks when I say really good I mean, if you want eighty pounds of resistance like a significant amount of resistance, there are resistance bands for that, so make sure you really quick how you would do a resistance band row e centric lee or with an e centric emphasis at home and again remember we're not talking about a new and different exercises were not saying if you know if you love doing bicep curls you can't do bicep curls anymore we're just saying if you want your bicep curls toe work even better to fire even more muscle fibers just focus on the centric portion so remember, pull up was a row above your head basically we're gonna do a row in front of your body so all you need if you've got a rickety cabin, you may still pull it down doing this but maybe be a little bit less likely to pull it down over here so what you would do is just get the resistance band positioned in front of you and then you would row back so the true look at that I'm moving the thing so you just grow back and then come forward right? This is the traditional movement you've been taught that's the concentric that's the e centric concentric e centric learning the basic movement is no different than it's ever been and anyone who understands exercise physiology can teach the basic movement. How would you do this essential, really, you could slowly lower atm, or you could focus on squeezing at the most difficult position, which is right here, up the top. Alternatively, you could row and then transfer all of the resistance, toe one arm, assist yourself and slowly lowered down with one arm, right, you very well made, and this is a great way to prove to yourself that you're stronger eccentrically, then you are concentric. Lee is actually it's, kind of a fun experiment. Find a resistance that you cannot that you could easily do this with, but you cannot do this with and notice how if you do this, but then try to lower it with one arm, you will be able to, because you are, in fact, stronger eccentrically than you are consensually.