Choosing Your Program

We have spent the past several weeks learning how to properly perform many fundamental movements. These movements are called fundamental movements because they are fundamental to how you move and work in everyday life. We will continue to work on our skill with these movements in our workouts, but need to take a look at what our goals are and adjust our individual programs to fit with those goals.

We will use adjustments in our sets, reps and load to personalize our program to our individual goals. These next three weeks you will have a choice between three types of set and reps schemes that will address there of the most common goals for people who train with weights.

Muscular Strength - Going after pure strength goals involves lower reps and heavy weight. Remember heavy weight is a relative term and refers to a percentage of the most amount of weight you can lift USING GOOD FORM! once. While as you get stronger there will be some growth in muscle, this approach does not address size and is for individuals who simply want to get strong. An example of a strength workout would be 7 sets of 3 reps.

Muscular Hypertrophy - This is a size gaining program. You will perform more volume with a different range of weights. The sole purpose of this training is to exhaust the muscle and then allow time for the muscle to fully recover before training it again. An example of a hypertrophy set would be 12-10-8-6-4 Reps of a weight that get heavier as you work your way down in reps.

Muscular Endurance - The muscular endurance training program is for individuals who need their muscles to do continuous work over long periods of time.  The focus is less on the weight used and more on the number of repetitions. An example of a muscular endurance training program would be 3 to 4 sets in the 12 to 15 rep range. This is the perfect program for the endurance athlete or the beginner who is still working on mastering the movements and building that strong foundation.

Decide which of the three plans above meet your goals and for this weeks blog let me know which program you are going to follow and why you chose that plan. How is that plan going to help you reach your goals?

Your current fitness level?

By the end of this week we will have completed our fitness testing.  We use several mesures of fitness because fitness is a dynamic thing.  You may be really good in one aspect of fitness but very low in another. Our goal for this class is to build a broad general base of fitness with which you can use to help you in your own specific activities.

It is important to understan that these are initial tests and just give aus a glimps of where we are right now. We can than use these results to guide our work in class.

Taking a look at you fitness testing results, answer the following questions.

1. What results are you most happy about?

2. What areas of your fitness are in need of improvement?

3. Based on these results does you goal stated in the first blog change?

Movement Quality

2nd period doing an upside down Cindy, Impressive!

We have spent a considerable ammount of time focusing on the quality of your movement. For this weeks blog I want to check for your understanding of the importance of quality movement. Answer the following questions to give me an idea of where you are in your understanding.

1. Why is quality movement important?

2. What can result from continuous practice of poor movement quality?

Muscle ID Quiz

This blog is a test of following dorections as well as what you know about the muscles of the body. As we said in class the body has several hundred muscles that control all of our various functions. No one really knows the exact number, but most agree on more than 600! We will focus on 10 muscles or muscle groups in class this semester. Their numbers are listed below the chart. Use the following diagram to name the muscle groups identified by the ten numbers listed below.

#11
#12
#13
#14
#17
#22
#23
#41
#49
#52