[Excerpted from She’s Tough by Kylie
Hatmaker]
Now that
we’ve plowed through the personal back-story, the motivational section, and had
a look at a few role models living and doing exactly what we have in mind for
ourselves, we’re getting mighty close to particulars. Let’s knock some out of
these out of the way with a little Q & A.
“I like what I’m hearing about tough but won’t this take a lot of time? It’s
not like I have 26 hours in a day, you know?”
I hear you, the
time crunch is a common lament and is actually one of the more common reasons
why some say they will forgo the tough track and opt for the hour-long Zumba,
spin, or step-class session instead.
But, lament no more my tough sisters, to get the hardcore results we’re touting
in this book takes less time than most all standardized exercise
sessions.
“How much less time?”
Well, often your
tough session will take even less time than it does for your less-tough friend
to drive to her Zumba session.
In other words, you can get tough and be tough and get on with what’s next in
the day before your yoga counterpart’s designer gym bag hits the “exercise”
floor.
Doesn’t seem possible does it? To show you I’m not just blowing smoke here I
will direct you to a few different scientific sources at the end of this
section, but if you want to skip what the long-winded folks in lab coats have
to say, here it is in a nutshell.
In trial after trial participants have been broken into three groups.
As a rule Group One is your control. They are assigned no exercise regimen at
all during the trial run.
Group Two is assigned what we have been fed to believe for years about long
slow distance (LSD) training, that is, getting your heart rate up to a moderate
level and sustaining this elevated rate for the specified time--anywhere from
30-60 minutes depending on which “expert” you want to believe that day.
Group Three is assigned the new way (the tough way) which is a series of High
Intensity Training Intervals (HIT), that is, if Group Two is expected to jog at
a light to moderate pace for 30-60 minutes per exercise session, Group Three is
expected to do 3-5 all-out, fast-as-as-you-can-run 100 yard sprints with 3
minutes of rest between efforts.
If we assume three mandatory exercise sessions per week, Group Two is putting
in (optimally) a total of three hours of training per week.
Group Three, once we minus out the rest time between HIT intervals is training
4.5 minutes per week if they only do three sprints per session, or 7.5 minutes
per week if they opt for 5 sprint intervals per session.
OK, time-management-wise, HIT, or the tough way is waaaaayyyyy better. You wind
up with oodles more time to do what’s next on you to-do list even if that next
item is just more “Me” time.
But, time-management is not our main concern here, is it? We want to know how
well these slackers in Group Three did against the disciplined put-the-time-in
folks of Group Two in measures of physical improvement.
First, Group One, the do-nothings, how do you think they did?
Yeah, no improvement on any fitness scale. No increase in VO2 Max, no gains in
strength or stamina at all, and zero fat loss.
Group Two, our long-timers? They saw a slight increase in VO2 Max, slight
stamina improvement, very little gains in strength, and as for fat loss, well,
unfortunately, not much.
Now for our Group Three slackers. Improvements across the board. And these
aren’t small gains that I’m talking about, at the very minimum HIT matches LSD,
but more often than not in test after test, trial after trial, match-up after
match-up HIT exceeds the benefits of LSD training by a long shot.
HIT results show up in all modes of physical effort:
Running
harder and faster is superior to running slower and longer.
Lifting heavier and more explosively with fewer repetitions is vastly superior
to lifting lighter weights, slowly, with lots and lots of reps.
Fewer repetitions of a difficult exercise are superior to more repetitions of
an easier exercise.
So, the
science says we can accomplish more in less time, that’s a win-win no matter
how you measure it.
“Accomplish more in less time, sounds too good to be true. What’s the bad
news in this story?”
Well, none really,
if your head is on straight, but we’ve got to acknowledge what the acronym HIT
stands for:
HIGH--Meaning, well, high or serious levels of output.
INTENSITY--To reap the big results in minimum time you’ve got to redline it.
There is no cruising or phoning it in in this type of training. You can’t just
strap on your iPod and trot around the neighborhood. If you want the quick
results in minimum time you can’t cheat the acronym.
You must train at high intensity and keep your sessions regular, in other
words, no “I don’t feel like it today because…” Can that stuff, and do the
work. Keep your focus on the good news, it’ll be over soon.
“Won’t I have to train like a man to
get these results?”
If you want to be tough as we define it
in this book, no you don’t have to train like a man.
That’s good news, right?
But…
Men, who get tough don’t have to train
like men either.
“Wha?”
Men and women who want to get tough
need to lose the idea of “this is what boys do” and “this is what girls do” and
simply do what athletes do.
I fail to see how a push-up, or a
pull-up, or a sit-up, or any inert piece of iron is imbued with gender specific
qualities that render it off limits to the opposite sex.
If we recall the wisdom of treating men
and women like their weight classes and not their genders and simply scale our
workload to the corresponding weight classes and fitness levels we are finally
approaching the topic with some common sense.
“I’ll admit that fast results in minimum time sounds good, but I just don’t
think I’m up to working that hard.”
First, yeah, I
know that’s not a question but let’s treat it as one. The good news about HIT
training is that it is all scalable.
What I mean by scalable is that HIT requires you to redline your efforts at all
times, but redlines are completely subjective.
My 100 yard sprint may be a walk in the park pace to you, no worries I still
reap the excellent results.
You may only be able to power clean 75 pounds which may seem ridiculously low
to another, but that’s OK, you’ll still have the science on your side.
Whatever the task is in front of you as long as you give it all you’ve
got with your current level of intensity the method will work for you.
Another good thing about HIT redlines is that they are movable. As you adopt
the HIT method your redline will tick upward as your fitness improves.
It is by always pushing that we realize setting the bar higher and higher is
what gives us our results and our rewards.
“You make a good case for HIT but I see some mighty lean ladies wearing yoga
pants, so doesn’t that mean that low-intensity work is just as effective?”
Not by a long
shot.
Look at it this way, yoga (and even yoga pants) are often self-selecting, by
that, I mean those with a figure that is conducive to wearing yoga pants in
public will purchase and wear yoga pants in public. (Please, recall one of the
top manufacturers of this garment refuses to make or sell sizes above a certain
number to continue to perpetuate this lean brand mystique).
Let’s look at self-selection in other physical endeavors. Basketball, lots of
tall folks, aren’t there? Now, did basketball make them tall or did the nature
of the game select for tallness?
Gymnastics, the nature of that sport selects for small-framed light human
beings (even in the male divisions). When was the last time you saw an Olympic
gymnast who was of NBA basketball height?
Again, did gymnastics make these people small, or did diminutive people
gravitate toward the sport.
With that in mind, I toss out the idea that a product that is made only for
slimmer, leaner folks self-selects our thoughts to assume that the yoga did the
job of what’s filling the pants rather than the product and activity marketing
selecting for the pants-fillers.
But if you want to try an experiment via science as we have been doing, hit
yoga for 90 days and then compare it with 90 days of HIT training and see which
one gets you in those pants sooner.
You already know which one that me and the empirical evidence says will do the
job.
“Yeah, I hear you about intensity and time-saving, and all the sciency sort
of thing, but what I’m really interested in is toning up my butt, and losing a
little off my tummy; why would I need to do all of these other tough exercises
that don’t even touch these areas?”
Ah, the old
“spot-reducing” business. The thinking goes along these lines, “I’d like to
lose some fat off of my belly so I’ll do lots and lots of sit-ups, crunches,
planks, (insert core exercise of choice) and that will do the trick.”
Sounds good in theory, but the reality is the human body does not operate in
that manner.
The body is a complex inter-connected whole, just as you can’t eat a BLT
hold-the-mayo and use the force of your mind to will which part of the body
those sandwich calories go to, you can’t exercise one small part of your body
and expect it to have a slimming effect on that intended target. Oh, if it were
that easy.
Look at it this way, if exercise of one part of the body led to significant
“slimming” or increased muscle size in that area alone we’d see some pretty
bizarre looking athletes out there.
Think of tennis players, these are athletes who are either right or left handed
and swing that racket with maximum force day in and day out with only one arm.
Now, the last time you watched the US Open did you see the Williams sisters, or
Andy Roddick striding the court with giant right arms, or super-slim right
arms?
Nope, that’s because the human body reads effort and codes that effort by its
own standards. Professional tennis players have equally developed arm and
shoulder musculature not because of equal effort put in on both sides, but
despite a great deal of effort inequality.
Shelve notions of spot-reducing and target slimming and go with what science
says works--HIT training.
The good news about HIT training is that it provides just the results that you
desire without the specific targeting. Yes, HIT is tougher than an extended
crunch session but it will do the job quickly and efficiently.
By the way, beyond developing and maintaining tennis skills what method do you
think these tennis pros (and all other pro athletes for that matter) are doing
to build their conditioning and physiques? Yep, HIT training, the very thing
we’ll be doing with this manual.
That’s the end of our Q & A, now for some of those sources if you want to
look into the science further.
Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? Fitness Myths, Training Truths and
Other Surprising Studies from the Science of Exercise
--Alex Hutchinson.
The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better,
Train Smarter, Live Longer
--Gretchen Reynolds.
