EP53 Kari and Paul - Strength Training Secrets

This is episode 53 of the Empowered Athlete Podcast.

Welcome to the Empowered Athlete Podcast, created to support athletes in their pursuit of excellence and inspire others toward their best lives. Hosted by Kari Schneider, coach to top performers in sport and life. And Paul Duarten, former national and professional volleyball player. Foreign.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Empowered Podcast. It's October, so it's time for a Paul and Kari episode. We're thrilled to have you joining us, and we are excited for October, the best month of the year. My birthday is in October. Hence the best month of the year. And before we get to today's topic, which is actually me interviewing you, Kari, I'm going to interview for the show.

I'm a little rattled. I just. It's your birthday. I gotta make sure that I'm prepared for that. You just took me off guard there.

Sorry. You're suggesting that you're not already preparing things. Well, okay. I would suggest that you get things rolling. High expectations this year. The big four. Five. That's right, everyone. 45 coming up for me. So numbers are meaningless. It's about how you feel and how you act. I act like a child. I'm young.

You're really excited about this birthday, aren't you? I better live up to this.

No pressure. Enough about me. We'll be interviewing you, but before we get to that, we need to know from you, what are October challenge is going to be for the 12:30 challenge?

Okay. This one is near and dear to my heart. It's all about being outdoors. And if people don't know this already, being outdoors is really key for health, for your best health. People usually don't realize that indoor air is anywhere between 5 and 200 times more polluted than outdoor air. And so the. The.

I realize that in the bathroom.

Wow.

The challenge changes drastically throughout the day.

The challenge is it's 30 minutes outside, but we're gonna do a point system. So you could do a workout outside, you could go for a hike in nature, but the minimum each day is 30, 30 minutes a day outside. And that would count for one point.

Yeah. Let's make this competitive because.

Right. Because. Well, the. The thing about October is that I find for myself and we made these challenges to challenge us. And I find that this is the month where it's getting kind of a little chilly. Might. Might be rainy. Just kind of depends on what our fall looks like. But it's the time where we start. Start to turn into hibernators instead of those outdoor creatures we were all summer. So I wanted to Challenge us to make sure we're getting outside time every single day and we'll see if Maeve joins us on this one. But I think she will, she'll like it a lot, especially keeping track with points on a calendar.

Yeah. Break down the points.

So the points are one point for a 30 minute outdoor stint. It could be a walk in your neighborhood, it could be a workout, it could be anything. And and then an extra point if that 30 minutes outside is in nature. Now you could do an hour outside in nature, so a hike in the woods and that would be worth four points because it would be two 30 minute segments. But you get an extra point because it was in nature because of the health benefits that come from that. So you're grounding your different electrical stimulus from being near nature in the earth and then at the same time all the amazing phytochemicals we get from trees or being around trees. So really good things for you that way. That's the challenge this month and we have all sorts of little resources, not only educational resources in our email and our 1230 email, but also a little calendar that is from the University of Waterloo that has different ideas that you can do outdoors every day. So all kinds of great options and all you have to do. There will be a link in the show notes for our 12:30 challenge if you want to opt into that. And also follow us on, on Instagram. Empower Conditioning. Because there will be an extra thing this month. We're going to do a workout challenge with a good friend of mine who loves the outdoors as well. She's in California. Coach China. And so when we do this exercise challenge, you can double hit this with this five day challenge outdoors.

Well, that sounds awesome. Yeah, cool stuff, fun stuff and perfect segue. Talking about exercise, getting into today's topic with you. So as all our listeners hopefully know at this point, you are a strength coach. You've done all kinds of study, you've got all kinds of practical knowledge, you've got real world experience, theoretical. You've tried everything you've ever prescribed. You're constantly learning about exercise, nutrition, health, wellness. And I'm going to be tapping your brain for the next 30 minutes just to give our listeners hopefully some information on questions that they might have burning in their minds about working out.

So let's do it.

So let's do this. So where I want to start, which I think is really important for everyone to understand, and I've learned this about you and how you look at strength and conditioning and how you look at training just from a really high level, your basic guiding principles. Can you give us your kind of key points in your philosophy of how somebody should be trained, what the overarching kind of goal should be?

Well, this, this came from many, many years ago, probably, I don't know, over, over 15 years ago where in my career I had, I was working with a Canadian sport institute and I had so many different types of athletes. So I had athletes who had real aerobic needs. Maybe they were triathletes or I had, you know, 50 meter swimmers, so fractions of a second were counting or explosive athletes like hockey players, volleyball players, and all these different athletes had such diverse needs for, for their goals. They were either explosive athletes or endurance athletes or just different energy systems being used. So, so I was the programming side of things and making a really good program to get them where they wanted to go was I was getting stuck on things. I was just like how I need to simplify this in my thinking so I can have a guiding principles to make sure that I'm on the right track. And I kept seeing the same things come up over and over. A lot of them was fitness was one of them. Fitness was stopping so many athletes from really tapping into their best performances. And then the other things were these, these injuries. So injuries that came from the specificity of the sport or injuries that overuse, overuse injuries? Yeah, stuff like that. Or just, just the nature of the sport. So it might be a contact injury if it's hockey or football, that kind of thing. So I was, I came up with this, this guided philosophy and the first principle in it is it's just three pretty simple principles and then I could kind of circle back to each. But number one was create a well balanced fit athlete first and the only.

Sounds simple.

Yeah, it sounds really simple, but it's this underlying. They need to have a baseline level of fitness. And this sounds so, it sounds so basic because people think, well, you know, they're an athlete, they're already fit. Well, no, there's so many hockey players or so many volleyball players that are just not fit enough for the demands of their sport. Or maybe they're barely fit enough for the demands of their sport, but they're certainly not fit enough to perform at their absolute best. So for instance, for a volleyball player, they have to be so, so explosive and so technical that if they're not fit enough, they might do that explosive movement, I don't know, maybe 10 times in the first set and keep being able to repeat it in the first set, but then it starts to slowly decrease in quality. So by the second set, by the third set, by the fourth set, you've got this athlete who can't jump as high and can't do anything technical. Not because they don't have those abilities, but because they're not fit enough to keep repeating something that's that explosive. Just because that anaerobic, a lactic energy system needs to have an aerobic foundation so that they can recover from each one of those super explosive movements in order to keep sustaining the core quality of that movement. And the energy system that's recovering them is their aerobic energy system. So if you think of a volleyball player, there would be a very anaerobic, a lactic, that's your super explosive moves and aerobic, your longer endurance sport. And people don't think of volleyball as being an aerobic sport because technically it's not. But they need a good foundation of an aerobic fitness in order to keep repeating the super explosive anaerobic movements. So that doesn't mean you go and take a volleyball player and you know, run them for an hour every day. That'd be ridiculous and really counterproductive to the their performance. But it does mean that you have to be making them fit enough minimally for the quality of their sport. And it'd be different for hockey. Hockey would be an anaerobic, lactic or that kind of power zone that really, you know, two minutes, that 30 second to two minute hard driving power and aerobic because they have to be able to repeat that. And if that aerobic system isn't there, they can't keep repeating those performances. Even, even a triple jumper or you know, sports you think would never require any sort of aerobic ability, still need some level of fitness in order to make that explosive movement repeatable. And that is exactly why, you know, there's these general base training foundations, these general prep cycles that are done for athletes early in the season to get them fit enough with, for the demands of what's going to keep coming. And some of this happens when they have two a days and that kind of thing. But the thing is that philosophy number one is a fit, well rounded athlete first. If they're fit first, it's going to prevent so many other problems down the road because even a lack of fitness is going to create almost a shakiness or an inability to move properly which is going to make them more prone to injury. So again, not saying that they, because people equate in their mind, if they need to be fit, they have to go and do a whole long sessions of biking or running or whatever. It doesn't mean that there's different ways to get fit, but just as long as that's being addressed, number one. And then number two is prevent. And I apply this to clients as well. So that, number one, it's a, it's a fit client first as well, because it's life over limb. So somebody might want, you know, a fantastic looking body, but at the same time, you know, they might be doing a whole bunch of things that are really unhealthy. So from a philosophical standpoint, it's that fitness and health, number one, in order to, to create the next steps of whether it's how they want to look and they'll end up going hand in hand because form follows function. Once that functional ability is there, there's going to be some level of the aesthetics that follow and then you can refine that once you get into your next steps. But so number two ends up being preventing what the sport or life or the client does to the athlete or.

Client preventing what you're saying, right, say life. It's the, the dentist who's bent over their patient, leaning and looking in their.

Mouth all day long, head forward. Exactly. Yeah. So for instance. Yeah, exactly. For the dentist, for the, you know, I can think of one of my clients who's a spine surgeon and he'd be getting, he would be getting people that were coming in from emergency car accidents and ending up operating for eight hours and literally standing and not leaning over, but in that position. It's just this slight angle forward with the head looking down and working on a fine tuned movement. And eight hours of that just would be awful on the shoulders, the neck and the lower back and also standing still for that length of time, it's, it's horrible for the joints as well. Anything for your back or your knees if you're in one position, standing or seated for long periods of time. So I'd end up creating programming for that person that was around preventing some of the chronic issues that came from holding those positions in long surgeries. But same thing for sport as well. It's preventing what the sport does to you. If you know in the sport I'm going to go back to, to volleyball if you know that all the acute injuries are going to be fingers, ankles, shoulder tweaks, maybe, maybe lower backs. Those are all, all going to be the acute injuries and the chronic injuries are going to be shoulders, lower back, sometimes knees. And that knowing that ahead of time, then you're doing the programming or the exercise prescription that is about creating a lot of support around those joints. So maybe it's a little more rotator cuff work or maybe it is a lot of core trunk work and also work that gets them strong in those movement patterns. You know, with the, with the volleyball teams I did a lot of eccentric patterning just because if they weren't doing that preventative work, there would be, there would be absolute pulls or hip flexor tweaks or things like that because there's such explosive movements with these long levered athletes. So preventing what the sport or the light or life does to the person. If somebody's sitting at a desk job eight hours a day, then I'm typically prescribing something in there like setting an alarm to get up and move around every, every 45 minutes just so that there's not that extended sitting periods. Plus, plus there's other countering movement patterns that are different from what that position holds for long periods of time. And this is something that is neglected. This becomes a reactive part of programming. For a lot of personal trainers it's like, oh, the person got injured in their shoulder, okay, so now we're going to do rotator cuff work or as.

Opposed to looking at the movement patterns right ahead of time and being proactive and thinking, okay, you're going to be continually in position X. That's going to stress these joints. Let's get ahead on the game here and add the preventative in ahead of time.

Right. And right now we see so much, so many changes in posture. And it's not that, it's not that somebody's, you know, just suddenly they have bad posture. They didn't suddenly get a wand waved at them that gave them bad posture. It's simply that a cell phone or a screen. Yeah, it's simply that. It's simply that they're holding a position for long periods of time and the body will adapt. The body is amazing at its efficiency to respond to what we give it. And we don't really accept that. Like, well, we want to think that, oh, one workout there, you're suddenly going to have all the benefits of exercise in one workout, which you do, there's all kinds of acute benefits. But at the same time you go, well to have the long term benefits that come from either fat loss or muscle gain or performance improvement or whatever it takes time after time after time to really get that adaptation and you have to keep bringing that stimulus in. So yeah, preventing what life or sport does to you might involve doing a number of things every day that counteract certain postural positions that are being held for hours. And I say to clients sometimes that, you know, you're, they'll say, I can't, I'm not strong enough to hold my shoulders back, or I can't, I can't do it for more than 30 seconds. And then they fall back into that position. And my response is typically that, well, you did two exercises for this and those exercises are fantastic to getting that area stronger. But those two exercises, those three minutes of movement that you did, aren't enough to counteract the eight hours that you held that position. So it's going to be your job to try and hold the position differently for many different times throughout the day, multiple, multiple times to start to counteract what you're holding for such long periods. That really doesn't work. And that exercise itself is serving to give you enough strength to hold that position when prior you just didn't even have any strength to hold the position because the muscles were so weak or stretched out. So now the exercise serves to provide the strength, but now you actually have to hold a different position and utilize that strength to, to change the positional, the positional hold instead of having it in that slouched or phone or computer position. Right, so that's number two. Number three only. Now, number one doesn't have to be perfect, number two doesn't have to be perfect, but they have to be addressed. Number three is the thing that people always want from first and it's the sport specific training for performance enhancement or if it were life, it would be the, you know, the aesthetic goals or whatever it is that the client wants for improvement in how they feel or their longevity or all of those things.

But like you said, this is the first thing that everyone wants. This is the. I want to jump higher.

Right, exactly.

So instead of thinking of the things that you just mentioned, the two priorities you have before that everyone jumps to this step, you're saying, right.

And the beauty of this though is that if we've tackled number one and two in a way that we're at least addressing it already, they're already going to have sports specific performance enhancement just because they're fitter and just because they've prevented what their sport or life does to them. So, so just because we've addressed those two things automatically, I see this all the time, automatically they get this carryover effect of feeling better, of performing better, of recovering faster, and they, but they just, there's that, that brain frustration in the beginning of going, but I don't feel like I'm working on the jump or I don't feel like I'm working on the thing. It's like, yes, we are. So as long as those first two are being addressed, it doesn't mean that we're waiting weeks and weeks to work on number three. It just means that in the way that I've programmed, or the way that we're thinking, or the way that the communication is going between the client and myself, or the athlete and myself is such that, okay, we're going to be doing these things because we've got to address these areas and this is how we're now going into what your main focus is. And then once those first two are addressed, I'm still programming in whatever the sport specific training is or for performance enhancement, whatever the thing is that they're really going for. And the beauty is that it's being covered in a more well rounded and broad base instead of just going in on this one thing that if we started with and did too much of number three, which is a sport specific training for performance enhancement, if we honed in on that right off the hop, then I'm going to put them in a greater likelihood for more injury, they might get faster improvement right away, but find that it's not sustainable and find that they're more likely for injury or some sort of acute injury, or some sort of overuse injury because they're doing too much of the same movement pattern. When there's too much of the same movement pattern, there's breakdown always. Now, it doesn't mean that they don't need that movement pattern, but I want them to be more resilient for those movement patterns. So it's the person who says they're the client who says, yeah, I'm going to do a gran fondo, I'm going to do a marathon, I'm going to do my first triathlon. But then all they do is the running, or all they do is the biking, or all they do is the three for triathlon, the swimming, and in those same exact movement patterns constantly, guaranteed there's going to be an Achilles, an IT band, a lower back or something if they haven't addressed not only different movement patterns out of the same plane, done the preventative work, made sure they had that foundation before they dove into tons of volume on those specific movements. So those are how I created a way of thinking that could guide me through any scenario that still would work. And of course there's tweaks along the way and there's different emphases depending on the person and the situation. So I can still customize with everything but it just allowed for a lot to be covered with a simple methodology.

So those are the pillars, if you will, of your.

Yeah.

And hearing it, it makes complete sense. And it's really, I think listening to that, being aware that the third pillar is the attractive one. And it's really, if you're focused on that, you're playing the short game because you are, like you said, setting yourself up for quicker results which seem better. But over the long term, you know, the long term view that not just looking at the next six months but looking at a career or building for true high performance. It's not going to work. It's using all three and combining those.

Yeah, and it's that third one that's the all show no go. It's the third one that would be the clickbait. You know, it's the thing that, it's the one that, you know, if I wanted to, if I wanted to sell somebody into coming into the gym, I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm going to make you jump, jump higher. I'm going to, you know, and sure those things are true, but that's not what we're, that's not what the main emphasis is. Because you will get that, yes, you absolutely will jump higher. That's easy to do, but it's not as easy to do it in a way that makes you someone who lasts a long time. And I'm going to use you as a quick example. It is so easy to get performance results out of, out of some young athlete who's maybe 14 to 18 years old. The room for improvement, the stimuli and response, all that adaptation is just crazy easy to attain. But you take the 30 something year old professional national level athlete, the diminished returns are ridiculous. And that's where it takes really, really knowing what you're doing in order to get the smallest of results. You know, you take that Olympic level swimmer who's trying to get fractions of a second off their race time, it takes a lot of really thoughtful prescription and really careful programming and work and interaction and communication and all those things in order to get those results. Results and, but really when it comes to overall general clients, it gets a little harder as clients get older. They're not as likely to respond, but they still, it's so much easier to have them get results or have, have young athletes get results. Young athletes get results because they're coachable. They're ready to go, they're going to do all the things and the results come just like that. The older clients, the reason that they may not get results is because they're not as compliant. They're not doing. Their brain gets in the way. They're not doing the things that they need to do in order to get the results. But yeah. So there's different issues in each scenario.

Well, that leads us into probably the what I would think or maybe hope is the big question on listeners minds of how do you. And before asking this, I do want to say that a little bit, a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. So I don't want you to go too deep into this and the question is about periodization. I just want you to explain what periodization is from a high level and most importantly, maybe just focus on recovery in your response to this question. But if you could give the listeners a rough idea of what periodization is and how it relates to thinking about a program that they're on or that you'd be creating or that they're working with a strength coach on what is it and why is it so important? And make sure you touch on recovery.

Periodization is that is the map. It's the plan with all the details as to how to get from point A to point B. And within say an annual plan you typically have mesocycles. So that would be maybe anywhere between a four to eight week training block most typically. And within those training blocks are built in recovery. So in a maybe in an eight week training block I might have done a build or a work cycle of two or three weeks and then a recovery week and then a build of two or three weeks and a recovery week. And those types of cycles are like that because they follow how the body physiologically responds best. And the reason we do a plan like that and plan for builds and recoveries and cycles and then that builds towards maybe a longer term goal that might be coming in eight months or might be coming in a year, maybe six months. Whatever it is. The reason we do those things is because that's how physiologically the body responds. We do not ever respond in a linear pattern. You think of a woman's monthly cycle, it's not linear. There's different fluctuations that happen. You think of there's all sorts of different ways that we respond and it is not linear. We do not just work and work and work and get improvement, improvement, improvement. So what happens is that our body gets a stimulus. And when our body gets a stimulus, if it's more than what we currently normally deal with, then we respond not only in mechanical ways, so biomechanical, we respond in neurological ways. Our nervous system and we respond hormonally or our endocrine system. If the stimulus, which might be the workout or the extra load or whatever it is you, you can make your stimulus. You carry some really heavy groceries back from the grocery store and you walked and you weren't anticipating walking and they were way too heavy. And you're going to be sore in your biceps or your grip or your forearms or something like that because it was too much of a stimulus. So that stimulus is going to cause a response. And when that response happens, you are performing worse. And this is where clients get stuck. If they weren't athletes in the past, is that they're working out, they're working out, they're working out day in and day out. And then they're wondering why they're running slower or they're tired or they're sore or they're.

I don't feel like I'm progressing down.

And it's just like, well, because you keep overloading and overloading and overloading. And that causes the adaptation side where your body's trying to really hard to deal with everything mechanically, hormonally and neurologically. There's different types of fatigue. But when that happens, they're in this dip phase where they're not performing very well. And so that is where the recovery is imperative. And there's so many different ways to get recovery. You can recovery cover certain body parts by training other body parts to give another area a break. You can have a complete day off. You can have a week that's downloaded so you're doing less than you had been for the pre previous three weeks. There's so many different ways to recover, but there has to be recovery. And if there's not, there won't be the adaptation to grow. Because what we're trying to do is create that fatigue, create that overload, and maybe even get to a zone which is what we call overreaching. And then when we get recovery, we get what's called the most amazing thing, which is super compensation. And once people get that super compensation, then they're running faster and they've lost some weight or they've, you know, they've increased muscle mass or they're stronger. And all the things happen depending on the programming of what's been created. And that's another important thing, because if somebody is just doing workouts, they, they need to really mitigate what their expectations are. So if somebody's doing a workout every day, or maybe, I don't know, four or five times a week, whatever it is, and they're recovering well from that because they're not. Maybe they get the weekend off, or maybe they're not doing much other activity for the rest of the 23 hours of the day, but they keep working out. Workout, workout, workout. Then what is the expectation there? Are they working out to lose weight? Are they working out to get stronger? Why are they working out? Because if the stimulus isn't specific enough or guided enough, then they might not be getting enough of a overload in the area that they want to improve upon. So they might just get the feeling of feeling really good because they worked out every day. They might get the improvement in mood, the improvement in energy, the improvement in sleep, but maybe that's not what they were going for. Maybe those things were already really good. Maybe they were going for an increase in strength or weight loss or something like that. And the random workouts every day aren't getting that. So that's where a plan comes in, in not only exactly what's being done each day, but the prevention of whatever their previous injuries are or what their life does to them or what their goals are. So all of that needs to be planned in. Otherwise, it's just working out. It's not actually training for something. When you train for something, then that's a different beast.

And that really, in a nutshell, is the periodization then. So you've got those specific stimuli that you want to give someone in a program at the various steps to push growth and challenge the body in new ways. But then at the same time, balance that with those recovery periods so that they can come back and hit that stimuli harder the next time around at a higher baseline level. So you're kind of raising the bar, almost thinking, maybe, I don't know. I picture this in my mind as something where somebody's working maybe three steps forward, they're taking a step back in recovery, or in when they're fatiguing at the end of a short cycle. But then by getting that recovery, they're now starting their ground floor two steps ahead of where they used to.

Yeah, and that would be kind of a pretty simple linear periodization with a progressive overload and building in the recovery. You know, there's a lot more complex ways to do things, like different concurrent styles of periodization or block periodization, and there's all kinds of different ways to do it that get more complex but that depends on what the person's goals are. If they're, you know, if someone's periodizing for a figure skater and you have to plan in not only their choreography, but their jumps players, plus their actual physical training and their office work and all of that stuff is all included in layers. You're almost creating an orchestra of events that needs to come together in all sorts of different layers and ways. And that gets pretty complex versus someone who wants to run a 5K and lose 5 pounds. It's a lot more simple. So, so those are. But those, they still are types of periodization so that we are honoring the body's need for recovery, especially in this day and age of constant stimulus. You know, sometimes part of that recovery just needs to be less screen time or, you know, less do, do, do, and more downtime. So, you know, there's. It depends on the person. Everybody's different. And that's. And that's the thing, most of the time when people are just doing general workouts, they're not, they're not quite being intentional about, well, why am I doing this workout? Am I doing it just because I'm supposed to, or I'm, you know, not happy with my body? If someone's driven to work out every day because they're not happy with their body, then it's going to become a pretty crappy relationship, right?

And really looking at everything you've said in the last 30 minutes, from your pillars of your philosophies of training to the period I planning, and it really boils down to anyone who has a goal either to work better, to perform better on the court, to swim faster, to run the 5k at a new PB, whatever it is you want to get better at, you need a plan. You need a workout plan that addresses what you're doing and is going to be countering the negative effects of your chosen sport or profession. And then you need that plan. Plan that takes into account everything that's happening for you. And I mean, we could spend hours talking about periodization and the nuances of a season where a team has goals of competing. Maybe I'm going to use volleyball. It's my go to. But for a league cup competition, but there's a regular season competition going at the same time and a European cup. And depending on how you do in each, you may want to have a different peak in the season per performance or goals are changing or injuries happen. And. But again, it's getting back to this plan where the strength coach clearly knows the goals of the client, the team of the athlete. And there's that symbiotic relationship where you're working together on this plan throughout the training period to get the best result. And so really that's why I don't want the listeners to think, okay, Kari's told me about periodization. I'm going to go do it. Don't you need to be talking to someone who's trained in this, who understands the, all the aspects that come into play, the neurological, physiological, all those different elements so that you are maximizing your returns and not just plugging in workouts and wondering why things aren't changing?

Yeah, like everything you're saying is right on point. And you've had so much experience with this too. What's really been in my space lately is what I'm seeing from a, from a corporate standpoint. When I'm seeing clients who are in high level corporate positions or their health care providers, their doctors, nurses, I'm seeing these people who really care about health, they believe in health, and they're just becoming really unhealthy for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's a lot of travel, maybe it's work shifts, maybe it's go, go, go, maybe it's their level of stress. But these exact same concepts are critical for people who are like, these are people who value health and will work out and they will work out consistently. But because they weren't maybe a top level athlete and they never had someone plan out recovery or look at how to manage all of this, then they don't work it in, in any way. They just keep working out and.

Well, yeah, I mean, the other thing that's worked for them is hard work. And so for them, more is better. So if you keep doing this, that's gonna be the best way.

Right. They're driven people, they don't want to miss a workout. So then what I see is all kinds of either chronic injuries or they're just kind of generally burnt out. But they won't let themselves stop because stopping feels worse than driving through when they're wiped out. And so in those cases, it's the exact same thing. Like these are people who need periodized plans, but in order to get a really good one, they need to be willing to stop and take a look at their next step. Six months to a year, what that looks like. And then plan cycles around that, around the travel, around the vacation time around, and then when recovery is built in at the right times. And then it works with their schedule, it works with their family events. It works with what's going on with major busy periods within their own life. Then all of a sudden and they don't realize this, but then all of a sudden they're going to be sick less, they're going to have way more energy, they're going to be feeling so much better along the way because. And they're going to give themselves permission to pull back at certain times because it's part of the bigger plan and they understand the bigger plan. Whereas if they know that they're about to travel or about to go on vacation or really run down and they just keep plowing through and then they're exhausted on their vacation because they needed that recovery so much that they. But they're just like flat out, you know, and that's not how it needs to go. It can really go in a way that they're feeling there. There are periods where they're working really hard and they're feeling a bit tired. But then they know that in the next week is their recovery week, there's going to be lower volume, they're going to do a couple little things, they're going to really rejuvenate their energy. So it's a period. It's almost like a corporate periodized plan for. It's the stress strategic imbalance that I talk about. And it's for greater performance, it's for greater health, it's for greater vitality and energy. But we don't think of periodizing that way for corporate people because they're not the athlete, but they really are. They're like the physical and mental athlete because they are just going all the time and need to have this high level of mental performance as well. And they really care about their physical and health performance.

Yeah, that's an awesome point. And the similarities are so clear. It's whatever it is the realm of looking for peak performance for whatever that endeavor is. I want to give you a couple. Want to do a little myth busting just really quick before we wrap up here. Just for listening. These are, I don't know, things that people might have thought of, might not, but here's an easy one. Spot reduction of fat. I've got some extra weight around my midsection, so I'm going to do some sit ups to get rid of it, right?

Yeah, yeah. Do lots of sit ups to get rid of it.

Why won't that work? Because there are still people out there who believe in this. So why does it work really quick?

Okay. Okay. In losing fat, we lose it everywhere across our whole body. So it's almost like you look when people are losing fat, they look like a shrinking person. I've taken so many photos of different clients, and as they've lost fat, they look like a shrinking person. They don't lose it in just one spot. And here's the thing where they tend to put their fat, say it's like in the, in the gut, or maybe it's the hips or whatever where that person genetically puts their fat. It's the first and last place to come off because that's just where they hold more fat. So, but in general, it all kind of melts off. It looks like a shrinking person. When you take picture after picture, it doesn't come off in one spot. But what people might remember is this principle called the SED principle. It's specific adaptation to impose demands. And all that means is that if you work one spot, that's spot that you're going to get stronger. So I think people sometimes confuse the concept that, that they can get better in that one spot, which they will from a training perspective, but not from.

A fat loss from a muscle standpoint.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so another one. I've had a great practice on court. You guys worked hard for the hour, hour and a half that we were, you know, having our basketball practice, and now we're going to finish off practice with some suicides to work on our speed training and get faster. So, you know, because I've been coaching this team for a long time and I just know we do some sprints at the end of practice. Suicides till the guys are dead. That's really going to help our speed later on, right?

No. Okay, so come on. First of all, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to really distinguish here because this is the important part. If the coach or the athletes think they're going to get faster, they will not if they're going to do those suicides for overall conditioning, so then that can help some of their overall fitness and conditioning. But it won't touch their speed. They've done.

They're going to be faster sprinters when they do this.

They won't even touch their speed. So they can't. They are too tired by that point to tap into that energy system that is all about maximal activation and maximal speed and explosiveness. That is the anaerobic elastic energy system. And by the point of the end of practice, it is so freaking fried they can't tap into that at that point. It's not making them any faster, any speed work very quick. Footwork, anything about speed or fine tuned technique that has to be early in getting the highest quality of that. And that's the thing, you can work some of that at the end of practice, but you're not going to get the quality or actually get the speed benefit. You're going to get a different effect. You're going to get a fitness effect with suicides. And suicides don't work speed anyway. They work. They're, they're like shuttle runs. They'll, they'll be more of a conditioning thing.

All right, well, thank you for clearing the air on those two points. Things that we've heard from coaches over the years. So I thought I want to bring those up for you to answer. Thank you. In summary, last question. As we've been talking a lot about these different strength and conditioning principles, obviously car, you can't be everywhere at once. So what should people be looking for in terms of qualifications? Somebody that they should be working with to help them address these things in their training and their programming.

You know, from an educational standpoint, a certification standpoint, you're going to have somebody who's a little more well rounded. If they have a degree and they have a certification that's a little higher end like a CSCS from, that's a certified strength and conditioning specialist from the National Strength and Conditioning association or a certified exercise physiologist. There are some weekend certifications that have some decent education in with them like a can fit pro, but there's just not typically enough experience that comes with that. So you might have really amazing trainer because they've gotten a lot of experience on their own, or they were an athlete or they keep getting continuing continued education on their own. But that's going to be the exception to the rule. If somebody doesn't have all of that and they just have a weekend certification, they're not always going to have all of that. All of what you're looking for. Sometimes it takes a little more schooling, a little more experience to get that information across. So there are a lot of amazing personal trainers out there. But you really have to ask the questions. Some of the questions would be how many years have you been doing this? Do you know about exercise physiology or periodization? What does it look like when you make a person's program? How do you decide what to do? Questions like that, you'll know whether you're satisfied with the answers or not.

And based on what you said, wouldn't a great question to ask a prospective strength coach that you might be working with is Ask them, here's my sport. Here's the movement patterns. What would you expect. Expect the injuries to be getting a feel of if they understand biomechanically what the movement patterns that you're presenting to them might be doing to your body in a detrimental way of that overuse. Right, yeah. Like, if you can ask them that and they can answer that, I think that's a definite checkbox that shows that they understand how the body works and that they're going to have to address certain things that are countering the stress of your sport.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's lots of. I mean, just. Just do your homework. Just ask those questions. Ask the questions that matter to you. Make sure that they know what they're doing. Those things really are important and. And then have a plan for. You know, it's usually not often now. It's usually not the. The trainers oftentimes. It's often that the person isn't following through with what they've been asked to do or if, you know. So there's a whole other. So, yeah, there's a lot of amazing trainers out there and there's a lot who are just have. The gym is no more than a hobby. So just try and, you know, ask a few questions that are gonna. And maybe we'll do an episode on what questions to ask at some point to dive a little deeper into that. But I have a question for you, since you've asked me all these questions.

Going to delve into my psyche.

Well, we're going to do the book of questions by Gregory Stock. Dr. Gregory Stock. Okay. So ask yourself.

Been a while.

You need to pick a number between 0 and 200. Hopefully it's not one you've picked before.

39.

39 is the number.

I should be picking 45 this month, but.

You should. Yeah, but you can do that next.

Time once we're going 39, please.

Do your close friends tend to be older or younger than you? There's an asterisk beside this. I don't know why that's there.

Why is there an asterisk?

I don't know. I'm trying to figure that out. Do your close friends tend to be older or younger than you? You don't keep a lot of close friends.

No, I would say older, though.

I think you're right.

Yeah. I think that is just a product of kind of my career. Joining the national team at a young age. Everyone else was older.

But you lasted so long.

Yeah, definitely. There's younger guys who came through, but, I mean, those initial Friendships and relationships were all forged with that kind of generation or two ahead of me. So from that perspective. Absolutely. And I think, you know, going a layer deeper here, you always want me to open up, but no, no.

Well, there's, there's an asterisk. I figured out the asterisks. Go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say that, you know, losing my dad when I was just after I turned 20, that I think I crave kind of that fatherly guidance somewhat. I, I feel that there are friends or people in my life that I've looked to maybe fill that role a little bit. So look for an older person to get advice from or seek to maybe connect with someone like that more than someone who's younger as well. So going a layer deeper there.

That's interesting though, because the asterisk, it dives a little deeper and what it asks is what kind of people do you like to spend time with, which you're kind of getting into that. What do such people bring out in you that others do not? But really. And there's one more question that I'm going to ask that they've added on here, but I know it's, it's the asterisk ones, they've, they've got extra questions with them to go deeper. But you're, it's, it's interesting that that's. But the older you get, it's, it's almost harder to find the older friend, almost mentor type scenarios because you're older and you are unique enough in your practices, your thinking and your health levels that it's harder to draw someone who could be a mentor to you the older you get. Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah.

And, and so, so when you look at the question, what do such people bring out in you and others do. Not that I think that's why.

Yeah. And that's why I think I default to thinking of my kind of closest friends as that early group of guys that I was with, with the national team who are all, you look, you know, five years older than me or more so they're always that step ahead in stages of life either with where they're at with their kids or, or what have you. So. Yeah.

But also good question. Which you looked up to them for performance league like crazy Y. So this last, this last one, this is a tough one. Maybe you can't answer this and maybe you can answer it as you.

But there's more to this.

There's one more question and it's what can people learn about you? By looking at your friends.

Gosh. Yeah, I gotta think about that.

Yeah. Crazy. Hey. Okay, we're gonna leave that one as a cliffhanger. You can, you can reflect on that. What can people learn about you by looking at your friends? And for those you listening, think about that. I'm going to recap these questions so you can think about it for yourself. Do your close friends tend to be older or younger than you? As the start of the question. And then it goes into, what kind of people do you like to spend time with? What do such people bring out in you that others do not? And what can people learn about you by looking at your friends? Remembering what we know about the five people that we hang out most with. And when it comes to training and being your best self and working out all those good things, those five people will influence that heavily for sure. Do they want to take you out for wings and a beer on Friday or do they want to go and do something, I don't know, that serves different options?

Yeah.

Well, we hope you enjoyed this. Thank you for.

Thank you, Kari, for all of your. Yeah, I. That was a challenging number 39 there. I. Yeah, I want to thank you for all your answers and providing our listeners with all that information. Again, we just scratched the surface today. There's so much to learn and so much to learn to do the training thing right, that keep learning, keep reaching out to people, look for experts. Kari gave you some qualifications to pick up on and finally, we want to hear, hear from you. So if there is a topic, if there's questions you have for Kari about training or what have you. PD powerconditioning.com we want your feedback on the show. We want you to share the show. We love that you're listening and we will be talking to you guys all again soon.

And if you don't want to contact him, look for us on social because your questions can help other people. So Instagram is empower, conditioning, Facebook. You can look for either of us. And we have an amazing group called Empowered Top Performers. If you would like to be part of that, just let us know. All kinds of great health tips in there. So have a great one, guys, and thank you so much for listening.