Mike Hartman’s Mindful Fitness Plan

Welcome to the Mike Hartman Show. Mike is a performance coach and former Stanley cup champion with the New York Rangers. Topics on this show are focused around stories, mindset and champions. Mike will also go into details about helping you with your pain points and struggles and finding motivational solutions on how to have the mindset of a champion. Now, here's your host, Mike Hartman.

Welcome back to another episode. Today I'm going to get into the topic of mindfulness. And what is mindfulness? Well, if you look up mindfulness, it says it's a state achieved by focusing on one's awareness or being in the present moment while calmly really acknowledging or accepting the feelings or thoughts or your body sensations. We usually use this in a therapeutic technique as it was used with me and I personally used mindfulness without knowing about it in 1987. And I'll share a little story with you. So it was 1987. I was going into my second year with the Buffalo Sabers and they told me I was in the plans that year and, and that right after the season, in April in my junior, I got sent back to junior hockey after my first year with the Sabres, I was eligible. When the Sabers didn't make the playoffs, I went down, played the playoffs in North Bay, Ontario. So down in North Bay and I end up pulling my stomach muscles in a game. So I thought it was a little nagging injury, didn't think too much about it, went back home and back then I should have been more mindful and took time off, but I didn't. I went right back to training, got into my training program and it got worse and worse and worse. So I did what I didn't want to do is I called the Buffalo Sabers trainer Jim Pizzatelli at the time nicknamed Pizza, and I said, Pete's, I got a problem. My stomach is just, I, it's, this is not getting better. And he says, well, how long has this been going on? I said, for, well, at least a month. He says, well, we got to get you here to Buffalo right away. So I get on a plane, I go to Buffalo. And while I'm in Buffalo, I'm just sore as could be. I mean, the doctors are looking at me and I talked about it a little bit in the last episode. They ended up sending me to this doctor in, in Chicago. And I mean, like, and I don't want to repeat the same thing I did last time. But we practiced massage. They did massage therapy there, physical therapy. We had some of the best athletes in the world as, as well as we did sports psychology and part of what I had to do is I had to be closing my eyes and having, you know, nothing else to think about but being fully in the present. So, you know, where am I, where am I going with this? I'm going to talk about a little bit about mindful training today because I don't want to repeat the same episode. All you have to do is listen to the gold paint theory. And when I first was introduced to this. But learning mindfulness was something that I didn't realize I knew I was even doing it. And I. And once I came back from Chicago. So I'm going to elaborate a little bit more in into this story. But when I got back from Chicago after doing this training, I realized that I had a slowdown as an athlete and understand that I had to work on my fitness level and my training level. I know a lot of us use the word conditioning in sports or athletic training, but this is for everybody. So I want to talk about, you know, thinking about your fitness level and I'm going to give you a little bit of a fitness program today that I use. And the first thing I'm going to start out with is, you know, being mindful within your. Your fitness training is being fully present but also understanding when to move on or go even further. What I mean by that is like the definitive definition of fitness to me is the ability to recover. So when you're recovered, that's when you go. So if you're playing a game, you're playing a hockey, baseball, soccer, whatever it is, you're playing football and you're really good that first time out, well, what's going to happen the next time when you're not recovered and go out? Well, you might get hurt. It's the same thing in your training. Now at my age, I play a lot of pickleball. So if I'm playing pickleball and I'm good for the first, you know, the first round we're playing, but I'm not really strong leading up to the next rounds. Well, you're going to end up getting hurt. So one thing I really want to talk about within your training is having a really good plan both on the conditioning side and also on body movement side, using your strength, your natural strength. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a program. Go over it here on how I love this program. You could visit the program at Hartman Academy so you could see all the exercises there for you. You could follow this before you start this program. It's really important that you consult with your physician or your trainer or professional because this is maybe not for everybody. And it's really good that you actually talk to somebody first. But the exercises are there. Please consult somebody before you do this. We don't want anybody getting hurt. So the first thing we do is we talk about everything that we've always talked about. The importance an athlete, whether you're the workplace athlete, which is you work in a company and you want to stay fit because we believe in that, we believe everybody's an athlete or you're an athlete that competes pickleball, racquetball, tennis, sports, hockey, whatever level it is, whatever age it is weekend warrior. And when doing this, it's important that you have a plan. So we always start with a baseline, especially in your training. So it's really important that you know where you are fitness wise. That's why I recommend a good trainer, somebody that may have their degree in it, somebody that has the initials like C.S.C.S. it's called their strength, you know, and, and I'm not trying to take away from any regular personal trainers out there, but it's important that you show somebody this or you know, you start off taking like a VO2 test. They have those at your local YMCAs and, or, or gyms, possibly where it measures your recovery time. But before we get too deep into that, I want to talk about about the fitness program with you. So the first thing that, that we do in this program is, is it's very important that you have some sort of a dynamic warm up. And that means just slowly being mindful, warming up your body. And I don't mean just getting right into it, you know, do some leg swings, doing some arm movements, moving stretches. I don't like a lot of static stretches. Before, before you do this type of program, I want your body to get warmed up. Your we start with your shoulders down to your core, your hips all the way through, all the way down, head to toe. And you're really warmed up before you start. So we're always stretching, but more of a dynamic stretch before you work out. Now to do this bodyweight training program, it's more based on the numbers but not trying to break records. So usually I say if you're a beginner and you could do about 10 repetitions to start per exercise. So when you're finishing with the total repetitions in this type of training program, and I'll go over that in a minute, it's about 480 total repetitions, getting serious is about 15 reps per set. So we're going to talk, let's say push ups for example. You're going to do the 15 push ups and you're going to do 15 repetitions done correctly. We call it corrective exercise training. CET corrective exercise training. So if you do that program, it's 700 in total repetitions. The advanced is 20 repetitions. That equals about 960 total within the fitness program that I'm going to share with you in a minute. And then on the ultimate challenge is 25 repetitions and that's around 1200 total. And I learned this years ago. If you remember Herschel Walker, one of the all time great football players, he did a similar program where he counted how many pushups and pull ups that he would do in a day. Body weight squats. He later then did weights as well, but he really focused on his body. But I call this being mindful because you're mindful of your own body. You're being fully present right at the moment where you're working out. But at the same time you're not going to go on until you're recovered. So listen to this word. Do not go to the next exercise until you're recovered. And yes, I'm going to get to it. Be patient with me. It's important that I go over this. So I like doing this about six days a week. But Monday, Wednesday, Friday would be the strength part of it. The Tuesdays, Thursdays and let's say Saturdays is more of the conditioning part, you know. So we tell some of our hockey players to. Let's say you're doing, you know, your conditioning. You do two miles around the track as your warm up and you start with doing hundreds, two sets of a hundreds with recovery. So it's a sprint of a football field. And then when you're ready to go for the next sprint, you do another sprint. So you could do up to three or four of those sprints and then you hit, you know, the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, all the way through 10 and just do like or two sprints into two sprints each of each exercise. Some people are visual. I could explain this to you @hartman academy no.com and you could ask questions under the area of where the training program is. All you got to do is click in the middle of the page. Then it will say audio blog. But you have to scroll down the page. You'll see the three, the first three audio blogs and you click on it. That will further then take you down the page to the mike Hartman Fitness program. Or you could do a straight conditioning at a low pace to keep your heart rate down. You could do a straight three mile run if you want. You could do an aerobic skate and I could explain what that is for you hockey players. Anyway, so your conditioning is done there with, with good stretching, a good static stretch when you're done. And I'll explain that to static stretching is more of holding that stretch. So this is what we do in between. Again, I talk a lot about yoga stretches and I we use that within our workout or one of our last episodes was Ali Faber who's got a great video on, on, on stretching. So you could go back and use, use her great, great stuff, great information that she provided. Some of it could be, you know, recumbent bike jump, roping, seated bike steer, climber, elliptical. I like boxing, not necessarily hitting somebody, you know, when you're doing it. Running, walking, hopscotch even. We do that through the, or using the agility ladder, doing stuff through the agility ladder, the dynamic warmup. And then you about 30 minutes of a baseline, probably baseline training and a warm up at the same time. And then you include some of these higher intensity exercises. But I just can't give you what I'm talking about because even though it might sound like it's not making sense, you might be visual but everybody's different. So that's why you need to talk to somebody first. And again, please consult your physician. So let's talk about week one of the training program that we do. So when we do this program, we're going to go all the way through, which is 10 weeks of training. So I called a 10. Like it's a 10 week training program, what you're going to do. So week one is, remember I said these numbers earlier on, it might be 10 push ups, it might be 15, 20 or 25. So exercise one is a standard pushup. So let's say we're going to do 10. You might even be able to get only five in so five pushups, you slowly get up because sometimes it's dangerous to pop up and down. And when you're recovered, we'll do 10 squats with the stability ball against the wall. Keep your back straight, your head up, knees bent, looking up, good form. Then we'll do a double crunch. And again these are on the video. So we're going to show this on the video. So that's number one right there. So we finish that and we do that a total of three to four times. That seems like a lot. So think about your push ups. That's 40 pushups right there. That's going to be. If you're doing just 10, that's going to be. Or not just. If you do 10, then you're going to do total of 10 wall squats with the ball. So now you've done 80 now total. So if you can see where we're going with this and the same thing with the double crunch, you're going to be doing four sets. You're recovered, you have a stopwatch. When you're ready, we're going to do a dive bombers push up. We're going to do 10 of those. The next thing we're going to do is a lateral squat or I call it under the fence. Then the third thing is an air bite crunch and we're going to repeat that three to four times with good recovery. And when you're recovered, you've had some water, you've repeated that for a total of four times. That's the elite level. If you could do that, some of us might only be able to do two. This is the tough program. And then the next one is the diamond pushup. So you do a. Let's say you do 10 diamond pushups. You do a hamstring curl with the stability ball is next for 10 of those. And then you're going to go do 10 alternating supermans on each side. And for those that don't know who it is again, we're going to have it on our website at Hartman Academy. So you can go see that this is all done through Monday, Wednesday and Friday on week one. Then we get to the last round. So there's four rounds and the last round is a close grip push up. This is set number four in the new series. Right. We're starting off. We've already done the first three series. This is number four, close grip push up. Then we do stability ball pull in. That's almost where you're in the push up position and you're pulling that ball in. It really works your core great, great program. And we do upright rows with the bands. So that's week one of the fitness program. And it sounds like a lot. It sounds a little bit confusing. So you're going to repeat that all the way through. It's right there for your training program. We compete that we complete this through a total of. You're going to do a total of four weeks with that. That's four weeks of that training program. So then we continue on to. I'm not going to go through Each one here, it's going to confuse you. The best thing to do is to go to the website Hartman Academy. You're going to scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see the fitness program and it will clearly explain it there. Because a lot of us are visual, they're probably saying, what, Mike, that wasn't too mindful of you going through this without visually seeing it, but this is a podcast. This is what we have. I love this bodyweight training program. And looking, you know, I developed this years ago when I was playing hockey. This was my, actually it was my in season program that I would do. So after practice I would, I would do body weight training during the season. And we have to know one thing is athletes. Now this is at the, at the higher levels. As an athlete, you do, you build the engine during the off season and you maintain it during the season. But a lot of us are weekend warriors. A lot of us play, let's say you're playing high school hockey, which is good. But if you're playing high school and sometimes you don't want to, you know, your goal is not really to play college or anything else. You just want to be a good competitive hockey player. You could do this type of program year round. But I do want you to keep in your mind that definition of fitness is the ability to recover. So no matter what it is, if you're doing your sprint, if you're doing my body weight training program, whatever it is, clearly think about recovery because it's important. And you'll listen to our dietitian where she talks about properly fueling your body like we talked about in a lot of these episodes. You could also look on the website and you will see her is right there as well. She will talk about, you know, the lot about the Mediterranean diet, about how good that is for you. So a lot of people ask me about different things. I'm not a dietitian, but we do have a good one on our team. Any questions about this, feel free to ask. I knew I went through these pretty quick. Just the one thing to keep in mind, I'll try to like if I simplify it for you, you know, the one thing that I talked about is I like to work out six days a week and then I have a recovery day. So I know my Monday, Wednesday and Friday. What I do is I'll do the body weight training program included with some yoga stretches. You could use Aliefer's program. It would be great for it. I think it's important. I love yoga. You could add some imagery into this training program. Monday, Wednesday and Friday you do your body weight training. You could do Allie's yoga program. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. We call that your conditioning. I like to mix it up where I'll do a sprint on one day of the week. I'm 55 years old. I don't train like a pro. Everyone trains differently based on what your trainer or your physician might believe, which is best for you. But one sprint training and then the other two days I like to do a nice conditioning workout, even a walk. I didn't mention that. How did I not mention that earlier? But that's also part of your conditioning. You can go as hard or not as hard as you want during this program. I hope everybody understood this. I know I was going really fast again without looking at something that's visual. It's tough. But Monday, Wednesday and Friday is your bodyweight training program. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday is your conditioning Hartman Academy. Any questions? Love to help you and I wish you all the best in your journey and looking forward to seeing you on the site.

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Sam.