A Mindset That Will Change Your Fitness Forever

It seems that the more I'm in the online fitness trainer industry, the more questions I get about "the best" this and "the best" that. Whether it's diets, nutrition, supplementation, or programming, everyone wants to know what "the best" is.

Honestly, I can't blame them. If I didn't know everything about something I was dedicating time to, I'd want to make sure that I was doing the best I could for my goal, that way no time is wasted and I have a strong return on my investment.

WHAT IS "THE BEST?"

I find it very interesting that "the best" isn't always what we think it is. I believe that happens for a couple of reasons:

1. "The best" for you isn't "the best" for me and vice versa.

2. "The best" (or any version of that meaning) is often used to sell things that actually aren't so great.

When I get a question regarding "the best", I actually enjoy it quite a bit because I like to shatter people's paradigms. That's what I'd like to do today in this short article. Now, as much as I'd like to sit here and tell you about how much I hate diets and how no single diet is "best" for fat loss, I'd like to head in a different direction. I've been creating a lot of content around nutrition, so I'm going to ask your attention for a couple of minutes to talk about what's done in the gym.

So, the question I'll be addressing today is:

"What's the best rep range for ________?"

Fill in the blank with whatever you choose. Fat loss, toning, muscle-building, whatever. You get the idea.

TIME TO SHATTER YOUR PARADIGM

Here's the quick answer to all of those questions:

There isn't a best rep range for each specific thing all the time. Is there a rep range that is shown to build more muscle than others? Sure. Is there a rep range that will most likely burn more calories? Sure. The thing is, it's not the rep range that's ideal. If 8-12 reps have shown to build the most muscle, that means that I can just go grab a couple of brewskis and start curling those for 8-12 reps. Next thing you know, I'll have some great-looking muscles.

However, it just doesn't work that way. So how does it work?

Well, there is a plethora of answers to that, but as an online fitness trainer, I want to focus on one thing specifically. That thing is what I like to call the muscle mindset.

THE MUSCLE MINDSET

When most people go into the gym (whether they have a program or not) they come to the conclusion that they're going to perform _____ exercise for __ reps. This is the mindset of a beginner. This is the mindset of someone who is going to the gym to get their workout in. Is it wrong? Of course not. Is it ideal? Not really.

An individual that is a little more advanced would normally go into the gym knowing that they're going to perform ____ exercise for __ reps. This individual would then go into the exercise using a weight that is challenging at that amount of reps, understanding that the heavier they go, the more challenging it is going to be, assuming that the more reps or weight that they do, the more they'll get out of the exercise. Is it wrong? Nope. Is it ideal? I don't think so.

Someone who is much more advanced that understands their body well will go into the gym with what I call the muscle mindset. The people (beginners and intermediates) that I talked about going into the workout wanting to move weight in order to work their muscles. Someone that has the muscle mindset flips that thinking on its head and does something different. This individual goes into the workout knowing how the exercises they perform will affect their muscles. But that's not all.

They also take a completely different approach during the movement.

When performing an exercise, someone with the muscle mindset won't just move the weight. This person will ask him/herself the following question:

"How can I engage this muscle in order to move the weight and perform the exercise?"

This changes everything.

For example, when I'm going to the bench to perform an incline dumbbell bench press, I understand that the purpose of the upper chest is to bring the humerus (the bone of the upper arm) closer to the middle of my chest. Therefore, I'll perform the exercise thinking to myself, "ok Adam, you need to squeeze/flex/engage the upper chest in order to bring the upper arm closer to your chest, and that's what will move the dumbbells. Someone that doesn't have the muscle mindset would say something like "ok, I need to push these weights up with my arms for 8 reps."

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL ABOUT IT?

"The muscle mindset? That sounds like something you made up. What's the point?"

That's fair. I mean, I did kinda make that term up on the spot. Put any attractive word in front of a concept and it'll sound wayyyy cooler (thanks a lot, fitness industry).

Although I made up the term, the mindset is very real. Having a good connection with your body and understanding how your muscles work during a certain exercise is extremely beneficial. That mind-muscle connection will allow you to do the following:

1. Get the most out of your exercise

2. Have more control throughout the movement

3. Have better technique and form throughout the movement

4. Improve your strength and muscle growth

Having the ability to master those four things will allow you to make great strides along your fitness journey. Getting the most out of your exercise will allow you to see more change in your muscles, causing more definition from growth. Having more control and better technique will keep you away from injury and will improve your ability to increase your strength. From that improved strength, you'll have a CNS (central nervous system) that will be able to engage more muscle fibers.

THE TAKEAWAY

The muscle mindset is simply a way of rethinking your training. In one sentence, here's how I can explain it best: Instead of moving the weight to contract the muscle, contract the muscle in order to move the weight.

You'll find that you'll get more out of each rep, leading to an increase in muscle growth and definition, bringing you the lean physique you've always wanted.

THANKS FOR BEING HERE!

I love writing, but to have someone like you reading what I write is...well friggin' amazing. Thank you for taking time out of your day to hear what I have to say. My hope and prayer is that the info in these articles gives you a new way of thinking, as well as a tangible takeaway that you can implement in your life. If you have any questions on anything health/fitness/nutrition, feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to serve you however I can with information about online personal training.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam is a fitness professional, baseball fan, and cookie fanatic based in Fort Collins, Colorado. After hanging up the cleats, this online personal trainer found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. As an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, he is constantly moved to help people improve in all walks of life. If you’re interested in hiring Adam as your coach, fill out an application here.

How to Boost Your Metabolism

How to Boost Your Metabolism

We've all asked Google this question before: "How do I boost my metabolism?"

Unfortunately, Google has most likely given you tons and tons of different sources for answers. Some may have been similar, some may have differed. Point is, you're sick and tired of feeling unsure. 

Don't worry, we'll answer your question without hesitation or doubt in this article. But before we begin to answer the question of "can or how do I boost my metabolism?", we must first go over what the metabolism actually is. 

Metabolism

The Merriam-Webster definition of metabolism is: 

- The sum of the processes in the buildup and destruction of protoplasm; specifically the chemical changes in living cells by which energy is provided for vital processes and activities and new material is assimilated. 

If you're like me, you read that over five different times, took a break from the computer, did some errands, came back to the computer, read it five more times, still thought you were reading Chinese, and proceeded to follow up with this statement:

So let's simplify things. When we're talking about metabolism in health, fitness, and nutrition, we're referring to the amount of calories our body burns in a day without activity. If your metabolism is slow, it means that your body is burning minimal amounts of calories in a day. If your metabolism if fast, it means that your body is burning tons and tons of calories in a day. 

So if we want to know how to "boost our metabolism", we need to know a couple of things:

1. What determines current metabolic rate
2. How to improve the determinant of metabolic rate

What Determines Metabolic Rate?

When determining how many calories you're burning in a day, it's likely that you'll want to figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate. Your BMR will tell you how many calories you burn in a day while at rest. Essentially, BMR will tell you how many calories your body will burn while you Netflix and chill all day long. 

So how do you figure out your basal metabolic rate? Well, there are a lot of factors that play into your BMR like sex, age, weight, and height. As you can see, all of these factors change over time and there's not much we can do about it. We age, and as we age our bodies change. Unfortunately a lot of those changes are out of our control.

Although some of those changes are inevitable, there is one big factor that we can control well with physical activity. It's our lean muscle mass. 

Lean muscle mass has been shown to be one of the greatest determinants of metabolic rate (1). Someone with the same age, weight, height, but lower lean mass will have a lower Basal Metabolic Rate than someone else with the same age, weight, and height, but higher lean mass. 

Simply put, the more lean muscle tissue that your body carries, the more calories your body will burn at rest. 

But what does this mean for you along your fitness journey? How can you apply this knowledge to your life and use it to benefit your health and physique?

How to Increase Lean Muscle Mass

There are plenty of things we can do to in order to burn more calories throughout the day like walk more, do a killer circuit workout, or add 30 minutes of cardio to the end of every single weight lifting session. When it comes to thinking about burning calories, have you noticed that we almost always think of what kind of additional activity we can do to burn more calories? The last time you ate more food than you were supposed to I can almost guarantee you told yourself you'd work twice as hard in the gym to make up for it. Why do we do that? Why don't we think more about what we can do to make sure our body is burning more calories while we do nothing? After all, if we're trying to ensure that our approach to fitness is optimal, practical, and sustainable, wouldn't it be best to be burning more calories at rest, rather than working more and more and more?

So what's the solution? What can we do to make sure our body is a calorie furnace 24/7? The answer is:

Increasing lean muscle mass through resistance training.

Resistance training should be the staple of every workout program whether you're trying to build muscle, burn fat, or do both. It sends a signal to your body that it needs to be stronger, leaner, and build more mass in order to adapt to the load that's being placed upon it. Cardio however, sends a signal to your body telling it to be more efficient with the energy that it has. Therefore the more frequently you do cardio, the better your body will be at using less calories in order to fuel the activity.

Am I saying that you have to or should cut out cardio completely? Of course not. But I do believe that if you're trying to lose fat, avoid a plateau, and avoid getting burnt out, cardio should be a supplement to your resistance training.

If you're at a plateau and you're doing more and more cardio, stop. Lift weights. Apply the same intensity in your cardio sessions to your weight lifting sessions and I'm willing to bet that your body will begin to build a faster metabolism. 

So how do you boost your metabolism? 

Increase your lean muscle mass by lifting weights! 

Short, sweet, and to the point. 

References

(1) Speakman, J R, and C Selman. “Physical Activity and Resting Metabolic Rate.” The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society., U.S. National Library of Medicine, Aug. 2003
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14692598.

Thanks for reading!

Be sure to follow Poehlmann Fitness and Subscribe to the YouTube channel! Why? Because you'll get notified when awesome videos get uploaded for you to watch. And that's never been a bad thing. 

Adam is a fitness professional, Chipotle fanatic, and cookie enthusiast based in Fort Collins, CO. After hanging up the baseball cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. 

Adam is an ACE CPT and Fitness Nutrition Specialist. His years of experience in fat loss, muscle hypertrophy, and sports performance training have helped people improve in all walks of life. If you're interested in hiring Adam as your coach, fill out an application here.

Do This to Significantly Improve Your Life

I don't care if you're a 40 year-old mom of three, or a 20 year-old kid just trying to impress the girl in your biology class, resistance training needs to be a priority in your training regimen. Whether you're trying to compete on stage or just look a little bit better naked, lifting weights is extremely important for many reasons.

Not only does lifting help to significantly improve your overall body composition, it also can help the functionality of your body, improve your bone strength, as well as improve the your metabolic rate and help you burn more calories at rest. But before I get into all of the benefits, let's go over the basics of lifting weights. 

Lifting Weights: The Basics

Understanding the many benefits on resistance training is good and well, but you first need to understand the different aspects of weight training and what they entail. Let's briefly discuss the some basic terminology just to make sure we're all on the same page.

Resistance Training: A form of exercise in which you move your limbs against resistance in order to improve muscular strength and endurance. The resistance comes in many forms like bodyweight, bands, weighted bars (dumbbells and barbells) as well as machines & pulleys.

Reps (or repetitions): The number of times you perform a specific exercise/movement.

Sets: The number of cycles of the repetitions that you finish. 

Hypertrophy Training: Hypertrophy in the fitness world means "muscle building". The actual definition is the growth of an organ or tissue due to an increase in cell size. Hypertrophy training is a type of training that is used to build lean muscle tissue. The most basic and common form of this type of training is typically 3-5 sets of 8-12 reps (note that this is NOT the only way you can build muscle. Building muscle takes the joined effort of a lot of different practices/habits in and out of the gym). 

Strength Training: A form of training designed to increase muscular strength. Typically 1-5 repetitions, usually 3-5 sets. This repetitions are not done to failure and each set has much more rest in between the next. 

1RM: This stands for your 1 rep max which is the most amount of weight you can move during an exercise for 1 repetition. 

These are the basic terms that I may use throughout this article, so feel free to scroll back up if you ever get lost!

Benefit #1: Significantly Improve Your Body Composition

Let's be honest, we're all just trying to look better naked, am I right? 

Glad we agree.

Now that we're all on the same page, let's get into the details with this one. Being lean and tight is going to be your best option when it comes to looking better naked whether you're a guy or girl. Doesn't matter your gender, no one is working hard in the gym to achieve an ultimate level of flab. The optimal way to create a lean, tight body is to make sure that you have a relatively low amount of body fat, and a high amount of lean muscle mass under your skin. The best way to achieve that is by lifting weights in a way that will force your muscle cells to grow. This is called hypertrophy training. Lifting weights for 3-5 sets of 8-12 reps has been shown to to increase lean muscle tissue (1). I need to clear something else up before I move on. 8-12 reps does NOT mean that you are only sticking to this range. 8-12 reps is simply a general range of repetitions that has been shown to increase muscle hypertrophy. There are many ways to enable our muscle cells to grow. 

Your body is extremely smart, and it will adapt to the environment and situations that you place it in. Take a minute and imagine a long distance runner. What do they look like to you? My guess would be very skinny. If not, you haven't watched the olympics enough. When's the last time you've seen a muscular distance runner? You haven't. This is true because that individual's body has been trained to be very efficient at running long distances.

Now, think of a sprinter. Much more muscular, right? That's because that person's body has been told that it needs to be good at powerful movements. 

It's all about what you're telling your body to do. If you train and tell your body that it needs to be good at moving weight, what's it going to do? It's going to increase the size of the muscle cells to move that weight easily.

Anyway, increasing your lean muscle mass and decreasing your body fat by performing resistance training will lead to a better body composition a.k.a a better looking body. And yes, I know what you're thinking ladies.

"Won't resistance training make me look like a guy?" No, testosterone will make you look like a guy, and you don't have enough of that so quit worrying. I'll tell you this, though: resistance training can most definitely get you that "toned" and "shaped" body that you've endlessly climbed towards on the stairmaster. 

Benefit #2: Improve the Functionality of Your Body

Not only are we trying to look better naked, but we're also trying to improve the longevity of our lives. There is no better way to work on this than by progressing in many different aspects of our health. When we think of resistance training the first thing that comes to mind is muscle growth and improvements in strength. I've got a surprise for you. Benefits to resistance training go much farther than your muscles. Weight training has been shown to have several health benefits that can improve not only the longevity of your life but the quality of your life as well (2). Some of these benefits are:

- Increased proprioception
- Increased movement control
- Improved cognitive abilities and self-esteem
- Improved bone density
- Decreased pain 

Ensuring that your body is performing at its best from gut health, to proprioception, to every-day strength is a great way to improve your quality of life. 

Remember, a lot of what we experience is a result of something within. 

Benefit #3: Improved Metabolic Rate

This is one of my favorite benefits, so I'm going to write another article speaking specifically on this topic. Stay tuned!

We have a big problem in the United States. It's an obsession with an "all or nothing" attitude. We place suffering on a pedestal. Why do you think that severe diets are still used even though they make people's lives miserable? Because people get praise for suffering and that makes them feel good. The same thing happens with training.

We place such a big emphasis on our workouts, what we're doing in the gym, how hard we're going, but don't think much about what's happening outside of the gym in order to lose fat and build muscle. 

An improved metabolic rate is one of the greatest reasons to lift weights. Resistance training has been shown to increase the amount of calories burned at rest. Why? Because the body needs to work harder when it has increased muscle mass. Here's something I want you to understand though (especially if you're a female). An increased metabolic rate does NOT come from an unbelievable increase in muscle mass. I'll give you an example. One of my clients came to me maintaining her weight at an average of 1700 calories each day. She weighed about 101 lbs at that point. She now weighs around 102-104 lbs and she maintains her weight at about 2300 calories. She has a little more muscle mass now, and her metabolism has transformed into this crazy calorie furnace. If she needed or wanted to lose body fat, she would be in such a great position to do so. Why? Think about it. She wouldn't need to do much additional work. Just dropping her calories a touch each week would do wonders. 

When it comes to fat loss, it's about priming the body to burn as many calories as possible with as little effort as possible. Why? Because that's sustainable. Imagine if you plateaued your fat loss while lifting, doing 1 hour of cardio, while eating 1000 calories. You seriously think you can happily maintain that for years to come?

Nope, didn't think so. 

If you wan't to be burning more calories throughout your day, using resistance training to increase your metabolic rate is essential. 

Takeaways

The takeaway from this article is simple. Lift weights. 

Programming plays a crucial role in weight training for progress. If you're interested in coaching, I'm taking on clients and have some openings available. Fill out an application here.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this article with your friends. 

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References

1. Thomas, Michael H., and Steve P. Burns. “Increasing Lean Mass and Strength: A Comparison of High Frequency Strength Training to Lower Frequency Strength Training.”International Journal of Exercise Science, Berkeley Electronic Press, 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4836564/.

2. Westcott, W L. “Resistance Training Is Medicine: Effects of Strength Training on Health.”Current Sports Medicine Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22777332.

About the Author

Adam is a fitness professional, Chipotle fanatic, and cookie enthusiast based in Fort Collins, CO. After hanging up the baseball cleats, he found a strong interest in the human body and how it performs. Since then, Adam has been transforming lives through fitness in a fun and encouraging atmosphere. 

Adam is an ACE CPT and has years of experience in fat loss, muscle hypertrophy, and sports performance training.