Sticking to that New Year’s Resolution

Due to popular demand, I will touch on New Year’s fitness and health resolutions. The annual reoccurring trend. While I believe anytime is a good time to start making changes for the better, the time stamp of a new year is something special. I figured that since we’re a few weeks into the New Year, and resolutioners are facing the struggles of sticking to the new plan, it would be beneficial to touch on this topic.

Of course, the hardest part of a new healthy lifestyle plan is actually following it. Depending on your starting point and what your body is accustomed to, the amount of change in habits and lifestyle can be significant. Unfortunately, our bodies do not like rapid change, and become very uncomfortable when we decide to switch things up on them. 

First, habits are hard to change. It takes a significant amount of time to reset the neural wiring in our brains and change the natural predisposition we have to going about our days. If you are interested in how formulating habits works and how to change them, I recommend the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. A few take home points include that you need to create a positive feedback loop to help reinforce your good habits, the adjustment period takes a lot of mental energy to make a change, and once you’ve developed a new habit, it turns into a default setting for our bodies that we end up doing automatically. 

Diving a little deeper into the adjustment phase and the discomfort you will feel making the change, you should take into consideration how much mental and physical strain this will take on your body. This is where resoultioners fail. Attempting to make a change that is too drastic will send your body into an almost shock-like response. Remember, our bodies do not like change because change requires us to use excess energy and mental capacity. When we try and make too big of a change all at once, our bodies will fight against us with everything it has.

”Small changes for big results”

This brings us to the point of making small changes to achieve big results. You can think about this in the sense of a minimal effective load, meaning that you need to do just enough to get the result you want and no more. Traditionally, resoultioners go all out and their bodies go into high alert mood. Once this happens, it’s game over. This occurs when you drastically change your diet and exercise routine over the course of one day, or in an otherwise short period of time. Your body is going to respond negatively and put an end to the change by making it incredibly difficult, physically and mentally, to stick to the plan. You’ve, in a sense, triggered a “change detector” alarm and now it’s on full alert. Try to make a change now; it’s going to be almost impossible. This is one of the reasons why so many fail. 

Taking a “small changes” approach keeps your body’s change alarm at bay and allows you to sneak things past it. This makes it easier to stick to changes you are trying to make. The only disappointing thing here is that the results don’t always show in a day, or a week, or a month. These small changes will add up over time and become something much larger. Longer term thinking is huge here. It’s too easy to think in the short term. Take an even further look down the road and think about where the small changes will get you in 2, 5, even 10 years. Pace yourself, and the plan, with small increments of change and you’ll be surprisingly happy with the results. 

These small changes are easier to make. Who doesn’t like things they know they will succeed at? For example, small goals and their progressions can include:

Going for a 15-minute walk, progressing to 20 minutes, to 25 minutes, to 30 minutes.

Going to the gym and performing 3 sets of 10 repetitions on 3 exercises, progressing to 3 sets of 12 repetitions, to 3 sets of 15 repetitions.

These are not by any means the coolest things, or the most exciting. However, taking a closer look at what you are accomplishing is very important. To use the walking example, yes you are getting more activity, but you are also teaching yourself how to carve out time during your day to promote a healthier life habit. Yes, walking is fairly easy and may feel like you are not doing much. One thing at a time, though. Making the time is a mentally taxing thing. If you throw in a highly demanding activity on top of that, it will make it much harder to stick to. Keeping with the example of walking, now that you’ve made time for yourself and are sticking to the 30-minute routine, you can change one more variable. Remember, small changes for big results. The next small change could be running for 5 of the 30 minutes. Not the whole 30 minutes, just 5. After sticking to that for a week of two, maybe bump up the running time to 8-10 minutes out of the 30. Then add a few more minutes running every week or two and you’ll be running 30 minutes before you know it. 

I could go on and on about small changes and progressions, but I think you can get the idea from the above example. Finding the small, easily obtainable changes will make things easier on your body without triggering its change alarm. If you set it off by attempting to do too much at once, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. I wish all you New Year’s resoultioners all the best; keep working hard. 

As always, thanks for reading!

Ryan Goodell, CSCS

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Box Jumps: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Box jumps offer tons of benefits-so many that I incorporate them into my training regularly. However, I often see people either performing them incorrectly or attempting to use them as something that they are physiologically not.

Starting with the good, box jumps can be incorporated into a program with many different variations. They’re a great way to develop explosive power and to get triple extension. Triple extension is simultaneous extension of your hip and knee as well as plantarflexion at your ankle. Another benefit is that landing on a box, after jumping, takes out the impact landing force (eccentric loading) from falling back down to the ground after the jump. Simply put, the box is just a safe landing place to shorten the distance between you and the floor after you’ve reached the peak height of your jump. The box height is irrelevant because the INTENT to jump as high as possible is what matters the most. The intent to jump as high as possible will create a neural response to activate as much muscle as possible to jump as high as possible. When performing the box jump, you are attempting to adapt a neural response within your body’s system to jump higher. Now that that’s been explained, let’s get into the other stuff. 

First, let’s take a look at a properly performed box jump to have a reference point.

The fact that jumps are an expression of explosive power means that they are not to be used as a “cardio or conditioning” tool. You can see this rule being broken when someone is bouncing up and down on a box like in the video shown below.

The above action completely defeats the purpose of a box jump. The landing mechanics of these cardio box jumps are normally not great, either. Taking energy systems into consideration, explosive and powerful jumps use the creatine phosphate system, which is in charge of supplying instantaneous energy to the muscles when performing the jump. Also considering the neural factors, in order to adapt the nervous system to stimulate high amount of muscle fibers rapidly in a short period of time synergistically, box jumps need to be performed one at a time. Bouncing up and down on the box does not cause a maximal voluntary neural drive for every single jump, nor does it tap into the correct energy system to produce powerful jumps for each rep. If you are attempting to perform multiple jumps, you are better off performing them on level surface standing in place (i.e. squat jumps) or jumping forward for 1-5 reps.

The height of the box is yet another thing to take into consideration. If the box is too high, often people will not triple extend completely. They cut their triple extension short in order to flex their hips and tuck their knees in order to get their feet on top of the box. 

Below is an example of full triple extension.

A major contributor to this problem is ego. Everyone wants to jump on the highest box possible, right? Check the ego and use a box height that is appropriate for you. Remember, the box is only a safe place to land following your maximal effort jump. Now, if you are competing in a box jump competition, of which I don’t know any, then by all means jump on the highest box possible.

With all this being said, what does a normal set or pace for box jumps look like? 

Box jumps are a great tool to use in your programming, just use them correctly. Train smart, my friends.

Hope you enjoyed this article,

Ryan Goodell, CSCS 

If you enjoyed this and would like to help me out please share this article! 

If you are interested in other content from Weights and Stuff you can find it at:
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