Going to the Gym (When You Really Don't Want To)

I am a personal trainer by trade. I spent four years going to school with the intent of doing this for the rest of my life.

I read articles and books on strength and conditioning for at least half an hour every day.

I have, more often than I like to admit, been that jerk who chastises people who find excuses not to work out.

And damn it, I did not want to work out last week.

The first week of April was a rough one for me. I decided to leave my old job at LIFT Fitness and was lucky enough to find work at Wildcat Fitness within two days, but as anyone who has gone through transitioning to another phase in their professional career can tell you, it's one of the most stressful things you can put yourself through. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of work put in for little tangible gain. And while I'm not exactly starting over, I know that the next few months will be spent building up a new client base, and there is a lot more stress to come.

Working out seemed like the least important thing I could have been doing.

A friend of mine has a pretty nice home gym setup, complete with a squat rack and adjustable dumbbells, and he was gracious enough to let me use his equipment while I was between gyms. Even with his generosity, it took just about all the willpower I had left over from my job search to put on a pair of shorts and squat. I did six sets with a weight I thought was kind of heavy, and quit.

Sometimes that's good enough.

Even for someone who more or less does it for a living, I know that working out should not be the most important thing in your life. That does not, however, mean it's not worth doing even during the most stressful times of your life. Here are some tips to get you to the gym when it's the last thing you want to do.

1. Get in and do something.

Not every workout needs to leave you drenched in sweat with jelly legs that can barely get you back to the car. Sometimes just getting to the gym and moving around is enough to keep you from losing the progress you have made with such workouts in the past. Do a set or two of goblet squats, some pullups, your favorite machine and ab exercise, and go home. Don't think ten minutes in the gym is a waste of time.

2. Have someone else write your workout.

I've mentioned it before, but this can do wonders for your work ethic. I was surprised at just how much willpower it took for me to write an honest workout for myself, until I bought Dan Trink's arm program and, more recently, started following the Olympic lifting workouts on Central Kentucky Weightlifting's blog. There's no more, "should I do another exercise for my shoulders?". Instead, you look at what's written, and do it.

3. Work out with someone who needs it.

There is no shame in getting out of shape. Life happens. But sometimes it gets to the point where it puts you at risk for losing your quality of life, and going to the gym becomes a literal life-saving endeavor. Maybe you have a coworker who has constant back and neck pain from her office job, maybe your mother is becoming at risk for type II diabetes, maybe your friend is clinically obese. Work out with them. Hold them accountable for making this important change. If you miss a workout, they might miss a workout. When it's someone else's health at risk, getting to the gym makes a big jump on your priority list. And hey- they might end up being your inspiration instead. 

These are just some ideas to get you through a rough patch. My goal is to make everyone I train love the gym as much as I do, and to make those patches as short as possible. As for me, all it took was a new facility and a new pair of Olympic lifting shoes to get me back on track.

Despite matching absolutely nothing I own

Go forth, fight through it, and pick up heavy things.

A Plea for Depth

"Go through a full range of motion" is the exercise equivalent of "eat your vegetables"; we've been told by our trainers/mothers that it's important, but we don't like to do it and will find every excuse we can not to. There are many different reasons to only go through a partial range of motion on any exercise -you can put more weight on the bar, you can get more reps, it seems safer- and they all have one thing in common:

With very, very rare exceptions, a full range of motion (ROM) is a requirement for optimal progress and safety. And in no exercise is the more important -or more widely ignored- than the squat. 

The squat is a scary but misunderstood beast. When broken down in to all of it's separate components, it's one of the most technically complex movements of the human body. I have textbooks with literally entire chapters  devoted to this one lift, and for good reason. However, when done correctly, the squat is perhaps the most effective, efficient, and safest exercises you can do in the gym.

Unfortunately, "correctly" means "to full depth", and this is where most people fall short (pun absolutely intended). "Full depth" means that your femur is parallel to the ground, and the crease of the hips is just slightly below the top of the knee.

Correct depth

Way too shallow. 

The head may be lower, but the hips sure aren't. 

When someone doesn't want to squat to full depth, the most common reason they give is that it hurts their knees.

This makes absolutely no sense.

You don't do partial push ups to save the elbows, and you don't do partial squats to save the knees.A review of squatting kinematics by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (man, what would I do without them?) reveals that full squats are actually superior to knee extensions and partial squats during rehabilitation for a knee injury.  In fact, a partial squat is actually worse for your knees. In a partial squat, most of the stress on your knee is generated by the quadriceps pulling your tibia forward. Repetitive, one-directional pulling on any joint, knee or elsewhere, is a recipe for injury.

However, at the bottom of a full squat, the hamstrings kick in and balance the anterior stress on the knee with an opposing force. At full depth, with correct knee and foot position, the anterior and posterior forces acting on the knee are balanced. Balanced forces = safe knees.

Figure 2-11 from Mark Rippetoe's book Starting Strength, showing the forces acting on the knee at the bottom of a full squat

And no, lunges are not safer for your knees. Knee range of motion is knee range of motion.

The key here is technique. Some of the things I see people do when trying to squat (see above) are absolutely bad for the knees, and that's why proper form is so important. If you can't squat correctly, you're better off avoiding the exercise. But you'll really be missing out, and I suggest putting real effort into learning the technique and gaining the mobility necessary for a proper squat. Remember, as a personal trainer, I'm here to help you with both.

Here's a simple exercise to practice getting to full depth, which also doubles as a fantastic mobility routine for the hips.

Stand up straight with your feet shoulder-width apart and your toes pointed about 30 degrees outward. Sit down between your legs, and drop your butt as low as it will go without coming up on your toes. Put your elbows between your knees, and push them out so they track over your feet. Try to sit a bit lower. Hold the stretch for 3-5 seconds, stand up by driving your hips up and forward, and repeat for 10 reps.

A strong, full-depth squat is one of the best indicators of total-body strength and mobility we can measure. At Lift, we include it in our warm-ups, our strength and conditioning circuits, our athletic development programs, our weight-loss programs, our...well, you get the picture. We want you to get the most out of your workout, and that means doing each movement to its fullest. 

As always, go forth, get low, and lift heavy things.