Here’s some proof that the mainstream media is finally getting a clue that interval training is far superior to long slow cardio. (There are some exceptions to this, but odds are they don’t apply to you.)
Hat Tip: Mike Boyle
Jason Ferruggia has a new post about what kind of coach he is, and what kind of coach he isn’t. He’s basically helping to define his own niche for anyone who doesn’t know what it is.
The fitness industry is just like any other industry – it’s a field of specialists who know what they are good at and what they aren’t good at, and then everybody else. If you look for a trainer and they tell you “I do everything: bodybuilding training, fat loss, functional training, strength training, gymnastics, tennis training, yodeling, etc” … find a new trainer.
If you have a specific problem, go to the guy (or girl!) who specializes in fixing that exact problem. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying your coach needs to be so tightly defined that he’s only got ONE focus. But, anything more than 3 (maybe four), and we’ve got a problem.
One of Jason’s major points about himself is that he is not a “motivator”.
Here’s a quote from Jason:
If you want to sit around and eat donuts all day why would that possibly bother me? And why would I want to motivate you? I’m not Jenny Craig or Matt Foley the motivational speaker who lives in a van down by the river. What you do is your choice. Sure I will make fun of you, laugh at you and encourage others to do the same; but it’s your life, not mine.
If you are too stupid to realize that regular exercise and a healthy diet is a necessary part of life I’m not going to waste my time telling you. Get on some prescription drugs, order a sausage pizza and watch another episode of Friends.
OK, he’s WAY more intense than I am. As you know, I’m a ridiculously mellow dude. I meditate, I read books about Zen, I love ABBA and Romantic comedies, have seen every episode of Sex and the City (twice), and have a habit of laughing at all of my own jokes. But, I am also NOT a motivational speaker.
Someone asked me recently what the name of my strength training company was, and I replied, “PDX Weightlifting.”
“Oh,” they said, “I think that would turn off a lot of people.”
I replied, “Yep. And that’s the point.”
You see, I’m not a yeller. I’m not like Jillian Michaels from the Biggest Loser. I’m not here to call you up on the phone, get you off the couch, convince you that it’s time to workout, force you to work hard, and then nitpick you every step of the way. There are trainers who do that for a living. They’re great at it. You need to be DEAD HONEST with yourself. If you NEED a trainer to be your external motivator, then you need to hire one of these guys (actually, they’re usually girls).
I ain’t that guy. I’m almost the opposite. I’m way too relaxed. In the gym, I’ll make sure you’re doing everything correctly, I’ll watch your lifts, I’ll discuss any and all topics you want to about your goals and progress. But, I’ll also be cracking (bad) jokes and being very silly. I do a great job of keeping the atmosphere exciting and fun. That’s my personality. And I expect everyone in my programs to stay positive and have fun while they workout, regardless of how hard it is. NO whining – period. I have no tolerance for whining. If you start wimping out, that’s you’re own problem. And I’ll focus my energy of the folks who are working hard with a great attitude.
I won’t force you to do something you don’t want to. If you say, “I can’t do it”, I’ll agree with you. If you say, “it hurts”, I’ll tell you to stop or modify till it doesn’t hurt. This is because when a truly motivated personal tells me this, it’s probably true! And I’m not going to make you do something that will result in injury.
Unfortunately, unmotivated people say these things as knee-jerk reactions to anything hard and as a result never push themselves hard enough to make any progress.
One of my favorite clients of all time is my client and friend Beth. She’s been working out with me for a few years now, and in all of that time, I don’t think I have EVER heard her say the phrase “I can’t”. This woman’s an animal. She’s more than tripled her strength levels, gone from “skinny fat” to seriously lean, and looks and feels great. (She regularly tells me about moving couches and other heavy shit up stairs by herself!) All I do is show her the most efficient path toward her goals. But, she’s the one who does all the work. And boy, does she!
When my people tell me “it’s hard” or “what the HELL are you having me do?!”, or “I’m going to kill you for making me do this”, they’re saying this as a badge of honor. They do whatever I ask of them, and they work their butts off. They may be cursing my name in the process … make no mistake! But, they do it.
If you have no personal motivation, you have no business doing business with me because you WILL NOT get the results you want. I’m a “lead the horse to water” coach. You hire me when you want over a decades worth of knowledge, program design skills, solid real-world advice, a fun atmosphere, serious weight-training, and serious results.
Tony Robbins eating Peter Griffin!
If you need more motivation, buy some books by Tony Robbins. And hey, once you’ve figured out your sh%t and decide you are ready to see the best results of your life and have a blast doing it, contact me and I’ll kick your butt with a big smile on my face.
I found this passage pretty funny from Jason’s post:
People ask me all kinds of questions when they find out what I do for a living.
“How do I lose this?” (grabbing a handful of a 48 inch waist)
“I don’t know.”
“How long should I do the stair climber for?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t give up carbs but I want to get lean. What should I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I only have twenty minutes to train, twice a week. What should I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you’re into all that heavy lifting but I can’t do that. What can I do instead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m a girl and I don’t want to get too bulky so how should I lift?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do I get motivated to go to the gym?”
“I don’t know.”
By training, I am a competitive Olympic Weightlifting Coach. THAT is what I do. I train athletes and people who seriously want to train with an athletic intensity on weightlifting-based programs. Every program I create is built through the lens of a weightlifting coach.
If you are someone who wants to be able to answer YES to that question box on your job application that says “can you lift 100 pounds?”, and then laugh that that sounds light, I’m your guy.
This can include lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds who have totally different end goals: obviously, competitive weightlifters; athletes in any “power sport” like baseball, football, golf; and fitness folks who want to be in the best shape of their lives and lose 20, 40, or more pounds of fat. The commonality is clear. All my people lift weights – hard. That’s the glue.
If you come to me wanting to lose 20+ pounds of fat, I’m not going to take it easy on you just because you aren’t in a competitive power-sport. I’m going to hammer you just like I would anyone else on heavy weightlifting exercises and make you ridiculously strong. As you’re losing that 20 pounds of fat, you’ll keep all your muscle, you’ll in fact gain muscle, become “toned”, learn a bunch of cool exercises like the clean and snatch, front squats, deadlifts, etc. And you’ll start being able to perform in a way you never have before in all of your life.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he approached every problem with only 6 tools. Whenever a problem came up, he looked in his tiny little tool box, and tried all 6 of those tools on it. If that didn’t work, he switched to a new problem.
I’ve found that there are things that I can coach at a high level given the tools that I have and things I can’t. These are the ONLY things I do – 1) Competitive weightlifting; 2) power-sport training; 3) extreme fitness training. 3 things. That’s it. I’m great at these things. But, if you want to become the most kick-ass marathon runner of all time … you’ll need to find someone else. That just isn’t what I do.
This particular quote sounds very much like my own way of approaching coaching (hey, that rhymed!):
Often times people will tell me that they want to train with me and that I if they hire me or come to my gym I really need to push them. No, I don’t. You need to push yourself. You’re hiring me for my program design skills which are based on 16 years of experience. I am not a cheerleader. Any nitwit can yell at someone like a drill sergeant. Just because a workout is hard doesn’t mean it’s effective. Just because a coach yells loudly it doesn’t mean he’s smart.
If you can’t find it within yourself and are not driven to excel, there is nothing I can do for you.
I’ll give hard working, motivated, intelligent people everything I have. But for everyone else I have no time or patience. I know this offends many people. But it’s just me being honest.
I feel very lucky. I have a great set of people to work with. They all come in, work hard, joke around, have fun, and get into great shape. Not a bad job.
If you ever need motivation to lose weight, try this one:
As a Weight Watchers group gathered for a routine weigh-in, the dieters got an idea of how far they still had to go: The floor underneath them collapsed, a Swedish newspaper reports.“We suddenly heard a huge thud; we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air,” one of about 20 group members said to the Smalandsposten newspaper. “The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls.”
The TV show “The Biggest Loser” has been on for quite a while now. It is extremely popular, and is touted by many to be an example of triumph over adversity. But, there are a number of vocal opponents, especially in my industry–the fitness industry.
Among the charges against the Biggest Loser are that it sets up unrealistic expectations, uses unhealthy methods, is all hype and no substance, and is in fact perpetrating a fraud.
Of course, they are totally correct on most counts (except fraud, that’s going too far). But, that isn’t the point. What is?
In short, I don’t think you are so dumb that you need we trainers to monitor your television habits lest you fall into a pit of self loathing. I think you are smart enough to tell the difference between a TV show and real life.
Entertainment is entertainment. The Biggest Loser is first and foremost an entertainment reality TV program that does a very successful job of selling advertising. But, it is about a subject that hits home for every American (and increasingly, the rest of the world). I don’t believe it’s my place to call someone stupid for liking to watch (or God forbid, feeling inspired by) The Biggest Loser. I don’t think it is my place to tell the contestants that they don’t have a right to do the show, simply because it might be unhealthy.
Is the UFC good for us, or the contestants? How about the WWE? No matter how you look at it, getting kicked in the teeth is not healthy. It is the choice of the contestants themselves to go onto the show in the first place. It’s been 8 years that the show has been on. They’ve likely watched every season before they got on themselves. They know what they are getting into, they are adults, and who are we to tell them they can’t.
Again, we aren’t asking the guys at the WWE to quit doing what they are doing because it’s bad for their health. We just want to watch Triple H slam a metal chair over the head of The Undertaker. What’s wrong with that?
The detractors of the show feel like they are doing the “average overweight person who is desperately looking for a weight-loss secret” a favor. As though, somehow, a fat person is also less intelligent than their thin counterparts, more susceptible to TV hype.
I trust people enough to be able to watch TV without falling off the deep end. It’s just TV for God’s sake.
Instead of that kind of silliness, I’m just going to lay out what I think are the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser from the perspective of fitness coach. You can decide for yourself whether you want to continue watching it.
And just for fun, I’m going to do it in reverse order.
Certainly not ugly
The ugly of The Biggest Loser is worse than the bad. There are real health dangers involved for the contestants themselves. During the first few months at the ranch, these very obese people go through workouts, and have workloads, that are absolutely insane.
Most athletes don’t even train for 6 to 8 hours a day. Those that do built up to it for years in advance. It is very dangerous to throw the contestants into a workout program like this out of the blue.
The show has already had a few disasters and hospitalizations. There is real risk that someone is going drop dead eventually. I know the show says that they have doctors monitoring them at all times, keeping track of what they eat, etc. And I’m sure they do (given the risk of a law suit), but the producers need to watch out.
Diet is another issue. Many weeks, the contestants are reported to be getting under 1000 calories a day. Given their daily workloads, they are likely burning anywhere from 2000 to 5000 calories. Do the math. That is scary.
Of course, one sure fire way to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit. And whenever you are training a severely overweight person, this is a must. But, a deficit of 500 to 1000 calories is more than enough to accomplish that goal.
If you up someones workload to the level that they are doing on the show, then you up their need for glycogen, protein, and all sorts of micro-nutrients that are impossible to get enough of on such a low calorie diet.
When you overwork someone, and artificially keep their calories so low, you actually impede their progress, and (ironically) cause them to be less likely to lose fat. Instead, they’ll start to break down, lose muscle, become stressed out (via massive levels of cortisol)–all progress stalls.
Top athletes train like maniacs, but they also eat like maniacs. Remember all the news stories on Michael Phelps diet? He eats upwards of 12,000 calories a day so that he can train for the same number of hours as the contestants on The Biggest Loser. See the problem?
As a coach, I almost never see genuine overtraining in anyone other than my competitive athletes. But, these contestants are getting hammered. They are nearly all massively overtrained by the 3rd or 4th week. Some crawl out of it, others get booted (voted) off the show.
And then there’s the weigh in. Competitors have been known to use any means necessary to drop every last pound for the weekly weigh in. They’ll dehydrate, workout with heavy sweats on, not drink water for 24 hours, etc. Not healthy. Potentially life threatening. But, again, it is their own choice.
They chose to go on the show and they chose to dehydrate to make themselves more competitive. High school wrestlers do it all the time to make weight. I don’t condone it unless you are under the supervision of someone who knows what they are doing, but it is hardly anything new.
Of course, all this craziness makes for great TV. The farther down the hole these people go, the more emotional they become, and then we get the crying sessions, the yelling, the storming out of the gym, etc. But, it is dangerous. Make no bones about it.
Yoga is never enough
The Bad isn’t as bad as the Ugly. These objections aren’t life threatening, but they aren’t good. The primary problem in this category is the idea that The Biggest Loser gives people at home, who hope to lose a lot of weight themselves, an unrealistic picture of how to do it.
It is certainly unrealistic. Who has time to do 6 or 8 hours a day of working out? Who’s got the self control to do all that exercise, and then only eat 800 calories?! I’d be at Crispy Cream every day (those of you who know me, know how true that is).
Losing more than 1 pound of fat per week is unrealistic for most. Some people can do it. And when you are 200 pounds overweight, then it is in fact likely that you will lose more than a pound of fat per week. But, it is never easy. It is brutally hard.
A great friend of mine, who is only 30 or 40 pounds overweight, recently sat down to talk to me about losing weight. I suggested that to start she simply start by doing 20 minutes a day, every day, of something physical. Nothing too complicated. Get up in the morning, do a few sets of wall push ups, and some jumping jacks, for example. If you can do just 20 minutes of light exercise every day for a month, you can build in the habit, and we can build on that.
Funny thing was, even that seemed like too much. The prospect of doing something everyday was daunting, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t even supposed to be hard. She’s a hard worker in every area of her life. But, she’s not yet built the habit of daily exercise, and that is a tough habit to build.
The people on The Biggest Loser are going well beyond 20 minutes a day, or even 1 or 2 hours a day. There is nothing easy about their diets and exercise routines. They can lose 100 pounds or more in a season because they are dedicating every waking hour to that pursuit. And they have a large staff cooking their meals for them, trainers pushing them in the gym, and no access to cheat foods.
At home, you don’t have any of that. Instead, it is all on your shoulders. Sure, you can hire someone like me to write you routines and push you in the gym. You can hire a nutritionist to make you a diet plan. But, I am not going to go to your house at 5am to wake you up and drag you into the gym (sorry, you can’t pay me enough).
Unless you’re rich, you aren’t going to be able to hire someone to cook all your meals. And there is no way you can avoid the temptations of the modern world with a Star Bucks on every corner, fast food coming out our ears, and supermarkets where the junk is cheaper than the good stuff.
At home, it is all up to you. That is hard. Much harder than what the contestants on The Biggest Loser have to face.
A second problem is that extreme weight loss almost never works long term in the real world. People who lose fat fast tend to gain it all back at a rate that is higher than those who lose the same amount of weight, but did it slower. I’m convinced this is because when you do it slower, you build in something that is more important that the numbers on the scale–consistency. Losing weight fast robs you of the time it takes to build habits. If you are going to keep the fat off, you HAVE TO change your habits forever.
Changing your habits is not a matter of will power. If it was, we’d all be able to do it all the time. Changing your habits is about time. The longer you plug away at something, the more ingrained the process becomes in your neural pathways. Baseball pitchers can do what they do only because they have done it for so long. When you first started learning to ride a bike, you fell off–a lot. But, after plugging away at it, you made it a habit. Now it ain’t nothing.
On the show, they don’t have time to build in a habit of exercise and healthy eating that will last a lifetime. They take people out of their real lives and put them into fantasy land for a few months of high-action television. And when these people get home, they have no way to integrate what they were doing in fantasy land into their real lives.
If you want to lose weight and keep it off forever, you have to start out by building in the routines, and make both exercise and diet a major part of your day to day life. You know, your real life. The one with kids, a job, bills, and no time. Once you do that, you’re on the road to seeing a level of progress that is even more impressive than what happens on The Biggest Loser.
The last problem is the in-your-face advertising. This season’s sugar-free gum ads are just wacky. Every time Bob Harper pushes some gum on one of his trainees, I burst into laughter. It’s become a farce. But, in today’s world, how shocking is that, really?
Looking Good Now
Alright, no more bashing the show. Now I’m going to tell you what I think is good about it.
There are two things that The Biggest Loser makes abundantly clear, that so many clients I’ve had didn’t believe (in their heart of hearts) until they saw the show. The first is that losing extreme amounts of fat (over 200 pounds) is actually possible. The second is that it is not going to be easy.
For nearly 2 decades Americans have been blaming obesity on genetics. Sure, we knew fast food was bad for you, and that we should workout more, but in the end, our parents were fat, and that is why we were fat. We were a country in denial.
The Biggest Loser has brought obesity to center stage and made it the most popular subject on television. It shows some of the heaviest people in the country doing what we as a nation previously thought wasn’t possible. They lost the weight. They really did it. 8 seasons in a row, this program has taken mega-fat people and brought them down to size. You can disagree with their methods, hate the hype, and I’m sure you could certainly do without the over-the-top advertising. But, there is no denying that these people lost a LOT of weight.
Secondly, the show does a great job showing the contestants in a lot of pain. That may sound bad, but as a trainer, I think that it’s a good thing. If you want results, the results you are dreaming of right now (I know you have dreams about changing your body–because we all do), then you have to work your ass off. Period.
Now, obviously, I would want you to work into it slowly, get up to speed for a few months, and meet some benchmarks that I’ve set into place before we get too crazy. But, hard work has to be on the horizon if you are going to get anywhere.
The contestants on The Biggest Loser are suffering. They’re crying. They’re whining. And, in the end, they are succeeding. This is a good message. Sometimes things that are worth doing are very hard, but if you fight through it, you can come out on top, and you’ll be a better person for it.
So, there you have it. Coach Nick’s version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of The Biggest Loser. Sure, the show has it’s problems, but the contestants are doing it of their own accord, and we have no right to stop them. The show is hyped up like crazy, and it portrays an unrealistic way of losing weight for the average person at home. But, in the end, it is only an entertainment TV show, one that shows real people in struggling situations, losing an amount of fat that too many people fear is impossible to lose.
On the balance, I’m for it. Besides, it’s just fun to watch.
Ice Cream Sushi!
Great news for Athletes trying to pack on muscle mass. A new study has shown that eating saturated fat can increase your appetite and trick you into thinking you need more food.
Since THE major factor holding back athletes who are looking to add large amounts of muscle (or even to maintain what they have–marathon runners, I’m looking at you!) is their inability to eat enough, this fact may come in handy.
My suggestion? Eat ice cream. It’s high calorie and loaded with saturated fat which will apparently make you hungrier. You get two for the price of one!
Of course, the article I found this tid-bit on was most worried about the implications of saturated fat on our overall health profiles. But, that isn’t your problem. You’re too skinny, and you need to muscle up. That takes more calories than you can eat comfortably. Science (and Ice Cream) to the rescue!
Below is the abstract to the actual study (I hate that most articles don’t do this, especially when they are on the web).
Insulin signaling can be modulated by several isoforms of PKC in peripheral tissues. Here, we assessed whether one specific isoform, PKC-θ, was expressed in critical CNS regions that regulate energy balance and whether it mediated the deleterious effects of diets high in fat, specifically palmitic acid, on hypothalamic insulin activity in rats and mice. Using a combination of in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, we found that PKC-θ was expressed in discrete neuronal populations of the arcuate nucleus, specifically the neuropeptide Y/agouti-related protein neurons and the dorsal medial nucleus in the hypothalamus. CNS exposure to palmitic acid via direct infusion or by oral gavage increased the localization of PKC-θ to cell membranes in the hypothalamus, which was associated with impaired hypothalamic insulin and leptin signaling. This finding was specific for palmitic acid, as the monounsaturated fatty acid, oleic acid, neither increased membrane localization of PKC-θ nor induced insulin resistance. Finally, arcuate-specific knockdown of PKC-θ attenuated diet-induced obesity and improved insulin signaling. These results suggest that many of the deleterious effects of high-fat diets, specifically those enriched with palmitic acid, are CNS mediated via PKC-θ activation, resulting in reduced insulin activity.
Normally your bodies cells are told to stop demanding food by a couple of hormones, leptin and insulin. This study suggests that certain saturated fats, particularly palmitic acid tell your brain to send signals to your bodies cells instructing them to ignore leptin and insulin. And therefore, you can be “objectively” full, but not feel like you are. So, you keep eating.
Clearly, if you want to lose weight, this is bad news. Keep your saturated fats down, and stick to unsaturated fats if you can like fish oils and olive oil.
But, if you are trying to gain size, this is GREAT. More ice cream, fried chicken, bacon, and even more ice cream!
(The image above is from SushiGallery.net. Very cool.)
References
Benoit, Stephen C, Christopher J Kemp, Carol F Elias, William Abplanalp, James P Herman, Stephanie Migrenne, Anne-Laure Lefevre, et al. 2009. Palmitic acid mediates hypothalamic insulin resistance by altering PKC-theta subcellular localization in rodents. The Journal of Clinical Investigation 119, no. 9 (September): 2577-2589. doi:10.1172/JCI36714.
Alwin Cosgrove lays out a workout designed to kick start your metabolism.
1A: TRX suspended lunge (with hop and knee drive)
1B: TRX Suspended Incline Press
2A: TRX single leg squat (each leg)
2B: TRX Atomic Push up
3A: TRX Sprinters Start
3B: TRX Single Leg Chest press
4A: TRX Hamstring Curls
4B: TRX Inverted Row
5A: TRX Hip Press
5B: TRX Power pull
6A: TRX Hamstring Bicycle
6B: TRX Swimmers Pull
I used a 2 x 45s on, 45s off interval split for this workout and finished with TRX curls, tricep pressdowns, side planks, pendulums and suspended crunches for one set of each.
Give it a try.
Looks very intense! If you try it, post your experience in the comments section.
The problem in modern society is both
And, in a lot of ways, ‘b’ is probably the more important of the two. Everybody knows that all diets will work in the short-term. Where dieting invariably fails for most people is in long-term adherence. People fall off the bandwagon for a variety of reasons.
He’s dead right. The most important rules are the most basic. Eat a good diet, and be consistent about it.
What constitutes a “good” diet? Just about anything, as Lyle points out. So long as you are exercising, and your calories are sufficiently low, you’re OK. But, only if you stay with it.
The following is a guest post by Heather Johnson.
Not everyone can get geared up to workout on a consistent basis. Many of us only get the urge when we’re feeling particularly gross about our bodies that day. After a week or so of working out we don’t feel the urge to stay on top of our exercise regimen. Those of us that fall into this trap know it’s faulty reasoning to believe that exercising in short spurts every now and again is actually helping us stay fit. We need extra motivation to hit the gym or go for a run on a regular basis. Finding that motivation is the only we can take ownership of our exercise situation. Here are a few tips to consider the next time you’re looking for that emotional lift that you need to get off the couch and into the gym:
This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of online nursing school. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.
Alwyn Cosgrove has a post on Abundance vs. Scarcity in the personal training market. He sets up the idea that some people have a mindset of abundance, and others of scarcity. Meaning, those with the abundance mindset think the world is full of plenty of opportunity for everyone whereas those with the scarcity mindset believe there is a limited amount, and to do well means (by necessity) that someone else must fail.
I call it going “Deep Sea Fishing for Water”. This can be a little deep (no pun intended) so bear with me….
It’s as if we chartered a boat and went out to sea, with the goal of collecting as much water as we could. When we get there – I start using a bucket to collect my water. You start using a tea cup.
Now ask yourself this — are you angry that I used a bucket? Do you feel as if I’m taking more than my “fair share” ?
In the personal training and fitness coaching market, there really is an abundance of potential clients. I’m never worried about helping out a fellow trainer for fear of them “stealing” my clients. That’s ridiculous. The United States has a population that is about 30% obese and growing (pun fully intended). Every year we graduate a larger number of high school students who have never had a serious PE class, who couldn’t run a mile to save their lives (literally, if a bear was chasing them, they’d be food).
Here’s the reality. If you’re a man, without any serious physical ailments, and under 70, you should be able to do at least 10 pull ups. You should be able to run a mile in less than 9 minutes (I’m being lax here). You should be able to do 100 crunches in a row, no problem; 50 push ups straight; and squat about bodyweight. I’m not joking. Any male of the species, if truly in shape, should be able to do these things. The amount of testosterone flowing in the male body is ridiculous compared to what women have. Men are quite literally on steroids. There is no excuse. These numbers are low. There are old old old men at Loprinzi’s that can do better than this.
All it takes is some work. And the pay off is huge.
For women there are similar standards. At least: 8 full push ups or 20 knee push ups; run a mile in less than 10 minutes; do 8 pull ups with 75% bodyweight (with 100% bodyweight if you have a small hip structure); Squat 75% bodyweight; 100 crunches, no problem. These could all be higher depending on bone structure.
For certain athletes these numbers would be different. Female Olympic lifters sometimes have a hard time doing pull ups because of the shear muscular weight they carry in their hips and legs. But, then they make up for that by clean and jerking their bodyweight (see below).
If you can’t do those things, I can help you. For that matter, a whole host of trainers could help you get better than you are now, even the crappy ones. All they have to do is encourage you to workout regularly. Most Americans don’t, therefor, it’s an open market. How many people do you know who can boast the aforementioned numbers? Can you?
This is Melanie Roach clean and jerking a ton of weight:
Cassandra Forsythe has some answers.
