Bench Press and Body Fat: Separating Fact from Fiction
In the world of fitness, the quest for a leaner physique often leads to myths and misconceptions. One such myth is the idea that chest bench presses alone can magically reduce body fat around the midsection and abs. In this blog post, we'll uncover the truth about how increasing lean muscle through strength training can indeed help reduce body fat, with a focus on three bench press variations: the Barbell Bench Press, Dumbbell Bench Press, and Incline Bench Press. Additionally, we'll provide you with an effective 6-8 week training program that balances these pressing movements with essential pulling exercises for a well-rounded approach to fat loss.
The Unwritten Rules of the Gym
Navigating the gym can be intimidating, especially if you're new to the fitness scene. Understanding the unwritten rules of the gym can help you feel more comfortable and ensure a positive experience.
Meal Planning and Timing for Tournament Weekend Triumphs: Nourishing Young Athletes for Success
Tournament weekends bring a unique set of challenges and opportunities for young athletes. At Atlas Performance Training, we recognize the importance of proper meal planning and timing during these intense competitions. In this blog, we will explore the distinctive aspects of tournament weekends, provide a meal planning strategy to optimize performance between multiple games, discuss timing and recovery strategies, and offer practical solutions, including meal delivery services, weekly meal prep, and easy breakfast ideas for youth athletes.
Why You Don’t Have to Spend a Fortune on Getting Healthy and Fit
While it would be nice to have a personal trainer on standby for personalized fitness sessions, not everyone can afford this route. However, that's not to say it's your only option to lead a healthy, active lifestyle. There are, of course, other alternatives (many of them free) that you can make use of, too.
Specific Health and Performance Training For Athletic Development
All great gains and achievements on the field and or court of play are made possible when athletes chose to dedicate themselves to the process of developing the work ethic needed to achieve their goals in the offseason, and between seasons if they are multi-sport athletes to compete and win in the regular and post-season. The four areas of focus mentioned above should be the foundation of any comprehensive training program. There may be other elements that could be included but for the sake of time, I chose to focus on these 4 elements that have shown results for my clients over the years. Let’s also keep in mind that this process is for the long-term growth and development of the athlete and there is no such thing as a quick and easy path to improving the physical and mental development of a youth athlete. Any youth training program should have the long-term development of the athlete in mind, and address all areas that will improve their physical and mental performance…..
The 3 Whey's to Get Stronger and Healthy
For one reason it’s relatively expensive, secondly what the body does not use it dumps what leading you to literally and figuratively flush money down the drain, and thirdly it is not sustainable in a realistic fashion, just think about how many different supplements you have tried for a few months over the past several years including the ones in your the kitchen cabinet that have gone unused. The use of supplements can be beneficial to and health and performance training program, whether your goal is to lose weight and improve your body composition, or if you are an athlete who is looking to gain weight, get stronger, faster, in the offseason supplements can give you the added edge you are looking for, but only if your nutrition plans’ foundation is based on consuming whole foods that have the three main macronutrients:….
The New and Old Smarter Cardio Training of the 21st Century....
The goal of any training program should be to develop these energy systems and “train” them to produce the energy in an efficient manner during practice and competition so that energy is readily available to the muscles during physical activity. All three energy systems are interdependent of each other, but in most situations, one energy system or a combination of two of the three is required to make things happen. This goes into the concept of performance-specific training and how to create training programs that are designed specifically to produce improvements in muscular endurance, cardiovascular fitness, and improvements in speed and power of the individual….
The Butt and Gut Connection: The Top 5 Core Exercises
What are the known and some not commonly known benefits of strong Core muscles?
When we see someone with a six-pack we automatically associate that with strength, and while improving the tone and the look of the muscles has its benefits, you can’t ignore that the function of the core muscles is to stabilize the center of the body during movement.
Some of the benefits of having strong core muscles are:…
3 Tips To Help you lose that last 20 lbs
This is a basic form of calorie restriction. Although there are several different versions of intermittent fasting, they all have the same fundamental rule; No Food or drink with a caloric value are to be consumed during the fast….
This is tried and true way to increase your energy expenditure to 525-625cal of energy per day. This could possibly help you hit that 1 lb- 1.5 lb fat loss per week. However, the 1# rule to remember is that you can not train yourself out of a bad or inconsistent nutrition/diet routine…
This is a more holistic way of planning out your weight loss program, and in my opinion, this should be the first method you should try to lose unwanted fat….
Nurturing Wellness | Habits for a Healthy Body and Mind
When it comes to practicing daily health habits, pretty much the easiest thing to turn into a routine is the basics. Of course, life is not always cooperative, but ask yourself how consistent you are with self-care. Do you shower daily? Are you staying hydrated throughout the day? How much walking do you do weekly? Being healthy doesn't have to take up a lot of time. Instead, look at what you can do to make adjustments to your lifestyle. Add fruit and veggies to your diet. Make a conscious effort to head to bed earlier. Switch off from tech in the evening. Reduce your caffeine intake. Avoid sitting for long periods. These may seem like small things, but they are not trivial to your well-being. Over time, they build up to have a meaningful impact on your health, from head to toe.
Build a Stronger Kid: Lift and Learn
There is an age old question that goes back as far as I can remember, I tried to find out where or who came up with this myth and google failed to give me the definitive answer. But that is not important, what is important is that we are going to look at the benefits of learning to lift by briefly looking at the process of LEARNING to lift weights, which is based on two important principles. The first principle is developing the young person’s Relative muscular strength, which learning to perform basic bodyweight movements like a push-up, bodyweight squat, and lunge Pull-Ups, etc. with proper form and body control. In developing youth strength training programs for beginners exercises should in my opinion be limited to the use of specific types of resistance equipment like dumbbells, rubber bands, and tubes, with minimal intensity (lightweight) after they have learned how to properly execute the basic exercises that improve their Relative muscular strength. Developing relative strength varies and depends on the commitment of the individual youth, and their parents. After a solid foundation of relative strength has been developed, start developing their Absolute muscular Strength. This is when Free weights and resistance machines are added to the training program, examples of Free weight movements are……
Stay Ahead of the Game and Away from Pain
Joint pain and discomfort are two of the main factors that prevent people from maintaining an active lifestyle. If you are a fairly healthy person you may take for granted the normal function of your joints and ignore the factors that will have a negative effect on your joints if you don’t apply some preventative measures to help you manage the pain and discomfort you may experience while exercising. The is no absolute way to eliminate pain from physical activity especially if you are out of shape due to an old injury, a sedentary career, or any other physical limitation.
Dying a death of 1000 Breaths
There are several techniques that can be used to train your lungs and diaphragm to work more effectively, by increasing the lungs capacity which will help increase the amount of oxygen that is drawn into the lungs and strengthen the diaphragm. As an athlete, I would do a self-audit once a year always trying to see what I could do to improve my performance from year to year. I realized that my breathing was the one thing that was an issue and seemed to not improve as I played until later in the season and my endurance was below average. So I thought about what sport was dependent on developing endurance, so I started researching distance runners and I found that there was are breathing exercises that some of the top runners would do to improve their lung capacity.
Finding The Function in Disfunction: The Foundation of Functional Training
In 2010 2 years after I retired from professional football, I decided to enter this industry and to learn how to train and develop programs for individuals specifically youth athletes correctly, I did not want to give someone a canned program I received from a coach that made up based on an old program that was developed for college and professional athletes. So I started to reads every book, dozens of articles about strength and conditioning, and performance training. that is where I discovered the FMS (Functional Movement Sytems)……..
Create Your Environment or Your Environment Will Create YOU
As I continue my journey as a father, coach/trainer, (ex-husband lol), and entrepreneur/business owner, sometimes I can have a bit of a negative disposition if I allow these short term situations within the surrounding environment around me to control my attitude and my approach towards my daily activities that negative environment will influence my behavior to a certain extent and if I don’t recognize this negative influence my environment will create my reality, which will influence my behavior and when that happens my environment is creating who I am..... Unless I make a conscious effort to maintain a positive environment. And how do I do this? By searching out positive influences, this could be a night where I binge on 80’s music or spend a few hours reading self-improvement books and listening to YouTube videos, or maybe do some writing (like tonight).
The Value of What You do
I could start this post with some generic google search definition of the word Value, but that would be cheap and plus I want to write about my definition of what I know "value" is and how I apply that definition to my business and my life. While I was journaling this evening I came up with two questions to come up with what my definition of what value is.
Question #1: What are my values?
Question #2: What do I value?
High-Intensity Interval Training
What is the AP HIIT method? Well, it is a training method that I turned into a small group training class in 2015 when I was finishing my bachelor's degree in Fitness and wellness. The concept was developed from a boot camp and a small group training sessions that I ran at the second gym I worked at when I first started. Most boot camps use just body weight for resistance and are really heavy cardio training (at least from the ones that I have attended and or seen) I wanted to include resistance training exercises within the session along with heavy to medium cardio, and core training. One of the main areas that I wanted to focus on was limiting injury but maintaining a medium-high heart rate and allowing the individual to focus on the movement first and not have to focus on counting reps. Here is an example of a training session………
High Brain Mileage
I hate running but I like finishing a run. My relationship with running is complicated, and it started when I was a chubby kid in northern Indiana around the age of 13. I was in the 7th grade and it was my first year playing tackle football or really any football for that matter. I was close to 160-170 lbs and the PE coach talked to me about trying out so I signed up having no idea that the amount of running that would be required because if I did I would have taken a pass and probably been on another totally different path….
Body Composition: Body FAT Mass v.s. Lean Muscle Mass
I can speak from experience as a trainer and former college and professional athlete that recording and tracking your body composition during training can improve your results and give you the blueprint to reaching your goals even if you fall off the wagon and regain that extra 20 - 25 lb over the holidays or on a vacation. There are 4 ways body composition can help improve your training experience along with your health in general, but only if you are looking for a long-term solution and not a quick fix plan that will leave you 30-40 lb heavier and wondering what happened. These are the 4 reasons you should be using body composition to improve your training experience………
Energy System Development Series
Lifting heavy weights to become stronger is one of the most popular reasons to lift weights. But the combination of using various weightlifting principles and program variations to improve muscular Hypertrophy (increase in muscular tone and size) is even more effective and fun. Lifting to increase muscular size helps individuals improve not only their physical appearance but also their physical performance. One of the factors that are important is the use of set and rep manipulation. This means programming different sequences sets and reps to increase the stress applied to the muscles that are being trained and. In theory, the number of sets should be about 2-4 sets and the reps should be 8-12 reps using 65%-85% of the maximum weight you can lift for 1 rep for that exercise to achieve hypertrophy. One other important factor is limiting your rest in between sets to less than 1 minute. This limit in the recovery time will increase the stress on your muscles which increases the growth response your muscles have during the recovery process. THE MAGIC HAPPENS IN THE RECOVERY!