Fitness Together Brecksville: September 2015

Trainer Tuesdays

Welcome back to the weekly edition on Trainer Tuesdays. Make sure to check in at our blog every Tuesday evening to learn the expertise of our great staff. Aside from being fantastic exercise coaches, they are also extremely knowledgeable in many aspects of health and fitness; so, it's time that you get to know them a little better! Each week, we will post a frequently asked, or sometimes just a fun fitness related question followed by the answers of each of the trainers at Fitness Together Brecksville.

Is it okay to exercise with weights two days in a row?

Adam Teplitz: Weight training is a vital part of every exercise program. However, one of the most

Fitness Together Personal Trainer Adam Teplitz with a client

frequently asked questions is if it's detrimental to weight train on consecutive days.

Whether you can efficiently weight train two days in a row depends on many factors, including what type of training you're doing, your goals and how fatigued you are.

One factor is muscle soreness. After an intense training session, you will often experience delayed onset muscle soreness, which can cause your muscles to feel tight and painful. This soreness is caused by the breakdown of muscle fibers during the lowering, or eccentric phase of an exercise. If you experience particularly bad DOMS after a training session, it may be best to take a day off.

Another factor is the routine that you're on. If you are following a full body program, you will need to leave at least a day of rest between sessions. This will give the muscles time to repair themselves. If however, you are following a split routine ( isolating certain muscle groups ), then there will you be times when you have to weight train two or more days in a row to meet the requirements of the routine.

One final factor is practice. Strength coach Dan John advises in his article , "The Gable Method", that if something is important , you should do it every day, and kettle bell trainer Pavel Tsatsouline bases his "grease the groove" training method around the idea that "specificity plus frequent practice equals success,". Both of these philosophies support the idea of performing certain exercises daily. If you have an exercise that you struggle with, you should aim to perform it every day. Use light weights and focus on using perfect technique, only taking a rest day when you have to. The key here is that daily practice is needed if you wish to improve.

Fitness Together personal trainer Steven Madden

Steven Madden: Yes, you can workout with weights two days in a row, as long as you are not Your muscles need time to recover, and working them two days in a row is actually more harmful than good. But my schedule only allows me to work out on two consecutive days. All you need to do is make sure you are not working the same muscle groups. My current routine has me lifting four days a week. I lift Monday, Tuesday, rest Wednesday and lift Thursday and Friday. On Monday, I do chest, and to make sure I don't overdo it, on Tuesday I work back. I have even done routines where I lifted six days a week, but I never repeated the same groups two days in a row. By all means, lift as often as you can, just rest the muscles after you do.

working out the same muscle groups.

Taylor Burns: You can exercise two days in a row if you are using different muscle groups because it gives the muscles time to recover while working out other muscles. So it just depends on what kind of workout routine you are on. However, it's not recommended to use the same muscles two days in a row because the muscles need time to repair and grow from the day before.

Trainer Tuesdays

What’s the difference between BMI and Bodyfat percentage and which one should I pay more attention to?

www.fitnesstogether.com/brecksville/nutrition

Adam Teplitz: Both BMI and bodyfat percentage are great tools to assess an individuals overall health. However, they need to be dejected based on who is getting measured , the purpose of the measurement and the individual's overall goals.

BMI stands for body mass index. It is a height to weight ratio. The formula consists of taking your

Fitness Together Personal Trainer Adam Teplitz working with a client

weight in pounds and dividing it by your height in inches squared, then multiplying it by 703. A BMI of 25 or above indicates the individual is overweight. The benefit of this formula is that you can calculate a large demographic of individuals in a short amount of time and get a good estimate of their overall health risk. The downfall of using this method is that it does not take into consideration those individuals who have a low percentage of bodyfat and a high percentage of lean body mass.

A great example would be a professional football player who is 6 feet tall and weighs 250 pounds, with 8.5 percent bodyfat. According to the BMI calculation , he would have a BMI of 34, and be considered obese. This is clearly not the case.

When it comes to individuals who are very active, BMI is not the best route to go. Calculating bodyfat percentage would be the better option.

Bodyfat percentage is how much of your body is composed of fat ( adipose tissue) and how much is composed of muscle , bone , internal organs, skin, etc. Various methods used to calculate this are Bioelectrical Impedance analysis , infrared analysis, skin fold calipers, and hydrostatic weighing.

Personally, I feel like calculating bodyfat percentage is a more accurate calculation and indication of your overall health.

Kelly Bailey: BMI, or Body Mass Index, is a simple height to weight ratio that assesses

Fitness Together Personal Trainer Kelly Bailey working with clients

normal, over-, or under-weight individuals. For many years BMI has been the gold standard for determining whether a person falls within a "healthy" or "obese" weight category. However, more recently, BMI is falling out of favor because it doesn't take into account the ratio of fat to muscle (and other lean tissue, like organ and bone) in a person's body. For example, the BMI of a very short, but very muscular person may put that person into the obese category, regardless of how little body fat he/she actually has. In another example, certain folks who are very thin, but have very little muscle mass may have a BMI in the normal range, but can actually have high levels of body fat. A better way is to measure body composition by determining percentage of body fat. Body fat percentage is usually determined by using skin fold calipers or a special bioelectric impedance scale. Your percentage of body fat will allow you to separate how many pounds of your weight is body fat and how many pounds is lean tissue (organ, bone, muscle).

When people set out to "lose weight", what they really want to do is lose FAT and maintain or gain lean tissue. The only way to know if you are losing fat weight and/or gaining lean muscle tissue is to measure your body fat percentage. In addition, knowing these numbers can help alleviate frustration if you're working out, but not seeing the number on the scale (or the BMI number) go down. It's not an uncommon occurrence for your weight (and BMI) to stay the same if you've lost fat weight, but gained lean muscle tissue (which, by the way, is the holy grail of body recomposition!).

Taylor Burns: BMI stands for Body Mass Index. The two factos used to determine your BMI are your height and weight. Doctors often use BMI as a simple and easy way to measure if a person is healthy, underweight or overweight. Body fat percentage is the weight of a person's fat divided by the person's weight. It lets you see how much of your body is made up of fat, and how much is bone, muscle, blood and organs. There are many ways to calculate the percentage such as calipers, high-tech scales and underwater weighing. Many people get their body fat percentage measured if they are into sports or trying to measure their progress while losing weight. Body fat percentage is a much more accurate measurement in determining if you are healthy. BMI does take into consideration how much of your weight is muscle and bone, and how much of it is fat.

Lisa Clark: People have many misconceptions as to what the difference is in BMI and body fat percentage. In my opinion BMI should not even be calculated or looked at as a means of telling a person how much fat or lean muscle mass they have. BMI is strictly based on a person’s height and weight and takes no consideration for amount of muscle the person may have. If you took two people weighing in at the exact same weight and measuring the same height, they would technically have the same BMI number. However their measurement could be completely off. One could be solid muscle which we all know is more dense than fat and therefore could look significantly smaller than the one who doesn't work out and has a higher fat percentage. For insurance and medical reasons they are both considered to be obese. Is that a fair measurement?

In contrast to that we also measure people's body fat percentage which can be done using several measurement techniques. Any of these techniques measures the amount of actual fat and lean muscle in a person’s body giving much more accurate results!

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Is it okay to exercise with weights two days in a row?

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Difference Between BMI and Bodyfat Percentage; and Which One Should I Pay More Attention to?