The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged: Ten All-New Programs for Men and Women

I GOT MY FIRST PERSONAL-TRAINING CERTIFICATION in 1997 from the American Council on Exercise. On here of the textbook, we were told that optimum fitness has these three components:

It seemed to make sense at the time. Today it just looks…random. I mean, who puts strength and flexibility on the same line? Cardiovascular health and fitness are obviously important, but what does “cardiovascular endurance” mean? Are we talking about a threshold level of aerobic fitness, enough to complete a workout, play your favorite sport, or survive a twenty-mile hike with your local Boy Scout troop? Training for an endurance sport? Or do we mean that vague category of moving-for-the-sake-of-moving exercise we call “cardio”? Finally, is “ideal body weight” a worthwhile goal? Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on body composition, with a goal of increasing your muscle mass while lowering your body-fat percentage?

These aren’t idle questions. As our friend Dan John says, if something is important, you should work on it every time you train. The NROL standard for a training session is sixty minutes, max. So whatever Alwyn decides is important enough to train, that’s what you’re going to work on within that one-hour window, three times a week.

The traditionalist view of fitness is that you need to do some of everything, regardless of what you hope to accomplish with your workouts. A man most interested in increasing muscle size and strength would be told he also needs to do steady-pace endurance exercise several days a week, even though it wouldn’t help him reach his goals, and might actually work against them. A woman focused mainly on weight loss would be encouraged to invest time in stretching, which back then was pushed as an elaborate, time-consuming, muscle-by-muscle process. How would ten to fifteen minutes of stretching help someone shed fat, especially if that time could be used for exercises that improve mobility while also burning a lot of calories and perhaps building muscle as well?

Alwyn ditched that some-of-everything paradigm a long time ago. Like many trainers I met in the late nineties and early 2000s, he didn’t think he was giving his clients fair value if he put them on a treadmill to run while he stood there watching. If he was getting paid to train someone, he was going to train her. That is, he was going to teach her how to do the exercises, coach her through a routine that offered increasing challenges, and keep her moving for the entire session. (I use the female pronoun on purpose. Alwyn has always trained his female clients to build strength and muscle as a path to making them leaner and lighter.)

He also encouraged and expected his clients to do other types of exercise on their own. That worked fine until the mid to late 2000s, when he and his trainers at Results Fitness noticed that their clients were no longer doing much outside the gym. If they were exercising, it tended to be repetitive, unbalanced activities, in some cases creating or exacerbating issues with strength, mobility, or core stability.

Today Alwyn and his trainers look to develop six key aspects of muscular fitness in every training session:

Each of those is important. But how important would any be, to the exclusion of the others? And more important, does it matter if you separate them at all? Indulge me as I rule on that.

NEW RULE #11 • The lines between “strength,” “cardio,” and “flexibility” aren’t as clear as you think.

When I showed Alwyn the circa-1997 ACE definition of fitness, the first thing he pointed out was the assumption that there are clear delineations, suggesting that for one to begin another must end. So jogging is one thing, heavy lifting is another, and flexibility is something else entirely.

But what happens when you do a grueling set of step-ups that includes fifteen repetitions with each leg? You’re certainly developing strength; you should be able to use slightly heavier weights almost every time you repeat the workout. You’re also developing muscular endurance. If you stuck with the same weight, you’d soon be able to do many more repetitions than you could at first. The harder you push yourself to increase your performance—the combined improvements in strength and endurance—the harder you’ll work your cardiorespiratory system, which has to pump blood to the working muscles. In fact, you’ll challenge all three of your body’s energy systems by the time you finish the set. (See Sidebar.)

Now think of what happens when you begin Alwyn’s warm-up routine. Some of you will be huffing and puffing, if you aren’t used to those exercises and techniques, a pretty good sign that you’re training something. But what? It’s not traditional cardio exercise, because you’re only doing a few repetitions of each exercise before moving on to the next. It’s not traditional stretching, since you’re rarely stopping to hold your body in a fixed position so you can stretch specific muscles to their full length. Instead, you’re moving lots of muscles in and out of those stretched positions, with an emphasis on moving. Many of these exercises challenge your balance, which means you’re developing strength in muscles that aren’t used to the new movements.

Can you find the point where strength training begins, or cardio exercise ends, or flexibility takes precedence over the other two?

Who Has the Energy for This?

“Energy” is one of our favorite words in the fitness industry. Magazines and websites love to use it in headlines like “Get more energy!” (Always with an exclamation point! Why? Because it’s more energetic that way!) Gyms across the country are named Energy Fitness. There’s even a stimulant product advertised on TV called 5-hour Energy.

Ask a nutritionist what energy is, and she won’t need many words, or much punctuation. It’s food. Period. When she talks about energy going in or going out of your body, she means the calories you eat vs. the calories you burn off. Thus, a nutritionist would see irony in a health club—a place to burn calories—promising that its patrons will somehow receive energy by training there. Energy Steakhouse—that’s where you’d go to load up. Energy Drain would be an accurate name for a gym, although the investors would probably rule it out.

The human body has three ways to turn food into movement, called energy systems. The first is your aerobic energy system. You of course know that “aerobic” means “with oxygen.” You use oxygen every minute of every day to tap into your abundant supplies of fat and carbohydrate. (A healthy body at rest will burn more than 50 percent fat.) During exercise, the ratio gradually shifts; the harder you work, the higher the percentage of carbohydrate you use for fuel.

You also have two anaerobic energy systems, which you use during more intense exercise. For a near-maximum lift or all-out sprint, your body calls on the phosphagen system, which uses adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and creatine phosphate (CP). Your body has enough ready-made ATP and CP for about ten seconds’ worth of extreme exertion. Once you’ve hit your limit, the phosphagen system shuts down while your body replenishes its ATP and CP.

The other anaerobic system is called glycolysis. Since you only have a small amount of ATP and quickly run out of it, this system creates more by splitting apart molecules of glycogen, which is the storage form of carbohydrate. The process lowers the pH of your blood, leaving your muscles feeling fatigued. Few of us can use this system for more than a minute or two at a time.

Your body typically uses these three systems concurrently whenever you’re up and moving.

NEW RULE #12 • The benefits of the program exceed the sum of the individual parts.

Let’s return to the American Council on Exercise definition of fitness. Back then I still believed you weren’t truly “fit” unless you ordered everything on the menu. I didn’t enjoy endurance exercise, and I can produce credible witnesses to the fact I wasn’t good at it. But I did it because I thought I was supposed to.

Today I think there’s a stronger case to be made for doing the type of exercise you enjoy most, doing it consistently and with as much vigor and ambition as you can muster, and letting your health take care of itself. If all you like to do is walk, get out and walk hard, as the great Dewey Cox sang. While you’re at it, walk long. Walk fast too, or at least vary your speed from time to time. Walk up and down hills, and get off the path to walk across uneven terrain.

Same goes for yoga, or golf, or anything else. If it’s all you’re willing to try, at least try a lot of it. Sitting is the most dangerous thing we do, and most of us do it for hours a day. Anything that gets you up out of your chair and onto your feet is better than nothing. Not-nothing is the number-one benefit of any fitness program. Not-nothing burns (some) calories, increases your metabolism (slightly and transiently), develops endurance in the muscles you use (but only those muscles), and probably improves other fitness qualities like balance, coordination, and the speed at which you can do specific movements.

If not-nothing leads you to a true, consistent exercise routine, you’re guaranteed to improve your cardiovascular fitness, your insulin sensitivity (that is, your ability to clear sugar out of your bloodstream efficiently), your immune system, your mood, and the strength and function of whatever parts of your musculoskeletal system you use in the activity. If you run, for example, you’re going to develop greater lower-body bone density. You’ll almost certainly live longer, and in better overall health as well.

Alwyn’s Supercharged workouts cross the not-nothing barrier the minute you enter your workout space and begin the warm-up exercises. Fifty to sixty minutes later, you’re in the “pretty much everything” zone. You’ve burned a lot of calories, cranked up your metabolic rate so high that it’ll take hours to return to normal, moved all your joints through their full range of motion, and forced all your major muscles to work both hard and long, building strength and endurance. Since you’ve done all this with careful attention to your posture and form, you’ve improved your core stability. And because you’ve included exercises that challenge your balance and coordination, you’ve improved those qualities as well. You’ll breathe hard as you push your muscles to exhaustion on the strength exercises. (If you aren’t, you’re doing them wrong.)

All that is a prelude to the workout’s final component: metabolic training. You’ll choose from a long list of drills shown in Chapter 16, any of which push you to finish the workout with lots of movement in lots of directions, challenging your endurance and fortitude in ever-shifting ratios.

The workout covers every aspect of muscular fitness. Since the heart is a muscle, responsible for pumping blood to all those other muscles, it gets trained along with everything else. You don’t have to worry about mundane, steady-pace cardio exercise, unless it’s something you enjoy (in which case I apologize for calling it “mundane”). You won’t have to worry about long, boring stretching routines, unless you like to do them. (You still have to admit they’re pretty boring.) A few months of these workouts and you’ll be in better shape, however you define it: leaner, more muscular, stronger, better conditioned, more athletic and coordinated. Work hard enough for long enough, and you can be “fit” by any reasonable definition.

What I can’t say is what any single part of the workout can do without all the other parts.

Take strength, for example. In previous books I’ve mentioned studies showing that physical strength correlates with longevity. But the elderly men and women in those studies—typically recruited in retirement communities—aren’t lifters. The stronger ones aren’t exactly “strong”; they just haven’t lost as much strength as their peers.

Or take the idea that strength training improves athletic performance. I don’t think you’ll find a coach who claims it doesn’t, but proof is harder to pin down than you’d expect. Strength can be correlated to improved speed and all sorts of linear things, like throwing harder or kicking farther. But does it help improve the skills that win games? Does it help you put the ball into the net (assuming you’re not playing tennis, where that wouldn’t be good at all)?

The research, it turns out, isn’t conclusive. The entire strength and conditioning field may believe the stronger athlete is the better athlete, and I’m certainly inclined to agree with them. But studies have turned up limited evidence that even a large increase in strength and power translates to a measurable improvement in on-field performance.

Another example: Wake me up in the middle of the night, far from the nearest research database, and ask me if balance is key to athletic performance. I’m going to say yes, right after I yell at you for ripping me out of a sound sleep to ask such a silly question. But is it silly?

When Con Hrysomallis, a researcher at Victoria University in Australia, looked at a vast body of research, he noted a link to injury risk (better balance=fewer injuries), but “the relationship between balance ability and athletic performance is less clear.” To no one’s surprise, gymnasts have the best balance among athletes. However, in surfing and judo—both of which would seem to require otherworldly balance—there was no link to performance. The best didn’t have better balance than their less skilled peers. He concluded that balance training could help regular people like us more than it helps elite athletes.

You may not realize you’re training your balance in Alwyn’s workouts, beyond the times when you’re doing single-leg exercises and you’re acutely aware of the risk of toppling over. But from beginning to end, you’re pushed out of your comfort cocoon, forced to move in new directions, hold yourself steady in unique positions, and from time to time move unbalanced loads.

We know all that is “good,” and way better than not challenging your body to learn new movements and skills. We just can’t say how much it helps outside the context of the full program.

But there may be one aspect of muscular fitness that surpasses the others in lifelong importance.

The difference between strength and power is easy to distinguish on a metaphorical level. Strength is demonstrable, but power works best when you can’t see how people use it to get what they want. In physiology, it’s a lot more explicit. Strength is the ability to exert force. Power is force multiplied by velocity. Put more simply, strength is what you can lift, and power is the speed at which you can lift it.

There’s a sliding scale for power. The smaller the object, the faster you can move it, but the less power your body generates to make it move. Power peaks when you lift something that’s about 70 percent of your maximum. So if you’re a woman who can squat 100 pounds once with good form, you would express peak muscle power when you squat 70 pounds as fast as you can. If you’re a guy who can deadlift 300 pounds, your power would peak, more or less, when you pull 200 pounds off the floor at max velocity.

The four Basic Training programs in Supercharged have a specific power-training component. Most of us have little opportunity to move fast in our daily routines, and health-club chains have done all of us a disservice by convincing their members to work out on machines, which force you to go at a slower pace and punish you for going faster. Doing something fast every workout reminds us of how much fun it is to run and jump and throw things around.

But the more advanced programs don’t include that specific training category. Studies are pretty clear that when athletes train for maximum power (moving lighter weights at top speed) or maximum strength (moving heavier weights at any speed) they get about the same improvements in jumping and sprinting. The researchers concluded that, over time, the overall benefits of strength training would exceed those of power training. So if you can increase power by training for strength, but you can’t increase strength to the same degree by training for power, it makes more sense to focus on strength.

For the youngest readers, these distinctions between strength and power aren’t all that crucial. It’s still important to do the exercises as part of Basic Training, since they contribute to the overall conditioning you’ll need for the Hypertrophy and Strength & Power programs. But you aren’t yet at any particular risk of losing the power you already have. It’s a different story for those of us old enough to remember when the continents were a single land mass.

We know that adults lose muscle as we age, and when we lose muscle we would expect to see drops in strength, power, and any number of performance variables, like walking speed. But when researchers at Tufts University looked at adults in their seventies, they found that power loss occurred at several times the rate of strength loss. And strength loss was itself three times faster than muscle loss, which was about 2 percent per year.

It’s not the loss of muscle in general that puts you into that wheelchair. It’s the loss of Type II muscle fibers, which generate four times the power of endurance-oriented Type I fibers. Those fibers come in bundles, called motor units, and each motor unit has a nerve cell to switch it on when needed. When you lose motor units, you also lose nerve cells. Lose nerve cells and you lose abilities.

One of the Tufts studies compared a group of healthy, middle-aged adults to two groups of men and women in their seventies—one healthy, one with mobility limitations. The latter group had 25 percent less muscle than the middle-aged people, but 95 percent less lower-body power. Compared to their nonlimited peers—also in their seventies—they had 13 percent less muscle, but 65 percent less power.

That’s where the death spiral begins: The loss of Type II motor units precipitates a higher magnitude of strength loss, and an even more dramatic power drain. No matter what age you happen to be as you read this, remember that the goal is to get old without getting feeble. That’s just as true at the start of adult life as it is in retirement. All of us, young and old, need to pay attention to our body’s most precious resource: our Type II muscle fibers.

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All Fitness Is Muscular Fitness