Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

Tommy's Training at the LTA with Strength and Conditioning Coach Steve Kotze




The Optimal Life Fitness Group has worked with Steve for sometime now and he now uses a lot of the training methods we use in our courses. In particular, in 2007 he introduced Extreme Kettlebells to the LTA. Since that day he has had great success with the tennis players at the National Training Centre.
After travelling the world with the players for a few months he landed back in the UK in January and we got in contact. His need for some real training was apparent after all of those plane journeys. To me that was the perfect excuse for us to get down the gym to do some training and thus along came the Ultimate Session!
Designed by my good self to employ a mix of speed, power, strength and strength endurance I met up with Steve at the National Tennis Centre and the rest is History!

See below for the full training session
Weights should be adjusted accordingly to your 1 rep maxes.
Enjoy Guys!
































Followed by a nice, freezing cold ice bath! I've never had one of these before, but now that I have I want one after every training session. It was brilliant and I felt 100% fresh the next day!





















It turned out to be a great training session and I know Steve felt the affects for a few days afterwards!!

Happy training

It's that time of year again the London Marathon is only a matter of months away. Alot of you will have clients who have entered and you may have even entered yourself.

I have my own theories and ideas of how you should go about training for the marathon, but as yet they haven't fully been trialed or tested. However they have been partially tested by some of my clients with good results and they basically follow this framework:

1. 1 hill or interval session each week
2. 1 Fartlek (various speed session) each week
3. 1 longer run varying distances each week
4. 2-3 resistance training sessions each week (obviously including Olympic Lifting and Kettlebells!)

Most individuals when training for the marathon spend too much time weakly plodding around with poor posture and compounding poor running technique. This leads to pain, injury and a poor marathon running time. By sticking to one longer run each week and keeping the other sessions shorter and more intense: technique, strength, speed and fitness will improve whilst allowing the body more time to recover.

Anyway the meat of this entry and what you can take away from it is the following couple of ideas for some of your fartlek or interval sessions.

These sessions are known as 'Marathon Appreciation Sessions'. I got this idea off a client and friend. Basically they are farltek or interval sessions where you spend your work time running at or as close to the speed run by Haile Gebreselassie in World Record Marathon time.

On the 28th of September 2008 Haile Gebreselassie at the Berlin Marathon broke his own world record and recorded a time of 2hrs3mins and 59seconds. This is where the concept of the marathon appreciation session comes in. The idea is that you perform your intervals or work periods at the same speed as Haile! Now for a very small percentage of you this might be easy. For the most of us however this will prove extremely difficult.

Doing the maths: The World Record Time is 2;03:59, that is near enough to 124minutes. Now to convert the distance to an athletic track, 42.5km (42500m) divided by 400ms, this leaves us with a total of 106.25 (106 and a quarter laps) consecutive laps.

Basically Haile runs 106.25 consecutive 400ms at 70seconds per 400m!

In the 'Marathon Appreciation Sesssions' the aim is to run at this speed (70seconds per 400m) or as close to it as you can.

A start may be to (after an appropriate warm up) try multiple 400m sprints with 2 mins rest and see how close you can get to 70seconds. You may try 5*400ms with 2mins rest.

The next step is to put this into a continuous or Fartlek session. This is where you perform 1*400m at or close to 70seconds and 1*400m at a recovery pace (as slow/fast as you are comfortable) and repeat this as many times as you can. I'm doing 6 of these with my work sets ranging from between 1:12 and 1:19 (72, 79) - I haven't been timing my recovery sets but they are slow! I'm not a runner at all but I'm really enjoying these sessions- they are tough but enjoyable if you know what I mean ie, bring a bucket! Including a warm up and recovery lap I'm done in 30minutes.

There are other ways that you can appreciate Haile's achievements. You can try and hold his speed for 100m, 200m, 600ms or 1000ms. His marathon time works out to a 1000m run in 2mins and 54 seconds, I'm not sure if I could manage one 1km at this speed!

Let me know what you think and what results you and your clients have with this session if you give it a try. If you have any other ideas for sessions please share.

All the best

BJ

Labels: fartlek, intervals, marathon, run training

Optimal Life Fitness took some time out recently to ask EKI and Olympic Weightlifting for the Fitness Professional instructor Joe Oliver a few questions on his career in the fitness industry. Joe has shared some insights into the company he works for, his own thoughts on the fitness industry as well as some of his own training goals. Joe is one of our top EKI's and you may know Joe from a couple of our video clips.

OLF: Firstly Joe thanks for taking time out to share a bit about yourself, what your company is doing and what some of your own business and training goals are.

JO: Not a problem Tommy.

OLF: Let's get straight to it then. How long have you been in the fitness industry?

JO: I have been in the industry for five years and as a Personal Trainer for four years. More recently I have moved into Personal Training Management.

OLF: What are your professional goals and ambitions?

JO: I have designed and implemented a Personal Training career package for REPS Level 3 Personal Trainers looking to build a sustainable Personal Training business within the leisure sector. My professional goal is to deliver a long term financially stable business model across the UK to dedicated, and inspirational Personal Trainers who share my beliefs of the industry.

OLF:Who do you work for and what is your current role?

JO: My company is Your Personal Training UK Limited and my current role is to direct the recruitment, set-up and ongoing support and mentoring of Personal Trainers across our London territory. We are working in partnership with GLL (Greenwich Leisure Limited) to provide Personal Trainers for their Central London gyms and leisure centres. We are currently recruiting for vacancies starting in 2009.

OLF: What do you think are the main reasons why some Personal Trainers find it difficult to build a long term Personal Training business within a Health Club?

JO: Having been a Personal Trainer in both the private and public health club sectors and in both Central London and the North of England I have been involved with a wide variety of different Personal Training systems. I believe the main reasons why many trainers struggle to build a sustainable business are the sheer volume of trainers in many clubs and in addition, the penetration rates in each health club. The Your Personal Training System centres around sustainability by only offering one Personal Training position per 800 active gym members in any health club, alongside high levels of sales, branding and marketing support – Your Personal Training do not believe in saturating the gym floor with PTs, which will allow all trainers to build a successful business and large client base.

OLF: You started your career as a PT, do you still find time to train clients in your busy schedule?

JO: I now only have the time to train a limited number of clients (5-10 per week), mainly due to my management commitments and my need to deliver a high quality service to my clients. I am now finding myself working 14 hour days regularly!

OLF: In your time in the fitness industry what has impressed you the most in terms of training?

JO: I would have to say undoubtebly that Kettlebells have impressed me the most in recent times. The versatility of this strength and conditioning tool is undeniable.
There are always new trends and fads coming in and out, but has there been anything that you think is here to stay? Kettlebells I am sure will be around for a very long time. Although I do think that there is a long way to go before the mass gym population can fully appreciate the benefits of the “cannon ball with a handle”. It is the responsibility of all those EKI’s out there to spread the Kettlebell word!

OLF: What type of training do you do and how do you find the time to do it?

JO: I usually manage to fit in 4 sessions per week which I now have to book into my diary to make sure I have the time! In a broader sense I use mainly Kettlebells alongside the Olympic Lifts with a functional strength training focus. With regards Kettlebells, I will train the Kettlebell Sport lifts alongside, 2 hands anyhow, Double KB Overhead Squat, KB Front Squat, Renegade Row, Double KB Sotts Press, Double KB Thrusters, Farmers Walk, Double KB Floor and Military Press amongst others.

OLF: Do you have any personal goals, ie kettlebell or OWL competitions?

JO: The goals I have set myself this year are as follows:
Barbell Overhead Squat 15 reps at bodyweight (110kg) – I might be dreaming!
Barbell Deadlift Max 250kg
Double Overhead KB Squat 40kg KBs for 15 reps
Military Press 40kg KBs for sets of 5 reps
KB Snatch 24kg 220+ reps in 10 minutes
Olympic Clean and Jerk 120kg

OLF: Wow Joe some pretty impressive goals there. Good luck with all you set out to do! We'll check in from time to time to see how you are getting on.

If any trainers out there are interested in working with Joe and Your Personal Training he is looking for trainers right now.

You can contact Joe on 07872 049 587 or joe.oliver@yourptuk.com

Labels: Interview, Joe Oliver