We’re looking to work each muscle group or exercise to a point where we hit what we call maximum effort. Somewhere between 50 and 70 seconds. That gives the body enough time to warm up that muscle, at the beginning of the set, and enough time to overload it at the end of the set, within a safe range. Most research done has shown that that’s the optimal level for most people, as far as the optimal range of time for most people to get the best results. So, we want to keep them moving slow and controlled, through each rep and each set, and like I said while keeping the forces and repetitions low. There are only two things that’ll hurt you: excess force and excess repetitions, and we’re trying to keep them both to a minimum.
Phil Faris: Another component of injury involves over-training. A lot of times people go all Gung-ho, and try and work out six, seven days a week. Is that something that you’d advocate?
Dwayne Wimmer: With our initial health history form, we ask them what else they are doing in their lives. We ask what other activities, what other exercise. And we want them to take a minimum of two days a week off where there is no exercise. Now, they can go for a walk or a stroll or whatever, but we’re not looking for them to do any real specific exercise for a minimum of two days a week. As far as strength training goes, we would never have them do more than three days a week because you need to have a day off in between at least, to allow your body to adapt to the overload. And if they’re doing lots of other activities, cycling, running, if they’re involved in other types of strength sports, I mean we have people going to the gym on their own; we take that all into consideration. We want to make sure that we get the overload that’s needed to create the stimulus, but then also have enough time for the body to adapt to that.
If you’re doing something every day, you’re either not doing it hard enough to really stimulate the body to change, or you’re just not letting your body have enough rest, which is then going to create a negative impact with your stimulus, so you’re becoming counterproductive. What we’re trying to do is make sure we get the overload but then also have enough time to recover. How hard you work determines how much rest you need between workouts. Most of our clients work out with us twice a week, and we do have some that work out three times a week, and some that workout once a week, based on other activities.
Phil Faris: To summarize, the keys here are to work out with enough intensity that you force muscles to adapt, and then allow enough time for the body to recover so that the body starts to heal itself, and rebuild. Then, doing it under a controlled environment so that you don’t overtrain or use too much weight. This was one of the issues I had after a layoff. I was trying to go back and lift the same weights I lifted when I was in college. I had to realize that my body was different. I had to leave my ego at the door tell myself, “All right, I’ve got to start from scratch.” That was hard for me.
I was wondering if there are other challenges that your 50-plus clients present to trainers?
Dwayne Wimmer: I think to your point, you aren’t 18 or 20 years old anymore, and we should start from where you are now, not where you think you are, or where you once were. We even have that same thing; we have clients who may go away for the winter and come back. We make sure that we start them at a place where we’re not taking them too close to where they were before, so where they’re going to be too sore, where they just don’t want to do it anymore. We’re going to ease you into it; we don’t want you to get hurt, we don’t want to discourage you – it’s a process. You’re always trying to get there, but there is somewhere else, and you’ll never reach there. If you realize that wherever you are now is where you are, and you’re going to adapt by overloading your body slowly, you will continually get stronger and stronger. Through the process, the increments get smaller and smaller, but you’ll continually get stronger if you keep working hard.
Phil Faris: Dwayne, in your club, trainers work one on one with your clients, and you have a lot of trainers. Can you talk a bit about how you maintain quality control? How do you make sure every client gets the same personal attention and approach to fitness?
Dwayne Wimmer: Everybody who comes in as a potential trainer goes through a six-week program that we have developed in-house, to make sure that they understand our methodology, our approach to the client as far as customer service goes, and just how to keep them progressing. Once they’re through that six weeks, it’s a continual learning process. We have meetings every week to make sure that we’re all on the same page as far as how we teach each exercise and how we adapt to each person’s problems that we bring to the table, whether it be orthopedic or even psychological. Some people come to the table one week where they’re really stressed; how do we deal with that? We work with all our trainers every week, to keep them learning and progressing, so they can work with every client. So, any client can work with any trainer at any time. They don’t have to adapt to any trainer’s schedule; we adapt to their schedule.
