
Enough Said!
Congratulations to our own Mike Overman who scored the best time on the obstacle course at the 2009 Police and Fire Challenge held last week. He and his team mates also won the team event which was the combination of a 5k run and the obstacle course.

This picture is taken from a gym blog that celebrates this kind of injury as accomplishment. This to me is not, in anyway accomplishment, this is a mistake. I will concede that with enough high intensity, sports performance based training, injuries are going to happen, no athlete stays 100% healthy 100% of the time. On the other hand I battle everyday to safeguard with every means possible, to prevent such injuries from happening. If your sport is fitness, then great, go ahead and hack up your hands. I work with athletes that train with my to improve their sport, not their "Fran" score. If this athlete plays golf, is a quarterback, plays tennis or baseball, and you have caused such an injury because you are doing workouts containing nine thousand swinging pullups, that athlete can no longer practice their sport, and you have failed as a coach.
We have experimented with many training protocols over the 15 years we have been in business, and I will admit, we have done workouts that result in this kind of stupidity. The only difference is we figured out these practices were stupid and ultimately unproductive and moved on to research more productive methods to produce athletic improvement, in as safe an environment as possible.
Here is the link to the brochure for the SAS (speed/agility/strength) program. We are happy to add Emily Hackert to our coaching staff. You will see from her biography that she is an accomplished coach, and we look forward to adding her skills to the mix.
Picture of Evan Wray walking into this weekend's game with the other Notre Dame football players. Very proud, as I am of all my athletes. Send pictures of you and your team, I'll post those too.
I just saw Valerie Burtinelli on Sunday Morning, she was talking about her weight loss, and her comment was, now that she lost the weight, she needs to figure out what things got her to that point (her high weight), so that she knows what situation in her life to avoid, so she doesn't get back to that point.
What's causing you to eat too much?
We are working on the concept of an all inclusive speed/agility/strength/injury prevention camps for athletes from all sports.
The curriculum will include sprinting, jumping, agility movements, as well as the associated exercises necessary to product power and strength while participating in their sport.
As a positive by product of this training, we can improve the athlete's ability to avoid injury by improving their ability to safely accelerate/decelerate and jump/land under control.
Workout options will be 2 x per week, 3x per week, 4x per week and an unlimited/month program
Any interest in this type of training should contact Paul at (937) 414-0362
Reading on the subject of fitness, athletic enhancement, and strength and conditioning, will exhibit to you how many new and innovative programs there are. Many are just fluffy, cookie cutter programs, but some are successful, very successful, and they all have one thing in common. Wether the program is a complex mash of Olympic lifts, sprints and standard lifts, or solely Kettlebell or Sandbag based, the successful programs all have intensity at their root.
The famous quote about fitness programs is that everything works for a while, and I believe that is true. To add to this, in order to make any program work well it must make your body adapt to a new stimulus. This stimulus must be a higher level of ability that will therefore show improvement in body composition, oxygen consumption and maximal strength levels.
So what ever it is you do for fitness, doing "it" intensely is much more important than duration, or style. Definitely error on the side of intensity with good movement form, it will get you where you need to be.
Women who claim to be afraid to train hard because
they “always bulk up too much” are often already pretty bulky,
or “skinny fat” (thin but weak and deconditioned)
and have found another excuse to
continue life sitting on their butts.
Here is one of five rounds that we recorded last Saturday of Mike's preparation workout
Combat Challenge Training from paul manfre on Vimeo.
Our own Evan Wray informed me this afternoon that he made the squad at Notre Dame! All this accomplished within months of some very serious personal tragedy. Fantastic effort on his part from a great kid.
Evan and his family
Recent work performed at the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston found that consuming a small preworkout protein-carb meal may help with recovery and muscle building.
The study focused on a small liquid meal taken before weight training. The researchers found that consuming a protein/carb drink before a workout can significantly increase the amount of muscle-building amino acids your muscles suck up during the workout and over the next few hours. The increase in amino retention amounted to roughly 150% more than when the same drink was consumed immediately after a severe one-hour leg thrashing. This is significant because amino acid retention is a major step in creating or enhancing the anabolic environment in muscle and in promoting better and faster recovery and growth.
The researchers used a drink composed of 6 g of essential amino acids and 35 g of sucrose, plus a small amount of artificial sweetener (containing aspartame), dissolved in a half-liter of distilled water. The same scientists had used this drink formulation in previous studies that demonstrated its significant anabolic effects on muscle protein synthesis when consumed one or even three hours after a hard training session.