The "Why" behind the workouts
Posted in Motivation
Hey Scorch Family,
This sort of post is long overdue, and I’m pretty sure you opened it in hopes that you’d actually get to see the workouts for the week. Well, you don’t…you do however get a brief synopsis of what this week will focus on and what days of the week will focus on what.
But before I give you that info I need to explain how I actually program your workouts (despite a majority thinking it involves beer and tequila and aggression towards Michael.)
Note: No rage and aggression goes into your workout programming…just many years and dollars spent in school, internships, continuing education, actual science and years of trial and error.
Let me begin with where “Scorch” started.
A young Liz had anger management issues and conventional therapy didn’t work. In hopes of saving their sanity her father taught her how to powerlift at the age of 13 and her mother made her run and swim in every race she possibly could…Sports exhaust children with anger issues.
Fast Forward to 16 year old Liz, she thought she wanted to be a physical therapist. She began working for a clinic in Vermont where she created exercise programs for patients as they finished their rehab so they could continue to work after they had healed up. Yes… this was monitored by a physical therapist and started the process of learning all about broken people.
Next came college… The University of Vermont was chosen because running in circles became a thing she was decent at and as a NCAA Division 1 program they offered her the ability to do so. Athletic Training Education was her chosen program since at this point she was obsessed with strength and conditioning, injury prevention and basically anything that had to do with the human body… this is also the place where she learned of her love of beer.
Pause from the story… Here is an actual definition of the degree that I have since sometimes it’s really effing hard to explain:
Athletic training encompasses the prevention, examination, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of emergent, acute or chronic injuries and medical conditions. Athletic training is recognized by the American Medical Association (AMA), Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as an allied health care profession.
Basically, we had to learn a lot.
Back to the story…
After 4 years, many miles logged, many, many clinical hours learning way too much about the human body that scared the crap out of her and gave her a brief period of being a hypochondriac… she had to take her dreaded board exam. Thankfully she passed the first time and could leave school with a degree and a purpose. (At this point I still had no idea my purpose.)
Still in Vermont, she started working with the YMCA on a grant funded project that paired nutritionists, exercise physiologists and doctors together to make sick people better….it worked!
Then…Liz got cold.
It snows a lot in Vermont.
This is when she called her bestie Sophie from High School who was also cold and said get in the car were moving to Florida. No jobs, No places to live, just two cold northern girls ready for the beach.
“It’s okay”, they told their parents… “We’re just going for a year and then its straight to grad school…maybe even med school!”
In those 4 short years between moving to Florida and opening Scorch med school obviously didn’t happen…. But saying she learned A LOT is an understatement.
From training people 3 times her age with every illness and injury in the book, from opening a gym for a multi-billion dollar company and creating programming based on professional athlete training programs (Surprise! Scorch isn’t the first gym I opened,) she paid attention to what people actually needed…not what the fitness industry deemed the newest fad.
Now after that long winded and possibly un-necessary story (that I left a copious amount of detail out of) I can explain WHY I train you like I do.
What I learned in creating exercise programs since I was 16 years old…
-The body can do amazing things if you let it… anything forced doesn’t work. If you are patient and take your time your body will give you what you want.
- If you learn physics… you can learn how to exercise correctly. The human body can be broken down into lever arms and vectors and you get to decide whether or not you have torque on a joint…does this mean you get to decide if a lift injures you? Maybe! This is for a later blog post…
-Newtons first three laws are phenomenal when it comes to goal setting… again details at a later time.
-“Functional Fitness” involves the first law of thermodynamics… which is the law of conservation of energy…which can also be used in many other areas of life. Long story short… energy cannot be created or destroyed…it can only be transferred…which is why I ask you to transfer it from your legs to your core to your upper body when you’re doing thrusters… remember its NOT an upper body exercise. This law can also be used when it comes to giving all your energy away to others… just ponder that one for a bit.
-Energy since it can’t be created or destroyed is stored as potential energy and can be used as kinetic energy… which is WHY we train in kinetic chains. If we want our bodies to be balanced, efficient and without injury we need to be able to train in kinetic chains so energy has the ability to move freely.
The kinetic chains:
Anterior- Front of the body
Posterior- Back of the Body
Lateral- All those annoying stabilizers that run down our sides
-Training HAS to be periodized… or its random…and random creates injury and plateaus. I will define perioidization in a much longer blog post.
-If someone isn’t ready to change… they haven’t figured out their WHY.
I’ve learned a lot more, but I don’t want to bore you in my first post!
Now all that being said…
I can explain to you WHY this week:
Periodization focus: General Hypertrophy (Basic Strength)/Endurance/Multi Chain
What the heck that means: Higher reps, lower weight, moderate cardio, switching up chains. This week is meant to make you huffy puffy but it won’t over tax your Central Nervous System (CNS… again more for a later time.)
The Split:
Monday- Posterior/Lateral Chains
Tuesday- Anterior/Posterior Chains
Wednesday- Lateral/Anterior Chains
Thursday- Posterior/Lateral/Anterior Chains (Yes this is a total body day)
Friday- Lateral Chains
Saturday- Posterior/Lateral/Anterior Chains (Another total body shake out day)
Sunday- Go rest you crazies
Please let me know if this is in any way helpful or it will be the reason you unsubscribe from future scorch emails. My goal for 2019 is truly to help you understand the science behind the reasons I do what I do when writing your workouts… so that you are better equipped to break down the BS fads that keep popping up and confusing people.
Thank you ALL for supporting me through these crazy 3 years and I can’t wait to see what this year brings… (hopefully a scorch franchise and a café next door…but who’s calling anyone out…Julia?)
Love you all,
Liz
This sort of post is long overdue, and I’m pretty sure you opened it in hopes that you’d actually get to see the workouts for the week. Well, you don’t…you do however get a brief synopsis of what this week will focus on and what days of the week will focus on what.
But before I give you that info I need to explain how I actually program your workouts (despite a majority thinking it involves beer and tequila and aggression towards Michael.)
Note: No rage and aggression goes into your workout programming…just many years and dollars spent in school, internships, continuing education, actual science and years of trial and error.
Let me begin with where “Scorch” started.
A young Liz had anger management issues and conventional therapy didn’t work. In hopes of saving their sanity her father taught her how to powerlift at the age of 13 and her mother made her run and swim in every race she possibly could…Sports exhaust children with anger issues.
Fast Forward to 16 year old Liz, she thought she wanted to be a physical therapist. She began working for a clinic in Vermont where she created exercise programs for patients as they finished their rehab so they could continue to work after they had healed up. Yes… this was monitored by a physical therapist and started the process of learning all about broken people.
Next came college… The University of Vermont was chosen because running in circles became a thing she was decent at and as a NCAA Division 1 program they offered her the ability to do so. Athletic Training Education was her chosen program since at this point she was obsessed with strength and conditioning, injury prevention and basically anything that had to do with the human body… this is also the place where she learned of her love of beer.
Pause from the story… Here is an actual definition of the degree that I have since sometimes it’s really effing hard to explain:
Athletic training encompasses the prevention, examination, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of emergent, acute or chronic injuries and medical conditions. Athletic training is recognized by the American Medical Association (AMA), Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as an allied health care profession.
Basically, we had to learn a lot.
Back to the story…
After 4 years, many miles logged, many, many clinical hours learning way too much about the human body that scared the crap out of her and gave her a brief period of being a hypochondriac… she had to take her dreaded board exam. Thankfully she passed the first time and could leave school with a degree and a purpose. (At this point I still had no idea my purpose.)
Still in Vermont, she started working with the YMCA on a grant funded project that paired nutritionists, exercise physiologists and doctors together to make sick people better….it worked!
Then…Liz got cold.
It snows a lot in Vermont.
This is when she called her bestie Sophie from High School who was also cold and said get in the car were moving to Florida. No jobs, No places to live, just two cold northern girls ready for the beach.
“It’s okay”, they told their parents… “We’re just going for a year and then its straight to grad school…maybe even med school!”
In those 4 short years between moving to Florida and opening Scorch med school obviously didn’t happen…. But saying she learned A LOT is an understatement.
From training people 3 times her age with every illness and injury in the book, from opening a gym for a multi-billion dollar company and creating programming based on professional athlete training programs (Surprise! Scorch isn’t the first gym I opened,) she paid attention to what people actually needed…not what the fitness industry deemed the newest fad.
Now after that long winded and possibly un-necessary story (that I left a copious amount of detail out of) I can explain WHY I train you like I do.
What I learned in creating exercise programs since I was 16 years old…
-The body can do amazing things if you let it… anything forced doesn’t work. If you are patient and take your time your body will give you what you want.
- If you learn physics… you can learn how to exercise correctly. The human body can be broken down into lever arms and vectors and you get to decide whether or not you have torque on a joint…does this mean you get to decide if a lift injures you? Maybe! This is for a later blog post…
-Newtons first three laws are phenomenal when it comes to goal setting… again details at a later time.
-“Functional Fitness” involves the first law of thermodynamics… which is the law of conservation of energy…which can also be used in many other areas of life. Long story short… energy cannot be created or destroyed…it can only be transferred…which is why I ask you to transfer it from your legs to your core to your upper body when you’re doing thrusters… remember its NOT an upper body exercise. This law can also be used when it comes to giving all your energy away to others… just ponder that one for a bit.
-Energy since it can’t be created or destroyed is stored as potential energy and can be used as kinetic energy… which is WHY we train in kinetic chains. If we want our bodies to be balanced, efficient and without injury we need to be able to train in kinetic chains so energy has the ability to move freely.
The kinetic chains:
Anterior- Front of the body
Posterior- Back of the Body
Lateral- All those annoying stabilizers that run down our sides
-Training HAS to be periodized… or its random…and random creates injury and plateaus. I will define perioidization in a much longer blog post.
-If someone isn’t ready to change… they haven’t figured out their WHY.
I’ve learned a lot more, but I don’t want to bore you in my first post!
Now all that being said…
I can explain to you WHY this week:
Periodization focus: General Hypertrophy (Basic Strength)/Endurance/Multi Chain
What the heck that means: Higher reps, lower weight, moderate cardio, switching up chains. This week is meant to make you huffy puffy but it won’t over tax your Central Nervous System (CNS… again more for a later time.)
The Split:
Monday- Posterior/Lateral Chains
Tuesday- Anterior/Posterior Chains
Wednesday- Lateral/Anterior Chains
Thursday- Posterior/Lateral/Anterior Chains (Yes this is a total body day)
Friday- Lateral Chains
Saturday- Posterior/Lateral/Anterior Chains (Another total body shake out day)
Sunday- Go rest you crazies
Please let me know if this is in any way helpful or it will be the reason you unsubscribe from future scorch emails. My goal for 2019 is truly to help you understand the science behind the reasons I do what I do when writing your workouts… so that you are better equipped to break down the BS fads that keep popping up and confusing people.
Thank you ALL for supporting me through these crazy 3 years and I can’t wait to see what this year brings… (hopefully a scorch franchise and a café next door…but who’s calling anyone out…Julia?)
Love you all,
Liz
