Hi, everybody. Dr. Cobb back with you.
We are going to talk today about a fitness test.
Most people, when they hear about a fitness test, they go, “Oh, you mean I’m going to go run up some stairs and check my heart rate?” It’s not that kind of fitness test. It’s actually a test to determine how well is your fitness program working.
What’s prompted this is, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from trainers, and therapists, and the general public, going, “Hey, love the Z-Health concept, but I wanted to understand a little bit more about what separates you guys from what a lot of other people are doing in the health and fitness industry.”
Here’s where Z-Health evolved, where it came from. I’ve worked with over 20,000 individual clients. I’ve trained thousands of professionals. What I’ve found in my career is that massive frustration abounds everywhere. Very few people feel like they’re getting a great return on their time and energy investment for their exercise.
So, here’s our fitness test.
Your fitness program has to pass through 4 filters, from my perspective, to know that it’s actually good for you.
Number 1: Are you looking better? In our courses, we say “body composition.” Are you getting thinner? Are you getting leaner? Are you putting on muscle? If your fitness program … If that’s one of your goals … is not accomplishing it, there’s a problem.
Number 2: Are you feeling better? In other words, how’s your pain? Exercise should make you feel great. Over time it should improve the health of your joints; it should improve the health of your tissues. If you’re feeling more beat up and in more pain from your exercise program, you may want to rethink that.
Number 3: Are you performing better? How is your life? Are you better at work? Are you better at home? Are you better in the gym? Great training should improve performance.
Exercise, as we’re learning, doesn’t just improve the body; it improves the brain. If you have a job that requires a lot of creativity, if you are working on your relationship with your kids, good exercise should make that easier, not harder. Those are our first 3 filters.
Finally, number 4: Are you becoming more injury-resistant? One of our big concepts is, we know that life’s a full-contact sport, and you can’t control for every variable.
Sometimes you’re going to slip and fall. Sometimes you’re going to be in a car accident. Those things happen; but the question is, are you becoming more injury-resistant?
When we say “injury” in Z-Health, we mean, “Hey, are your joints, tendons, ligaments, all those things, becoming healthier and more injury-resistant as a result of training?” Also, are you becoming more resistant to a heart attack?
You want to make sure that your exercise program is hitting on all cylinders. I run into people all the time that are like, “Ah. I look a lot better; but, man, it’s killing me. I feel terrible.”
The goal here, like I said, is for you to take a step back from whatever you’re doing or not doing and start to think about “why.”
A lot of people I’ve worked with over the years gave up exercise because they knew that these 4 things were what they wanted, but the program that they were following wasn’t building that for them.
There’s some great research evidence as to why. I’m going to explain that quickly, and then I’ll talk about it in a follow-up blog.
Here’s the basic thing we’re starting to learn.
There have been multiple studies in this genre. If you take a group of people, and you put them on an “average” exercise program, they’re going to break into 3 groups: a non-responder group, an average responder group, and a super-responder group.
Think about this. One of the studies that I find most interesting was done in Finland. What they found was, they took 270-plus people, 21 weeks of exercise.
That non-responder, that bottom group, at the end of 21 weeks of exercise, were weaker; they had worse cardiovascular efficiency; and they were fatter … after 21 weeks of regular exercise.
That is very frustrating, but I know a lot of people that experience that.
What’s happening in the big, wide world out there right now is, people are going, “Well, it must be your genes. It must be you’re pre-destined to not be responsive to exercise.”
I personally find that a silly concept, a silly idea. So far, nowhere in those studies has anyone mentioned this simple fact which we know to be true … People believe that exercise is so simple that you can’t mess it up.
That’s not true.
The wrong exercise done by the wrong person at the wrong time can break them. We see it happening day in, day out around the world.
The Z-Health system exists to help fix those problems.
The goal for us is to help you understand that your exercise and your nutrition program are literally a one-size-fits-one, one-size-fits-you; proposition. There’s going to be commonalities that we’re going to see; but the way that you perform things, the quality with which you do it, how your body’s moving in the process, is going to have an enormous impact on the eventual outcome of any time and energy you invest in an exercise program. That’s really what we’re all about.
If you’re a personal trainer, you’re a therapist, you’re a physician, interested in this stuff, that’s what we talk about in our certifications, and we spend tons and tons of time showing how to very precisely identify key needs for people.
If you’re a general consumer of health and fitness stuff, I encourage you to find a Z-Health trainer. They can help you start to break through those frustrations.
You can contact us. You can look at the products, the things that we have. Really, my passion in life is helping people break through their frustration barriers, particularly when it comes to movement, to health and fitness, to getting the body that you want, and getting the brain that you’ve always wanted
I will follow this up with another blog, because I’m going to talk about this in a little more depth. I want to end it here just, again, reminding you.
You need to pass your fitness training through those 4 filters, and you need to start to realize that if you’re frustrated, you’ve probably been following someone else’s idea of a perfect program for you, rather than having someone help you design something that truly works in your life.
If you have any questions about this, anything that we can do for you, please let us know.
Thanks.
