We must smash them - the rise of bootcamps

We must smash them - purely in a fitness sense

These days you can’t walk through a park without encountering a group of people wearing coloured bibs being shouted at by a guy in a pair of combat trousers. It’s a cross between school PE classes, with everyone dressed to play in a five a side tournament while the staff sergeant from full metal jacket tells them what to do.

Coming to a park near you

A few weeks ago I was driving past one such class in a park near where I live, one group of women was doing bodyweight squats – fair enough. But then I saw another group of men in their coloured bibs running along with another guy on their back piggy back style. These weren’t special forces recruits practising running out of a firefight with their injured buddy on their back, they were a mixture of young, old, overweight. As I watched a couple of the guys struggling as they carried a partner that may have weighed 80-90kg, with their backs in forward flexion under load, I knew I was never going to be short of back pain clients.


Power clean till you puke.

A guy I know who used to be a trainer, would often talk about how he was ‘going to smash a client’, he wanted to break them. He’d often start a workout with a 50 or 100 burpee warm up, if they threw up he considered it a good training session. He would then often get them to do high reps of power cleans ( and by power clean I mean round back Romanian deadlift followed by a reverse curl ) until they were broken. My friend had never heard of crossfit, but he had inadvertently invented his own version of it.

The point is, it’s easy to smash a client, you get them to do a 100 burpee warm up, my friend knew that. But giving a client a workout that’s progressive and addresses their weaknesses and has balance is more than that. Its good to really blast it once in a while, but being completely smashed in a workout and having one that is effective are not necessarily the same thing. And it wont be long before your clients start breaking down with injury.

When I started in fitness 12 or so years ago, everyone was paranoid about ‘contraindicated’ movements that would injure someone, with boot camps the pendulum has swung the other way with trainers getting clients to do all types of crazy things because ‘that’s what the military do’, but most of us aren’t training military personnel or athletes, we’re training people who sit down for 8 hours a day. The type of people who we wouldn’t make run 5k because its ‘bad for their knees’ but then get them to do plyometrics and sprints with appalling technique even though they couldn’t even do a bodyweight squat.

I recently bought a new magazine, trail running (generally a good magazine), in it was a british military fitness bmf) pull out with the standard guy in a pair of combat trousers demonstrating the usual exercises and then I saw a picture of him doing the old skool hurdler stretch with back in forward flexion, have we learnt nothing?!

Now classes have always suffered from the problem that you can’t individualise a workout when you have 20-30 people, but the motivational class environment is what people go for. But making it safe & effective is another matter. Knowing how far to push someone is a mixture of art and science. But some things are obvious, making a middle aged overweight man or woman do hill sprints until they throw up does not make you big or clever or a master trainer.


Pre qualifying your bootcamp participants

Me and my colleague Nick recently ran our own bikini bootcamp. However, we set some criteria for people before they could do the boot camp:

1. We only let people who had been training with us at least 3 months take part, people we had worked with one to one or in small group training sessions in the gym.  
2. We made it clear to them that the bootcamp would involve running & sprinting, we only let people take part we knew could do this. 
3. The clients that took part had no major injuries, especially hip or knee problems.
4. We limited the 6 week course to 10 people.
5. We started each session with mobility drills, a dynamic warm up, went through sprint technique with build up sprints and built up over 6 weeks. Now when we first started the sprints,a couple of participant still got rectus femoris pulls (see Mike Boyle Advances in Functional Training for an explanation of what this is & why it happens ).

After all this screening this still happened. Imagine what happens when you have 30 people turning up each week and the instructor is just trying to smash them with the random exercises they have selected that day to try and make up the hour.

Now all of our participant achieved outstanding results training this way 3 x week for 6 weeks, and we pushed them hard, but we had the luxury of pre-selecting them for this. The point of this isn't to say we're any better at bootcamps than anyone else, its to illustrate how we screened, and even with experienced exercisers injuries can occur when they are introduced to new activities.

Don’t get me wrong, bodyweight exercises are a great tool, training outside in the fresh air enhances your mood and bootcamps

I can understand why trainers do them, you don’t have to carry around equipment, you don’t have to pay a gym excessive amounts of rental money each week, you don’t have to plan what you're doing, and when you're training groups of people you’re not relying on one personal training client turning up.

With the growth of bootcamps, military fitness circuits and women only bootcamps hopefully more people will exercise. But lets not trying to build fitness on top of dysfunction (to paraphrase Gray Cook) and end up permanently injuring people who just wanted to lose weight.

Exercise can be intelligent as well as intense.

Stirring the pot - core exercise (swiss balls can be used for good as well as evil)

Here's an exercise I've been using a fair amount in the past few months. Like quite a few exercises it seems to have been resurrected after Stuart McGill mentioned it. It appears in one of his articles here and is also covered in his excellent dvd The Ultimate Back Enhancing Performance.

People do a lot of stupid things on swiss balls, granted I see less and less people trying to stand on them, and if I do see someone do that I will palm strike them. And at the other end of the spectrum is a backlash from coaches not using the swiss ball for anything. As usual the truth lies somewhere in the middle, the swiss ball is a good tool for certain exercises, and not so good for others. This exercise falls into the good and useful category.

Some clients can't do ab-wheel roll outs or hand walk outs from a plank position, for them stirring the pot is a great exercise, and in many ways this exercise is superior because it also trains anti-rotation in the lumbar area. As we know from McGill resisting rotation in the core area is something most people need to work on.

Before attempting this exercise make sure you or your client can hold a normal plank, there's no point progressing to this if can't hold a standard plank or keep your back neutral.

How to do it
Adopt a plank position on the swiss ball like in the video below. While bracing the core, and by core I mean glutes as well, start to do a stirring movement with the arms in one direction and then the other. Try to minimise the movement in the core area, try not to let the back sag down or let the hips hitch up. In the video you can see I am better rotating one way then the other, in one direction my hips don't move but in the other you can see them lift.

You can vary the speed of the stirring, you can do a small or big stirring movement, you do do it for a set number of reps on each side or do it for time. I like to do it for time or until I feel myself starting to lose form or my abs burning. Not only is it good for anti-rotation, and a stronger core, it makes your abs look better too!

Commercial gyms - it doesn't have to be this way

Power rack - get one!

I work in a commercial gym - in the sense that members of the public have to pay a fee to use it - technically it's a leisure centre. I also teach classes in private gyms & train clients outside of the gym.

Commercial gyms get a bad rap, see here & here ( these made me laugh so much i printed off and stuck them up on the wall of the gym I manage ), and I've seen all of the things mentioned in the elitefitness posts at some point in my career. But it doesn't have to be that way. In the gym I manage, yes you can use chalk, yes you can lift barefoot, yes we have a power rack, yes you can do olympic lifts & we'll even plug you ipod into our music system ( but when the Glee album comes on after rage against the machine we will laugh at you, though maybe I'm a secret gleek too!)

All we ask in return, is pay for using the facility, you put your weights back after use and you don't bring your dog to the gym ( True story: yes a guy decided to bring his dog to the gym, not a guide dog or anything either, and when I told him he would have to take the dog out he accused me of bad gym etiquette by interrupting him in the middle of his tricep pushdown set, at which point i punched him in the face with a kettlebell; okay, the last part isn't true but the rest is!)

Now there are some compromises. The management above me trust my judgement and pretty much let me get on with things, but if I burned all the x trainers & treadmills and replaced them all with prowlers & sleds someones gonna probably notice ( and x trainers melt before they burn anyway). And yes we do have the perfunctory abductor & adductor machine but i haven't show these to anyone in years.

Adductor machine - just say no!

One of the problems is people join the industry & get disillusioned. They start out with good intentions but end up churning out standard gym 'inductions' because in some cases they don't have the right skill set, but mostly because they are poorly paid & undervalued, and no one else in the company bizarrely cares how good their training programs are. And members of the public are so used to getting the same old gym program, that sometimes they can't even appreciate it when someone tries to give them a program that may actually give them results! Upper management types can think its all about machines and flashing lights & integrated TV screens, anyone can show you how to use these. But over recent years the trend has thankfully started to go towards freeweights, bodyweight exercises, kettlebell, barbells, corrective exercise & mobility work - all of which require good coaching skills to teach correctly. Fitness professionals on the gym floor can end up being undervalued, even the ones running GP/ Exercise referral schemes & cardiac rehabilitation can end up getting paid little more than a standard fitness instructor and considerably less than someone who is teaching an aerobics class.

And training members of the public who have been previously sedentary, inactive or injured can be way harder than training athletes. I think it was Mike Boyle who said he had a whole new perspective and respect for personal trainers after doing personal training with some non athletic clients. Trust me, trying to get a 70 year old lady who's had a hip replacement or a 50 year old man with chronic back pain to hip hinge and get a decent squat pattern is way harder than dealing with a fit athlete.

Of course, there are bad trainers out there, in and out of gyms & sometimes personal trainers are seen as superior to mere fitness instructors. And the discussion of personal training & coaching is a whole other post. But case in point, I was attending a course with a colleague of mine in a gym up in London last year, this gym is in a very affluent area. We walked in and saw a personal trainer with his client doing squats on a bosu ball while holding a medicine ball and twisting from side to side, now from the look of the woman I'm guessing she wanted fat loss and this clown was doing unstable surface training ( see Eric Cresseys the truth about unstable surface training to find out why this was a bad idea ) and at first we laughed at this clown, but then I wanted to cry because he was probably charging £50-100 per hour for this and thought he was a world class trainer, and she could have come to our gym and got a superior training program from a lowly fitness instructor & included in her membership.

Finally, you don't have to train in a commercial gym. My brother trains at home in his garage, Ross Enamait style with an olympic barbell set, pre-selectorised dumbbells, sledghammer, tyre, sand bag etc: its suits his lifestyle and he doesn't have to wait for a bunch of guys doing 50 sets on national bench press day to finish. But that doesn't mean all commercial gyms, leisure centres are bad places to train. And if they are, we can change them from the inside out.