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Dealing with clients and being in a gym all day, you begin to be able to draw up a list of the most common injuries the average gym goer can get.

Shoulder Injuries are one of the most common injuries I see in the gym, with many of them involving the rotator cuff.

Reasons for shoulder injuries:

The shoulder joint, along with the hip joint, have a range of motion in every plane. The rotator cuff is a group of muscles that help stabilize the shoulder during exercise and activity.
These muscles, without exercise and care, are very easy to injure.

The rotator cuff muscles are small compared to other working muscles in the body and many weight lifters do not think of strengthening them during exercise, and instead place a lot of stress upon the shoulder joint during bench presses, shoulder presses, etc.

Many shoulder and rotator cuff injuries are as a result of failure to properly exercise the rotator cuff, lifting with bad form, and too heavy a weight coupled with poor technique.

How to prevent & shoulder injury

A weight lifter looking to prevent a shoulder injury really needs to start by warming up with some light rotator cuff strengthening exercise.
Making sure your weight lifting form is correct, and make sure on exercises like shoulder presses and bench presses that you are lifting with good form and with a weight you can manage without struggle.

Strengthen the muscles around the scapula or shoulder blade – rhomboids, lats, and traps.
Exercises that work these areas are: Seated or standing back rows, lat pulldowns, pullups, and reverse flys/bent over flys will all help retract  the scapula and help protect the shoulder (so long as your form is good and you do not drop the shoulders forward).

Avoid lifting too heavy on shoulder presses and chest presses and make sure you do not lock out on these exercises – locking out takes stress away from the muscle and directly on the shoulder joint.

Prevention Workout:

Rotator cuff – Internal & External Rotation – 15 to 20 reps of each

Barbell Row – 4 sets of 10-15 reps

Lat Pulldown/Pullups – 4 sets of 10-15 reps

Reverse Fly – 3 sets of 15 reps

About the Author:
James Dawson Martin is a fitness professional, personal trainer, nutritionist, and massage therapist based in Los Angeles, California.
To contact James regarding personal training, and nutrition, go to www.jamesdawsonmartin.com and select Personal Training Los Angeles

We’ve all seen them.. Magazines with self proclaimed amazing diets, internet blogs with celebrity miracle diets, etc… etc…

These articles all promise you the same thing – a great transformed physique.

Would it not be amazing if  we could all read these diets, apply the calorie count and eat the foods listed, and lose the weight/bulk up?

It would be..

However, I am here to tell you this:
It isn’t that easy!
There are many factors as to why these diets fail to give you the results you are looking for. Below I am going to list some of them:

• Your metabolism – your metabolism can either be too fast or too slow for the diet.

If you are following a ‘gain muscle fast’ program on 3000 calories, yet your metabolism is so fast you actually lose weight at 3000 calories (yes, it happens), then the program is wrong for you and you need upwards of 4,000 to 5,000 calories daily.  Same for a person who has a slow metabolism and barely looks at food and gains weight – 3000 might be too many calories.

• Your activity Level

So let’s say you are on a diet plan to get you lean and shredded for summer. The calorie count is 2,500 – which is about right for your body type and metabolism. However, if you haven’t taken into account your activity/workout level for the week, and end up not doing enough calorie burning, you aren’t going to lose weight.

You have to have a careful balance of diet and training to really get the results you are after.

• One style of diet type does not work for everyone – ‘low carb’, ‘south beach’, ‘paleo’,  etc.

Again, going back to body type. one style of diet does not work for individual people.

If your goal is to gain muscle and you are ectomorphic (find it hard to gain any weight), the low carb diet is not going to work.

Why?

Because some lucky (or unlucky) people with fast metabolisms need upwards of 5, 000 a day – that’s a lot of meat and eggs to consume right there – almost too much.
That coupled with the fact that carbohydrates are the bodies most effective source of energy (great for heavy, intense workouts) means a low carb diet is not going to work for that person!

However, if a person bloats very easily and gains weight easily, a lower carb diet can work pretty effectively.

• Calorie Maintenance Level

We each have a unique calorie maintenance level – a number of calories we consume and do not lose or gain weight at. Most diets do not factor this in.
There are many ways to find this level/number. One quick way is to take bodyweight and x it by anywhere from 12 to 18 depending on metabolism speed – most being in the 15 range.

You then take this number, spend a little under a week monitoring that number of calories – if you start losing fat or gaining muscle, depending on your goal, you know you are at the right calorie number. If not, take off/add a few hundred calories.

Once you have your magic number, you know what foods you are then eating to get that number = easy to follow, easy to get to your goals.

What does this tell you?

Do not follow the set diets you see in the magazines, in the blogs, etc. Unless there are effective ways you can customize them, or if they have diets for each type of person, you are best to consult a qualified trainer and nutritionist on what to eat and when to eat it. Tell them your background, have them find your body type, get them to find your calorie maintenance level, tell them your likes & dislikes, and let them tailor make a diet set just for you.

If you feel confident doing it yourself, follow the calorie maintenance level approach and slowly adjust your calories according to your results the first week. After the first few weeks of grasping your maintenance level, it will become easier – as you will now know what foods and how much to eat to get your required level on a daily basis.

I would like to take a few moments to address an issue that I deal with on a daily basis – Women in the gym who are afraid to lift weights, fearing they will become female versions of the incredible hulk just by touching anything heavier than a 2lb dumbbell.

They are many benefits for women when it comes to participating in regular weight resistanceworkouts.

Below I will list the top 3 reasons:

1. Shape and tone – Shape and tone comes from losing body fat and gaining lean muscle.  Women seem to be fine with the losing body fat part but when they hear the words ‘gaining lean muscle’ they begin to panic… WRONG.

Lean muscle is what gives your body shape with the tone you want. If you didn’t have muscle you would just be fat hanging from bone. You would have no tone to work with.

2. Burn more calories – The more muscle to fat ratio you have, the more body fat you are able to burn. If you have a high percentage of bodyfat and a low percentage of muscle, you will have a harder time being able to burn fat and keep fat off long term – another reason why fad diets alone without weight training does not work long term – it doesn’t help you gain lean muscle to help you raise your metabolism to fuel the fat burn process throughout the day.

My wife, Nicole, is a great example of a woman achieving great, feminine lean tone in the gym(just don’t wear the stilettos)

3. Health Benefits - By working out and eating correctly, not only can a woman look better on the outside.. They can feel better on the inside! Studies have shown that building healthy lean muscle is a great indication for longevity – more so than cholesterol or blood pressure levels.

By mixing endurance weight sessions with strength weight lifting sessions, women are able to increase their cardiovascular output, have healthier and stronger bones/joints, and be able to live longer!

Not to mention lifting weights can be even better for you than just doing cardio!
If done right, you can burn just as many calories, if not more, and burn more calories throughout the day because you have more lean muscle!
Copyright JamesDawsonMartin.com

Periodization: periodization is planning and structuring your training into specific phases – either by manipulating intensity – reps, tempo, rest, or weight and volume of load lifted. It can also be about taking someone from point A to point B in a structured and goal defined way.

A microcycle phase – refers to one week of training

A mesocycle phase – refers to two-four months of training

A macrocycle phase – refers to one to four years of training

Periodization is a form of structured training that is popular amongst athletes.

Coaches across the world structure an athletes program based on their current level of fitness, season of training, and competition.

For example, a football coach will have his athletes on a strength and mass routine during off season, before bringing in a period of recovery, and then changing it to endurance, speed and more agility later on – this is all part of periodization.

Periodization allows you to train certain times with higher volume and load and then have you go through a new cycle phase of recovery training so that you do not overtrain.

Where many people make mistakes is that they think training too much and too hard will cause overtraining. The truth is that by manipulating our training to include periodized recovery weeks - reduced volume – will stop overtraining from being able to occur.

As you can see, bodybuilders and anyone wanting to increase lean muscle can see the importance of periodization for further growth and fat loss.

You are able to plan weeks of intense, heavy lifting and then structure in weeks of higher rep, higher volume training, before tapering off and recovering.

We get all the benefits of strength training, lean muscle building – and we recover before we overtrain!

Perdiozation is becoming more popular with bodybuilders because of this.

Training hard is great.. But training smart as well as hard is the key to results.

Many people think it is over training – too much of a good thing to train a muscle group more than once a week.. That we are limited to training just once and nothing good can come from pushing ourselves that little bit more.

The fact is, our muscles need 24-72 hours of recovery (general rule of thumb) after an intense workout session.

Studies show that after the 72 hour period, our muscles atrophy – they get smaller.

Therefore, by training a body part 2-3 times a week in a smart, effective and program structured and periodized way, with the correct nutrition throughout, we..

Access this Program in full HERE

Breakdown:

Carbohydrates, along with protein, should make up the heart of your daily caloric intake because they form muscle glycogen – the fuel that gives us that energy to perform our workouts.

Focus on non processed, natural complex carbohydrates like yams, potatoes, whole grain breads, oatmeal and brown rice. The complex carbs are made of long chains of sugar and are digested very slowly, a lot slower than simple sugar carbs. Slow burning complex carbs promoted consistent blood sugar levels, which help to offset fatigue while promoting the release of insulin – the body’s principal anabolic hormone.

Spread them out

Divide your carbs into 5-6 meals throughout the day. This forms a steady release of insulin to keep our body in an anabolic environment! If you eat them in large amounts in one sitting, the body will store them as fat.

Eat them when you are active

Eat the majority of your carbs when you are most active – before and after workouts, and in the morning.

Focus on a big complex carb meal an hour before your workout. Focus on simple sugars and after an intense workout when you are bulking.

No Carbs before bed

4 hours or so before bed, taper your carbohydrates down and just have lean protein sources and green leafy vegetables or green vegetables.

Having carbs before bed will interfere with the release of growth hormones and promote fat storage as you sleep.

Eat carbs with protein

Mixing carbs and proteins reduces the risk of carbs being stored as fat. Eating protein with carbs facilitates the transport of amino acids in protein foods into the muscles to trigger new growth – just what we want.

There are two main types of stretching – static (holding a stretching exercise in one position without movement) and dynamic stretching, which means moving while stretching – quick bursts of dynamic movement to stretch.

Static stretching works great for flexibility and recovery after a work out/inbetween workouts. However, when it comes to warming up, static stretching has been proven to be less than beneficial.

Static stretching, studies have found, has been associated with muscle damage. A study completed on mice illustrated acute stretching of muscle fibers just five percent beyond resting length resulted in a five percent loss of isometric force.

More studies have found that stretching twenty percent beyond resting length have been related to muscle damage and decrease force in humans. Therefore, stretching before sport or intense strength activity could provoke enough muscle damage to reduce maximum force and explosive strength.
Infact, the National Association of Sports Medicine and many other organizations agree with this.

Going Dynamic:

Dynamic stretching is aerobic, it elevates heart rate and gets the oxygen pumping – resulting in your muscles being warmed up for the workout to come. Dynamic warm up activates the musculature to prevent injuries and the body is in a heightened active state for the workload ahead.

Dynamic stretching will give you better conditioning, it will help with balance and co-ordination, and it is effective for warming up many specific muscles at a time for strength exercise.

Following a dynamic stretch routine will give you the most effective warm up you can get:

Below I list some very effective dynamic stretches that emphasize the quads, abs, calves, hamstrings, pecs, shoulders, and back.

Squat into Arm Raise

1. Perform a regular squat, keeping your arms at your side

2. As you reach the bottom of the squat, extend your arms back behind you.

3. Come back up out of the squat, raising your arms in a controlled fashion as you do, all the way above your head, stretching your lower back.

Chest Stretch:

1. Stand with feet hip width apart and knees slightly bent
2. Start with arms stright out in front hands at shoulder level, as you would a bench press.
3. Keeping you arms straight take your hands back as far behind you as possible so you feel the stretch around your shoulders
4. Still keeping your arms straight return your hands back to the front
5. Repeat these actions for 30 seconds, gradually getting quicker and quicker

Side Lunge with rotation:

1. With feet touching, bend your arms at the elbow and hold in front of your chest
2. Bring your right foot out, taking a wide stance from the left, which stays where it is
3. As soon as you do this, lunge down as far as possible
4. As you are lunging down,  rotate your arms and upper body all the way to the right at the same time as you lunge
5. Come back up and bring the right foot back right next to the left, as you are coming up from the lunge, rotate back up with your body, so it is back to where it was at the beginning.
6. Once practiced, this should be performed in one dynamic burst

Celebrity Workouts:

The Fight Club Physique:

Fight Club is arguably one of the best movies of Brad Pitt’s career. However, the majority of buzz surrounding the movie was Brad Pitt’s ripped and toned physique, not his acting.

Below I list a workout split that would have been like the one Brad used to get lean and mean for the role of Tyler Durden.

The Routine:

Brad’s goal was to get ripped, functional and toned muscle. He didn’t want a bulky look for the movie.
With that said, Brad used an intense weight training circuit program a long with a cardio program to achieve the physique of fight club.

Weight Circuit:

This routine is an intense weight training circuit. 2 days a week will be multi joint compound movements and inbetween those days will be a mixture of multi-joint exercises and isolation exercises – more reps.

This routine would be perfect for Brad – The constant circuit training kept his heart rate elevated and the weight training helped tone and chisel his physique without adding bulk. Exactly what he wanted for the Fight Club Role!

Guidelines:

Do one set of each exercise of the circuit without stopping.

Once you complete the circuit once, rest a few minutes and begin again. End after doing 3 sets – finishing with the ab workout after completing the weight training circuit.

Monday:

3 sets of each, 12 reps
Do one set of each exercise until you reach the end of the circuit – then repeat another 2 times – this will equal 3 sets per exercise.

Squats x 3 sets -
Dumbbell Bench Press x 3 sets
Barbell Rows x 3 sets
Stiff leg deadlifts x 3 sets
Arnold Dumbbell Press x 3 sets
Dumbbell shrugs x 2 sets
Tricep Pushdowns x 2 sets
Barbell curls x 2 sets

Abs:
After completing the circuit, do 3 sets of each ab exercise
Planks x 3 sets
Roman Chair side raises x 3 sets

Wednesday:

Leg Press x 3 sets
Cable Crossovers x 3 sets
Lat pulldowns or pushups x 3 sets
Leg curls x 3 sets
Lateral raises x 3 sets
Dumbbell Shrugs x 2 sets
French Press x 2 sets
Hammer curls x 2 sets

Abs:
Decline crunches
Roman Chair scissors

Friday:
See Monday’s workout.

Cardio Program:

2-4 days a week. Following a HIIT (high intensity interval training) system.

2 minutes – warm up, slow jog pace
1 minute – all out sprint
2 minutes – jog
1 minute – all out sprint

*Continue this for 20-25 minutes

CLA (conjugated Linoleic Acid) is a naturally occurring fatty acid. It is found in cheese meat and dairy products in low amounts.

CLA is one of the ‘good fats’, and at levels of 2-3 grams per day CLA can help achieve body fat loss – which studies have shown.

The one problem with CLA is that it is found in foods at very low levels that also contain a lot of saturated fat – this is the reason we supplement with a CLA product.

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STUDIES & Research:

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CLA has strong and scientific evidence to support weight loss. For many years, studies have been done on CLA to find out just how effective supplementing with it can be.

Extensive studies have shown that  CLA reduces fat mass, while increasing lean body mass. A recent study showed that in 53 healthy individuals taking 4.2g of CLA a day led to a significant 3.8% decrease in body fat compared to individuals not taking CLA!

Optimum CLA, 180 Softgels CLA Is A Naturally Occurring Nutrient That Exerts A positive Effect On Protein And Fat Metabolism!

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Impact on Weight Training

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When combined with a weight training program, CLA can be of even more benefit.

A small trial study investigated CLA on muscle development in bodybuilders consuming 7.2 grams of CLA or placebo a day for 6 weeks while completing bodybuilding multi-joint exercises.

An increase in skin fold corrected arm girth, body mass and leg press strength was seen in the group taking CLA – this was not found in the group using the placebo!

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Summary

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With proper exercise, nutrition and dedication, CLA can undoubtedly lead to an increase in fat reduction and increased lean muscle.

Remember that in order to be successful, the dosage of CLA should be around 3.4 or higher – maybe as high as 6 grams for bodybuilders and weight training men.

I will be utilizing CLA for my new workout journal – so keep checking that out!

- James