Pro Grade Training: One-on-One or Group Training for Rapid Results

Recently I had a bit of “another” backtrack to my health, fitness and work. Why do I say another? Well, because it doesn’t matter how healthy I eat or how fit I am, there will always be something that occasionally happens to me that bits me in the ass and sets me back. This time around it was Appendicitis, which developed into a ruptured Appendix. It seems that every few years I wind up in the hospital with something totally random. If not a broken ankle or jaw, then a severe infection or some sort of complication. It almost seems like I am prone to these unhealthy occurrences even though I try to take the best care of my health. Some people even try to convince me that maybe my healthy ways are making me unhealthy, if that makes any sense. Some people even un-equate living a healthy lifestyle with future disease because of my misfortune. I just see it as an excuse to becoming healthy.

With every experience there is a lesson. Even if the experience sucks! So here we go, what did I learn?

The first lesson that I learned can and (I hope) will be used from now on. In order to understand it, I will write about what happened.

It was a Thursday morning and I had a bit of a fever and some “bladder pain”. I was scheduled to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity that day. There where many occasions that I cancelled due to various reasons, so this time around I felt like I had to go, no excuses. Even though I felt pretty sick all day with bad bladder pain I muscled through that day and felt a bit proud that I didn’t “wimp out”.

That night I had to change my soaked shirts on three different occasions due to a high fever. I also had quite severe lower abdominal pain, which didn’t allow me to sleep much. I was scheduled to do night shift work the next day at a new job that I just started and I was determined to go. I decided to see the doctor the next morning just to see what’s up. The doctor said that I either had Appendicitis or severe constipation and that if my symptoms got worse, then I would have to go to the ER. I knew that if I went to the ER, then that is where I would most likely spend the rest of my day waiting and would have to cancel my shift. I called my dad right after coming out from the doctor’s office and he said that I should just go to the ER right away because Appendicitis was not something I would want to mess around with. He was speaking from experience. I decided to cancel my shift, even though I felt guilty in doing so. My situation did worsen when I got to the hospital and I was glad to have listened to my dad.

The lesson that I learned was that if you ever suspect anything that may be threatening to you, such as a potential health condition you may be experiencing, then no matter what you are doing that day, you first have to take care of your health. I felt bad leaving volunteering early because I didn’t want to disappoint people that I didn’t even know, so I stayed and made my condition worse. I felt bad that I was missing a shift at my new job because I didn’t want to make a bad impression, even though I had a potentially life threatening condition. I almost didn’t go to the doctor and as a result would have gone to work. There I would do anything to try to conceal the pain until I would have to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital. That would obviously not make a good impression.

Another less pronounced lesson that I received was how this situation made me appreciate how our current health care system, even though I am not in total agreeance of how it is run, ie. Pharmaceutically based, has saved me many times.

I can now see how our Primal Ancestors, who where exceptionally healthy, had a relatively short average life span compared to people today. It was not because they just died of modern day diseases such as metabolic derangement, but rather because of injury, severe infection or some sort of complication. If it wasn’t for today’s health care system, I would have been dead at least five times already.

I will continue using the health care system that I follow daily, which is to live as healthy as I possibly can so that I minimize my chances of ever having to use our current health care system. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, I just rather not use it.

– Simon Bialecki

Just as there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding nutrition, I find that there is also a lot of confusion regarding exercise and fitness. Many people wonder what types of foods they should be eating and what types of training they should be doing. Both aspects can be quite complex when you get right down into the physiology and science of it, but to get significant benefits from both nutrition and exercise you can keep it simple. They almost mirror each other in the sense that both depend on the goal that a person wants to achieve. Therefore, the first step in acquiring the perfect nutrition and exercise program for yourself is to determine what your goals are in both. In this blog, I will be concentrating on exercise and fitness alone.

What are your fitness goals? This is the first question you should ask. Why is this important? For two reasons:

1. Setting goals gives you something you can reach. It gives you a clear path and makes you continue to work in order to reach that goal without uncertainties. This is the long-term gratification.
2. Fitness goals will dictate the type of training that you want to do depending on what aspects of fitness you want to achieve. I will explain in the next section.

There are many types of fitness aspects that an individual can participate in. This depends on what they want to achieve as the end result. Here is a list:

– Training for general health and well being (Increase health and not performance)

– Training to loose weight (Very popular in North Americans. Go figure.)

– Training to increase muscle growth or muscle hypertrophy (Body Building and looking good at the beach)

– Training to increase muscle strength and power (Power sports and being freakishly strong)

– Training to increase muscle endurance (Endurance sports or to increase muscle tone)

– Training to increase stamina or Cardio (Endurance sports, mix power/endurance sports and general population)

– Training to correct muscle imbalances (Physiotherapy clinics or people having significant muscle imbalances)

– Training to increase speed and agility (Sports requiring these elements)

– Training to increase balance and coordination (Sports requiring these elements)

– Training to increase flexibility (Sports requiring flexibility and the general population. This aspect of fitness should go along with every other fitness program to decrease muscle tightness and decrease muscle imbalances. This is one of the only elements of fitness that will actually supplement any other fitness element)

– Training for sport specific movements (Incorporates many aspects of fitness depending on the sport)

It can be difficult to decide what type of program you may want to participate in. Many times people work on aspects of fitness such as agility, power and balance for fun and just wanting to have a high level of fitness. Make sure to know what your goals are.

Even though many fitness aspects overlap into one another it is important to mention that it is not always a good idea to mix certain fitness aspect together. This is the case if you are particularly interested in increasing one part of fitness exclusively. For example, training to increase power should not include training for endurance. It is impossible to have a high level of fitness in all fitness aspects. Training all of them will result in less than optimal results.

In contrast, you may want to be a jack of all trades and train everything. Again, this all goes back to your personal fitness goals. The more elements of fitness you train, the less results you will get in each, with the exception to training flexibility. This fitness aspect should be included in all programs.

– Simon Bialecki