Regenerative Fitness
What is Regenerative Fitness?
Short answer: Training that makes you feel and look younger.
Longer answer: It’s getting strong, mobile, elastic, and metabolically healthy through intentional fitness that revitalizes you rather than beating you down.
It’s a practice that energizes you rather than the feeling of being depleted from haphazard workouts created with little more thought than the perception of exhaustion in mind because most people equate that sensation to getting their money’s worth, even if they aren’t getting results.
Anyone can create an exhausting workout. That requires very little skill.
True skill is creating programming that gets meaningful results now that are sustainable without downstream negative consequences.
Enter Regenerative Fitness…Training that presents the appropriate challenges that stimulates what we call regenerative adaptations and what you call results, across the full spectrum of qualities that make us feel our best now with abundant energy, vitality, fitness, mental acuity, movement freedom, and a thriving sense of wellness without mortgaging future healthspan. The training has to challenge our bodies to adapt on multiple levels – muscular, fascial, neurological, cardiovascular, metabolic, and even the cellular level to improve mitochondrial function. Truth be told, if you add consistency over the long term you can even dramatically affect genetic expression.
The greatest skill though is simplifying all that into straightforward workouts that are engaging, fun, easily adaptable to different ability levels, and that can be done in small groups because humans are social creatures that thrive on camaraderie.
Enter Free State Gym…Welcome!
Start as an expat with either an introductory personal training session that includes a comprehensive health and fitness assessment or a trial week of unlimited group fitness classes.
Regenerative Fitness: Philosophy x Science x Practice
Strength Training
It’s one of the greatest determinants of movement freedom; our relative ability to do the physical tasks we need to do, want to do, and may one day have to do in an emergency situation. Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.
Strength is also a determinant of physical independence and healthspan later in life. If you can’t lift things, carry things, and open something you’ll need assistance. [Not us!].
What you may not know is that real strength training stimulates the release of anti-aging, mood, and metabolism boosting hormones.
- It increases bone density so you’re resilient.
- It builds muscle, which looks great, but is also your greatest armor against chronic diseases, like diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimers.
- It releases a cascade of anti-aging hormones that stimulate collagen production that keeps your skin, joints, and connective tissue youthful and elastic.
- Remember what I wrote before about metabolism boosting hormones? Strength training stimulates dramatic increases in testosterone, growth hormone, IGF-1, Adrenaline and Norepinephrine, Thyroid hormones (T3 and T4), and improves insulin sensitivity. The net result of all that means that your body burns more fat 24 hours a day, even when you aren’t training, and it reduces the messages your brain receives to store more body fat. No other kind of training can boast this effect.
Point blank. The way the vast majority of people train, especially in group fitness, isn’t real strength training.
Just because you’re lifting weights doesn’t mean you’re strength training. To earn the benefits of strength training you have to be working at an intensity level that would make it impossible for you to do more than about 6 reps per set. That’s it!
Then you have to allow yourself enough rest time to do it again…and again, each time lighting up your neurology to engage as many neuromuscular connections as possible.
Doing sets of 10, 15, 25 reps with light weight with little to no rest time feels really hard, but you’re not getting any of the benefits of strength training when you’re doing it. What you are getting is a lot of stress hormone release and inflammation that may work in conflict with improving your physique and how your body feels.
It’s the sets of very heavy compound lifts that stimulate that hormonal cascade that regenerates you, keeping you young, vital, strong, capable, and resilient!
Don’t fall into the trap of turning your strength training into haphazard conditioning work because you’ll end up doing a poor job of both, but feeling ass kicked, exhausted, and inflamed.
Mobility Training
Mobility also has massive utility and is the greatest determinant of movement freedom and healthspan.
Age isn’t a number, it’s how well your joints move and feel.
Consistent mobility training will make a 40 year old move and feel like a 20 year old and a 70 year old move and feel like a 40 year old…Not attending to it will have the opposite effect, aging you before your time making 40 feel more like 70.
But, what is mobility? It’s a word floating around the zeitgeist that needs some clarity.
Mobility is a combination of flexibility; available range of motion, and how much of that range of motion you can consciously control, which is the strength and coordination component.
Think of it like this. Flexibility is bending over to touch your toes. Mobility is hanging from a bar and lifting your straightened legs to touch your toes to your fingers. Mobility requires strength, especially at the end ranges of flexibility, so passive stretching the way it’s traditionally done isn’t going to get the job done.
Here’s the great news about mobility training…
While it’s contributing to pain free movement freedom it’s also stimulating connective tissue healing and regeneration at the cellular level and challenging your nervous system in a way that keeps it functioning at a high level to stop the digression of balance, coordination, and explosive athletic movement most people experience as they age. That regular stimulation to the nervous system will also protect against neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia and Alzheimer’s.
You’ve got to have good wiring to age well!
Metabolic Conditioning
Conditioning is the final piece of a holistic training program. It’s also where most people expend a lot of energy inefficiently, working in conflict with their desired results.
The silver lining is that means you could probably work smarter for less time, rather than harder, to get better results.
The fact is prolonged bouts of hard conditioning focused on burning the most calories possible per hour, like non-stop bootcamp station training, isn’t better and is counterproductive to your fat loss and longevity goals. At the very least it’s an inefficient use of time and energy that inflames your body and triggers a surge of stress hormones leaving you feeling stiff, sore, and depleted without much in the way of results to show for it.
A more scientific and effective approach to conditioning is to divide your time between the two extreme ends of the intensity spectrum.
Mitochondria are the energy producing parts of a cell that convert nutrients to fuel and directly influence metabolism, health, and performance. Today’s biology word is brought to you by Free State Gym 💪🏼
VO2 Max is the maximum rate at which your body can utilize oxygen during intense exercise. Research shows it’s a key indicator for cardiovascular health and longevity.
I promise that’s as far as it goes with the sciency stuff. – Tanner
The problem with the way most people train, especially group fitness, is that it’s in that 75-85% max heart rate range that’s neither intense enough to improve VO2 max nor slow and long enough to dramatically improve mitochondrial function, and the energy system it uses runs on sugar, not body fat, with high amounts of inflammatory metabolic exhaust that degenerate joints and stiffens muscle tissue, and because it gets prolonged for 45-60 mins classes done frequently, it also releases lots of stress hormones that tell your brain to breakdown muscle and store fat.
Because of the non-stop nature of that bootcamp style training, you can’t lift heavy enough to reap the benefits of strength training, which is what you should be doing when you’re in that heart rate range…not conditioning work!
One more thing we’ve got to address when it comes to the fundamentals of conditioning training – proper breathing.
Most people are mouth and shallow chest breathers stuck in a physiological stress response that only amplifies with exercise, especially high intensity conditioning. (More stress hormones and inflammation combined with worse digestion).
First, you need to learn how to use your breathing to take you out of that state to relax your heart rate and respiration before you start high intensity conditioning, especially if you’re already experiencing a lot of psychological and/or physiological stress.
Breathing is your gateway to affecting your autonomic nervous system that’s responsible for controlling your stress, mood, metabolism, digestion, inflammatory response, and much more. It’s the most important skill to master.
Teaching the fundamentals of breathing is a foundation of our practice at Free State Gym and something you’ll be coached on regularly.