The Misconception about High-Intensity Workouts

First of all, you know, just kind of like the old school thought that like you need to be sweating, your, your heart rate needs to be up the entire time you need to like, feel like you're actually, you know, working if and the only way to do that is if you are sweating and you're, you're like, just jumping around and all this stuff, right. And I think that that's a huge mistake because it burning calories, right? This is the thing, like when you're sweating, when you're doing these things, you're like you're feeling and this is, you know, what kind of drew me to CrossFit was like, you know, back in the day, I was like, damn, like, I'm dead on the floor after this, like, I feel good. I'm making a sweat, Angel, all this stuff, I've got a really hard workout.

But the reality is, that is counterproductive if your goal is to build muscle, right and put on muscle, which in turn is going to actually change the shape of your body, right, we talked about this all the time, you want to get toned, you want to get whatever you need to put on muscle to change the actual shape of your body. Again, this is like the biggest mistake that I made personally, in my own training career was like, doing these circuit training things, doing CrossFit a lot trying to literally change my body composition, but using, like a very inefficient way of doing it. And, again, not that CrossFit and Orangetheory and Barry's Bootcamp, not that they don't have their place in certain things, like if you're someone who enjoys that, and that's the, that's what gets you moving, do it. But if you're trying to change your body composition, if you're trying to, you know, actually get stronger, and you know, build muscle over time, I think that we need to think about really like what's going to do that. And I think these, you know, during your rest periods, when you're like lifting heavy shit, you should not be jumping around, you should not be doing jumping jacks or jump squats or things like that, for the majority of the time, you should be resting so that your body can recover from that previous heavy set, and then go in and do it again.

Obviously, like there are times and places for that. So for example, in our programming in the muscles for in program, we have like at the end of the workout, there are sometimes like metabolic finishers, or things where you know, it's it is the whole point of that is to get your heart rate up a little bit to add some fun to it right to add a little bit of like an ending, you do it at the end, right? And it's like, okay, maybe we do like an AMRAP, but like as many rounds as possible, or something like that with bicep curls or triceps or kind of supersets or things like that. But the goal of that is actually more so just enjoyment, it's yes, to get your heart rate up. Within that period of time, you're actually not building as much muscle as you could, you're not really getting the stimulus that we want, which is creating as much tension within that muscle tissue. So I think that it really just comes down to like, Okay, what is like, what are you doing? Why, why are you doing this don't you shouldn't be lifting weights, you shouldn't be going in the gym and lifting weights. If your goal is to change your body composition, you shouldn't be trying to burn as many calories as you can, during that session, you shouldn't be chasing the sweat, right?

You shouldn't be chasing, you know, a high heart rate, you should be legitimately like sometimes, and we talk about this all the time, like I don't like there's most of the days when I leave the gym, I'm not sweating. Like I'm literally like completely dry. And that is, you know, obviously, you should feel some disruption in your muscles, you should feel some of that. But don't chase the sweat and don't chase kind of the, you know, BOSU, ball squats and all that fancy stuff. Because it just doesn't make sense.

One other thing I'll say is that there are some things that might seem like sometimes I'll program things and even for myself where it's like a heel, elevated, split squat with like my rear foot elevated as well. And like that seems kind of fancy, like, Oh, you're like doing all these things. And I have like a hand support. Like that might seem fancy if you're kind of looking at it. But there is like a reasoning for it. In terms of like what we're doing so some of these more fancy things like different types of split squats or different types of I don't know, it's mainly split squats because there's like so many different ways to do a split squat to target different areas, whether it's your quads, your glutes, but that has a purpose behind it and it's, you know, yeah, maybe it looks a little fancy, but yeah,