At Hammer, we model our training methods on strength and conditioning principles developed for elite athletes but modified for the ‘Average Joe’. Our belief is that if athletes strive for greatness and supreme performance, why not model our training on those same principles?
Wait. ‘Summer Preseason’ doesn’t sound particularly scientific or elite in the slightest. In fact, you may be thinking ‘has Hammer sold its soul like all the other big gyms to exploit the marketability of fitness?’
We’d be lying if we said there wasn’t some capitalisation on the nervousness that showing a bit of skin during summer usually involves; however, we won’t be gunning for a generic 8-week ‘beach/bikini/mankini/thigh gap/man-V’ challenge with bullshit eating plans and meaningless exercises regimes making up the content.
The Program
Leveraging our knowledge of high performance training methods, our goal is to get you as lean as fuck possible, just like any elite athlete preseason program (mesocycle). An advantage that we have over elite athletes (a rare one at that) is that we do not have to allow time for technical/tactical training specific to the sport; we will utilise each week to focus on pure strength and conditioning in order to attain our best possible physical shape.
If you are a Hammer regular you may be thinking ‘What the hell have you got us doing normally? How is this different?’
In this clinic the resistance program is specifically designed to train concurrently with an added conditioning aspect. This means that exercises, reps, sets and intensities are directly formulated to accentuate your conditioning, not hamper it; this means training smarter in the weights room, not necessarily harder.
Not only is the resistance program designed with conditioning in mind, there is the additional accountability of fortnightly skinfolds to determine who goes in to ‘Fat Club’. These skinfolds will ensure that we abide with one of the most important aspects of the clinic – Nutrition. It stands to reason that if your skinfolds increase, then correct nutritional principles aren’t being adhered to and you will have to attend the dreaded ‘Fat Club’ until those skinfolds drop. This isn’t about fat-shaming or humiliation but merely additional motivation to ensure that you aren’t sabotaging your work in the gym with bad eating habits out of it, as the Fat Club will be an extra session of particularly brutal conditioning that no one wants to do.
Make no mistake; the conditioning aspect of the clinic is the major component. This will be a combination of aerobic and anaerobic conditioning, implemented each week which will torment your mental capacity. No one likes cardio (not even marathon runners, surely) but these two components, properly periodised throughout the clinic will reap huge results. This is exactly how professional team sports target their preseason; utilising a clever mixture of aerobic and anaerobic conditioning in order to boost their sports specific fitness capacities, as well as overall body composition.
Proper periodisation and management of the huge conditioning and resistance loadings will be of utmost importance to avoid over-reaching and injury. To that end, we will use load monitoring data combined with CNS fatigue markers to keep all participants fresh and ready, week in week out.
The 2 mesocycles (4 week blocks) will look like this:
This illustrates that as one aspect of training receives more training load (stimulus) then the other aspect must decrease in order to ‘keep everyone on the paddock,’ so to speak.
Program Breakdown
Monday 18th September to Sunday 10th December 2017
So we’ve covered the impetus for, and the science behind, the clinic; so what will you get as part of your program? Commencing Monday 18th of September you will receive:
- 12 weeks of training with specific resistance programming (tailored to compliment the conditioning training);
- 12 sessions of intense 45 mins – 1 hour conditioning sessions;
- Access to weekly seminars:
- 3 x nutrition workshops
- 3 x Lifting workshop: Basic lifts (a revision of the staple lifts used in the gym), Olympic lifting
- Velocity Based Training: Velocity based training what it means and how to use portal
- Q & A for anyone wanting to know more
- And more coming!
- Fat club sessions (10 sessions);
- Fortnightly skinfolds;
- Anaerobic and Aerobic testing before and after clinic;
- Detailed weekly plans;
- Use of the Push Band technology; and
- Load and intensity monitoring.
Training Options