41 Training while on vacaction

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beatsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri. I'm going to talk about training while on vacation today and the reason for that is because Rob has just got back from vacation. So he is super relaxed, super chill and he's going to explain to us what he was doing on holiday to get his or to keep his adaptions that he'd been obviously working hard to achieve beforehand for what he went away. So we're going to get a kind of really good snapshot into what a really great coach does when they're on holiday to kind of fill in what they're not able to do with the equipment that they don't have. As we go along, I'll tip in and talk about that a little bit. But what I do, if I don't have equipment, I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms, Airbnb's, in different parts of the world. So I often don't have access to a gym. So it's something that I'm quite familiar with as well. Not going to be a lot of physiology in this particular episode, but we will or I will at least kind of comment as we go along if I see something really, really important to emphasize. So Rob, welcome back. Good to be back. Great time. Fantastic. So tell us about the, give us an overview to start with about the availability of gyms and equipment that you kind of had access to because then you went to a number of different places. So kind of just give us a brief overview. You don't have to give us details of where you were. But like just over your bottom, I couldn't really have access to what you obviously didn't have access to. Yes. So I was from about a little more than half of the trip. I was bouncing over the whole trip. I was in Croatia for the first little more than half of it. I was on a boat kind of going around from Ireland to Ireland. So the only gym equipment I had access to was on the front end when I flew in. I got a session out again, normal, you know, standard equipped gym. Still was very lazy because the vacations I did one set of squat bench residents left and some accessories. And then after that, I was on the boat. So for the eightish days and nights on the boat, they had one bench that was adjustable. They had dumbbells up to about 25 kilos. And then they had some bands. So really, really limited on the boat there. After that, I was in a hotel for a little over a week that had a gym. And it looked very nice when I went to the pictures. Then I got there and had a little wooden weights that not a lot of weight total. And they're like hilariously sized, even the 10 kg plates were, you know, maybe twice the size of my hand. They're very odd looking. Yeah, it was a really, really weird gym. So basically what I was trying to focus on when I was gone was just maintaining muscle size essentially. I'm sure we'll get into it a little bit, but wasn't really all that worried about getting too much, you know, specific practice on stuff. The coordination with those things, you know, it's not like I'm a new lifter of learning anything. It's not really going to go away. Speed stuff, they don't really care about too much either. You know, for the most part, those adaptations are very neural. So we're going to go away too fast. So they don't do much jumping, they don't do any sprinting, you know, my vacation was quite lazy. So really mainly everything was a weird mix of super light weights and body weight. So yeah, like on the boat, for example, I generally squat, you know, for my rep work in the in the 400s or so with 25 kilo dumbbells, a little hard to do any kind of like normal squatting. So I just did like a sissy squat where I had one hand, you know, supporting for a little bit of stability held the heaviest dumbbell they had, the 25 kilo upright around my neck and then just a sissy squat, you know, throw in my knees as far far as they can possibly get. Did you, I mean, I saw that on your stories, but did you actually upload that as a post to Instagram as well? Or was it just on your stories? I think just on my story, because I think you should, I think you should upload that as a post because I think that'd be really interesting for people to be able to see what you were doing there. Hey, Matt's because ultimately my kind of so a very very long time ago, very, very long time ago, before most of the listeners to this podcast are probably even born. I was doing I was doing I would do pistol squats as like a lower body sort of addition to my focus, which was trying to get one arm chins and do silly weighted chins and dips and things like that. And I was basically just doing pistol squats because I thought it would be appropriate to have something for the lower body because I wasn't really interested. It wasn't really a goal that I had. But, you know, the numbers went up and I kind of ended up doing weighted pistols with some decent weight. Obviously then I kind of went into doing more conventional barbell training and that kind of got me more into that sort of side of things. But what I tend to do now, therefore, is go back to that. If I'm in a hotel room, if I don't have any equipment, I tend to just kind of go back to the pistol squat side of things. But, obviously, I'm now a lot older than I was like that. And doing pistol squats requires a lot of flexibility. If you're actually going to do them kind of properly. I mean, the balance in the kind of side of things is not a problem because I didn't know the practice before, but yeah, the flexibility side of things at my age is just not. I mean, like sure, there are people at my age with amazing flexibility, but you have to work really hard to keep that. So what I tend to do is use a sort of like a chair or some sort of step or a stool or whatever it is available. There's actually some really solid stalls in this apartment. I'm in at the moment. In the past, I've had steps that I've been able to use. Even the tops of short flights of stairs have actually worked because all you really need is to have the leg that you're sticking out in front of you, able to go down slightly and suddenly the flexibility requirement drops dramatically and it becomes something that is literally now just stability issue, which obviously I've got some done the practice. So I found that that actually then works if you've got a hotel gym and it's got a bench. As long as you can put the bench near something that is stable and you can put your foot on it and it's not going to fall over. Okay, none of those things are guaranteed, but if you can't set that up in a scenario where it is relatively stable and safe, then the pistol squat with the leg pointing downwards because you're basically elevated on the other side. I think is a really, really, really good way of getting a pretty decent stimulus. And if you at the point where you can add a numbell, then suddenly it jumps you even higher than what you're doing with your CC squats. I think anyway. Yeah, yeah, definitely a good option. I just hate pistols. I would, is that because you're actually, is that because of the flexibility issue? Because you're actually obviously, right, notoriously tied. Okay, well, then I would, I would just encourage you to try doing them while basically one foot elevated on a bench and just let the other foot dangle down. Yeah, just dangle down. Yeah. And I mean, the higher that you go, the higher the bench or the higher the step or whatever you've got access to, the easier it is because you can let the leg really drop. But I've found that it is actually very, very obviously you've got zero support, whereas obviously with any other kind of, I've been making this point on social media actually recently, making the point that we should probably stop or encourage. Yeah, I don't like giving kind of we shoulds and whatever's, but there is a difference between a genuine single leg exercise and a split stance. Yeah, yeah, those are not the same thing. And the problem is, we've got a whole bunch of influences, some of whom actually, you know, kind of work in industry as coaches, but they're kind of acting as influencers as well. They're making the claim that split stance exercises count as single leg exercises. And they don't, they're not the same thing, they're not the same thing physiologically, they're not the same physiologically, because you actually do still have a contribution from your leg. Okay, fine, yeah, that makes it easier, but also you are then using muscle mass from that other leg. So you're not getting the same level of recruitment that you would get if you're actually doing a genuine single leg. So the optimal, the best kind of single leg variation is probably going to end up being a single leg leg press for most people, simply because they don't have any stability demand. I mean, I like the pistol and it works for me because I've done the practice, but you know, and I found a way that doesn't kind of create flexibility challenge that is, I agree with you, it's very unpleasant. I don't want to go down that room and say, oh, I've got to try and get the flexibility back. My age is just not pleasant experience. So, yeah, no, I think, not as interesting. So, but yeah, I think looking at those videos that you shared of your, you'll see he's got, it looked really clean, really, really nice, like the way you were doing that. Pretty decent at him. I mean, it's very cool. Yeah, years ago, I messed with him a bit and like, you know, I never really liked them, but I didn't dislike them. And so with the lightweight, I just dab for some high reps, for like a set or two, for hinging, you know, obviously deadlifting and that, you know, my typical rep work is in the high fours or low five hundreds or so. Very hard to get much out of that with little dumbbells, but I did do like, is basically a single like RDL, but with the opposite of like supported, like kneeling on a bench, so very stable. So like, sand doing on the right leg. The right leg is forward and straight and then the left leg was bent with the knee on the bench. And then I'd use 25 kilo dumbbell in each hand and then just did some high rep. It's more like a stick leg. Yeah, not on an audio really. So yeah, that's stiff leg because I was trying to keep the knee from moving it all. If I was to do a more audio style, I would just take even more weight and it would not be as good anyway. So yeah, I did the single leg knee supported stiff leg just for some high reps. And again, it would be cool to see that video again, even if you have to reshoot it. I mean, I should have that one. And then when I got to the hotel gym and they had at least, you know, up to like 185 pounds in barbell weight, you know, I was able to do that a little more easily than with the dumbbells with a little less reps. But I don't like going over, you know, five days behind. So doing like 15 to 20 was just unbelievably miserable. Yeah, it is. For like upper body and that on the boat, no chin up bar, anything like that. Really? No, no, but they did have stairs that you can block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen them. Yeah, I did that because they had the steps going up to the top for the boat. So I just did some like different. You just have to kind of make sure that you're definitely paying attention because obviously with the stair, you can't. So driving your head straight into the. I was going to say, my pull too high. I would have smashed my forehand. So it's just a very strict range. And I was going to step pull up. But that, you know, worked well enough for back. And then just just quickly on that point. And thus is really, really important to bear in mind that the pull up bar, if you can get a pull up bar, even if it's like a local park or, you know, as you say stairs or whatever, you can actually just kind of get a grip of. You can get two totally different exercises out of that because you can get the wide and the narrow grip. Yeah, that literally gives you pretty much all of the, that a lot. And you know, a lot to the rest of the back as well. So that's, I think that's a really, really good point there. It's not just like running around town trying to find a park with a, with a suitable pull up bar. It's like just for one exercise. It's like you are actually getting too out of that. I think that's. Yeah, you get, you get a lot. And then, you know, with very light dumbbells and, and that it wasn't really work too well for rowing. I'm not going to do like reps that high. I would hate it. Incidentally, I told you about this a while back. I've, I've, I've discovered that sometimes, and it depends on the, on the hotel or whatever that you're staying in, but sometimes you can have a, a chair that actually has space underneath it for you to do a row like, a lot of chairs don't these days. They have kind of weird configurations of how the kind of basic sport works. Or obviously the modern kind of office chairs used those for that. But if you have an old fashioned chair with literally just four kind of legs, if you like, you can actually do an inverted row underneath that. And if you focus on the, and this is the, this is the bit that most people will miss because they'll go, oh, no, that's easy. Well, it is, and if you focus on the very, very top range of motion, it becomes a lot harder because it's the last little bit to range of motion where you bring your chest into the kind of bar. That's the hard bit. Most people will do a row and they'll come all the way out and they'll start and they'll come back down again. And it's like a, almost like a lateral raise where you do the lateral raise in the top bit. It's like you're just surviving the last kind of couple of degrees and you come straight like that. If you, if you didn't do that, you would find that you'd have to use like 10% of the weight because you wouldn't be able to hold the position at the top. And so you can actually, I'm not suggesting that this is what people do normally, but in you, if you have a situation where you haven't got access to any equipment at all and you literally just, but you can fit yourself under a chair. And again, you know, this is one of those situations where people can say, oh, no, I'm too big to feel under a chair. Okay, fine. Well, you know, I'm 50 years old. I can, I can feel under a chair. So you can actually focus on the top range of motion and it becomes difficult enough for it to become like, especially if you do like isometric, kind of holds, it becomes actually something to give you a training stimulus. And that's from somebody's done one on chin. So it's not like a, you know, like, oh, yeah, it works if you've kind of general population. No, actually gives you a training stimulus, even if you're pretty strong. Yeah, I mean, I've definitely, like, people definitely underestimate how are like a good, you know, invertebrate range. It's the top range of motion. It's the top. Because most people what they do is they, they, they, they hang, they just throw themselves up, and they bounce off the bar and they come back down again. It's like, okay, hold the chest to the bar and see how much it changes the range, it changes the movement for you. Because if you try to hold 10, 20 second niceometrics in the top, you will know about it. You'll, I'm not saying it's replacement for standard strength training. It's not, but in the context of low, you're in a hotel room for a week is absolutely better than nothing. Yeah, yeah, good, really good travel exercise. Um, for a chest pushing stuff. Yeah, yeah, for chest, my bench press is not terribly strong. Anyway, 25 kilo dumbbells for flies was, was more than adequate. Uh, I didn't even need to get very high with the reps there. You know, I think I actually did like a set of like, it reps and it was toast. So, you know, a little bit of elbow bend, not an insane amount, but it was other, I do some sort of like fly motion, or I do a set of, you know, 25, 30, whatever reps it would have been on a dumbbell press. And I just, I hate that. I couldn't push ups as well, but, um, you know, for a million reps and I'm just not a push up fan. They annoy me. So, okay, push up variation to them because this is something that I've messed around with quite a lot. Um, so going kind of like from one extreme to the other, obviously, yeah, standard push ups. You know, it kind of be, most people are going to be busting out sets of 30, 40, 50 and they're not really going to be seeing anything from that. I mean, it's not really going to do anything. Um, you, opposite end of the spectrum. If you've got the, I mean, obviously your background allows you to do this very easily, but, um, I don't think it's so difficult. If you've got a wall that you can support against, you can do handstand push ups. Um, yeah, I have that. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting because I've got a lot my head is going to explode every time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, being having been a gymnast like, sure, you just kind of age. Yeah. Um, I didn't do those at all on this trip, actually, though, for the, for the shoulders, I just didn't, is it just lateral raise and then, um, more like satinal plane shoulder press and that, you know, dumbbells for me, there was having up with just not too, too many reps. Um, but handstand push ups are definitely a good option for delts. And, you know, like you're saying, you just think it a push up variations that you're trying to make them difficult. Um, the, the thing for me is that, um, the handstand push up is, yeah, really, really uncomfortable. Um, maybe that's one of those gymnast kind of specific things. And maybe I'm just kind of, you know, not sucking it up. But, um, the, the intermediary variations where people go, okay, well, why don't you just do inclined, inclined press ups? I've never found that to be particularly kind of useful. It feels just like I'm doing a normal press up. It doesn't really feel that different. No, really to me doesn't feel so, maybe if there's a listener out there who kind of has mastered that kind of variation and understands what the problem is, and maybe they can let us know. But, uh, I've never found that to be particularly useful. One on, um, push ups are an interesting variation. If you've, again, if you've done the kind of, um, so this is an interesting thing. If you've never done them and you try and do one, you think you're just going to kind of, it's not going to happen. This is all those kind of fun things. It's like, um, but if you, if you look at people doing them and you can see the change in the body position that they're adopting in order to make it happen, it will happen. It's not as hard as it looks. It's just that your body position is wrong. Um, so it's, it's just a requirement that you want to kind of make sure that your, well, most of your upper body weight is over the arm that you're pressing. And then actually it will work and if you give yourself a wider base to support with your legs, it will actually work relatively easily. It will feel really tough. It just won't feel impossible. Like it would do if you tried to do it in the same configuration that you're doing in all of the pressure. That's part of the really obvious to most people who do them already, but for people who aren't, like, familiar with it, that's what the issue is. Yeah, but yeah, if you can do a million push ups, you can definitely try those. Um, and it's obviously, you know, it goes without saying it's nowhere near the same kind of difficulty as like a one arm chin up. No, it's not even the same touch. I mean, this is a totally different animal. I mean, like, um, I think that most people who can do kind of, um, 30, 40 push ups will be able to do a one arm press up if they just kind of give them some practice time and, like, look at the configure, because it is a configuration issue. It absolutely is a configuration issue of how way your limbs are and where your body weight is. One arm chin up is not that. No, no. One arm chin up is just like a different kind of animal entirely. It's something you got to spend a lot of time working towards. But yeah, no, I think, I think the one arm, for me, the one arm press up is probably the, the answer, because, um, it doesn't make my head feel like it's going to explode. Um, so yeah, it's just, and the, the incline variations, I just don't, I just don't get anything out of it. No. Um, trying to think any of the muscles we didn't really cover. Uh, I did throw some, uh, the occasional, uh, reverse Nordic in there for a little bit more wreck fam and that. I mean, I assume I'm getting someone that says he's quiet, but, you know, maybe, maybe not a ton, not really sure on that because of the purposeful, like, epic extension I was doing. Um, being then, I mean, that was kind of, you know, normal, like, lying dumbbell press or triceps, see the call for buy steps, easy stuff. I was definitely prepared on the boat. I didn't know that they would have any incline bench dumbbells stuff with that to do just like some brief intense isometrics, which we definitely talked about in the isometric episode. That was kind of the original idea I have. It's just like, you know, a few sets of like, a few sets of a few reps of three to five seconds. I chose for each muscle, but, you know, glad I didn't have to do that because I do like, you know, a little bit more normal lifting, but I have done it before. There are some muscle groups where I think it works. It lends itself to naturally. So I think the most obvious muscle group that you can do in isometric in is the glute doing a hip thrust off the edge of the bed. On a single leg kind of hip thrust off the edge of the bed, you can get a massive kind of isometric contraction there, because you're pushing into the end range of the joint. So, you know, it's a really, really kind of, and it suits that, the glute suits that position, because it's actually where it's most strongly activated. So I think that's probably the most obvious one. Were you thinking of any of us? - I mean, I've done like normal, you know, like elbow flexor isometrics, just grabbing something and curling into it as hard as I can. Opposite end, you know, for triceps, just pressing into something as hard as I can, just trying to extend my elbow. I've done, like, peck fly isometrics, like in a doorway and so forth like that. Like all these kinds of things, when I have absolutely no equipment for like a few days. But yeah, the glute one is probably the best one, or ones are pretty easy to do. - You say that, you say that, but I think this might be one of those things that is kind of unique to me or unique to, um. - It does hurt some people's elbows. - Yeah, hurts me. - Yeah, and people have reported that. But I don't, I don't notice anything. So for me, it's fun. But I get to, I get to let usometrics as well, and it's, I think it might just be one armchins in the past. I think it might just be that I did stuff that I probably shouldn't have done. So it might, it might be a completely relevant thing for most people, but yeah. I do find the online metrics uncomfortable and as I say back as well. The other stuff mostly is okay. I think the glute is the one that really jumps out as being this is just such an obvious thing to do. If people are thinking about doing cough work, I think it's worth, it's worth noting that how can I explain this? I think that when you're in a gym, and you've got a kind of either a leg press and you can do your calf raises of the edge of the leg press or you've got a calf raise machine or whatever like that, I think that that set up, probably makes things a lot easier than trying to do them kind of. Obviously, if you're doing calf raises in an apartment, you're going to be doing single leg variations and you're probably going to be doing the morphine edge of a step or something like that. Okay, fine. I think that the higher repetitions that you're going to have to do to make that happen, I'll probably going to be getting to the point of being pretty pointless. Isometrics, though, which is kind of the way I was going. I think are also pretty difficult. - Yeah, totally a calf I sell without anything at all. It is. - Yeah, it is. - Feeling super useful. - Yeah, it is really real. - I just didn't do it. I'm not. - No, I think the calves are actually really difficult to train and what I keep coming back to is that, depending on your footwear and depending on how you want to train and what you're going to do, I think that a lot of the time, calf raises are going to end up being limited by your feet, not by your calf muscle. That's probably something that deserves its own composition, but. - Yeah, but I know you're getting out of that. - Yeah. Anyway, that's probably just a kind of, but the bigger point is that I think that the number of repetitions that you don't have to do first, even single calf raises were probably so high as to be pretty pointless and it kind of ends up just being like press ups really. But equally, the isometrics I think is difficult. I don't see. Unless you can kind of wedge yourself against something in a kind of, so that your calf is in a stretched position and then you can, that's not really a nice, well, it is an isometric, but it's an isometric resistant one rather than that kind of, what you were talking about just now, which is like, you're kind of doing the flexing side of things. - Yeah. - If you can wedge yourself against something to get a calf isometric in the straight position, it's probably going to be the best bet. But again, it's like, I'd have to think about that. I don't, I don't do it because it's just not something that is relevant to me. - Yeah. - I don't care about my calves that much. - I don't have a wear shorts. So. (laughing) Nobody is, I'm the opposite to, the opposite to the Arnold Schwarzenegger point, where he cuts the bottom part of his trousers or so, when he has to see his calves all the time, that made him drink hard. Like, exact opposite to that, I'd never go anywhere. (laughing) - Yeah, it's good in vacation. I'm pretty much all worth it. - No, I'm short and I trousers all the time. - Yeah, same, same. In fact, I wore shorts, I worked once, a few months ago, and everyone was like, something's weird about you. - Something's wrong, yeah. - It's going on, and I was like, shorts, and then I can't put them. - Yeah, I was never doing it. (clears throat) - But there we go. So, any other recommendations, suggestions, thoughts, comments about strength training while on vacation for people? - Yeah, so like, you know, obviously, we just went through like, generally, you know, exercise ideas and things like that. But the, I would say the general like, you know, idea when you're in a way is just maintaining as much muscle size as you can. - Hopefully. - So, you know, two to three sessions a week, full body, you know, not like that's not how I train most time, anyway, but just make sure you're in every muscle group that you want to keep with, you know, a few hard sets, two to three times a week. I did pretty much every other day when I was gone. And really, you know, from leaving to coming back, a little bit of strength loss on main lifts, you know, didn't do the maton and didn't have normal equipment, so maybe lost a little bit of muscle. But for the most part, you know, maintained, I would say 90, 95% of everything, you know, especially I got back and like, things like, pops, pull downs, curls, lateral raises, all that. Essentially the same as when I left bench press, more or less the same squat. Squat was kind of the only one that was a bit lower. And I would say it's because I did just this is a squat. Yeah, instead of something that had a bit more, you know, add up your magnus and glutes and things like that. So I've lost a little more. - I think that, that, that, that, that barbell, that barbell weight on your back is a unique stimulus. I think it's, it's, it's unique stimulus. It's not a unique stimulus in a physiological sense. It's a totally kind of normal stimulus. It's a unique location of stimulus. You can't recreate that distribution. - No. - Or maybe across the entire body, not entire body, obviously, but places that you're not getting it from, from even doing single leg press, I mean, like, you're looking at it, or single leg leg press and squat like from a, generally, generally, not genuinely, generally, in the research, they tend to treat those as like, well, you're training the same muscle groups. Well, you are and you aren't. I mean, if you're talking about power lifting, then you are going to have a, the bar on your back is doing stuff to things that you're not reaching with a single leg leg press. It's not just, you can't, you can't get that. And I think that's probably what, that's probably why, when people go away and they come back and they're like, oh, I'm honest to keep most of my bench and most of my deadlift and my squat has dropped my neck. That's gonna happen. - 'Cause like, deadlift wasn't changed too much. You know, the single leg stiff legs, like did a good job there. And always, every time I go away and I come back, you know, the first squat session, adult gymnasts gets completely crushed. (laughing) - That's probably actually cause I'm the same. And I don't know, this is the thing I fear. If I miss, if I miss a week or so or three or whatever, of that kind of leg press type activity. - I go back and the first, I literally, I look at the leg press across the gym, I'm like, as soon as I, (laughing) - After the first day, I was like, I'm gonna be miserable. - Yeah, the only thing in my body I could feel, and I did like, triples with like three to four reps in a row, you know, it was nothing crazy. And literally after the first triple, I was like, for like a cramping in my abdomen, it says, this is, this is horrible. - Yeah. - Every time. - I don't know. - And it's, every time I do it, my brain starts going, going back to the, the delayed on thermal solenoid mechanism's problem. Because that, because that entire kind of, core position literature at the moment is trying to understand why sometimes we get delayed on thermal solenoids and it just doesn't make sense. - Yeah. - You know, it's like, you can, you can go in the gym and you can do an absolute monster session and you don't get any solenoids. We get a little bit of solenoids and it's not an unpleasant solenoid. You can go into a single set of single leg press. - And get crushed. - And you just get crushed, and it's, that's why I keep coming back to these new mechanisms that people are talking about where it's maybe something to do with the kind of the stretch position or maybe the sensory nerve or something is being aggravated. Really, really interesting hypothesis. Nothing I think is really definitive at the moment, but those kind of experiences always bring my brain back to that problem because it's like, there is a difference between, you know, I think just to be clear, a lot of people kind of use the soreness as like, how am I recovered or not? It's like, absolutely nothing to do with that. - Yeah. You can get horrendous amounts of fatigue and no soreness and you can get horrendous amounts of soreness and no fatigue in the context of the same kind of gym session, it just depends on what exercise you're doing and what state you're in. Cool, awesome. Well, hopefully that was a nice easy kind of podcast episode, people to get back used to us again after your brief trip away. We are going to, we've got a couple of episodes, topics planned for the next couple of weeks, but very soon we are going to do a kind of full-on series of two or three episodes where we're going to walk through exactly how to build a strength training workout plan or strength training program for athletic purposes. So we're going to start with the framework, the eye performance for the LG Method talk, talk through how that works, talk about frequency and that kind of thing and basically just try and give a full-on three-part probably tutorial of exactly how to do this. That's coming up soon. We are working on that as we're very exciting, but we do have a couple of other topics to do before that. So that's everything for this week. We will be back next week with another topic.