Sharp Savage Fitness's Personal Training Curriculum
Learn more about how we structure our in-person, Personal Training sessions in Fort Collins
Sharp Savage Core Curriculum
Regardless of what your individual goals are, you must understand that you have a human body. Whether you're focused on improving body composition, enhancing athletic performance, becoming healthier and more resilient or eliminating chronic joint pain, you must improve the quality of your movement.
The human body has 6 fundamental primal movement patterns:
The Squat, The Hip Hinge, The Lunge, The Press, The Pull, Gait/Locomotion
Skill And Efficiency In The 6 Patterns Of Movement
In order to improve our physical fitness in all categories, we must focus on continuously increasing our skill and efficiency in these 6 patterns. If we are successful in this endevour we experience the following benefits:
1. We stabilize the body and eliminate chronic joint pain
2. We enhance balance, strength, speed, and power
3. We improve longevity
4. We add balanced lean muscle mass and increase our metabolic rate, burning more fat
5. We become more resilient and become less likely to suffer acute injury
6. We imporve emotional health and cognitive function
Weight Loss & Toning
This is the number one reason most people hire a personal trainer. In most cases what they end up getting for their money isn't actual training but rather workouts with dietary guidance involving calorie restriction. By burning more calories than your consuming, anyone will naturally lose weight. This method is highly effective for someone who is obese or overweight.
However, simply burning more calories WILL NOT get you that jacked, shredded, toned, cut, powerful, athletic physique most people are truly after. In order to achieve this, you need to increase your metabolic rate by building lean, balanced muscle mass.
The only way to do this safely and effectively is to engage in accurate, focused strength training which follows the Sharp Savage core curriculum. By carefully following this training plan, you will not only lose body fat, you will shift your metabolism from a fat storing metabolism to a fat burning metabolism.
This is something that CANNOT be done through diet and exercise alone. Let's say that right now your body needs 2,000 calories to sustain itself daily, regardless of activity level. With Sharp Savage Training you can increase that maintenance level to 2,500 or 3,000 calories in six short months!
What does this mean? You can literally be enjoying a rest day by relaxing on the coach or vacationing with your family and your body is now burning an extra 500-1,000 calories! Can you say splurge? It's literally like trading in your 9-5 job where you trade time for money (diet/cardio) for having your own business that generates you passive income (lean muscle mass).
Nutrition is crucial for overall health and longevity but you can literally get yourself to a point where you have and maintain the body you've always dreamed of and you can actually eat what you want, when you want.
Strength Training
As stated, if you follow the Sharp Savage core curriculum, you will build balanced, lean muscle safely and effectively. This is worth repeating because although strength training can give you the body you've always dreamed of, it can destroy your body even faster if you're not careful.
Depending on a persons natural strength level, alignment, and quality of movement, the initial phases of training involve much more software than hardware. We cannot effectively train and grow muscles without first aligning the body and fine tuning the nervous system. Motor programming is the key to success!
We have to ensure that your movement quality is sound before we start loading your body with higher intensities.
This is where many fitness professionals drop the ball and clients get injured. Unfortunately, we can't significantly impact our performance or metabolic rate without consistently exposing ourselves to higher intensities and heavier weights so keen motor programming is vital.
Injury Prevention and Sports Performance
The ability to maintain structural alignment and stabilize the body through varying degrees of intensity and dynamic movement is what makes the difference between being vulnerable and being resilient.
A football player who can squat 2 or 3 tims their bodyweight but can't properly perform a single leg squat is not strong. On the contrary, they are fundamentally weak and imbalanced and a high risk candidate for a career ending knees injury. The reason they're able to squat as much as they do is because they've become conditioned to compensate. Conpensation in a nutshell is imbalance.
We will never be completely symetrical but the more assymetrical we allow or bodies to become the more vulnerable we are. Just like in the weight room, our bodies are being loaded at varying intensities every day. Whether you're an athlete or not, gravity is working on you all the same. Perhaps just at lower intensities.
Still, running, jumping, sprinting, cutting, sitting, standing are all actions resisting gravitational forces against the body that range anywhere from 1.5-7 times your bodyweight! This is why proper strength training and mobility is crucial to anyone with a human body.
Cardio & Conditioning
Most people tend to think of cardio and conditioning as a primary tactic to lose weight and tone up rather than what it actually is, a method to increase work capacity.
As discussed above, we can lose weight by burning more calories than we consume. However, this is an inferior training method for improving body composition.
The body has 2 energy systems, aerobic and anaerobic. We train our aerobic system through steady state cardiovascular exercise and we train our anaerobic system through high intensity interval training. Both styles of training performed together drastically increase our work capacity and athletic performance. Although these training methods can aid us in our body composition goals (specifically anaerobic training), they will not help us if we are not heavily engaged in a strength training program.
Specialized metabolic conditioning programs are best stacked on strength programs and typically run 8-12 weeks.