Misc – Zoom Performance

The Resolution Lie: Why 92% of New Year’s Goals Fail

Zoom Performance — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 17:52:47 +0000

Despite the best of intentions, only 8% of New Year’s resolutions are successful. Even more shocking, 25% will fail within the first week. A look at some common causes for failure can be key to setting realistic goals for your New Year.

Takeaways:

More Americans will make New Year’s resolutions than watch the Super Bowl
Only 8% of those resolutions will be successful
Understanding why so many fail can be key to setting effective goals for 2017

Self-reflection upon entering a New Year is a common thing. Defining what went well last year while reflecting on what we’d like to do better is what makes us uniquely human. So too does our innate struggle to drop old habits and pick up new ones.

Understanding why our attempts at change sometimes fail can help us avoid common pitfalls and build goals that last.

Resolution Pitfall 1- Too Large of a Change

Sadly, life doesn’t work like a montage from an 80’s movie. You can’t win the all-Valley Karate tournament by hanging out with an elderly Japanese mentor for a few weeks. Real lasting change takes time and progresses slowly.

This makes resolutions easy, but follow-through hard. Stretch goals are a challenge because circumstances change and challenges arise which make them easy to abandon. A better plan is to focus on the steps to attain your goal rather than the big outcome you desire. By setting more realistic goals you’ll enjoy the journey, build good habits and celebrate small victories along the way. Progress, not perfection.

Best Practices

Remember January is busy, be realistic about what you can accomplish in both the near and long term
Carefully consider what your goal will take in terms of time, money and effort. Be realistic in assessing your readiness
Start slow. Changing your routine too drastically can bring major unintended consequences to your body, motivation and attitude

Resolution Pitfall 2- Too Broad of a Focus

Many well-meaning people often set themselves up for disappointment in the New Year by being too aggressive. Fueled by dreams of an “extreme makeover” type transformation, they simply try to tackle too many goals at once. According to statisticbrain.com, the top five common resolutions include the following.

Weight Loss
Getting Organized
Finances
Personal fulfillment
Fitness

Tackling just one of those changes can be challenging. Loading up more is a recipe for failure and reduces the chances of even seeing one through to fruition.

Best Practices

Pick a single meaningful change to pursue
Give some thought to the impacts to your body, finances and relationships that your goal will require
Consider time constraints and other obstacles you’ll face and how you’ll persevere

Resolution Pitfall 3- Poorly Defined Goals

Another frequent culprit in failed resolutions is failing to clearly define the resolution itself. We tend to think in terms of outcomes or feelings rather than measurable changes.

I want to

… get faster

…be stronger

… look better in a bathing suit

… save money

All are noble intentions, but none are truly goals because they aren’t measurable. If you don’t know where you are going it is easy to get lost, distracted or not even know when you’ve arrived. Dialing in a specific and measurable goal is the first step to seeing that goal through to the end.

Best Practices

Make your goal SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic & Timebound)
Consider writing and signing a formal contract with yourself outlining your goal and the metrics you’ll use
Share your goal with a friend or accountability coach
Start a journal to track progress toward your goal and set a schedule to regularly review progress

The New Year is full of opportunity. By carefully building your goals you can take action and make it a year to remember. If you’d like some help defining and tracking toward fitness, nutrition or strength goals, our coaches would love to help. Accountability and a rock solid plan can be crucial in making your wish into a reality.

Attack Your Offseason: Why a Functional Movement Screen is Job 1

Zoom Performance — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 16:01:55 +0000

Throughout a long season and career, endurance athletes put an incredible amount of stress on their muscles, joints and soft tissue. While the movements required for a given sport are similar between competitors, how a specific athlete handles the load can differ greatly.

Understanding how your unique body moves and adapting your approach can be key to success, longevity and injury prevention. A Functional Movement Screen can help.

What is it?

A Functional Movement Screen is a test delivered by a licensed coach that takes an athlete through a series of seven basic movements to map out how their body behaves. These include asking the athlete to squat, twist, push, pull and bend. The test uses light weights and is most concerned with form and alignment of the upper and lower body.

The assessor will look for tightness, weakness and compensation through each movement with a focus on defining potential issues. These are related to how an athlete balances and adapts to the specific demands of the task. The assessment is not difficult, but can provide great insight.

Why should I care?

Many factors influence how an athlete completes the core movements of the screen. These include injuries (past and present), age, lifestyle, genetics and many more. In short, you are uniquely you and how you handle load through movement is different than anyone else.

The results will offer insights into training more efficiently and have implications for your entire approach. Adapting a training plan to account for the “unique you” is crucial to…

Helping you to safely and effective ramp up training
Preventing injuries by identifying and mitigating risks
Customizing an approach to your body type, movement patterns and core discipline

When is a Functional Movement Screen most beneficial?

The deficiencies and opportunities uncovered by the assessment will require tweaks to training, equipment and approach. This could mean new or different strength training, modifications to technique, equipment or others. Implementing changes like these are helpful any time. Be that in the offseason or during the rigors of a competitive season.

Getting Started

The Functional Movement Screen is being offered now to help athletes gear up for a successful 2017. In addition, Zoom Performance is also offering a variety of additional assessments addressing mechanics, nutrition and strength testing. All will be customized to your specific situation and discipline.

The January calendar for all is filling fast and capacity is limited, so if you are interested, please contact your coach for more information.

A Rising Tide: Four Powerful Benefits of Group Workouts

Zoom Performance — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 20:07:32 +0000

It wasn’t too long ago that the term boot camp was reserved for military recruits and virtually all “group rides” took place on Harleys. Those days are long gone as group fitness has forever changed what it means to work out for millions of Americans.

Even participants in traditionally individual sports like cycling and running are finding value in aligning with a core group of training partners to supplement their individual workouts.

Why the shift from fitness as a solitary discipline to a collaborative affair? More importantly, what’s in it for you?

The takeaways

Group fitness is here to stay
The inherent benefits of group workouts are many
By properly integrating team training into any plan, you can enjoy those benefits

Perhaps the most interesting component of the rise of group fitness is the diversity of its adherents. Participants range from schlubby weekend cyclists all the way to extreme cross-fit zealots and everything in-between.

If you are interested, there is a group for you, and the right group can bring a variety of positives.

Forced Accountability

We’ve all slogged through workouts where we weren’t our best. A variety of ailments or mental hurdles may have prevented us from giving it our all, or even showing up in the first place.

In contrast to an individual plan, when you fail to show up for a fitness group, you are missed. This can prove to be an incredible positive. Encouraging texts and social media posts from your team can be all you need to battle back the next time the snooze button beckons at 5:30am.

What’s more, not only does your team expect you to show, that team expects you to perform. This is another important component of accountability. One only need get “dropped” from a group ride to understand this concept all too well. The aftermath can serve as much needed motivation.

Camaraderie/ Support

A friend cheering from the side of the course on race day can be helpful, but that same friend actually engaged in the activity with you over weeks or months is much better. The camaraderie you can build via group fitness highlights this value.

Social interactions with fellow team members are natural and can last even after workouts end. Many people are able to build entire new networks of friends based on commonalities discovered through shared fitness. Business connections are possible as well, though this has limits—so leave the Amway recovery drink at home.

Variety

As a veteran of a healthy lifestyle, there can be times when fitness is just… boring. Your energy and enthusiasm level can ebb and flow throughout the season. The antidote to this is variety.

Group workouts can help. Instead of slogging through the same or similar routine day after day, simply following someone else’s plan (even once a week) can breathe new life into your workouts, your mental health and your gains.

Shared Expertise

Most people sign up for group fitness for one reason—interaction. Successful team members use those interactions to not only connect socially, but to get better. By engaging with your workout team and asking questions you can learn about managing injuries, racing tactics and even which gear works best. This can help you crowdsource your best self, a valuable thing for newbies and veterans alike.

At the end of the day, just being able to say “we’re all in this together” feels a lot better than taking on the world alone. By incorporating a few group workouts into your normal routine, you can enjoy these benefits and others, bolstering your performance and your state of mind. Finding the right group that approximates your fitness level and goals is key.

Zoom Performance hosts many group fitness events throughout the year, and we have a vast network of additional groups we can recommend. If you are interested in finding some accountability, camaraderie, variety and leveraging the benefits of shared expertise, we’ve got the perfect group for you.

Contact your coach for details.

Goal Setting, Part One: Why is Setting Goals So Important?

Julie Kirkpatrick — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 21:23:34 +0000

Too many of us wake up each morning, go through the motions day after day, waiting for the day when suddenly our dreams will come true:

“Someday I’m going to get in shape.”

“I’d love to be able to do a pull-up.”

“I’m going to be paying on this student loan until I die.”

While we can come up with any number of excuses as to why we aren’t in shape, can’t do a pull-up, or still owe on a college loan from 20 years ago, so many of our ideas on how we could improve our lives have one thing in common – follow-through. We don’t follow through on our goals.

Think of your goal as a destination you want to visit. You’re hungry, and you want to check out a new restaurant you just read about. With no plan in place and no idea where this new hot spot is located, you could just jump in your car and drive for hours looking for the location, never find it, and eventually give up and grab drive thru from the Taco Bell. You’d head home disappointed from not finding what you set out to discover and feeling crappy for settling for something less than what you truly wanted.

On the other hand, if you know exactly where your this new place is located, you can locate it on the map, and head out with a plan on how to get there. Once you arrive, you can savor your dinner and head home fulfilled having accomplished what you set out to achieve!

In this three-part series, we will examine the following questions:

Why should I set goals?
What does a successful goal look like?
How exactly should I go about creating goals?

While many readers will apply these questions to athletic or performance goals, we will also look into how these apply to all areas of your life: health, financial, family, community, career, etc.

Why should I set goals?

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us get up and go about our days (and weeks/months/years?) in survival mode – we do what we need to in order to get survive the day and survive until tomorrow. But what if we awoke each morning with a plan of how to tackle each day so we not only survive until bedtime, but we make progress towards what matters most to us?

The idea is that with concrete goals and objectives in place, we can live a life of intention. An intentional life is in line with your values, and you never have to question if what you are doing is important to you.

As we prepare to discuss the “what” and “how” of goal-setting in future articles, let’s take a closer look at the “why.” Ask yourself the following questions:

What motivates you?

Don’t think about things like “a drill instructor yelling in my ear” or some music that makes you run faster. Rather, think about what makes you want to live a better life?

If money and time were no object, how would you live your life?

Think about what you’d like to accomplish personally, for your family, in your career, for your health, financially. Look beyond just athletic goals. All of these factors will work together (or against one another, if you’re not careful) as you work to create the best you possible.

What would you like your life to look like in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years?

Be serious and realistic – being a movie star with a billion dollars in the bank isn’t going to likely happen. And, is pursuing that really what will motivate you to get out of bed every day for the next 10 years?

Which goals are the most important to you?

Focus on the goals that mean the most to you – the other less-important goals may need to be modified or eliminated to reach the ones that matter most. If spending time with your kids is the most important thing in your life, a job that has you working 80-100 hours a week is incongruent with family time.

Homework:

Start by spending some time thinking about what is important in your life. Get a notebook and write the name of each sector of your life at the top of each page: Family, Career, Money, Community/Faith, Personal, Health/Athletic, etc. Then, just start brainstorming ideas of things that you’d like to accomplish in each. Don’t be afraid to list things that seem really far out there. If you’ve secretly wished that you could learn to tap dance or play the cello or ride your bike around the Australian continent, list everything you can think of. As you move through this process, you can alter or change anything.

In the next two articles, we’ll look at what types of goals are the best for you and how to write goals that work.

By Coach Julie Kirkpatrick

Case Study — solving tendonitis

Matthew Zepeda — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 19:30:14 +0000

Many cyclists have experienced knee issues in one form or another. I can remember having bouts of tendonitis where riding was out of the question for extended periods. The high volume of miles, hours and pedal revs will wildly magnify any imperfections or alignment issues in the pedal stroke causing inflammation and irritation in the hip, knees or ankles. Two years ago I had a local pro with a notable US Pro team approach me with pain in one of his knees. Due to the knee issues, the athlete had missed going to Asia with the team to race. He was frustrated because traditional methods hadn’t yielded results. We agreed to work together to resolve the issue.

The athlete, we’ll call “A” had worked with a noted fitting agent on his bike and they had made some changes to the balance of the bike and how he sat on it. A’s team requires him to use a sponsor saddle and the saddle was not the right width for him causing him to hold himself ever-so-slightly just off the saddle. We were able to communicate with the team to get a sponsor correct saddle that was the right width for him. That allowed him to comfortably sit ON the saddle without constant tension on the legs. This got us going in the right direction. He also made changes to his shoe/cleat interface based on recommendations from his team resources.

A chronic problem with cyclists is weakness in the gluteal complex (butt muscles) that cascades all the way down to the knee and ankle. In A’s case, this weakness caused his ankle to collapse at the power phase of his pedal stroke AND created misalignment of the knee. Because A had made the above mentioned changes to his shoe/cleat interface, this partially eliminated the collapsing of the ankle and knee alignment issue.

Next, we began a strengthening program that addressed three elements.

First, we worked to strengthen his gluteal complex. Because of the linear motion of pedalling, the musculature that helps to stabilize the pelvis and femur can become inactive and disproportionately weak compared to the rest of the gluteal muscles.

Second, we worked to create synchronization in the firing or activation of his quadriceps muscles. (medialis and lateralis). A, like most cyclists, has tremendously well-developed quads but his inner quadricep muscle (medialis) fired before his outer quadriceps muscle (lateralis). This created a slight turn of the patella (knee cap). The patella slides in a “groove” at the bottom of the femur and any misalignment is incredibly irritating which leads to inflammation.

Third, we worked on core strength and stabilization. The muscles of the hips, legs, spine and of course, abdominals are attached to the pelvis. When a cyclist pedals the musculature of the legs, spine and abdominals pull on the pelvis. His legs and glutes were already quite strong but we needed to shore up the low spine and abdominals. If you’ll recall one of the t-mobile or HTC/Highroad physios a number of years ago said that …”if you’re core is weak, it’s like shooting cannon while in a canoe.” (I’m paraphrasing here) We also added in some stabilization exercises to “wake up” his little stabilizer muscles starting in the foot all the way up to the hip. Many of his exercises were done bare- footed and/or on an unstable platform. Many moves also involved holding weights over the head to elevate his center of gravity there-by destabilizing “the platform.”

This combination of elements allowed us to get A back on his bike in a limited capacity in 30 days and back at full capacity in approximately 75 days. I also gave him “homework” to do while he was on the road to help maintain the work we did.

At the time of writing he had been able to put in a considerable amount of mileage at team camp as well as on his own.

A holistic approach to issues with the hip, knee or ankle often yields favorable results. In my experience there is usually no ONE factor but a constellation of factors that lead to irritation/inflammation issues which in turn become tendon or joint issues.

Ainslie MacEachran, the author of Simple Cycling Performance, is a Level 2 cycling coach with www.getzoomperformance.com. Ainslie is a AAAI/ISMA certified personal trainer and a Level 2 USACycling coach.