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How to Get the Most From Your Fitness Park Visits

How to get the most from your fitness park visits

Getting the best workout from a gym, fitness centre or a fitness park is not as hard as you might think even if you haven’t worked out before. Your body has several built in sensory systems providing you with real-time feedback on your posture, your exercise form, and your muscular effort. Besides the feedback your body is providing you with, there are some important guiding principles to be familiar with. So, equipped with feedback from your body and an understanding of the guiding principles, you are ready to be your own personal trainer. Let’s take a introductory look at the Top 8 Training Hints to keep in mind whenever you work out:

Introducing the Top 8 Training Tips

Before beginning any workout at the fitness park, do a thorough warm up. This could be a walk from your home to the fitness park, or a walk around the school for 10-15 minutes. Mobilize your joints as you walk, and visualize what exercises you’re going to do for today’s workout. “Warming up” prepares you for working out and may help to prevent injuries. Stretching can be included at the end of a warm up, and individual stretches can also be performed between exercises targetting the muscles you’ve just worked. Once you’ve completed a workout, think about another 5 minute walk to “cool down”, and maybe do some more stretching exercises focusing on relaxing and letting go of tension before you head home.

Before performing any exercise, take a moment to set your posture to “active” mode. Whether the exercise involves standing, sitting, lying, kneeling, or bending: keep your spine long, right through the top of your head. To help, imagine a cord attached to the top of your head. As the imaginary cord is pulled upwards, your spine naturally lengthens. Moving down the posture chain: open your chest, float your sternum, relax your shoulders, lengthen your abdomen, and draw your belly button inwards towards your spine. Maintain a gentle lower back curve. Working out with an “active posture” helps you to be very sensitive to your body as you’re exercising. Being sensitive to your body, you will be able to feel the work and know when to stop.

A common question about resistance training is “how many reps do I do?” For best results with any exercise, perform as many reps as you can without struggle or compromising posture until you feel some muscle fatigue. Muscle fatigue shows your muscles are being challenged and beats reps as a indicator of when to stop. You can stop once you feel a little muscle fatigue, or you can move further into the fatigue zone, extracting more work from your muscles as you go. When you pay attention to how your muscles respond to work in real time, you’ll know when to end a set of any exercise. Using this method guarantees progress. Week after week, as your muscles adapt, it will take more work to reach the fatigue threshold.

Not all exercises are equally important. Single joint upper body exercises, already contained within larger exercises involving multiple joints, need not be included. For example, two-joint pulling exercises “contain” a bicep curl. Any two-joint pressing exercise “contains”a tricep press. How does knowing this help you? You don’t have to include these smaller upper body movements in a workout consisting of pushing and pulling exercises. This saves you time and offers a priority system for identifying the most effective exercises to include. Any single joint exercise, seen to be not already contained within a bigger exercise, is worthy of inclusion, particularly when sequenced within a workout of bigger exercises, to provide some recovery time.

Learn to see beyond exercise names. An exercise name doesn’t reveal much about the movement you are performing. For instance, the exercises –bench press, pushups, decline press, and incline press– are all variations in the upper body movement theme of “pushing from the chest”. Knowing this, your workout can be based on movement themes, each with several exercise choices. Building your workout from movement themes adds variety, encourages you to learn new exercises, and it frees you from the monotony of the same workout day after day. Think about accounting for movement themes like “pushing out from your chest”, “pulling in towards your chest”, “pushing up from your shoulders”, “pulling down towards your shoulders”.

By design, the Windermere Community Fitness Park encourages users to move from exercise to exercise, station to station. When moving from exercise to exercise, you get more work done sooner, and you get fitter, faster. It’s important to pay attention to your body when you work continuously. If an exercise leaves you breathing hard, follow with an exercise that is simpler, less challenging overall, and uses fewer joints and muscles. Sequence a pair of 2-joint movements like “pushing from your chest” and “pulling twards your chest”, with a single-joint movement like “up on your toes”. The pair might leave you breathing harder, while the single joint movement lets you recover to normal breathing. Sequencing leads to better workouts.

You’ve taken the time to pay attention to active posture, now let’s consider “range of motion” as another way to exercise safely and effectively. Focusing on range of motion (ROM) means to allow a joint to open and close fully during an exercise. Working out through a natural ROM preserves flexibility, and helps your muscles do their best work. For instance, when a muscles contracts fully during the work phase of an exercise, it’s natural to allow that muscle to fully lengthen, to stretch momentarily on the return phase. Fresh blood flows into the muscle between reps under these conditions. This enables you to achieve more work before fatigue sets in. Healthy muscles and joints depend on a full ROM.

Congratulations! You’ve visited the Windermere Community Fitness Park and you’ve left after an excellent workout. As you walk home, your muscles feel a little weak and maybe a bit shaky. This is a natural indicator of a quality workout and tells you loud and clear that you now need to stay away from the fitness park for a couple of days to allow your muscles, joints and connective tissue to heal and recover from the last workout. Progess without injury in any weight training program goes like this. Each workout breaks the body down (in a good way) and to follow this up with resting, eating and sleeping well ensures your body recovers and you return for your next workout stronger with more capacity for work. Work + recovery = progress!

Taking a deep dive into the Top 8 Training Hints

WCFP-top-8-hints-preview-go-beyond-names

WCFP-top-8-hints-preview-range-of-motion

In this space over the next few weeks we’ll be taking a deep dive into the Top 8 Training Hints. These are important topics to consider now that you’ve embarked on a workout program. The Top 8 Hints will help guide you, give you a sense of control, and make you feel a little bit more like your own personal trainer. Each hint is worth exploring as a topic on its own beyond the limited introduction above. We’ll be devoting an entire page to each of these topics:

Warm Up: Published
Active Posture: Published
Feel The Work: Published
Big vs Small: Published
Go Beyond Names: Publishing March 1 or earlier
Sequencing: Publishing March 1 or earlier
Range of Motion: Publishing March 1 or earlier
Recovery: Publishing March 1 or earlier

– Windermere community fitness park (WCFP) presents –

The Top 8 Training Hints

Last month we published an article in the Our Story section titled "How to get the most from your fitness park visits". The article briefly presented 8 important training hints to keep in mind as you embark on workout program. Whether you to a gym or Windermere Community Fitness Park, knowledge of these 8 hints will help you to: make good exercise choices, train safely and effectively, and add variety and progressions. Over the next few weeks, we'll go deeper into each of these Top 8 Training Hints. As the deep-dive articles are published, they will appear below.

Top 8 Training Hints: Warm Up

Why is a warm up before exercise important? What changes within the body occur when we warm up before exercising? Will a warm up protect you from injuries? These are all important questions about an essential component of fitness that many people don’t pay a lot of attention to. Let’s take a deep dive into why a warm up should be the first thing anyone does when working out.

Top 8 Training Hints: Active Posture

This deep dive into “active posture” shows you how to recognize, establish, and maintain an anti-gravity stance while you’re exercising. Active posture supports your body under load, helps you sense what your body is doing, and encourages you to use good form while performing any exercise. In a few easy steps, you’ll be an active posture expert. Find out how easy it is to practise active posture in all your daily activities. After all, daily life is full of movement. Movement loves active posture.

Top 8 Training Hints: Feel The Work

Do you let numbers tell you when to end a set? In this training hint, we do an in-depth exploration of “feeling the work” as a guide to ending a set. What do we mean by the term felling the work? You’ll find out how this method pairs with counting, and how together they help to ensure you progress towards your goals. Learn to use your body’s real-time response to each exercise (i.e. local muscle fatigue) as an alternative method of determining the end of a set.

Top 8 Training Hints: Big vs. Small

In this training tip you’ll learn that not all exercises are to be treated equally. Find out how exercises that use a single joint like a biceps curl are contained within bigger, multi-joint exercises like a chin-up, as shown in the header image. You’ll learn how to watch for the active joints in any exercise to then be able to distinguish between big and small movements.

Top 8 Training Hints: Range of Motion

This deep dive into learning how to benefit from a full range of motion for each exercise is coming March 1.

Top 8 Training Hints: Recovery

This deep dive into learning to pair adequate recovery with each workout is coming March 1.

Are you enjoying reading these articles?

These articles were written to help you make the most out of your Windermere Community Fitness Park visits. Equipped with the right information, you’ll be able to visit the fitness park, workout effectively, and head home knowing that each workout has improved your fitness level, increased your strength and endurance, and helped you maintain your motivation to continue. This kind of practical training knowledge coupled with a free outdoor gym to put these hints to use is priceless, and rare. Please consider donating to Phase Two of the Windermere Community Fitness Park today 🙂

This page was developed and maintained by WCFP Volunteer William Vrabel, NSCA-certified Personal Trainer with more than 30 years of experience working the front lines of Vancouver’s public fitness centres. By the time William retired in 2010, he’d taught 1000’s of citizens how to be their own personal trainer through the empowerment model expressed above.

How to get the most from your fitness park visits

Introducing the Top 8 Training Tips

1. Warm Up

2. Active Posture

3. Feel the Work

4. Big vs. Small

5. Go Beyond Names

6. Sequencing

7. Range of Motion

8. Recovery