Of all of the waste of time exercises that people do in the gym, calf raises and all of its iterations, are probably the worst of all of these exercises. And of all the machine-based exercises, no other machines are as much of a waste of space, iron and cable as the various calf raise machines.

Stop doing calf raises.

Just don’t do them.

In the abstract, in isolation, the calf muscle may be getting stronger. But this strength gain is meaningless because it there is little, if any, transfer to improving movement or actual function. The goal should be to train movements, not muscles. The calf doesn’t work in isolation to produce any movement that we make, so there is no reason to perform an exercise that isolates the calf muscle, insulates it from the other muscles that it works with to produce functional movement. There is no reason to train any muscle in isolation.

The calf raise is the biceps curl for the legs. There’s an old saying they use in golf that says, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” When it comes to leg training we can adapt it to, “Calf raises for show, squat and lunge for dough.”

Walk into any gym, anywhere and you will see plenty of people doing all kinds of leg raises, but you rarely see the squat and lunge being performed, let alone performed correctly. And for goodness sake, do not superset calf raises with other purposeful exercises like plyometric jumps or squats and lunges.

The calf raise is an less-than-ordinary exercise that should be consigned to the scrap heap of exercises, exercises from a by-gone era when we just didn’t know any better.

There is an epidemic sweeping the country these days. No, it’s not the obesity epidemic, or the drug abuse epidemic, or the Glee epidemic. The “Doing Stupid, Waste of Time Stuff in the Gym Epidemic,”is a real problem. Earlier this summer I posted a piece about some of the things that people need to stop doing, and this is a follow-up piece that follows the same theme.

Take the weight belt off and wrist wraps, too. Wearing a weight belt for anything, but especially when doing exercises like triceps push-downs, and doing them poorly, to boot, just makes you look ridiculous. Thirty years ago before people knew any better, you had an excuse for wearing a weight belt while squatting or dead lifting, but today, no. If your back hurts, no belt or brace will “fix” it, and if you aren’t strong enough, you aren’t strong enough; the belt doesn’t make you stronger. Wrist straps make you weaker, not stronger. If you can’t lift the weight, make it lighter. Try developing the strength in your hands, wrists and forearms rather than ignoring these incredibly important muscles by using wrist straps. The person who can dead lift 200 pounds without straps is stronger than the person who needs straps to lift 225 or more.

Stop doing curls in the squat rack. The squat rack is really for doing squats. No, really. The rack is not for barbell curls or upright rows. I actually saw some guy doing a barbell curl, dumbbell curl superset in the squat rack last week. I almost said something to the guy, but I figured he really was misguided and was better off left alone. Just because you can curl with 100-pounds on a barbell doesn’t mean you need a heavy duty piece of equipment like a squat rack. Actually, the less time you spend time doing curls the better.

Don’t do the Sleep Walk on the treadmill. Walking on the treadmill is okay for an occasional warm-up. All of this low-intensity (slow) walking is a tremendous waste of time and, no matter what the computer read-out says, does not require a lot of energy. Think of it as 30-45 minutes of your life that you will never get back. And walking on an incline and hanging onto the top of the treadmill, or the side-rails, is plain silly. If you can’t keep up the pace slow it down, don’t hold on. Do you hold when walk down the street? Treadmill; it’s what’s for warm-up on. Occasionally.

Using the Step Mill really doesn’t get you in shape. Disabuse yourself of the notion that doing work on the Step Mill, or other similar “stair climbing” machine, is truly improving your fitness level. Disabuse, I say. Using these machines will only improve your performance with regard to using these machines and will not improve your performance in any meaningful, purposeful way. As a matter of fact, these “steppers” are really a waste of time, as they require a minimal range of motion, allow the user to hold or lean, and bear no semblance to any real function. And contorting your body so you can lean into the machine not only stresses the body in a way it really shouldn’t be stressed, it makes an inefficient exercise even worse.

Get off of the mat and onto your feet. There is very little that we do in our day-to-day lives, aside from sleeping, lying down. So stop exercising this way. Gravity is the single, most-important factor to take into account when designing an exercise or exercise program, so to lie down while exercising ignores the physics-based reality of our existence. And if you participate in sports at any level, doing prone or supine exercises (fancy talk for lying down), you are really doing yourself a disservice. We need strength, stability and balance in the vertical plane (standing up) not the horizontal plane, and the only way you develop skills in the vertical plane is to exercise in it. Think about it, do you know of anyone who practices the golf swing lying down?

Get more efficient with your workouts and stop wasting your time and energy.

I’m reading a book about health and fitness – shocker! – and came across this passage.

“Man is made with a body containing certain separate parts, each of which must be kept in proper use or the others will suffer. This becomes a troublesome question in complex modern life…Exercise, to produce it’s best effect, must be recreation, mental as well as physical. We cannot separate any one part of our economy and produce the best results. There must be well-rounded development…What most of us want is to have our bodies harmoniously developed on the general plan on which they were built.”

The author also bemoans the fact that the modern man gets too little exercise, both city-dweller and farmer alike, even going as far as to write that thanks to modern equipment the farmer now “may be (physically) inferior” to the average citizen.

The book was written by Theo Knauff and is titled, “Athletics for Physical Culture.” It was published in 1894. One-hundred and seventeen years ago.

So nothing has changed since the advent/awareness of the concept of “physical culture” two centuries ago. Physical culture is what we now call health and fitness, and physical culturists from the day of our great-great-grandparents were singing a song that is still being sung today.

You really can learn alot from reading these old fitness books. I like the perspective they provide. In this case I find it incredibly interesting that the affects of the advances of the Industrial Revolution were obvious 120-years ago and the concerns and observations are just as relevant today. Think about the life of a late 19th century farmer as it compares to the routine of people today; wouldn’t you think it was physically demanding, if not brutal? By the standards of 1894, guess not.

Another great observation made by Knauff is the need for recreative exercise and well-rounded development in the pursuit of fitness. This is a point that is still missed today by way too many so-called fitness experts. Knauff mentions that it was (is) a mistake for people to treat exercise as “a business and necessary work.” Whether it’s 1894 or 2011 this condition hasn’t changed, as there are fitness folks who promote this kind of thinking up to this very second. Walking on a treadmill, exercise while sitting down in a machine, mimicking mindlessly in an exercise class, following an externally developed diet that tells you what to eat and drink and when to eat and drink it.

That, my friends, is work. And it’s a big business getting people to work for their health and fitness. So take a step back and look at the elements of your routine, heed Theo Knauff’s advice and make sure you are doing everything possible to work your body harmoniously.

You need to have variety in your workout routine. You shouldn’t perform the same workouts over and over again, and using a variety of different workouts over time can help keep you from getting bored and help you improve your fitness level. You can get this variety by using different exercises from workout to workout and by making slight variations to exercise during each workout.

I hope you squat during your workouts. You really should, as the squat is one of the great exercises. A great way to get variety in your workouts is to use many different stances/foot positions during your squat session. You should use the basic, shoulder-to-hip width “even stance’ foot position for squatting, but you should also use squat stances of different widths. Squat with your feet thisclose together, really wide, and all points in between.

But don’t limit the variety you use to the width of your squat stance, as you can also stagger your squat stance so that one foot is slightly in front of the other, using about a heel-to-toe relationship. Of course you should perform an equal amount of squats with each foot forward – balance is as important as variety in your workouts. You can also point your toes out, in, have one foot straight and the other foot pointed, either staggered or even. When you add the different width stances to the staggered stances and other varieties, you can experience a tremendous amount of variety in your workouts. You don’t have to do all of the varieties in each workout, but feel free to experiment and mix and match.

Another leg exercise, the lunge, can be altered in many ways. You can step forward, step on a variety of angles forward, laterally, and a variety of angles to the rear. Utilizing this kind of variety in your workouts can be a tremendous boost to your fitness level.

The push-up, another great exercise, can be modified with the pattern used with the squat. Changing your hand positions from set to set, changing the width, stagger and angles of the hands will make push-ups more challenging and effective than sticking with the traditional method, set-after-set, workout-after-workout. Experiment with having your hands at different heights, placing one hand on the floor the other hand on a Reebok Step or other similar piece of equipment. Be creative and your workouts will be more fun and effective.

So, you workout. You’re serious about your workouts and you work hard. You never miss a workout. Rain or snow or shine, holiday or birthday, weekday or weekend, you are at the gym pushing yourself as hard as you can. Other people recognize your commitment and hard work and it makes you feel good, makes you push hard even on days when you don’t feel 100%.

But here’s a question for you. Are you getting better or just getting tired?

Make no mistake about it; just because you work hard doesn’t mean you are materially improving. Just because you have nothing in your tank at the end of a workout doesn’t mean you are experiencing development in any meaningful way. The human body is an amazing machine and is capable of performing a great deal of work, but being able to do this work is not always a positive thing, and does not mean you are getting yourself in shape. Your body doesn’t recognize intent, so if you’re beating up yourself in the gym or on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, it matters not. You can wear down and do harm to yourself despite your best intentions.

Make no mistake about it, wearing yourself down and beating yourself up is not getting in shape. Being able to spend hours and hours in the gym doesn’t prepare you to do anything – endure anything – but spending hours and hours in the gym. The body doesn’t grow – improve – as a result of constant work. It grows as a result of a combination of quality work and rest, and the older we get the more rest we need.

In many cases, it’s not more and more exercise, but less and better exercise, and more rest. Quality over quantity. High-volume/low-intensity work that can be done everyday isn’t worth much. If it gives you a sense of accomplishment to spend hours in the gym everyday, that’s about all it will do for you.

So evaluate your workouts. If you are always at the gym, spending hours to finish workouts, and constantly pushing to do more, it might be time to back off. You might be doing good stuff, but doing too much of it.

It’s the time of year when we start to get all the ridiculous, “Get a Bathing Suit Body For the Summer,” articles. I am constantly amazed that this crap gets re-cycled every year in magazines, newspapers and television shows. The same weight loss based garbage every year. I cannot believe editors keep asking for these stories and writers keep churning them out. And people pay attention to them.

In general, weight loss goals are a bad idea. “Weighing less” is meaningless. Making a short-term effort to lose 15-pounds by Memorial Day, even if you do it, will usually be worse for you in the long run, and doesn’t even mean that you will look better.

Set a goal of improving performance of a given task by the time you have to get into your bathing suit rather than focusing on weight or appearance. If you can’t do a push-up, make a concerted effort to do a push-up. And if you can do 5, work to be able to do 10. The same goes with just about any other exercise, especially the ones you avoid because you can’t do them or because they are “too hard.”

Pursuing these performance-based goals will give you the best chance to appreciably change your look while improving your fitness and capability level. Over a 6-8 week period if you work diligently to improve your performance you WILL look better.

The catch is you have to work hard at things that are hard to do; 60-yard shuttles, squats, jump rope, push-ups, pull-ups. In my experience these are all activities that most people avoid because of their degree of difficulty, but at the same time represent the opportunity give a person the chance to truly improve. Weight loss doesn’t represent improvement, but learning how to do pull-ups or any of these other meaningful tasks – genuinely trying – is the definition of improvement.

And even if you don’t reach your goal, whether it’s doing a pull-up, a push-up, completing five 60-yard shuttles in a given period of time, you will have improved your performance and will NOT have failed. People who set out to lose weight, and don’t, or do and gain it back, always feel like they have failed.

The term “warm-up” is never as appropriate as when its absolutely freezing cold, miserable weather and you feel like your bones are going to break with every step you take. I hate the winter and I hate the cold, but the only thing that allows me to deal with it is that I have a great pre-workout warm-up routine. I should say, I have a whole bunch of different warm-up programs that I use, and they come in quite handy when it’s cold.

Did I say I hate the cold?

On the days when you feel cold you should take extra time to warm-up. It’s as simple as that. The problem for many people is that they don’t have an appropriate warm-up, or any warm-up for that matter. I have seen it countless times; people rush in to the gym in the dead of winter, jump on the treadmill and start running, not even jogging, but full out running. This is a bad thing. Here are some other bad ways to start your workout; crunches, biceps or triceps exercises, leg presses, bench presses. Even when the weather is warm it is bad form to not take some time to get loose and warm before you start your workout.

A proper warm-up consists of so much more than just walking on the treadmill for 5-minutes and running through a handful of static stretches. A lot of people don’t like to warm-up (as in my previous example) because it’s A) boring and B) they don’t really know how to. A good, progressive warm-up routine prepares you both physically and mentally for the workout. I think the key word here is “progressive.”

“Progressive,” means proceeding step by step, moving from one member of a series to the next. When warming up the progression should move from easy to difficult so that it blends into your workout. With my client training sessions the warm-up/preparation period has evolved from a very simple series of exercises to a much more complex program of complex movements, both in the individual workout and in the overall concept. For someone who has never trained in this manner, this kind of warm up would be THE workout. Over time my clients’ warm up has served to increase their fitness level, and their increased fitness level has served to improve their warm-up.

So it’s okay to walk on the treadmill for 5-minutes if you transition to something a bit more challenging, such as jumping jacks, squat thrusts and other calisthenics. This will increase heart rate, literally warm up the body and prep it for the workout. Total body movements should the feature of the warm-up, which is one of the reason calisthenics are a great way to start your workout day. Calisthenics are progressive, in that you can start with a simple move like the jumping jacks and move to squat thrusts and their varieties, leg drives, grass hoppers, to name a few.

Jumping rope is another great exercise to include in your warm-up routine. If you aren’t great at jumping rope take it slow and give yourself 5-minutes to work at it. What starts as slow and, at times, frustrating work, slowly but surely turns into an efficient and effective way to warm-up and improve your fitness level.

The warm up is part of the workout, not something separate from it. So don’t neglect the warm-up and your workouts and your fitness level will improve.

There are a lot of theories, myths and “Wives’ Tales” that deal with cures for jet lag and exercise is my cure.

There are a lot of cures for jet lag, from the simple to complex, scientific to goofy, medicinal, herbal and elemental.  Some are simple and others are complex and convoluted. Take melatonin, drink water, starve yourself take pharmaceuticals, wear goggles that shine light into your eyes and more.

I don’t travel all that much, but when I do I find the best way to get over jet lag and its associated problems is to grab a quick workout, sometimes intense, sometimes restorative. I don’t have any hard and fast rules – there’s no science behind cures for jet lag – but I listen to my body to determine what kind of exercise routine I’ll do.

If I’m on the road I usually intend to do a light workout – especially if I’m feeling laggy – and definitely start slow. Sometimes I perk up during the workout and wind up going pretty hard, other times nice and easy does it.  Also, sometimes the facilities don’t permit a heavy-duty workout, but any workout is better than no workout.

Calisthenics, dynamic flexibility work, a light run, an easy circuit training routine are all good strategies to combat jet lag.  Do something that gets you, and keeps you, moving for at least 25-35 minutes, incorporates whole body movements and has you changing elevations.  You know, get down on the ground, get back up…keep moving and get the blood flowing.

When I get back home my workouts tend to be more rigorous, usually because I’m glad to be home and that I’m familiar with my surroundings.  I just got back from Las Vegas and less than 2 hours after I we touched down I was on the local high school field doing what started out as a recovery-style run but wound up being a full-blown workout.

Felt great, ate great, slept great and I was back in the swing of things right away.  Exercise is a great cure for jet lag.