Enhanceing Your Proformance

In last day’s post, TACFIT Commando Designer and Founder, Scott Sonnon tells us about his training program and how it utilizes specific dynamic body movements to give you a complete body workout in a short time producing fitness results.

As we stimulate the muscle growth with these short bursts intense movements we have to be careful not to fall into overuse injuries as we read in today’s interview excerpt.

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Craig Ballantyne:  Can you expand a little bit why the TACFIT training works so well describing the actual workouts and the methodology?

Scott Sonnon: Well, in functional training we’ve used the slogan, “It’s about movements, not muscles,” and that’s absolutely the truth. We need to train complex movement’s not just basic movements.
Usually when a person starts, they feel very uncoordinated and a lot of people don’t go to the gym because they’re embarrassed about the poor physical shape that they are in and their size.

Well, they can start right at home and there should be a way that somebody can stand up or fall off the couch and begin to exercise in a basic movement. However, that basic movement must progress, or it can develop into exercise specific injuries with diminishing returns and those injuries turn into illness.
It’s at this point that we need to revisit why we’re doing exercise. There has to be a way to increase the complexity of our nervous system.

Aging has been proven to be a loss of complexity, so if we are only doing simple movements over and over and repeatedly, we’re actually accelerating the aging process. I learned this the hard way because of where I came from genetically, but the solutions that I was given from different people around the world challenged the very notion of what we know about exercise. Our nervous system creates complexity so there has to be stages of an exercise.

So, take a basic push up, when you achieve the results that you were looking for you should be able to quantify them by tracking how many you are doing, then improve it upon it.  As soon as you achieve that threshold change the exercise making it a little bit more complex.

Turn it into a screwing push up, which is what TACFIT Commando has become infamous for, it’s close to being a one armed push up but as in a rotary action. Each one of those movements continues to become more complex.

It’s about movements and not muscles. If we want to turn back the accelerated aging process and become more youthful in our movement then we have to make each movement more complex every time we schedule out a training program.

TACFIT makes it dummy proof. I need to be able to follow a schedule, so, everyday has a particular calendar of what I’m doing, telling me when I should progress as well as other factors that I can use.

The fitness benefits are helping my nervous system so the body fat loss and the muscle gain are byproducts. They happen because I’m becoming more neurologically advanced. That sounds like a bunch of gobbledy gook, but with this is a four day wave of intensity.

Olympic teams have been using this for years; it is only now starting to trickle down to the average fitness consumer. Basically, what we were told when I was a kids competing in different sports is if you want to prepare for an event you take the day off before.

Unfortunately, what we learned is that our metabolism then comes in cold, and we’re warming up during the workout, so we actually have little performance in comparison to, say if we did the similar workout as we did the day before just to get the engine cooking to prime the nervous system so it can prepare.

So, if this applies to sports it must apply everywhere. The nervous system can’t differentiate between types of resistance; it only knows resistance, so it doesn’t know if it’s a barbell, sandbags, or your human body weight. If that’s true, then to prepare the body for our exercise the day before we want to peak, we have to do the same workout but at a lower intensity.

You have two types of people when it comes to fitness. You have the people who need confidence in their movement, and then you have the hard chargers which have been pushing themselves so much that they’re in a constant state of deterioration. They’re under restored and subprime conditions.

So, to get them to the point that they can actually do high intensity you have to force feed them, the active recovery and the compensations for the movements that they’ve been doing. So, there are four days that you need in order to recover completely from a high intensity performance. Most people, even professional athletes, even the elite spec ops guys whom I train don’t know what high intensity is for a couple of years.

It takes that long, INTENSITY IS A SKILL THAT MUST BE DEVELOPED, and if they’re not recovered they’ll never develop it. So, if they keep on trying to do high intensity every single day in every single workout they end up doing moderate intensity all the time and lower and lower and lower intensity, because of the injuries and the pain that accumulates since pain competes for performance, it goes to the same entry point in the spine.

This format that we developed, is a very short high intensity program with levels of sophistication. So there are levels of complexity where everybody gets to train together, but we may be doing different levels and depending upon where I am in my recovery, I may choke back in a level of complexity, I may drop down to a regular push up if I’m not fully recovered.

Then four days from that will be my next high intensity performance that I’m going to prepare for, and that sounds like a lot for the normal person because we tend to think, “Okay, so I have to exercise everyday this guy is saying, seven days a week.” Well, yes, you have to exercise seven days a week, but not conventional endurance standpoint you know hours of grueling exercise where you have to pull yourself home in a bucket.

A lot of the active recovery methods we’re talking about are eight to 14 minutes in the morning and then suddenly you just feel better and you have more energy throughout the day. The nutrition in a body is locked in the inside bag wrapped around the joints the synovial and the ground substance around the bones. So, you can have the best diet in the world, but if we’re not doing these active recovery methods it’s not being shipped out to the tissues that are literally being STARVED TO DEATH, so your diet means nothing.

It’s only through these mobility exercises that we’re actually able to bathe the body in its own nutrition and accelerate the recovery process so that we get the benefit from the high intensity that we’re hoping to do. If we don’t do it in advance we only will get the high intensity. So, this four day wave of using different types of exercise for a few minutes a day is how we structured our program.

We fumbled about with it for years, and until we were able to knock all the bugs out, I didn’t want to release it publicly. It was only since 2005 that I’ve been teaching this to the public, and I’m impressed, Craig, that the average fitness consumer has fallen in love with this.

We’ll be back with part 6 from TACFIT author  Scott Sonnon to discusses integrating the TACFIT training program.