The Bro Interview

     If Cameron (my brother) and I didn’t realize that we were fitness noobs before, we certainly do now. Though we have been “working out” for several years, we know now that we’ve been doing a lot of things wrong.  In today’s weekly blog post of Bros and Fitness we will be discussing our mentor interview and how we came to formulate our hypothesis, which we will be testing over the next few weeks, to answer our ultimate question… What plan will make us the Elvis Presley of fitness?

Our Mentor

     Our bro, Landon, is studying to be a physical trainer, has completed college coursework in physiology, kinesiology, weight training, and nutrition.  He is a firefighter-EMT for Cal Fire and volunteers with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department Mountain Search and Rescue team.  He has been an avid weight lifter, runner, hiker, and all-around fitness junkie for 12 years.  Landon is our mentor for our 20% project (in case you didn’t read the comment section) and he has enlightened us on some very interesting points. Landon is a believer in the fitness religion known as HIIT, which is an acronym for High Intensity Interval Training.  The idea of HIIT is to work at maximum capacity for a relatively short interval, (usually 15 seconds to a minute), take small breaks in between sets, and then “HIIT” it again…(see what I did there?).  Now I know what you may be thinking: “Joel, this is insanity. Do you honestly think this is the perfect plan for me?”  If that’s your question right now I’m going to leave you hanging, instead, I’ll explain what we discussed in our mentor interview.

The interview

     In the interview we discussed the average persons work out plan for strength, if their goal is to be a tank, and cardio, if their goal is to be the Flash.  Landon explained to us that people who work out to be strong tend to work extremely hard for a short amount of time and do a small amount of reps, take a long rest period in between sets, and then go at it again.  On the other hand, he also told us that people who specifically train in endurance cardio, (like distance running), take their work at a lesser intensity, but over a longer period of time.  He also drew diagrams similar to the ones below to show how hard each type of person works and how often they usually rest.

 

Landon’s suggestion for us was to combine both strength and HIIT.  A basic layout of his plan is shown below.  Keep in mind that this plan is the best and most efficient way to gain lean muscle and lose fat (or so we think for now).  This plan is NOT designed for endurance cardio.  Landon’s formula is also excellent for training in sports like Football, MMA, Wrestling, Parkour, and Gymnastics. We’ll talk about other plans for different goals in the next blog post.

·         Warm up with low intensity cardio

·         Strength with weights

·         HIIT set(s)

·         Cooldown with low-intensity exercises and stretching

Where do we go from here?

     Cameron and I have tried this general workout formula for the past few days, but we will talk more about that in next week’s blog post as well as specific instructions on what to do in beginner, intermediate, advanced, and BRO STATUS levels.  In the meantime, we will be testing Landon’s plan on ourselves, (which we’ve already started), and on our other two test subjects who have happily donated their bodies to science.  We will also be posting instructional videos giving you examples of what each exercise should look like.

     Be sure to leave a comment if you have any suggestions on how to make our blogs better, if you have any questions, or if this blog made you laugh or smile at any point…. or not.