Posts in category women

Workouts For Women

Written by Hans Hageman

I was recently asked why I don’t believe in stretching. In my mind I said, “Huh?” The photo would have been a better answer. I responded that I “kind of” believe in stretching. “Kind of,” because I think of what we do as more “flexibility training” than stretching. Every now and then a new person gets confused about why we do what we do in our 45-minute workouts for the women we work with.

We are not shy about letting people know that our primary concerns are strength and movement. The recent tragic and deadly assault on a subway platform here in New York validated this emphasis. A man was pushed onto the tracks by an assailant and killed by an oncoming train. Witnesses and others talked about the missing strength that would have allowed the victim to get back on the platform or a bystander to pull him to safety.

I should probably do more direct flexibility training myself but as it is, I only allow 30 minutes for my own workouts – that includes warm-ups. The mobility I have comes from the warm up and going full-range in my exercises. I’m not a stranger to stretching. I’ve taken teacher training with one of the best teachers in the world – David Swenson. It was an incredible experience and I should do more of it. It took me until my mid 50’s to realize I can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all.

I am not interested in being hyper mobile. Ask me about super strong, though. I want to be strong enough to resist my children when they try to put me in a home. That’s one of my main goals. Being able to put my leg behind my head won’t help me with that.

What’s your goal? One of the biggest challenges we all face is trying to make sure we keep the goal the goal. We don’t want to make our training sessions a gift basket of all the latest exercise fads. That’s we’re so focused in the workouts for the women who train here. Let other people go to those big chain gyms if they don’t care about being pressured into one-on-one training or paying to “rent” to an elliptical or treadmill. We’re going to get you strong and mobile and help you rebel against your work posture

We’re working with the 80/20 Rule and the Minimum Effective Dose. That gets me a more than double-bodyweight deadlift, 15 pullups, a one-armed pushup, and the ability to walk more than 15 miles with a heavy back. It will help me to eventually regain my cartwheel, and when I upgrade my health insurance I’ll be tackling a back flip. I can skin-the-cat and put my palms to the floor without bending my knees. I do need to work on my sprinting and jumping.

So no, we don’t do a lot of stretching in our sessions nor do we put people on an exercise bike for 30 minutes while we stand there with a clipboard and a cup of Starbucks. But we’re pretty happy with the outcomes we get with the people who put in the work.

Just relax about the stretching thing, come here and get strong first.

Posted in body transformation, exercise, flexibility, mobility, strength - Tagged Brownstone Fitness, fitness, Harlem, personal training, workouts

What Are You Training For?

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Written by Hans Hageman

This past Saturday, Brownstone Fitness hosted a fantastic Women’s Self Defense workshop. It was conducted by Rick Capozzi of Senshido Connecticut. It followed on the heels of the workshop that Bernadette and I conducted for V.O.W. (an advocacy and counseling program for survivors of domestic violence). Rick is a great instructor and he delivered content and instruction that will make every woman who attended, safer.

“A self defense workshop for women?” “You run a fitness studio – isn’t that mission creep?” After these two workshops and requests for more (from individuals and youth programs that work with teen girls), the answer is a deafening “NO!” Read our Manifesto (below).

Saturday’s workshop found twenty females ranging from 12 to around my age, strengthening their independence and learning to make fear their ally. They learned principles, concepts, tools, and targets that are potentially life-saving and definitely spirit-strengthening.

There has been an increase in violent crimes in New York City, including daytime sexual assaults against women in Central Park and Hudson River Park. We think it’s critical to provide options to women who have given themselves permission to fight back.

When diving into the waters of self protection, certain truths bubble up. These truths are not as readily apparent to people who fool themselves by taking the local “cardio kickboxing” class. Some of these truths are:

efficient self defense is about violence/injury
to survive a violent encounter, you need to train to become a more efficient animal – become the predator instead of the prey
those of us with a good and true nature need to bring this into an alchemy with our primal and shadow selves
intention is the mother of technique
controlling ourselves is more important than controlling others, if we want to prevail
the 80/20 Rule also applies to self defense techniques
using artifice and pre-emption are sometimes necessary and don’t make you a bad person
you have to be willing to accept pain to win a greater victory

The women who attended took action. Intuition, action, awareness, and intention will make a woman a formidable opponent for anyone trying to take their freedom.

We’ll get you your six-pack and toned arms. Give us a chance, and we’ll help you get much more.

P.S. LIKE Senshido Connecticut on Facebook

Posted in community, fitness, health, warriors - Tagged Brownstone Fitness, safety, self defense, trainining

Women and Stress

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Written by Hans Hageman

Women and Stress?

Do you train with us? If you do, you know that the overwhelming majority of our clients are women. Out of our approximately 70 clients, about five are guys. Most guys want to bench press and do curls. We don’t do a lot of either of those here.

Our Clients
The guys who we let train here are after something more than beach muscles – kind of like the women who train with us. Our focus is on busy women, over-30, who have not had much success in a traditional gym setting. You’re busy building your career. You’re busy taking care of a family. Sometimes you’re doing both. You didn’t like the lack of results, you didn’t like the time investment, and you didn’t like the social scene that are all part of the Big Box gym experience. So you put up with our lack of showers, our lack of Zumba classes, our lack of 3 pound dumbbells, and our lack of shiny, chrome exercise machines. You put up with our nagging about food journals and consistency; our emphasis on functional movement and strength.

You find that friends, family and associates notice your newly defined arms. You feel comfortable telling that strange man, “NO! I don’t need help with my bags.” He looks at you and knows that you mean it in every way. You find your nagging pains disappearing. You lose the hate affair with your closet as you pick out clothes you hadn’t been able to wear in a long time. You make these changes with a couple of 45 minute sessions per week and a change in diet that gives you more energy than you’ve had since college.

The Good News and the Bad News
The 2011 Nielsen report, “Women of Tomorrow”, talked about how greater access to educational and technology was creating greater opportunity for women throughout the world. Along with increasing opportunity comes greater levels of stress as women try to juggle their various responsibilities and grapple with the question of whether they can have it all. Societal and family structures have not kept pace with the changes in the work place. What remains is tension between the pursuit of a promising career and expectations around more traditional family roles.

This tension is compounded by the reality of biology. A study recently published in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry found that female brains may be more sensitive to the hormones produced during times of stress (let me know if you want a separate post on corticotrophin-releasing factor!). Whatever the biology turns out to be, women are twice as vulnerable as men to stress-related disorders.

Women and Stress Management 201

there is an external event
then there is our perception of the external event
finally, there is your body’s reaction to your perception

Managing this process starts with developing choices. You have an Area of Influence and an Area of Concern. Your choice operates mainly in the Area of Influence. We can concern ourselves with a great deal but there are often many factors that are out of our control. Focus on your internal experience and the meaning you give to events if you want to make changes. In other words, it’s not what happens to us, but how we feel about what happens to us that makes all the difference. We get into trouble when we instead try to control the external world instead of our response to it.

Awareness
What feedback is your body giving you about stress? What are the triggers? What are the patterns? Awareness is everything – from eating, to exercise, to relationships. It also helps to look at sources of stress using the Logical Levels of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The levels are:

Environment
Behavior
Capability
Beliefs
Values
Identity

The process for dealing with the sources of stress would be different based on what level it’s coming from.

There’s a lot more to say on this topic but that’s all for now. If you want a more in-depth treatment of these issues, send me an email at [email protected] Let me know you want to get on the list for the Grateful Living 2.0 series. If you’re one of the first 50 you’ll get 50% off.

Until then,

Who loves ya, Baby?

Posted in stress, work/life balance - Tagged fat loss, Harlem Personal Training, stress

So Which Woman Has The Perfect Body?

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Written by Hans Hageman

Brownstone Fitness - Harlem Personal Trainer

Nasal feeding

My answer to that question is another question: Who gets to decide?

I was originally going to make this a post about those “healthy, whole grains” that too many of our clients and their families eat – to their tremendous detriment. I had a couple of catchy titles on tap like “Don’t Hate The Player, Hate The Grains,” or “Speaking Truth To Flour.” A recent New York Times article changed my plans.

The War On Women?
The article was titled “The Bridal Hunger Games.” It focused on the extremes that some brides-to-be will go to for that special day. One of the women profiled paid $1,500 for a nasal feeding process. She has taken a lot of hits for her chosen weight loss method. The reality is that we live in times where it has become common practice for women to run after anything that incorporates, tubes, pills, scalpels, or the word “Brazilian” in pursuit of the movie star look.

There has been a lot of attention paid to “The War on Women” – reproductive rights, lower pay, etc. The New York Times article got me thinking about our little piece of the world and the women we work with. My perspective results from my work as a trainer and co-owner of a studio (that has women as 97% of its clientele), as a husband, a father to daughters from 6 years of age to 22 years old, the co-founder of a school for girls in India, and as a middle school and high school educator. I cannot imagine the constant assault these girls and women have been under from society’s messages about beauty and health.

Myth-Busting
I’m also frustrated. My frustration comes from the fact that I know what to do to get anyone – man or woman – to look, feel, and perform better. It turns out that that’s not good enough! Starvation diets, breakfast cereals, tofu, chronic cardio, fad workouts, are too often the go-to tools for women who have been brainwashed to get that special look. We, the trainers at Brownstone, walk a thin line as we provide clients with what they need, while we are required to acknowledge what many of them have been convinced that they want.

We explain that strength training will not make them “bulky” with muscle; we tell them that long distance running will likely injure them and make them “skinny fat” at best; we explain that pharmaceutical companies, large fitness chains, and the agricultural behemoths that dictate food policy, want them to be sick, fat, and weak as part of a business strategy. We explain that diets are detrimental and that they could eat more and not stay hungry if they ate the right things -including healthy fats! We let them know that 95% of people who go on diets regain the weight they lost after two years (and most put on even more pounds).

Bernadette, Yaromil, and I care about the people who cross our paths. Our years of nonprofit work might indicate that we care too much. In the work we do now, we see people at their best and at their worst. I spend my free time reading “The Journal of Applied Physiology” and “The Journal of Obesity” with the same zeal that I used to read “Assessment Update” or “Educational Leadership.”

It makes us crazy to know that with two workouts a week lasting no more than 45 minutes, and adherence to a few nutrition principles, 80% of the women who cross our paths could make tremendous changes in body composition, strength, and performance. The media tells them that this prescription is too simple and that they need to exercise more and eat less. People who struggle with weight do so because of underlying health conditions, stress, lack of information about exercise and nutrition, poor sleep, and toxic relationships. Sometimes the excess weight is a protection against the world. Laziness and gluttony account for a tiny fraction of the people who are overweight or obese. We get that and that’s why…

La Luta Continua – Are You With Us?
Our mission at Brownstone Fitness is not limited to the Harlem community. We have a goal of improving the health, safety, and fitness of 100,000 women around the world in the next two years. We will do this through things like workshops, speeches, webinars, writing, memberships sites, and conferences.

On Tuesday May 1 at 7:00 pm EST, Yaromil and I will hold a FREE internet seminar (otherwise known as a “teleseminar”) to expose some of the myths around nutrition, fitness, and wellness. We will also discuss strategies to fight back. If you believe that the “war” is taking place, this teleseminar will give you a few tools to fight back. Go here to get on the list. We look forward to speaking with you.

Which woman has the perfect body? I love women who like to sweat, who work to improve their physical strength, who want to move the way humans were meant to move, who are confident about being Strong, Sexy, and Serene, but…

WHO CARES WHAT I LIKE!?

Take back the right to define this for yourself – you decide the perfect body for you. By the way, until things change, let’s start complaining about all those sloppy guys in tuxedos.

P.S. The teleseminar is May 1st at 7 pm. Click here to get on the list. We are limited to 100 lines. So sign up and send the link to your friends.

Posted in body transformation, exercise, health, nutrition - Tagged diets, fat loss, Harlem personal trainer, Harlem Personal Training

Do You Train Like A Woman?

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Written by Hans Hageman

I may be treading on dangerous ground here with some of my tough guy friends. This post might also mean I’ll get my AARP card before my “Man Card” gets renewed but…

I’ve spent a lot of years training – including the glory days of bodybuilding in the 70′s and 80′s. I know my way around sweat, grunts, screams and “arm day.” The squat, deadlift, and bench press are the staples of any man’s program who is trying to increase his strength – and they have been key components during many of my training years. They are also lifts that most women are discouraged from attempting.

So if I want to train like a woman, does this mean I have to give up the big lifts and the sweat dripping onto my face from my training partner’s gym shorts as he screams “One more rep! It’s all you!!!” Not exactly…

At Brownstone Fitness, 95% of our clients are women.Several of them are working with the deadlift, pullups, kettlebell cleans, and other challenging exercises. Many of these women bring as much intensity and purpose to their workouts as any guy I have trained with. Many of the methods are the same – it’s the mind that’s different. This doesn’t happen all at once. Some clients come in with the same hedonistic and vain intentions of any guy who wants to only work the “show” muscles. For those women, that means an obsessive focus on THE CORE! While almost all of us who train want to look good, those who evolve in their training, begin to appreciate other qualities. This growth, in my experience, is more common in women than in men. What are these other qualities and how have I applied them to train more like a woman?

I pay more attention to the process than I do to the outcome. I now compete to be the best me and not an idealized action figure. I rely on my intuition more than the latest muscle magazine to guide my training week to week and month to month. Too many guys don’t know how to even spell “intuition.” They get it confused with “domination.”
I now look at my training with “beginner’s mind.” This allows me to ask questions that go deeper than “how can I get my arms bigger?” I have developed not only more clarity around my goals but more honesty as well. I can’t do all the things that I used to do but the good news is that I don’t have to or want to.
I pay more attention to how my physical body impacts my emotional landscape - sentio ergo cogito.

Men who workout for a significant period of time often undergo the process of hedonic adaptation where even bigger is no longer better. Women who put in the time training, look at how the work they do at the gym impacts their roles as mothers, daughters, lovers, workers.

I get that I am only working with a limited sample size but these are my observations. Let me know if you think this is only my hallucination and if there are any other guys man enough to work this way.

P.S. – Speaking of women, check out our new bodyweight exercise video, The Sulaxmi Method. A portion of the proceeds will go to support the girls school we co-founded in Lucknow, India. Under the leadership of Shashi Mehta, the school will be celebrating 10 years of providing education to underserved girls in Lucknow.

Posted in body transformation, exercise, mindfulness - Tagged Harlem personal