As we tell all our personal training and fitness boot camp clients at Genesis Gym Singapore. The idea that only weight and height are important for indicating your level of health is (thankfully) regarded as old fashioned and incomplete now.

Your level of body fat is a far better indicator of overall health, and risk of chronic lifestyle diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular conditions and some forms of cancer. Most notably:

• Esophagus
• Pancreas
• Colon and rectum
• Breast (after menopause)
• Endometrium (lining of the uterus)
• Kidney
• Thyroid
• Gallbladder

And possibly more.

But to track the progress of your training and nutrition program, you need a way to accurately track your body fat.

If it goes down, you are on the right track, and if it does not, or goes up, you need to make some modifications

But not all fat measurement methods are created equal. Here are some common, and not so common ones. From the pros and cons, you will be able to choose a method that suits you best.

BMI – Body mass index

• Pros: Very simple to do and great for big studies with hundreds of people because it can be calculated fast.
• Cons: Incomplete picture. Not so useful to each individual because it assumes quite a fat, and weak person as the norm. For example, even a moderately sized person who weighs 73kg at 170cm height would be overweight. Any male who exercises regularly can achieve that size. And some people are genetically thicker and bigger. BMI does not account for this either.

Circumference Measurements

• Pros: Quite easy to do as long as you get the points right.
• Cons: Does not take bone structure into account, and can vary from time to time. E.g. if you just had a meal, your waist would go up even though your fat level did not.

Fat Measurement Scales & Hand Held Devices

• Pros: Simple to use – hold the handles, press start.
• Cons: Wild fluctuations in measurements. This is because these use electrical methods which rely on your body’s current hydration status in specific areas of the body. This can change if you drink, eat, sit, stand, are in different parts of a menstrual cycle, sweat, etc. Accuracy tends to be plus or minus 7%. That is too much variance to know if you are truly progressing or not. For example if a person was 14%, he may measure at 7% (professional athlete) or 21% (fat!).

Caliper Measurements

• Pros: Very accurate if done right by a good practitioner, with good equipment. For lean people can be almost as accurate as a Dexa scan.
• Cons: Needs lots of constant practice to do properly. It is like playing a musical instrument. Literally thousands of measures before it becomes “2nd nature” and consistently correct.

Hydrostatic Weighing

• Pros: Accurate, and good for general population
• Cons: May not be as accurate for other populations e.g. athletes and elderly. This is because they have different bone and muscle densities that are not taken into account by the standard formulas

DEXA scan

• Pros: Super accurate, can give readings of not only total amount but also where the fat is distributed. E.g. fat around organs is more damaging to health.
• Cons: It is an x-ray so repeated radiation exposure may not be a good idea.

The most practical method if you were alone would probably be circumference measurements. But because that is not as accurate, it may be worth it to get professionally measured once in a while by either:

• A skilled practitioner with calipers.
• Or a DEXA scan.

There are some medical clinics which have DEXA scans for about $200 per scan.

If you choose the calipers route, here are some ways to tell if the person knows what they are doing, which will help you get an accurate result.

• They use good calipers (as seen above). The cheap white plastic ones are not accurate enough for professional use. A good caliper can cost more than 600 Singapore dollars. But good calipers such as Harpenden are accurate to 0.2mm and can even help a skilled practitioner see if you are retaining water.
• They measure fat often, every day if possible.
• They use at least a 7 site formula. A 12 site Bio-Signature formula is even better and more useful for problem spot reduction.
• They pinch your fat HARD and get ALL of it using a wide grip (not 2 fingers). The common mistake I see many practitioners make is they are afraid to cause discomfort to the client/patient. Sorry, if you are overly fat, it may be uncomfortable for a few seconds when your fat is being pinched. But you want an accurate result right?
• They try to measure at the same time of the day
• They don’t measure you after long flights
• They can tell you what to do to improve your results once you get them

There you have it! A short article about all the ways fat can be measured. Even if you choose a less than perfect measure, as long as you try to be as consistent with all the variables, it can still give you a somewhat meaningful result.

There is a saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and measuring body fat is certainly going to help you manage it with a lifestyle, nutrition and exercise program.

Coach Jonathan Wong is the owner of Genesis Gym Singapore which aims to provide the best personal training and fitness services in Singapore.

Faith only gets strong when tested

Faith is like a muscle, it needs to be put under stress before it can be strong!

As the team at Genesis Gym help more clients, we get approached more to promote other people’s products because we have a (hopefully!) loyal client base who will buy stuff from us.

There are two conditions under which I will gladly promote a product to my personal training and fitness boot camp clients. So those of you who want me do to so, read this first.

1. It must solve a problem with the best possible solution available in the world today
2. It must be a good deal for Genesis clients.

If I promoted every product that came along (on average I get approached about 2-3 times per month by different suppliers) we could probably make a few thousand extra dollars each month.

But would this “easy” be worth it? I don’t believe so.

Most of these products are health based but they do not meet the requirements I have listed above.

This is important to me because this is being faithful to what Genesis Gym is.

Genesis Gym is a place where only the best methods and products in the world are allowed to be used.

Try to ask me to promote a Multi Level Marketing product – Flat “No” from me.

Some MLM’s have decent products, but they are overpriced and are a BAD deal for our clients. Simply because of the commission structure where the end user pays a large percentage of the product price into the many levels of commissions to sales people. (Yes MLM people are sales people, not business people so don’t be fooled when they offer your a business opprtunity).

Try to ask me to promote a non-world class product – Flat “No” again!

I have been asked to promote supplement brands, fitness bands (and other bits of fitness equipment) as well as some herbal health stuff.

Again, some of it may be good, but its not the best that you can get, and so you won’t find it in our products for sale corner.

Why so serious?

In the history of Genesis Gym, I have made mistakes in purchasing equipment and services before. These “less than best” products have ALWAYS had to be replaced eventually. These mistakes have cost us thousands of dollars in wasted money.

My learning point is to always get the best stuff. You will never feel like replacing or upgrading it.

What I think about constantly is: “If I had 100 times the money, could I get something better?”

And I want to have “No” as the answer.

This is also the way I hope our personal training and fitness bootcamp clients think of Genesis Gym.

In Singapore, even if they had 100 times the money, could they get coaching or information that is better? Equipment that is better? A training environment that is better?

My team and I work all the time to make sure that answer is “NO”.

After all, clients are trusting us with their bodies and their health that is also a kind of faith!

They should be provided with the best available care that can possibly be offered.

Want to find out where your trapezius is? Google Body it

I’m an anatomy nerd, I have a pile of different anatomy books on my bookshelf. Anatomy is critical to giving good advice to our personal training and fitness bootcamp clients.

But Google is taking over my 10+ anatomy books. I have been playing with Google body for the last 2 hours and its amazing. You can see just about everything you need to see in the human body. Its a great tool for studying, or fast revision of anatomy. And as is always the case with Google, there is a great search function. Give it a try.

One of my personal training clients asked this question last week, and I also saw it posted on some local health forums. So here is the answer…

Yes it does. But only in the short term.

For example, I had a client who was a dancer. She wanted to get stronger so that her ballet moves would be more powerful (seen by the audience as graceful). I gave her a workout and within a few weeks she said: “I don’t think your workout is good for me, I stumble and fall more than before”.

I said “Great! Its working!”

What is happening is that in your muscles there are 2 kinds of feedback sensors called golgi tendon organs (GTO), and muscle spindle cells. Spindle cells are responsible for feedback of position, and golgi tendon organs feedback tension.

When you train, your muscles change size, and your spindle cells are not in the same positions as before. So their feedback is different and you are not used to it. Your GTOs also are not used to the new tensions placed on them by the training. So the feedback they give your nervous system is messed up and you stumble.

This takes approximately 21 days, in my experience, to reset. So train really hard till 3 weeks before your competition or performance, then just maintain your strength and size. This will allow your body to be both strong and coordinate the new strength.

Exercises like strongman training where things like farmers walks, log presses, and sled and prowler work also help to coordinate the strength you have gained in the gym to “real-world” strength that is “functional”.

So a combination of understanding anatomy and strength training leads to great results.

3 weeks later my ballet client remarked how much better her performance had become. Just as physiology determines that it would.

Every month, we measure the progress of our clients, both in the individual weight loss, or muscle building programs, and in the group fitness bootcamps. Last month as I was reviewing the results of one of our personal training clients, I asked him how he felt about training at our Singapore gym, and how he felt about our coaching services.

My staff and I always try to get as much client feedback as we can, so that we can find out what difficulties they are facing, and how we can help them overcome those problems.

What he said made me happy, but at the same time helped me understand a bit more about the “fitness” industry from the perspective of a client rather than a coach.

He said “When I train here, I feel protected”.

I asked him if he meant that we teach good exercise technique so he feels safe performing the exercises.

He said “No, that’s not what I mean, rather, I mean that, in the fitness industry there is so much mis-information and nonsense out there, but when I train here, I know that you guys filter all that stuff out, and I am protected from wasting my time and effort on stuff that does not work, or is useless and unsafe”

I think he hit the nail on the head with that statement. That is exactly why we spend hundreds of hours per year on education – just so that we can protect our clients time, effort and financial investment. No waste, just results.

Days like this is where I love my job!

It is quite to hear from our Singapore personal training and fitness boot camp clients that they have been to a chiropractor or therapist for treatment of a past injury before coming to train with us in our Singapore gym.

Sometimes these treatments have great success, sometimes they have no result, and sometimes they cause even more problems.

So how can we tell if a therapist is going to give you a high chance of getting a good result?

After all, the alternative medicine scene is so un-regulated here in Singapore. How do we know if the therapist cares, or only cares about lining his pockets with our money?

One of the key tips that I tell our personal training and bootcamp clients is that they should spend time preparing the body for any kind of manipulation. A good manipulator can achieve a great result in a short time. But before the “crack-crack” they need to spend time preparing the tissues.

They may use an infra-red lamp, they may use massage, or they may use some form of active stretching. But the fact that they spend time on this is important. Manipulation and adjustments without this kind of “warm-up” is like running sprints without warming up. A far greater chance of injury. If you walk in and get treated with manipulation immediately, chances are this is not a good therapist.

Another tip is to see how long the manipulation lasts and what advice the chiropractor or therapist gives you for helping to KEEP the adjustment. There are many reasons that an adjustment doesn’t hold, lack of critical nutrients, too much inflammation in your body, muscle imbalances, scar tissue or trigger points, etc. If your therapist does not tell you about these, then stay away from him/her.

You see, it comes down to $$$, more patients per hour, more $$$. A money minded therapist goes through patients like a machine gun. “Crack-Crack”… next please.

A good one takes the time to prepare you, treat you, and then teach you so that you DON’T need to come back so often and don’t need to buy a “package of 20 treatments”. I personally believe that if you don’t get better within 3-4 treatments (and often 1 treatment), you should look elsewhere.

There we go! Wish you luck in your search for a treatment specialist. If you have an injury that does not seem to get better, you are welcome to come for a injury prevention/recovery consultation with me. Just like all our other services, if you don’t get better, you don’t need to pay. What do you have to lose?

Quite a number of our personal training clients come to us because they have not been able to get the results they desired from other personal trainers or online fitness programs. One of the most lacking things that I have seen from these ineffective programs (if they are written down at all! – you will be shocked how many “personal trainers” come up with random stuff off the top of their head when their client appears at their door) is the lack of tempo prescriptions.

For those of you that are not familliar with them, tempo refers to how each rep is performed. We use a 4 number tempo system e.g. 4-1-1-2.

• The first number “4″ refers to the number of seconds that it takes to lower the weight.
• The second number “1″ refers to the length of time that you should pause the weight at the bottom of the lift.
• The third number “1″ refers to the speed at which you should lift the weight. In this case – as fast as you can. The only thing faster than “1″ would be an “x” where you would jump or throw the weight.
• The fourth number “2″ refers to the pause you should take at the top of the lift.

Variations in tempo between workout programs can greatly improve your training results. I use up to 30 second lifting and lowering times for certain clients with special needs.

However variations in tempo during the SAME SET can give you trouble in determining if your workout is effective, and if you have progressed.

For example, if you start out with a 4-1-1-2 tempo but later in the set, as you fatigue, your tempo changes to a 2-0-1-0, your reps are not consistent. A 2-0-1-0 rep would usually be much easier to perform.

This means that you have no clue if your improvement is because of progress, or simply using a easier tempo (its the same as using a lighter weight!).

Even the most experienced trainees have a tendency to “cheat” on tempo as they fatigue. The best solution for this is a good strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer.

The next best solution is a metronome. Since nobody plans to carry a foot long wooden box with them as they do their training, I went to find a solution.

I spent some time during my last infra-red sauna session testing out all the available metronomes for the iphone/itouch platform. In the end I thought that the “Flash Metronome” (it’s free) gave the easiest way to set things, and the most adaptability for gym use.

Set the “Beats per minute” to 60 so you get one beat per second, keep your phone a distance away (mobile phones in pockets make you weaker), set it to airplane mode so you don’t get distracted by messages and calls, and check out how “hard” your training suddenly has become because you have probably been cheating on tempo all this while.

Suffer the ego drop, but enjoy the improved results!

I get many requests for “in home personal training“. I often turn down these clients because I won’t lie, training at home usually does not get the same results as training in a fully equipped gym like we have at the Genesis Performance Center. The reason for this – if you are on any decent program, you will be way stronger and fitter than you imagined, and your own bodyweight, or the small weights that people often have at home, will not allow you to progress further.

Yes body-weight exercises, and even things like TRX or bands will get some results. However they are more suitable for times like holidays in the outback where you may not have access to any equipment at all.

I have seen some poor choices that people have made in setting up their home gyms. So I have decided to help with the things that will really help you get results.

If you are serious about results, here is what you should have in your home gym depending on your space and budget.

Priority #1

Adjustable Dumbbells and plates preferably the ones I use, as seen above. They have rotating handles (better for wrist and elbow health), as well as a thick grip which leads to better progress than regular small grip weights.

They also fit olympic size plates which can be used in your future purchase of a good olympic size barbell.

Dumbbells are the most versatile piece of equipment there is. So if you had to choose only 1 item, dumbbells would be it. Better than kettlebells, better than barbells, and certainly better than any gadget you can find on sell-a-vision

Cost $300 including shipping, Space anywhere, buy where? http://www.newyorkbarbells.com that is where I got mine, but if there are Asian suppliers or local ones that would be a good option as well to save shipping.

As for plates, their cost varies alot, from cheaper metal ones, to rubberized ones which can cost alot more. Make sure to get small ones (they go as small as 0.125kg) so you can adjust your loads precisely for continuous progress.

Priority #2

An adjustable bench, this allows you to add to your possible exercise list. It should be able to go from flat to about 80 degrees (the really good ones go from decline -15 to 80 deg)

Cost Depends on the brand you buy, I have some flat to incline benches for sale at $157, the top brand benches can cost up to $1500 and will last forever and go from -15 to 80 degrees.

Space Required about, 1.5m x 1.5m

Flooring, use the mats for children play areas. They can be found in toy stores for about $25 for 4 pieces each 60cm x 60cm.

Priority #3

Power rack and barbell. These will allow you to get on with some heavier lifting. The important thing about choosing a power rack is its hole spacing. Ideally, every 5 cm or so. Some poorly designed ones have hole spacings every 10cm or more apart. This is not good because we all vary in height, arm length etc and we need stuff “in-between” to comfortably rack and unrack the bar. I have some good power racks for sale along with a decent bar. Make sure it has a chin-up bar option as well.

Price: Racks can cost from $500 to $4000 depending on the quality. Bars can cost $100+ to $1500 For home gyms, if you are an average male who wants to squat up to 140kg or so eventually (yeah thats average to us) even a cheaper bar will do. The more expensive items will last longer but their value is in their calibration, steel quality and warranty. I choose them for out heavy duty commercial gym use, but for home use, choose what fits your budget.

At this point you may need a bit more plates to match your strength:)

Space Required: About 3m x 2m

Priority #4

Other stuff – Kettlebells, TRX, grip training tools, etc

There we have it, for less than the price of a big screen TV, you can have something much more valuable, that lasts a long time, and will never go out of date. The basics of becoming fit, lean and strong have not changed for hundreds of years and are not going to in the future.

This leaves one more problem – what to do with all this stuff? Train! How? Get some coaching – That is what my online fitness training programs are for. If you only have a swiss ball at home PLEASE don’t sign up, it will waste your time and mine, at least have a pair of adjustable dumbbells and possibly a bench. Then we can start talking about how to get into the best shape of your life while training at home.

Yesterday I went for a massage and when you get deep tissue work done, your body will release toxins. Massage is a manual form of detoxification. After the massage, I also took supplements like a multi vitamin, antioxidant support and a green veggie and berry drink. However today I was still feeling the effects of the toxicity coming out, and my body still dealing with it.

I am doing “German Body Composition” program with short rest intervals, and the day after the massage I was doing that workout for the 2nd time. I managed to increase weight for all the exercises compared to the first time. In fact, there was much less discomfort from the lactate as well. (less burning feeling in the muscles)

However, after 2/3 of the workout, I had to stop. Light headed and with a headache. Power went up (as I used at least 5% more weight for every exercise and got extra reps too!) however work capacity went down (I only finished 2/3 of the workout).

This is a sign of possible overload on your body’s systems due to the cleaning up of toxins. So if this happens to you, just take it east for one workout so that you body gets detoxified and you have potential for even further gains in the future.

A clean body is a lean body.

Areas like the knowledge of understanding a less than optimal performance during workouts are things that only an experienced coach can help you with. That is what my staff and I do for our fitness boot camp, Singapore personal training and health consultation clients.

Of course there is nothing wrong with looking good! I too enjoy being fit and healthy and strong looking. I know it can be tougher for ladies. There are clothes, bags, shoes and accesories and they all have to match.

While I am no fashion expert, I do care about the health of the female clients at our fitness bootcamps, personal training and nutritional / health consultations. And here is a good website that can help all the readers and clients choose good cosmetics. So here it is.

There can be incredible amounts of heavy metals, and other toxins in cosmetics (and these can absorb through the skin!) so I hope you ladies can stay healthy while lookin good.

If you think that cosmetics or other conditions have caused you internal toxicity, no problem, we provide a complete detox program to help you out as well.