Will:  

It's this process of learning and creating these new connections that keeps our brains young and firing on all cylinders. And scientific studies have proven that a lifelong learning of skills is a great way to ward off and guard against degenerative brain disorders. So, a variety of movement styles and novel exercises is perfect for coding the body and the brain. And incorporating movements that challenge coordination and balance is like a continuous upgrade on the hardware that is your body and your brain.

Will:  

Hey, I'm Will Brereton, founder of Sh1ft Fitness. And this is Group Fitness Real Talk, a show about how to survive and even thrive in group fitness in 2021 and beyond. This week, on the podcast, we're gonna talk about a principle that's close to my heart and that forms a big part of my approach to fitness. And the motto of my fitness brand shift, which is Fitness for Life. The principle that we're going to talk about is novelty. So, simple dictionary definition, novelty is the quality of being new, original or unusual. And it's probably my favorite word when it comes to exercise. Now, in the Instagram age, novelty can sometimes have some negative connotations. And yeah, I'm going to talk about the fitfluencers who do kettlebell swings on a Swiss ball while they're doing a cable crossover and in a headstand. So let's preface this entire conversation with an acknowledgement that novelty can be taken too far. And when we speak about it, we're speaking about safe thought for movement, not the crazy shit. So why is novelty so important as a training principle.

Will:  

So we already know that exercise is one of the best things that you can do for your body, but it's also great for your brain. And if you want to achieve the biggest body and brain benefit, novelty of movement is key. So novelty, when it comes to exercise means a move or exercise that is new or different to how you normally train. Now, novelty and exercise is important for two big reasons. The first is neuromuscular connection, and movement as a way to code our nerve networks. So think of when you learn to ride a bike, or to drive a car, or ride a skateboard. At first, it was difficult, and it requires so much effort and concentration. And then after a while it became second nature, and you didn't even have to think about it. That's because your brain has created a neural pathway, creating new connections in your brain and body that allow you to handle the task with ease. While it's great to become good at something, it's this process of learning and creating these new connections that keeps our brains young and firing on all cylinders. And scientific studies have proven that a lifelong learning of skills is a great way to ward off and guard against degenerative brain disorders. So a variety of movement styles and novel exercises is perfect for coding the body and the brain. And incorporating movements that challenge coordination and balance is like a continuous upgrade on the hardware that is your body and your brain. The second one is adaptation to training. So think of the last time that you did a sport that you hadn't done a long time and how sore you were afterwards. This is what I always get when I go swimming, I wake up the next day and I cannot lift my arms, my lats are just dust. This is the impact of novel exercise. Now, it's also worth pointing out at this point, the being sore isn't the goal in and of itself. But it's a really good illustration of the concept of adaptation. It's not necessarily that you worked harder than you do in your normal gym routine. But it's simply that you challenged yourself and your body in a new way, as your body has already adapted to those familiar physical experiences. So take for example, walking, it doesn't make your calf sore because you've been doing it your entire life and you do it every day. But if you perform a heavy standing calf raise for 10 or 20 reps, that's an unfamiliar experience that will likely leave you a bit sore. The answer always has a lot to do with the novelty of the stimulus. When you're a beginner and you've never tried trained at all, everything you do is going to be novel. If you've been training for years, your body is already seen and therefore adapted to the types of training you're doing. And in this way, varied workouts help to keep your body constantly guessing, adapting and improving. Now obviously if your goal is to be better at bench presses, then the best way to train is to train a lot of bench presses, increasing the load as your muscles adapt, but following the same movement pattern a number of repetitions. This type of progressive overload is definitely how I train when I'm focusing on strength and lifting heavy in the gym, using movements that I know well and that my body understands, which means I can push heavier weight than I will be able to do in a position that my body wasn't quite so well adapted to. But here's the thing. I do not believe that bodybuilding style training is the way to stay fit for life as you age. If your goal is to really be fit for life, and be able to handle anything that life throws at you, then a varied and novel approach to fitness is the best way to keep you feeling mobile and fresh.

Will:  

This was super important to me when I created shift, and I did heaps of research into theories of movement before coming across the six degrees of freedom, which is what we use as a guiding principle for our bodyweight workouts. Now, this term is a term from engineering and robotics. And it basically refers to how any type of object moves within three dimensional space. So think of a ship on the water, or a plane flying through the air, or a robotic arm, which is how I actually first came across it. It can go up or down, forward and back side to side. But it can also bend around perpendicular axes. So this means it can hinge forward, beam from side to side, or twist around the middle. Now, all of these movements are key movements to a normal human life. We go up and down when we sit or stand, we go side to side when we need to stick around something forward and back pretty obvious every time we walk. But then when we pick something up, we also incorporate a hinge. When we turn around to wave to someone behind us, we incorporate a twist, or when we reach across to pick up a bag, we're doing a side bend. These are all fundamental movement patterns that we use each and every day. And ensuring that you train and all of these types of movements. And you work through all of these six degrees of freedom is totally crucial and guarding your body against imbalances or not being able to do the basic types of movement that you do in everyday life, as you age and as you build up injury. Because here's the deal. Aging itself isn't the problem when it comes to people losing mobility. The problem is that with every single year provides another opportunity for you to have an injury or an accident. And it's the accumulation of these injuries is what causes your body to lose mobility as you age. And the best way to guard against these injuries, the things you pick up from tripping over and not being able to catch your fall from bending over and picking something up with bad form and putting your back out. The way to guard against these things is to train in those directions to make sure that your core is strong that your balance is good that your body is ready. And that's what novelty and exercise will help you to achieve. So one of the reasons I wanted to create a program around every typical movement that a body can make is because I know that when it comes to group fitness novelty can sometimes be a little bit harder to achieve. What a lot of people love about group fitness is the consistency, being able to go to that same class at the same time every week and to know what to expect from their workouts. And that's why many group fitness programs use the same blocks or movement patterns over and again. But it's my personal belief that that quest for consistency sometimes actually does a bit of a disservice to people in terms of staying fit for life. In an ideal world, people would train in different ways every day under guidance, but this isn't realistic or enjoyable or potentially sustainable. So the question is, as group fitness professionals as people within the industry that really do believe in promoting Fitness for Life, and allowing our class members to live active, healthy lives, right through their life as they age, what can we do about introducing more novelty into our workouts, the best advice that I can give you is to create novelty upon a foundation of consistency. So what that means is your class members that really want to know what they're getting themselves into will have a familiarity with the process. It might be a consistent warmup, or it might be a consistent format, in which you introduce elements of novelty, it's really important that you have a reliable framework that people know and trust and enjoy. But I also strongly believe that it's super important that once you have them bought into that framework, you vary it up to do the best for their fitness. At shift. We do this by giving each and every single one of our workouts a unique theme. And we do it in lots of different ways. So every single workout has a unique theme. But the theme depends a little on the genre of the workout. We absolutely have consistent elements like a consistent warm up where we go through the same mood progressions, and we always use the six degrees of freedom in our body weight format, so that people have a feel and understanding of familiarity with the workouts. But we use that grounding in the familiar to really work the uniqueness and novelty of each individual workout. So in shift that bodyweight format, when we're not working with simple progressions around the six degrees of freedom, so that's up, down, forward, back, side to side, twist, bend, and hinge, we lean into sports or styles of human movement as inspiration. So we've incorporated things like rugby, tennis, surfing, yoga, baseball, sprinting, if there is a sport or a way of moving, then we will create a functional workout from it. But when it comes to lifting, even lifting in the gym studio sense where the weights are not quite as heavy as they are in the weight room, I do appreciate the first point that I made about fluences in saying that when something looks cool novel or entertaining, yet has a high potential to be ineffective, and the basics do just fine. So when we do our live classes, we focus on things like core or upper body. So we still make sure it's unique, and we really smash into a particular focus. But we don't do it in quite the same way as we do with our bodyweight exercises. Sometimes it's around training protocols like giant sets, single side isolations or volume training. And in mind, our mobility program, we take inspiration from yoga, Pilates, calisthenics, sports recovery, ballet, martial arts, Tai Chi, you name it, we incorporate it into mobility training to keep it fresh, fun and novel for our instructors and their participants. 

Will:  

Okay, so that's what we do. But if you're listening to this, and you're a freestyle instructor, and you program your own workouts, I recommend that you bring more novelty into your classes by picking some industry figures that you admire, and following what they're doing. I know this started with a little chat about fitfluencers and Instagram, because it's sometimes the home of a ridiculous novelty. But it's also a fantastic place to get true fitness inspiration.

Will:  

If you see someone that you respect and know that there science back doing something fun book market, or tag it, and revisit it when your next planning your freestyle workouts. This is the sort of stuff that you used to have to pay hundreds of dollars for at conventions, to go along to the hottest step class or the hottest functional training class with your notebook and take little notes about what that fitness star was doing in their class that you can bring back to your classes. And if you've been in the fitness industry, for as long as I have seen, you know, two decades, then guaranteed you've been to a convention where people have had the little notepads out copying down furiously from what the person on the stage is giving out. Nowadays, you can just go to Instagram, you can see what they're doing, bookmark it, think about how you may incorporate this into your unique style of programming, and use that to create novelty in a way that's safe, fun, and easy. And completely free. Now, if you're someone who teaches pre programmed formats, then Fingers crossed, these are the ones which also lean into the principles of novelty, and don't just feed you the same stuff every time. This is one of the great aspects of dance classes, right uniqueness of movement is almost guaranteed. If you're teaching something that's a bit repetitive, consider how you might create some variety for your classes in other ways. And particularly if you've moved into digital and you're creating your own schedule your own timetable, then this is something that you really can work with. Maybe you could consider teaching a shorter version of your repetitive format back to back with another style of class and creating a bit of a mash up for your users. So you're giving people that familiarity and the chance to know something well, while also giving them some novelty in the workout. So whether you're freestyle or you teach pre-programmed formats, you can always deliver a type of format that your classes expect or a type of class that they'll film familiar with and want to join in, in a way that allows them to reap all the benefits of training with novelty, which really is the essence of staying fit for life.

Will:  

Thank you for listening. If you're enjoying the show, don't forget to subscribe for all the latest episodes wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please drop us a review. You can also get in touch with me at will@sh1ftfitness.com. I'm Will Brereton and you've been listening to Group Fitness Real Talk.