Workouts for the Weekend Warrior; Doug Jackson interviews Sean Greeley

4/21/05

Workouts for the Weekend Warrior

Last Sunday morning, I had a leisurely brunch with my friend Sean Greeley, a respected personal trainer from Orlando, and his wife. In addition to the great conversation, the atmosphere also made the meeting memorable. We were sitting in a restaurant in Deerfield Beach overlooking the clear waves and the beachgoers.

Seeing the wide variety of people who were taking advantage of the beautiful weather by cycling and running along the beachfront, throwing football on the beach, and the surfers in the waves, brought us to the topic of weekend warriors...the topic of this newsletter. Because of Sean’s background as a world-class wakeboarder, I decided he’d be the perfect person to interview in this issue which focuses on the weekend warrior. Here goes:

Doug:Sean, thanks for doing this interview today.

Sean:Thanks, Doug.

Doug:Let me just tell everybody a little bit about you. Sean Greeley is a good friend of mine, and a very good trainer in Orlando. He has his own training company, Wake Up Training. You can visit his website at www.WakeUpTraining.com Sean has sort of a unique background that I’ll let him tell you a little bit about. He is also a writer for national sports publications, so Sean, tell everybody a little bit about what makes you unique as a trainer?

Sean:Sure. I think what makes me unique as a trainer is the fact that I come from an athletic background in a unique sport, the sport of wakeboarding. For three years, I was on the USA Wakeboard Team, and I competed internationally as an extreme sports athlete. So, my background is not just in the traditional, you know “gym rat” sense, but more of an athlete, and also one who’s done some crazy sports at the same time.

Doug:What magazines are you writing for right now?

Sean:I’m currently writing monthly columns on fitness for WaterSki magazine and WakeBoarding magazine. Those are the two national magazines. In addition, I also write for some local publications and have co-authored 2 books on fitness.

Doug:We discussed before, instead of doing a column in my newsletter about extreme sports, that we could do a column on “weekend warriors”, so that’s what we’re about to get into. I know you’ve trained a lot of weekend warriors in the past. What defines a weekend warrior to you?

Sean:Weekend warriors are fun people. I have several clients that are in the 30, 40, 50 age bracket, and they like to have fun on the weekends. They like to go out and do activities like mountain biking, rock climbing, surfing, waterskiing, downhill snow skiing, snowboarding - all the fun things that are now considered “extreme sports”, and they like to do it on their free time, either by themselves or with their families.

Doug:Traditionally, a lot of these people haven’t done extra workouts during the week. Maybe they work nine to five during the week and they go home to their families, and then they go out and they’re active on the weekends, so how important is conditioning during the week, for the weekend warrior?

Sean:Conditioning during the week is extremely important for everybody, but especially for weekend warriors, because they’re going out and challenging themselves in activities that aren’t easy on the body. When you go and participate in some of these sports, you’re placing a lot of demands on your joints, on your connective tissues, and if you’re not conditioned, you’re going to get hurt, and it’s not going to be fun anymore. The thrill is gone if you’re laid up in a cast or in pain. So, just doing at least some basic, general maintenance conditioning during the week, and it doesn’t take much, is going to go a long way toward making sure you remain injury-free and having fun.

Doug:I know you’ve developed quite a reputation as a trainer. How do you train your weekend warriors?

Sean:Training weekend warriors is similar to training other people. You want to make sure they’ve got a solid foundation of strength, cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and develop some good nutrition habits. All of those work together to keep the body healthy and safe. So when I train people, we look at where they’re at and where they’re starting from, and make sure we have a solid foundation, and from there, we go on to some advanced and intermediate workouts, where we’re including more functional work. We’re including balance training, we’re including some core strength to really challenge their bodies and help them to use the power that they have, to translate that into functional movement.

Doug:I know a lot of these weekend warriors are very busy people. I’m going to ask you two questions here. One, what do you think the minimum amount of time is, that somebody needs to work out during the week to still receive a benefit? And two, what are, in your opinion, the most effective and efficient ways to get your workout sessions in?

Sean:The great thing is that with the development in science and understanding of the human body, and understanding of exercise - really, the stigma is gone that everybody needs to go into the gym for two hours, and train biceps on Monday, triceps on Tuesday, and really do more of a “meathead” routine. Now, you can go in and do some stuff really efficiently, and I’d say the minimum would be 30 minutes, two to three days a week, during the week. If it’s done correctly, and that does take some time to learn how to do, it’s enough to prepare the body not only to maintain, but to have a good foundation and be able to enjoy those activities that everybody likes to do on the weekend and stay healthy.

Doug:Just to clarify, for my readers - because I know for some of my readers, I’ve said that working out more than that is advantageous - do you believe that working out more than that is necessary for people who are really looking for a measurable fat loss and weight loss?

Sean:I do. It obviously depends on what their goals are. Generally, the type of clients that I’m working with, that I would consider the “weekend warriors”, they’re not dealing with huge weight challenges, or they’re not extremely unconditioned, so maintenance and small gains can happen pretty quickly.

Doug:I just wanted to clarify that for the people who are really reading, and they want to see weight loss, that we would say you really need to exercise more than two or three days a week, right?

Sean:Yes. If you’re overweight, lose the weight before you go out there and possibly injure yourself on some of these extreme activities.

Doug:If somebody had come up to you and said, “Sean, what is the top workout concept that you could share with somebody who is a weekend warrior,” what would your answer be?

Sean:You and I talked in preparing for this interview, about how to make a workout efficient, and how to keep the time to a minimum, because time is such a premium for folks. Sometimes spending an hour or two in the gym can seem difficult to fit in, between everything going on in their life with work and school and family. Getting in there and doing a total body workout, I’d say is the most efficient way to get a solid workout in. By that, I mean - a workout would look like this: Come in, warm-up for about five minutes on some cardiovascular equipment, go through a quick stretch, go ahead and go into a workout consisting of the largest muscle groups, and then descending down. So we might go through a squat exercise, a leg extension, a leg curl, a calf raise, we’d do a pull-down exercise for the back, a chest press, a military press for the shoulders, one bicep curl, one tricep extension, finish it up with some abdominal work, and we go right to about 15 minutes of cardiovascular interval training; quick stretch before they’re done. You’re talking 35 to 45 minutes, and they’re out the door.

Doug:So really, what you’ve just outlined, would be a generic, but an effective workout for somebody who’s really just looking to stay in shape so they can help prevent injuries and feel great on the weekends, when they’re out participating in their other activities.

Sean:Absolutely. It’s a great, generic, preventive workout, to have fun, to stay healthy and make sure to get it done, and enjoy those things you like to do on the weekend.

Doug:And just in case we do have somebody who is an extreme sports athlete, reading the newsletter, I’m sure they can contact you for more specific advice, correct?

Sean:Absolutely. They can visit our website at www.WakeUpTraining.com, or they can shoot me an email: Sean@wakeuptraining.com.

Doug:Okay, Sean, thanks so much for your time today. I think the newsletter readers will enjoy this. This is an interesting topic people don’t read about much, so I think this will definitely help people out.

Sean:Thanks, Doug. It’s a pleasure.

Doug:Thank you.