It was a beautiful Friday evening in late June.
The sun reflected off a neighboring building on 2nd avenue and bathed my boss’ office in a beautiful red light that can only be found at that time of the year and in the parts of Manhattan that are closest to the river.
We all gathered around the speaker phone (which was how conference calls happened in the pre-Zoom dark ages) anxious to get our Summer weekend started.
The Ameritech executive on the other end of the phone had other ideas.
He had been quiet for the entire thirty minute call discussing the latest radio advertising campaign we, the creative team of the advertising agency I was working for, presented to the midwest telecom giant.
We were about to put this baby to bed and ship off the masters to the radio stations when he chimed in.
“Guys, what I really think the spots need are some post-score sound design,” he contributed. Scared an entire call might go by without him saying anything and, hence, justifying his job.
“Post-score sound design” is essentially a fancy way of saying “sound effects” of which the commercials already had plenty.
But this gentleman was so eager to use the term - he repeated it about 9 times in the waning moments of the call - that he cost me an entire weekend of work and put about ten thousand dollars worth of overtime into the pockets of the music and sound studio that would have to open their doors on a Summer weekend to get the job done.
Some people are just addicted to jargon. Using it makes them feel elite. And, in the case of the phone exec above, they will even blow tons of cash just to have fancy words spill out of their mouths.
The fitness world is no exception.
Whether they’ve lost touch with their audience and are using words and terms that are common place to them but unfamiliar to the general public or they are using fancy words in order to confuse their audience, gain status or mask that they don’t know what they are actually talking about, there are not shortage of fit pros using some big, confusing or undefined terms.
As your friendly, neighborhood fitness dude, your Uncle Dan is here to help.
For those of you who are new to fitness, or, perhaps, have been around the block a few times but have been too embarrassed to ask, I’d like to break down a few fitness terms that get thrown around on the regular but you may find confusing.
They say the best way to show mastery of a subject is to teach it to someone else as simply as possible. This is my attempt at displaying mastery.
Macros
Macros is shorthand for macronutrients. There are three (some would argue four) macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fats (the fourth is alcohol). These are the main nutritional building blocks of your foods and it’s pretty rare when a food only has one of these macros, but it does happen.
Each macronutrient serves different functions in the body including building muscle tissue, supplying energy and storing energy for later use. Each macro also has a different calorie count with protein and carbs being about 4 calories per gram and fats being 9 calories per gram (alcohol has about 7 calories per gram).
When most fitness professionals, nutritionists, dieticians and your Aunt Miriam talk about “macros” they are referring to what percentage of their total diet is constructed from each of these nutrients relative to their total caloric intake. And since each of these macronutrients has a different function, they believe that manipulating these percentages can influence body composition and performance.
And there is some truth to that. However, macros are not a magic bullet. They are a good tool to use in conjunction with an appropriate calorie count and good food selection.
Intensity
When most people think of intensity they envision a red-faced, vein-popping effort while a trainer stands over them screaming that they shouldn’t be such a baby.
And while that is a reasonable definition of intensity - more specifically intensity of effort - intensity in training more typically refers to a certain percentage of a one rep maximum (or the most weight you could use in a given lift to perform one rep).
Intensity is most commonly noted as a percentage. So a recommendation such as 80-90% for a set of three would require you to know the maximum amount of weight you could use for a single rep of an exercise and then do some math so you can figure out your appropriate rep range.
Intensity can also be expressed as rate of perceived exertion (RPE) and reps in reserve (RIR).
Rate of perceived exertion is essentially what it sounds like. You assign a number out of 10 to how hard you feel like you are working. A “7” is relatively moderate. A “10” would be an “all out effort”.
Reps in reserve is related to RPE but you are assessing your effort by how many additional reps you feel you could do once you’ve ended the set. So something like a set of 8 with two RIR would mean you ended the set at 8 reps but likely could have done two more.
The benefit of RPE and RIR is that they take into account how you are feeling on that day. Some days you might feel like a superhero and a one hundred pound squat feels like an RPE 7 or that you had 4 RIR. Some days that same 100 lbs could feel like an RPE 9 and you only had one RIR.
The downside of these methods is that people are generally terrible at self-assessing and typically have more reps in reserve and overestimate their perceived exertion. Given this, it makes more sense to utilize a percentage-based approach even though it doesn’t account for normal daily fluctuations in performance.
In any case, using an intensity measure is very important. Because you need to have a measurable way to increase and decrease the amount of work that you perform in any given workout. It’s the only way to ensure progress and results. Otherwise you’ll end up just grabbing whatever weights you feel like or, even worse, just use the same weights or number of reps for years on end.
Pace
Since we’ve spoken about nutrition and strength training it only seems fair that we discuss something cardio related so I’ve chosen “pace”.
On its surface, pace is a relatively simple term. It’s the speed at which someone moves.
But when it applies to training, pace becomes more complex as its application is typically relative.
In running, most things are based on your mile or kilometer pace. On the ergs (Ski, Bike, Row) pace is always relative to your 500 meter split time.
Split times aren’t like one rep maxes. A split is just the average time it takes to do 500 meters in any length of effort. So if two thousand meters (a very common rowing distance) takes you ten minutes, your split time (aka your pace) would be 2:30 (since two thousand meters is essentially four 500 meter efforts we are just taking the total time and dividing it by four). That number isn’t necessarily your best 500 meters during that effort, just the average of all of them.
Paces become important reference points because they give us data in which to assign very specific efforts. For example, for a short effort (say 200 meters) you may want to attempt a 500 meter average that is faster than even your best 500 meters (the ergs will extrapolate 500 meter paces even if your effort is shorter. The 500 meter pace is always the default and that’s what makes it so valuable as a training parameter).
Same with running. If you know your best mile time you can start assigning targets to intervals or longer runs based on that metric.
Looking back on it, maybe these terms are less “jargon” and more common terms that are misused or misunderstood.
But one thing’s for sure. Unlike my “buddy” at Ameritech, I didn’t take up your entire weekend to write about it.
Just a few minutes of your time on an equally beautiful Monday morning.