SOME COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT DST’s ZEROFORCE EXERCISE PROGRAM
Winner Of Best Of Bay Area Exercise Facility
David DeSisto has been successfully helping hundreds of clients in the Bay Area and North Bay (DST at E Studio in Santa Rosa) since 1998.
DeSisto Strength Training is the only ZeroForce fitness studio in San Francisco. The clean, very private, positive environment will provide you with SuperSlow® Systems exercise machines — the most efficient strength training machines available. All clients are supervised by a SuperSlow®, ZeroForce Method, or ECSN trained instructor in a one-on-one environment.
As we age through adulthood, we typically lose 1/4 to 1/2 pound of muscle mass per year, while usually putting on at least that much fat. It is this slow change that has profound implications on well-being. It can be a downward spiral, consisting of:
- less muscle
- less strength
- less activity
- lower metabolism
Any or all of these changes result in gained body fat. With proper strength training like the ZeroForce Method this can be halted and even reversed!
The ZeroForce Method is based on David’s 20+ years training clients with the SuperSlow® protocol.
An osteoporosis study at the University of Florida in the 1980’s found that profound strength gains occurred with the subjects who increased their bone density through very slow, intense exercise.
Today, we know that eliminating momentum in exercise will allow you to increase your workout intensity without risking injury, resulting in better gains in strength. Increased strength gains mean more muscle and higher metabolism, resulting in lower body fat. When performing ZeroForce Exercise correctly, you can expect changes in as little as 3 to 6 weeks.
Your body only grows and changes when new demands are placed upon it. Most “aerobic” activity is steady-state, and although difficult at times, our bodies easily adapt to such activity. To improve your “aerobic capacity”, you would need to run farther and faster at every workout — forever!
However, by carefully increasing the stimulus through weekly strength training, your body will begin to change. This is why performing 20-minute workouts just once a week (to momentary muscular failure) will provide you with more cardiovascular benefit than running miles per day.
David or your instructor will monitor your progress precisely to determine how little exercise you require, rather than how much you can stand.
When your body is put under stress, it adapts, given enough time. When you exercise properly, and reach momentary muscular failure for each exercise your body’s own defense mechanisms kick in. We use this natural response to physical stress by exercising to a high level of intensity and then resting those muscles so they can build up naturally between workouts.
Your workout will be brief – only 90-120 seconds per exercise – and only 5-6 exercises per workout session. It’s the proper dosage we want to find to get the response you should get from the stimulus.
More is not better, Better is Better.
Try the complimentary intake workout to test it out for yourself and you’ll see how this works from the first workout.
Yes, that is what I am saying. In fact, you should avoid it! “Aerobics” is usually done because the person wants to lose fat and improve his “cardio.”
The fact is that “cardio,” or steady-state activity is a very poor way to build anything – and instead of gaining strength, it often leads to muscle wasting!
At DST we have NO treadmills, stair-steppers or anything like that. Remember, your body responds to demands put on it that are MEANINGFUL. The typical treadmill runner can go for miles and miles, and although he’s winded, the body can continue moving. Since his body isn’t sensing any real threat, the stimulus is not great enough to create a real change.
Similar to a sun-tan, your body adapts to the summer sun by getting darker with intense sun very quickly. But the winter sun is less intense and so the tanning is slower or nonexistent.
The heart and lungs support the muscles – not the other way around. So pushing your muscles to their limits – safely – will do as much for your cardiovascular system as most anything else. Plus you get the additional benefit of making their job easier as you become physically stronger.
When you “do cardio,” the intensity is relatively low and the body doesn’t HAVE TO make much adaptation, and so it doesn’t.
Also, you can burn ALOT more calories rebuilding a body from an intense weight-training session to muscle failure than you ever could running several miles or hours of aerobic dancing. It’s just the way the body runs and conserves energy that makes this work this way.
When you exercise properly, you only need to be active daily to get all the benefits of health, strength and injury prevention. This means you should move your body every day, but only because it feels good and you WANT to do it that day. You’ll no longer need to get out in the rain or the 98 degree weather to go for a run because you have to lose some more body fat!
So, a tennis match, or a round of golf is a great daily activity because you ENJOY doing it. These recreational activities do little for your strength gains, but are very important to your overall health. A strong body with a strong mind and and active lifestyle will give you all you are wanting.
TZFM is all you NEED to create a healthy and strong body, but we want you to enjoy using your new, improved body by playing and recreating with it. It’s a perfect balance.
When you exercise properly, like we do here, you’ll gain muscle. You do, however, have a genetic limit to how much muscle your body will create. Most of us are not capable – no matter what the muscle magazines tell you – to become bodybuilders even if we wanted to be.
You will build shapely, strong and firm muscle with this program. Your body finds it difficult to build a lot of muscle and so takes an enormous amount of energy and calories to make it. It only makes what it is forced to make based on it’s environment.
So, you will use stored calories – known as body fat (or even cellulite) – to rebuild muscle from your workout. This process will progressively burn your body fat stores and make you lean and strong without creating the bulky muscle-bound body you see at Mr. Universe
David DeSisto has completed the Transformation Institute’s School of Natural Hygiene course. He will help you learn about your body and its many requirements for health: exercise, sunlight, fresh air, diet, rest, and sleep. Our other trainers have knowledge in additional methods of nutritional counseling as well.
Guidelines and recommendations are available, and you will have access to as much or as little information as you wish. At our facility, you will learn why you are seeing the results that you are.
Force causes injury. If you don’t want to get injured, you should avoid forceful things like driving your car into a tree. If you drive into that tree at 2 miles per hour, you get much less damage than at 75 MPH. The mass of the car is the same, but the speed (or acceleration) is the factor causing the damage.
This is what happens when you lift weights too quickly. The force is greater and the chance for injury is escalated.
At DST we only lift weights slowly. REALLY slowly. Most exercises are done in a 10-second positive, 10-second negative movement speed. This keeps the weights at a manageable level, and the form is easily corrected before any injury should occur.
This slow-motion exercise is very high intensity without the risk of high force. Once you start moving the weight, you keep it barely moving, never speeding up, and with NO momentum.
It’s not easy, but it’s finished in under two minutes per exercise and you’ll feel the exhilaration of real muscle work and start the process of building a healthier, trim, strong body!
Your body needs sleep every night, typically 7-9 hours of it. It needs this time to rebuild from the day’s activities, and clean house – among millions of other actions.
Recovery is so important that the body will break down without it. And this applies to exercise as well, of course. When you exercise to momentary muscular failure (a good thing at the right dosage), you need a long time to recover and rebuild. If you go and try to exercise with high intensity again too soon you will stymie the progress your body is desperately trying to make.
It’s again a dosage response we are looking for here. Too much exercise will actually make you weaker or sick, just like too much aspirin can. Take the right amount and you get the desired response. More muscle, stronger cardiovascular system and more energy are the desired result from exercise, and our research over the years has clearly shown that the body needs between 5-14 days to fully gain all the strength and other benefits from intense, slow-motion exercise.
One of the main ways elderly people get hurt is from slipping and falling. When a body has atrophied (lost muscle) over many years, that body cannot protect itself as well. So when the old man falls, his lack of muscle mass limits how much he can absorb when he hits the ground.
When you exercise properly and get the right amount of rest between exercises, you can regain much of the muscle you have lost as you’ve aged. The body still responds to it’s environment like any other body, but usually a little slower. This is normal and with a good trainer (like ours!) that is carefully monitored.
You are more likely to get hurt if you DON’T weight-train than if you do – as long as you do it right. Slow-motion exercise is so very safe because the force is so low. The low force puts a great demand on your body, but not much force, so you get the benefits of increased strength, cardiovascular improvement and more energy and flexibility without the risk of injury.
Also, as you get stronger, you will feel more balanced and that alone will lessen your chance of injury.
For your complimentary introduction and workout, please phone 415.287.0110, or complete our convenient contact form. Clients are seen by appointment only.