Kettlebells aren’t the easiest tool to grab, and the ballistic nature of many kettlebell movements makes them even harder to hang onto. What’s more, your ability to grip, and grip tightly, actually facilitate stronger and more powerful lifts. And it all starts with your muscle fascia.

The Importance of Grip

The fascial lines of the body are many and varied. This article isn’t intended to be a primer on fascia but on better understanding it to enhance our training. The arm lines are particularly relevant to our grip needs. There are four of these lines, and all play some part in grip and its effect on supercharging our performance.

This experiment uses the principles of irradiation of muscle tension to demonstrate just how vital grip is:

1. Let your arms hang loosely by your side and notice where there is tension. Now make a fist. Notice it’s not just the muscles of the hand that are tight. The tension travels up your forearms.
2. Now grip even harder. Notice the abdominals engage. Observe how the tension is now not just in your shoulders but also the muscles within your shoulders. How you grip grip has the potential to activate every muscle in your body.

Let’s try our experiment again, this time to demonstrate the importance of the arm lines:

1. Grip as hard as you can, but focus on squeezing the thumb and index finger the hardest. You should feel the pec and delt engage forcefully.
2. Now focus on gripping hardest with the little and ring fingers. This time you should feel the muscles in the back — the lats, rhomboids, and rotator cuff muscles — engage.

Applying this knowledge to exercise is common sense, yet few people do it. The conclusion to make from these tests is that if the body is ready for pushing (via the pecs and delts being engaged), your grip needs to have the index finger involved. The opposite applies to pulling motions, where we want to make sure that the pinky and ring finger are in direct contact with the bar or bell.

Hand Position for Smarter Grip

The most common hand position when using kettlebells is a grip that slides the wrist into the corner of the bell where the handle and body of the bell meet. This allows the handle of the bell to run diagonally across the hand and minimizes discomfort on the back of the wrist.

Then, most folks will close their index finger and thumb around the handle. You may mistakenly believe this grip is acceptable. It’s not acceptable. This grip will actually decrease performance while increasing injury risk. 

Here’s why: During pressing, you need to address not only shoulder flexion but also shoulder stability. If the pinky doesn’t grip the bell, the rotator cuff won’t be fully engaged. And when it comes to swinging or pressing a heavy object overhead, you definitely want all the musculature of your shoulder to be engaged.

A better way to grip a kettlebell for pressing (or get-ups or snatching) is with the handle of the bell going directly across the hand, in line with the calluses. This grip allows both for use of the prime movers and for optimal function of the stabilizers.

Stronger Grip for Better Movement

If we extrapolate this for other kettlebell exercises, such as squats or swings, we can see these fascial lines connect the fingers to the muscles around the shoulder and also become muscles of the trunk on both sides. The front and back functional lines create two large Xs, one on the front of the body and one on the back.

The correct use of grip will switch on our postural control muscles and enhance all of our bigger lifts. For kettlebell squats, the flat grip is once again the better option (as opposed to the diagonal grip), since it activates the most support muscle.

Once you’re used to gripping this way, you’ll find your performance improves while your injury risk decreases. Changing your hand placement will perhaps make a difference in how much load you can move, but that shouldn’t be a concern unless you’re a powerlifter. Focus on how well your body can move and function as a unit.

More on Breaking Muscle:

• Get a Grip: 3 Ways to Grip a Deadlift and How to Get Your Grip Stronger
• More Insight Into Developing Grip Strength: Your Hand Digits
• Beyond the 2-Handed Swing: 5 Effective Kettlebell Movements You May Be Neglecting

The post This Kettlebell Grip Cue May Change Your Training for the Better appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When you achieve the right balance, you get what is called super-compensation, or training adaptation. When it’s wrong, you get over-reaching, which could make you too fatigued to train hard enough to stimulate change. If you go even further down the wrong track, you end up with over-training, which can lead to a near total system shut down.

Emotional stress wreaks as much havoc on your body as physical stress.

Stress Is Stress

Most people only look at the training performed in the gym or on the track when assessing levels of fatigue. However, the body doesn’t differentiate between mental, emotional, or physical stress. As far as the systems of the body are concerned, stress is stress.

That time your boss dropped a big pile of work on your desk that had to be done before you left the office was just as traumatic for your body as a max effort squat day. So the last thing you should be doing if you’ve just had one of those days is head to the gym and max out. This seems counter-intuitive. When you have a bad day, it’s natural to want to take out that aggression in the gym and let off some steam. But when you do, you’ve essentially had what amounts to two max effort sessions in the same day, as far as your body is concerned.

From Joel Jamieson’s, Certified Conditioning Coach manual.

Stress in the Gym

Before we get to the actual stress-management solutions you can accomplish at home, let’s discuss some of the problems with most gym training models. Like it or not, anaerobic training produces the same type of energy seen in our fight-or-flight responses. It has to, because we need it to help us run away from predators for survival. But all that energy being produced so quickly has a damaging effect on your body. It is highly inflammatory, just like your stress-filled days at the office.

This is where movement quality comes into the picture. Movement quality has both a physical and a mental component. The energy systems and connective tissue are the bodily components, but they are driven by the autonomic nervous system and motor control, which are managed by the brain. The role of the nervous system is to perceive threat through the use of all of your senses and is linked to motor output functions (such as speed and power), and these functions are linked to your motor control.

The sympathetic nervous system drives extension-based postures and activities, such as running and jumping, as well as most lifts. In other words, it is your fight-or-flight posture and supports higher force activities. However, as motor control is based on threat perception, an over use of both this system and these postures results in negative changes in motor control. These changes to motor control lead to higher levels of fatigue. Those higher levels of fatigue lead to less movement variability – you become more robotic – and that leads to more injuries. In other words, spending too much time in your fight-or-flight postures performing high-force activities leads to greater likelihood of injury. What can you do to fix all this?

Protect Your Body From Threat

The body perceives new activities as a threat. This applies whether it is a new load, new exercise, or a new distance – they will all be viewed the same way by the body. That drives you straight into your fight-or-flight system and instantly turns what is meant to be an educational session into something that is perceived by the body to be a maximum effort. So we need to slowly introduce new stressors to training. This is precisely why you shouldn’t learn the barbell snatch on day one in a gym. There are just too many things that are new if you’re not familiar with barbells and weightlifting.

As movement quality improves at each level, the first step is to add load. Once that step has stagnated then you can seek to add complexity – perhaps going from a hang power snatch to a power snatch. Once that has settled you can seek to add fatigue by adding volume before starting in on the next progression. The basic format is to add intensity, then complexity, before adding capacity.

Balance Your Stress Level

But don’t forget, new movements cause stress. To counteract all that stress you need training methods that soothe the body and allow your system to reset. For example, a day where you learn new moves should finish with an easy aerobic cool down to return the body to a suitable resting state that is responsive to training. Just as your warm up should prepare you for stress, your cool down should ready you to absorb the stress. And that is best done with a settled mind and body.

But all that could change if you chose the wrong recovery format. I’ve known beach volleyballers who weren’t great swimmers choose to go swimming for recovery the day after a tournament. Unfortunately, their bodies didn’t agree that it would be easy, so what should have been an easy session smashed them further. Walking in cool water might be a great choice for you, but unless you’re actually a good swimmer there’s not much chance that swimming will be a good recovery session.

Remember, if your body perceives a threat then it will react as if under threat with that same fight-or flight-response. Next thing you know, you’ve turned your recovery session into another hard session and your system will be depressed even more.

Is swimming the right active recovery for you? That depends. How well can you swim?

What Activities Are Best?

Some activities lend themselves better to recovery than others. Here are three I recommend:

Flexion-Based Postures: The parasympathetic nervous system features flexion-based postures. Activities like cycling and rowing make for far better choices than running, as it is extension based. Have you ever wondered why yoga has such a settling effect on the body? All that time spent in downward dog, a flexion-based posture, has a deep-seated link to promoting calmness within the body and mind.

Breathing: The quickest, cheapest, and easiest way to influence the parasympathetic system is to focus on respiratory function. Methods such as FMS have had highly successful results from exercises as simple as crocodile breathing. I have had clients who have found huge improvements for shoulder pain after five minutes of targeted breathing practice, combined with education about how to recognize and manage signs of stress.

Meditation: My good friend Chris Holder has done some interesting studies on using guided meditation to reduce stress among his Division 1 athletes. He and his colleagues found that following a daily guided meditation made up for poor sleep and dietary habits often seen in college athletes burning the candle at both ends. In my experience, the best time to perform this is before bed so that sleep quality is enhanced. Omvana is a free app that guides you through a twenty-minute series designed to relax the body and mind.

Train and Recover Smart

Once you’ve got your recovery figured out, the final step is monitoring training intensity and frequency. Most people can’t handle more than two or three hard sessions per week, and the days between should be filled with active recovery to stimulate the system, not further deplete or stress it.

The goal of training is to improve the body, not test its limits. Focus on adding guided meditation and focused breathing work, as well as aerobic recoveries and cool downs, and you will be surprised at how much better your body feels.

More on Stress Management:

• Hack Your Stress Before It Hacks You
• The Ups and Downs of Cortisol: What You Need to Know
• Diaphragmatic Breathing Reduces Exercise Induced Oxidative Stress
• New on Breaking Muscle Right Now

Photo 1 courtesy of Jeff Nguyen/CrossFit Empirical.

Photo 2 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

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However, unless you’re an elite athlete, a more well-rounded program may serve you better. Specialists in a single sport tend to suffer injuries once they pass their mid-thirties. Diehard runners will add cycling or swimming because some part of their body “just can’t handle it anymore.” Likewise, the old-school iron monk will add yoga or bodyweight exercises because some part of their body “hurts all the time.”

If you aren’t competing at an elite level, you would be better off with a more generalized training program.

The Diminishing Returns of Specialized Programming

Many new athletes begin training with a sensible, well-rounded plan. At first, progress is abundant, hence #newbiegainz. But sooner or later, progress stops and the search for a “program” begins. This new program usually has a tighter focus and kick starts progress once again. With each plateau, the athlete searches for a more refined program. Progress resumes, slower and slower each time, yet still clawing forward. This trend can continue for a long time, until suddenly the wheels fall off.

Progress halts for this simple reason: we aren’t designed to do just a few things. When we reduce our movements, particularly loaded ones, we begin to lock down our body. Don’t believe me? Go find a lifelong distance runner and ask her to touch her toes. Or find a 600lb squatter and ask him to squat unloaded. These specialized athletes may excel at their sport, but they’ve lost some of their baseline abilities in other areas.

Are You Fit Enough to Train That Hard?

When we train for a specific goal, we instinctively look to what the top performers are doing. It seems to make sense to follow a similar path, but we fail to recognize the level of performance required just to undertake their level of training.

When I was preparing for Ironman, I did exactly what all the experts suggested: I started running. The only problem was that there is no such thing as a “couch-to-Ironman” plan. All Ironman training plans assume you have at least a base level of running fitness, and that includes the tissue adaptation to deal with running in the first place. The lungs and muscles adapt quickly to endurance running, but the tendons and bones take much longer. In my case, the result was six months on a constant merry-go-round of injury, rehabilitation of that injury, and then a new injury.

What I needed was a beginner running plan, as well as supplemental gym work to protect my body from the reality of running. This experience formed the foundation of the Run Strong program. As I got closer to Ironman, other elements of my training plan fell away. My strength training was reduced to spending the minimal amount of time at the gym I could get away with to unwind the damage from running and riding. And anything that didn’t involve training was cleared from the calendar in an effort to keep myself as fresh as possible.

Once Ironman was over, my body was all out of whack. I was stiff and sore from the epic race itself, and the months of hard training leading up to it. My body needed a break from swimming, riding, and running. So I adapted my training program to reflect a new, wider approach to fitness that my body craved. 

Vary Your Training Around Your Life

Traditional programming consists of cycles from volume, to intensity, back to volume. Most people can handle 3-6 weeks of intense training before they need to deload. Life is a series of ebbs and flows, and training has to follow the same progression, or the demands of life will force it to take a back seat.

Most people think of periodization in terms for training for a specific goal while varying volume and intensity, but not many people think of it in terms of variety and focus. Sometimes it makes perfect sense to focus your training on only a few things, to be fast and effective in the gym so you can tend to the rest of life.

While on vacation, for example, it would be silly to spend most of your time tucked away in the gym because you’re following a rigid program. In these situations, I like to choose quick workouts that hit all my needs, like fifteen minutes of as many push ups and pull ups as possible, followed by a twenty-minute run. The next day would include thirty minutes of mobility work before spending the rest of the day relaxing as a tourist.

Once back home, you can ramp up into your regular training protocols, volume, and intensity. But at some points life gets in the way, as it always does, and those are the times to use that get-in-and-get-out, hard and fast, minimal training.

Focused Training in Blocks, Not All the Time

Block training is a type of periodization used by the old Soviet sports machine. In Return of the Kettlebell, Pavel Tsatsouline talks about using two-week blocks, as does Kenneth Jay in Viking Warrior Conditioning. I find two-week blocks to be a little short, especially if you have an external sport focus. But if your goals are strength- and gym-based, you may find that after 10-12 workouts you are in need of a change. For me, using the calendar is an easy way to organize training blocks. I dedicate a month at a time to a particular goal.

Right now I am training for a BJJ tournament, and my sole focus is competition fitness. Each session includes one strength lift, an assistance exercise, and conditioning work, usually on an Airdyne as it spares my back and knees. Here’s what a week of training looks like in this specialized phase:

Monday:

• Morning stretch
• BJJ
• 30 minutes easy Airdyne

Tuesday:

• Morning stretch
• BJJ drills only
• Power cleans and pull ups
• Airdyne sprints – 6 x 30:30 (3 sets)

Wednesday:

• Morning stretch
• BJJ
• 30 minutes easy Airdyne

Thursday:

• Morning stretch
• Front squats and rows
• Airdyne sprints – 6 x 30:30 (3 sets)

Friday:

• Morning stretch
• BJJ drills only
• Freestyle wrestling

Saturday:

• Morning stretch
• BJJ
• 30 minutes easy Airdyne

Sunday:

• Morning stretch
• 60-90 minute easy ride

Once this tournament is finished, my program will expand to a more well-rounded approach with greater variety. My next major competition is in August, which leaves me plenty of time to cycle through another volume and intensity phase before narrowing my focus once again to competition-specific preparation.

Focus When You Need To, Generalize When You Don’t

Minimal training plans have a time and place in everyone’s fitness routine, as they allow you to improve specific qualities quickly. However, sooner or later, spending too long with an intense and narrow focus will whittle away your overall movement skills and you’ll find yourself in front of a doctor wondering why something hurts.

We’re born to move in a variety of ways. Don’t get sucked into believing that there is only one way to move for the rest of your life. Allowing certain periods of more variety and less intensity is a good thing for your health, fitness, and especially your longevity.

More Tips on Creative Programming:

• The 4 Phases of a Solid Strength Program
• Get Back to Fighting Weight and Conquer Race Season
• The Sweet Spot: Balance Variety With Routine
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo 1 courtesy of André Zehetbauer | Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 2 Copyright Breaking Muscle/Bruce Klemens.

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You’d think this would leave grapplers with a set of strong, resilient hands, but often the opposite is true. Outside of training, many grapplers can’t even manage simple tasks like shaking hands or opening jars without some small pain. Once they reach a certain age they need to put more tape on their hands than a mummy to protect their fingers from getting worse.

But if you’re serious about grappling, sooner or later you start thinking you need better grip strength. You think if you just made your grip a little better, you’d become a more difficult opponent. Well, yes, but quite possibly no.

Reverse the Damage

To figure out if you really do need extra grip work, you must first consider your training load. If you train infrequently (or are a beginner without a strength training background), it is possible you could benefit from a stronger grip. However, most BJJ guys I know train on the mats a lot – four to six times per week is common – often with multiple sessions on a day at least once per week.

If I spent my entire week cycling as my sport and went to a strength coach, the first thing a good coach would do would be to try to get me out of my sport position and reverse some of the damage from the sport itself. And this is exactly why adding more grip training for grapplers is often detrimental. They spend so much time with their hands flexed that adding in more flexion-based work is akin to getting a cyclist to do more quad-based work in a sitting position.

Do you really have a weak grip? Or is it a wrist issue?

Stretch Your Digits

I’ve found that the single most helpful thing for me in relation to keeping my hands working well is simply stretching them out after training. Make sure to stretch the forearms in both directions, as gripping is a fixating action, making both the extensors and flexors work simultaneously. But even more importantly, make sure to stretch the fingers. Simply bending the fingers on each hand back individually will result in an enormous stretch if you’ve spent a lot of time on grip work.

The next step in this process is to revert to the RAIL system as per many of my previous articles on fixing body issues quickly. In RAIL, the “R” stands for Release, the “A” for Activate, the “I” for Integrate, and the “L” for Locomote. We really only need the RAI part, as there’s no way to locomote on the fingers.

• R – Release: Stretch both the forearms and fingers.

• A – Activate: Perform active finger extension work, either by extending the fingers as fully as possible, or against light external resistance like a rubber band. This short video shows a smart way to train extension while going through wrist extension, flexion, and rotation to make sure the fingers are moving through the full range of motion you use in training.

• I – Integrate: Any part of your regular strength training that involves gripping: deadlifts, pull ups, club or bag work, or grappling itself.

People usually have no problem getting enough integration in training. The issues usually lie when not enough time is spent countering that training through release or activation work.

Build Strong and Supple Wrists

The next link in the chain for a strong grip are the wrists and forearms. Seasoned grapplers don’t need to add extra direct forearm work as, like with the fingers, they will already be stressing that area enough in regular training.

A better option is to focus on wrist mobility and strength. Martial artists have spent centuries developing wrist strength and suppleness and there are many systems that will all work. My preference is to follow the wrist preparation from Gold Medal Bodies and then the wrist push up series from Ross Enamait to get everything fired up and well integrated.

A Grip for Every Situation

Now that you’ve got strong, supple wrists and fingers, you’ll probably find that your grip works better, and your hands are feeling less riddled with arthritis. If you still feel like you need extra grip work, then you may want to think about the type of grip that needs the most work. There is no point in working on a rotational grip exercise if your issue is not being able to hold an open grip. Let’s look at the different type of grips and how they are related to grappling.

• Open grip – Imagine holding onto a fat bar or a tennis ball where the hand isn’t closed. This kind of grip is often used as a friction grip, when cupping the back of the elbow or head, or attempting a kimura. Wrist strength plays a big factor in your ability to keep and hold this grip.

• Closed grip – Your normal grip used in strength training. Very rarely used in actual grappling, but is gentle on the hands.

• Tight grip – Almost a fist. Your hand is as closed as it can be while still holding something. This is the normal grip you will find yourself using while grappling, and the one that damages hands the most.

• Pinch grip – Not often found in grappling, but very common in strength sports. As a type of open grip, it is characterized by pinching two objects, such as two weight plates, together and being held for time.

• Rotating grip – Usually employed as a tight grip, although can be found in open form too while looking for submissions. The ability to keep the fingers flexed hard while the wrist rotates can take a while to develop.

If, after all this, you still genuinely find yourself needing extra grip strength work, one of the best tools to train the wrists and forearms as well as the grip is a Bulgarian bag. Rather than do multiple sets at some point in your training, I prefer to spread sets throughout a session so the grip is accustomed to working for extended periods of time. Pick an exercise you like, such as halos, and use a variety of grip options on the bag throughout.

Old-school trainees may recognize this technique as the same method Arnold Schwarzenegger was said to have used to build up his calves when he first moved to America. He performed a set of calf raises in between every set of his other training in the gym. Considering the pair of iconic calves the Oak managed to build from this method, you’ll be following a tried and trusted path if you decide to adopt this approach.

Consider What You Really Need

If you are a grappler, it’s unlikely that you need extra grip work. Focus on restoring full range of motion in your fingers first in extension, both by adding specific stretching as well as strengthening. Then work on wrist strength and suppleness.

And if you still find yourself losing grip fights due to lack of strength, add in the Austrian Oak’s method of blasting your grip after every single set of strength work. Keep it up for four to six weeks and watch as you develop gorilla-like grip.

More Ways to Strengthen Your Grip:

• Grip Strength for Lifters, Climbers, and Fighters
• How to Build Grip Strength for BJJ
• More Insight Into Developing Grip Strength: Your Hand Digits
• New on Breaking Muscle Right Now

Photos courtesy of David Brown Photography.

The post Do You Need Extra Grip Work? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Despite all the heavy abuse it’s taken in the gym and on the fields, I’ve never had any problems with my back. But at forty-plus, it has started to show the first signs of trouble down the road. Where once I could abuse it with heavy pack work, heavy lifting, and wrestling without concern, these days things are different. If you want to save yourself a lot of trouble down the road, then read on. 

I’ve had a pretty clean slate when it comes to back problems, but age is changing that.

Pain Creates Fear of More Pain

Fear is the biggest hurdle facing people who are starting to deal with back problems. There’s an inbuilt button in our heads that immediately gets pressed whenever something starts to feel not quite right in our backs.

If your back got hurt, it got hurt for one of a few reasons: 

• You weren’t strong enough.
• You didn’t have enough strength endurance to withstand what you were repeatedly doing.
• You lacked the flexibility to get into that position safely.

Once that fear button is pushed, it can be hard to convince the mind and the body that it is alright to start to do some serious work again. To convince the body that everything is alright, we need to take some threat out of training and revert back to easier work. 

The Answer Is Not More Stretching

Most back problems are caused by an inability to deal with flexion, rotation, or both. Dr. Stuart McGill has said that in 80 percent of cases who present to his clinic for treatment, he can alleviate lower back pain by simply having them stop stretching the area. This directly contradicts the normal clinical advice given to someone with a lower back complaint. 

In her book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes, Dr. Shirley Sahrmann says that:

…most spine dysfunctions occur because of excessive relative flexibility, particularly at specific segments, rather than at the segment of reduced flexibility.

In other words, your lower back shouldn’t be all bendy and whippy like a willow tree in a storm. This is why heading off to yoga to fix lower back problems is also fraught with danger. The area doesn’t need more stretching.

If it doesn’t need more stretching, what does it need? 

Some of the drills I recommend: rolling, fire hydrants, and crawling.

Mobility and stability are a little bit like Schrodinger’s cat. They are both there and not there simultaneously, and in varying degrees, in the movement systems of the body. But we’ve already established that the lower back doesn’t need to move more and become more mobile. That means we must need more stability. 

Gaining stability in the lower back isn’t a case of just going to the gym and doing some deadlifts or swings. It’s not that simple. Lower back stability is actually built on a foundation of adequate mobility in the joints above and below – the hips and thoracic spine. This can be done simultaneously by restoring correct trunk muscle function, so that normal movement can be regained quickly.

The cure for the lower back isn’t about addressing the spine itself, but regaining lost movement in the hips and T-spine, and restoring or improving core strength.

1. Start From the Ground

The best way to begin is in a stress-free environment, and that means we start from the ground. We’ll start with an exercise that works both hip mobility and core strength. This leg raise pattern is done with some core assistance, provided by a kettlebell being held at arms’ length.

While we’re down here, we may as well perform a stretch to open up the T-spine, so we’re going to superset the leg raises with a movement called a rib grab. Like the leg raises, the benefit of the rib grab is that it isn’t just a passive stretch. You have to work to achieve the new range you’re after, so you develop strength and increased movement at the same time.

To finish off, we’re going to do some upper body rolling. But before you can roll, you need to have developed adequate range in both the hips and T-spine. Don’t bring your mobility problems to a motor control exercise. You must fix the existing mobility problems before you can address the necessary stability requirements. If your hips are stuck, feel free to include lower body rolling too, but for most people you can just do the upper rolls shown in the video.

2. Quadruped Exercises

The next step could simply be the next exercise in your warm up sequence, or it might take you a few weeks to get to. It will be another combination of exercises, this time from the quadruped position. These two exercises are the fire hydrant series and the T-spine rotations in both internal and external rotation. We also need to do some core work while in this position, so you’ll finish each set with a few meters of crawling.

This is where things start to get tricky. It’s likely one of two things is happening for you now. Either your back feels fine at this point – whether it’s been a few sets or a few weeks – or it doesn’t. If you feel fine, then start back with normal loading slowly. Remember that for every week off you’ve had due to sickness or injury, it can take four weeks to recover that form. 

3. Kneeling Exercises

If you’re still not ready to resume normal training (in standing postures), then this next bit is for you. The kneeling position is a transition between the ground-based postures and standing. This is why you should absolutely be training lunges, as they’re a key link in your ability to change levels athletically. The kneeling position is perhaps the most useful place to start to work again, as it is the first time the core is working properly in the same alignment it will be when standing. The only difference is that by the time you get here, mobility has been developed, so you need to start working on strengthening the weak lower back and the surrounding abdominal muscles.

The exercises you’ll use are the half-kneeling halo (pictured below) and the chop using a resistance band. Both require good stability at the hip (remember what I said about mobility and stability having to exist simultaneously) while addressing many other qualities. Think of these exercises as similar to the rolling that was performed early on. Any motor control issues will be highlighted if they still exist. 

The kneeling position is perhaps the most useful place to start to work again.

Put It All Together

Once these are mastered you can return to standing postures. My warm up now consists of exactly this sequence:

• 1 set of 5 reps each: leg lowers/rib grabs/rolling
• 1 set of 5 reps each: fire hydrants/ T-spine rotations/crawling (10 meters)
• 1 set of 5 reps each: half-kneeling halos/chops

I finish each warm up with 3 sets of single leg deadlifts (SLDL) and get ups, performing 5 reps of SLDLs and a single get up each side. Each set is progressively heavier than the one before. By the time I have warmed up, my body is ready to go and my back, and the surrounding areas, is fired up and ready to work.

Take the Time to Really Heal

Healing of any kind takes time. Unless you’ve had a severe back injury, it should settle down within six weeks. My general rule of thumb is to start taking anti-inflammatories immediately to reduce the swelling. Healing will not begin until the inflammation is gone.

The next step is to avoid sitting as much as possible. I’m actually typing this from a standing work position to avoid sitting. Add in the mobility/stability supersets as often as you can. If possible, instead of doing them a few times once per day, do one of each multiple times per day.

And finally, be guided by pain. Let your body heal without trying to rush the process. Add load and intensity as you feel appropriate. And if the problem hasn’t resolved within that six-week time frame, you need to go see someone.

More Tips on Bulletproofing Your Back

• A Safe System for Heavy Lifting After a Disc Bulge
• The Way You Stand is Damaging Your Body
• Banish Pain Permanently: Basic Drills to Repair Your Posture
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos courtesy of Andrew Read.

The post Armor Your Back Against Age and Injury appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There’s a saying in sports performance: “If it fires together, it wires together.” That means if you want real-world conditioning, you need a combination of heavy lifting and tier-one conditioning.

Enter Interval Weight Training

Pat O’Shea first talked about interval weight training workouts, or IWTs, in his book Quantum Strength and Power Training. The basic setup goes like this:

• Perform a full-body athletic movement, such as the power clean, power snatch, or snatch pull for 8–12 reps. Immediately following the strength movement, move to a cardiac conditioning effort for 2–4 minutes and work at 90–95 percent of your maximum heart rate. After completing this round, rest for two minutes and begin again, performing three total rounds.
• Following the three rounds, take a 5-minute complete rest. Let’s face it: you’ve earned it. But you’re only 30 percent done.
• Following the 5-minute rest, repeat the format first used, again using a whole-body strength movement, but this time substitute a grinding-type movement such as the front squat. Perform 3 total rounds and then take another well-earned 5-minute break.
• The final stage is a bodyweight circuit using exercises performed at high pace for 6–12 reps, each with minimal rest between movements. Rest no longer than a minute between circuits. Complete 3–5 circuits.

After you’ve earnestly done one of these workouts, you’ll never think of a few mindless laps of farmer’s walks and prowler work as conditioning ever again.

Choose a weight that feels explosive for the duration of the workout.

Cardio or Conditioning?

Everyone gets all tangled up over trying to define cardio and conditioning, as if there is any appreciable difference between them. Both require you to have an elevated heart rate. Both teach you to work for extended periods of time. And truthfully, there is no one exercise that builds work capacity that is exclusively one or the other.

You may think anything that gets your heart rate up can count as cardio training, so you will be fine just doing high-rep squats. Well, no. Just like you can have concentric and eccentric muscle contractions when doing curls and presses, your heart can have different training adaptations. So it makes sense that the hearts of endurance athletes and strength athletes differ, just like their physiques do.

When it comes to conditioning, there is a clear hierarchy. Like it or not, some exercises are just more effective. In tier one are the classics – running, swimming, cycling, rowing, cross-country skiing, and the VersaClimber. Tier two includes kayaking, boxing, and kettlebell snatches. It’s not until you get to tier three that you find the exercises most people try to use for conditioning – jumping rope, circuit training, and kettlebell swings.

The reason why circuit training is in tier three comes down to one factor: blood flow. When a muscle is tensed beyond 50 percent, all blood flow is stopped. Since less oxygen is being used by the working muscles, less oxygen is provided. And when it comes to getting that adaptation to the heart that helps it grow, it’s all about the need for high levels of oxygenated blood to be pumped to the muscles.

This is one of the big disconnects when it comes to conditioning work – your goal is to end up with higher levels of work capacity. While circuits may help to develop high levels of strength endurance, they do little to boost your heart’s ability to pump large quantities of blood. Further, because of the low loads used, they do little to develop muscular strength. If you’re looking for ways to improve functional horsepower, there is a far better way.

An IWT Primer

Before I get into the specifics, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Substitutions: Don’t substitute small exercises for big ones. Lat pull downs aren’t a replacement for power cleans.
• Load: While the loads should be relatively light – O’Shea recommends 70 percent of your 3 rep max – don’t skimp. The strength component must tax the muscles so you learn to display both strength and high levels of conditioning.
• Difficulty: 90–95 percent of max heart rate is hard. Like, collapse-on-the-ground hard. If you don’t despise these workouts, you’re just not doing them hard enough.
• Equipment: If you think running for two minutes will make you skinny, then stick to the big guy options – the Airdyne, rower, and ski erg – although a two-minute incline run on a treadmill is the hardest option you could choose.
• Heart Rate: If you use a heart rate monitor, don’t expect to see your heart rate at more than 90 percent for the first 30 seconds. It takes about that long for it to really jump. Instead, expect to see it peak near the end of your effort.
• Bonus Points: If you’ve spent time already addressing your fitness and know that while you are strong, you suffer with endurance work, then use slightly longer intervals of 3–4 minutes. Three-minute efforts, in particular, are heavily used in training methods designed to peak VO2 max abilities. That is the kind of training that gets you comfortable with being uncomfortable and increases your top-end fitness dramatically.

More is not more when it comes to IWTs. A single session each week following the full format is enough to see great improvements in real-world conditioning, and prepare you to kick some serious ass when needed. Trying to do multiple IWTs in a week will leave you burnt out quickly.

If these workouts aren’t kicking your ass, you’re doing it wrong.

4-Week Interval Weight Training Program

Try this IWT once a week for four weeks before taking a break:

First round:

• Power clean x 8–12 reps
• Row 2 minutes
• Rest 2 minutes

Repeat for three rounds. Rest 5 minutes before the second round.

Second round:

• Back squat x 8–12 reps
• Airdyne 2 minutes
• Rest 2 minutes

Repeat for three rounds. Rest five minutes before the third round.

Third round:

• Mountain climbers x 10
• Push-ups x 10
• Burpees x 10
• Squats x 10
• Box jumps x 10 (jump up and step down)
• Rest one minute

Repeat for five rounds.

Your goals for this workout each week should be as follows:

• Record the distances rowed on each interval. At the end of the four weeks, you should cover 10 percent more total distance than you did in the first week. A good starting goal is 550 meters per 2 minutes. That means you should break 600 meters per interval in the final week.
• Record total calories on each round for the Airdyne. Each Airdyne model records calories burned slightly differently. On the newer AD6s, we expect to see 40 calories or better for 2 minutes, while on the older AD4s and the Stair Master Air Bike we see roughly double that. In either case, just like with the rowing, your goal is to add 10 percent over the 4 weeks.

Aim for Progression

If you’re really out of shape, you’ll notice a tremendous drop-off in the number of reps you can get with the strength exercise, as well as how far you can go on each tier-one effort. Over time, as you become fitter and better adapted, you’ll see that all your efforts stay close to one another. At my gym, we expect to see less than a 10 percent drop in performance from one interval to the next.

When choosing your weights, don’t pick a weight that barely gets you 8 reps for the first set. That’s too heavy, and you’ll likely get only 5–7 reps in the second and third sets. Instead, pick a weight that you are confident you can get 10 reps with, and try to get at least 8 reps each set. If you are hitting 12 reps each round, add some weight for next week.

Embrace the Sweat

Don’t be scared of conditioning. You won’t lose muscle. In fact, as you get better conditioned and your heart gets stronger, you’ll find all sorts of other benefits, such as faster recovery between sets of your regular workouts and increased recovery between workouts. A strong, healthy heart is the most important muscle in the body. But to develop it, you don’t need to run an hour daily.

More Interval Training and Conditioning:

• The Fast Way to Long Health: Move Really Quickly
• A CrossFitter’s Guide to Interval Weight Training
• How to Choose the Proper Work and Rest Periods When Interval Training
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

The post Rev Up Your Horsepower: An Interval Weight Training Plan appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Like most things in health and fitness, the problem stems from a simple fact: you were lied to. Lies form the basis of the fitness industry. Included among them are ideas like needing to join a big gym that has an army of treadmills and two of every machine created in order to get in shape. Or that you need to consume four different protein concoctions to help burn fat. Most of it is just designed to sell things – usually supplements or gym memberships.

The truth is simple: the quality of your diet dictates your body composition.

A Growing Epidemic

These lies have propagated because the modern world is getting fatter and fatter. The rate of obesity has increased 214 percent since World War II. Three out of five people are overweight, and one in five is obese. That leaves only one in five with a healthy body mass.¹

Like everything in our modern world, we have access to a lot of information about diet. Probably too much information, because the reality is, diet isn’t that difficult. The biggest problem is that many people wrongly interpret their needs. Figuring out the type of diet you need starts with an honest assessment of where your body composition is right now.

If you’re one of the five who isn’t overweight or obese, congratulations. Your task is to train the house down and increase athleticism. Make yourself as strong as you can while keeping your body weight in a healthy range.

Which category do you fall into?

You’re a Ticking Time Bomb

For the other four out of five people, listen up. Your body composition is indicative of your overall health. If it’s too high, your system is under extra pressure. Sooner or later you will suffer some kind of problem. Whether that is diabetes, a heart attack, or knee problems from being overweight, I don’t know. But I do know that when the odds are against you, the house always wins. So sort it out now. If you are overweight, you don’t need another bulking cycle. Nor do you need a strength cycle. You need a weight-loss cycle.

This is where that information overload becomes a problem. There are so many weight-loss programs to choose from – Zone, paleo, vegan, Atkins, Lemon Detox, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Buddhist, Kosher, Body for Life, South Beach, Grapefruit Diet, Israeli Army, gluten-free, ketogenic, alkaline, Blood Type, intermittent fasting, and more.

And the weird thing is, they’ll work. Maybe. The one factor that determines success on any ideal eating plan is compliance. It’s easy to write down a New Year’s resolution that says you’ll finally get a healthy body composition this year. But actually eating the salads and doing the food preparation ahead of time is much harder.

5 Steps to Get Your Body Composition Under Control: 1. Get Rid of Junk Food

“I’m having a hard day. I deserve a beer.” What a complete load of crap. Food isn’t a reward system for showing up for work and doing your job. Nor is it a form of self-medication to deal with your idiotic boss. If you want to be an athlete, food is your fuel. If you want to rev your engine hard, then you need to use quality fuel.

That means fast food and highly processed snack foods need to go. Alcohol too, for the most part. Replace calorie-containing beverages with water. At this stage, what you replace these things with hardly matters, as long as you replace them with actual food.

5 Steps to Get Your Body Composition Under Control: 2. Minimize Carbohydrate Intake

Don’t get rid of your carbohydrate intake all together. That’s like trying to run your race car on fumes. Carbs fuel hard efforts in training and help keep your system running properly.

If weight loss is your goal, be mindful of timing. The best time to take carbs is post-training when the body is primed to store the glycogen gained in the muscles rather than as excess body fat.

5 Steps to Get Your Body Composition Under Control: 3. Eat More Salads and Vegetables

The root of this whole conversation is health, so you should be concerned about how many vegetables you get every day anyway. At Read Performance Training, we tell our clients to eat a minimum of four cups of vegetables and one piece of fruit daily.

5 Steps to Get Your Body Composition Under Control: 4. Add Daily Walking

Low-intensity activity, such as walking or easy cycling, won’t burn up the small amount of muscle tissue you already have. It also won’t leave you flat and unable to repeat it the next day due to soreness. I watched someone lose 100lb in a year with 10,000 daily steps as the cornerstone of the program, so I can attest to how well it works. For myself, I am always at my leanest when I get in daily walks.

5 Steps to Get Your Body Composition Under Control: 5. Add Resistance Training

This is actually the easiest of the five, which is why I’ve placed it last. For many people, the hardest part about weight loss is preparing meals and eliminating bad food choices. Daily long walks can also seem difficult for those who don’t believe they have time. If that is the case, I suggest reading Rob McDonald’s time audit article for a reality check.

Lifting weights, on the other hand, is easy. You show up, work hard for an hour or so, and then you’re done with it for 24 hours or more.

Undoing Damage Takes Time

The one piece missing from the four points above is hunger. I mean actual physical hunger. It is perfectly fine to be hungry all day long. Learn to deal with it. This is the price you pay for having not been hungry at all for however long you’ve been overweight.

Remember, you are covered in excess energy stores, and the only way to get at them is to be in a caloric deficit. There are no secrets, just the constant application of basics over enough time to get the results you want.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• How Strength Levels Affect Work Capacity and Body Composition
• How Much Overhead Are You Carrying?
• The Intelligent Athlete’s Guide to Fueling Performance
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. Bird, B. “How Much Have Obesity Rates Risen Since 1950?” LiveStrong.com. Demand Media, Inc., 26 May 2011. Accessed 15 Jan. 2016.

Photos courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

The post Your Diet Needs a Reality Check appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

1. Body composition
2. Flexibility/Range of movement
3. Strength
4. Conditioning

There are many ways to individualize and tailor your training within each group. But the categories remain the same.

As I wrote in a Coaches Only article a little while ago, these are the four fitness pillars. Following this, I was ecstatic to see Charles Staley say the exact same thing in his article here. When you’ve got two experienced people in complete agreement, it’s a solid head’s up that what is being said is worth of remembering.

While there is a logical, sequential order, these categories are also related. This makes it possible to work on elements simultaneously while still prioritizing one at a time. Body composition comes first for one simple reason: being overweight has an adverse relationship with health and fitness, as well as your mental state.

Controlling your diet is the first step toward peak athletic performance.

Assess Your Body Composition

The BMI (Body Mass Index) is often maligned as an inaccurate way to assess risk in athletic populations. But there is sufficient research to show BMI is a valid tool. While some outliers at the upper and lower ends may fall into undesirable ranges, I have yet to meet many healthy people in these ranges.

Many people are lost in a game of trying to be big. The number on the scale is all they care about, regardless of whether they’re fat or lean. Unfortunately, the heart can only handle so much stress before it becomes damaged, and adding enormous amounts of muscle adds considerable danger. A good number of people who fall in this category also use drugs to help them get there. While I don’t think steroids are the devil they’re often portrayed to be, there are real risks associated with their use. Strike two for chasing excess muscle.

“At the end of a month, when you’ve burned 7,000cals and they’ve burned 13,500cals, who is going to look better?”

It’s time for a reality check. Use BMI, your waist measurement, and body fat scales to figure out where you should be. For reference, an athletic male should have between 6-13 percent body fat, while a female should have 14-20 percent. This study¹ found body fat was closely linked to BMI measurements greater than 30. In other words, if your BMI is 30 or more, you are likely to have a corresponding body fat percentage.

BMI is simple to calculate and can be done using this page here.

The healthy range for me, as an example, is between 65kg and 86kg, making my score 18.5 to 25. However, this is only part of the equation, as BMI alone isn’t a great indicator of heart risk.² Not surprisingly, fatness is also an indicator of future risk,³ and the measurement of your waist is the current benchmark.

Take Action Outside of the Gym

The first thing we train for at Read Performance Training is health. Ironically, even in these times of “functional training,” people are often more worried about what they’re doing in the gym than they are about life outside the gym. I know my clients agree that they’d rather have a little less on their deadlift and live a bit longer. That’s why our first job as coaches is getting body composition to acceptable levels. Food tracking becomes a large part of this process, as does the effort to create new habits and educate people about what to eat and when.

But here is where people get derailed. At this point, with only a little understanding behind, people start to worry about whether one type of training is better than another. Let me give it to you straight. If you are overweight, what matters most is what goes in your mouth. Concentrate on that.

Work Out Longer, Not Harder

People want to talk about the differences between interval workouts and steady-state exercise when it comes to fat loss. They opine about EPOC (post-exercise oxygen consumption, or the amount of energy required to allow you to recover after exercise). Did you know that the difference between a steady-state workout and an interval workout is 7 percent?

Just to give an example of how little EPOC matters, consider that I burn 30cal/km riding my bike. In thirty minutes, I can ride 15km and burn 450cals. The amount of energy consumed is largely a factor of how far I travel, not how fast.

Choose aerobic-based workouts that won’t take a toll on your body and delay your next training session.

If I were to do that workout as an interval session, it would take longer due to the rest time needed between intervals. So instead of taking thirty minutes, it might be closer to sixty. In this case, all that extra EPOC amounts to 31.5cals – the amount of energy found in a single pretzel.

When it comes to training for fat loss, the decision is simple. Pick the workout that burns the most calories in the most sustainable way. In 2006 La Forgia et al did a study⁴ on high intensity work and found that:

“[T]he earlier research optimism regarding an important role for the EPOC in weight loss is generally unfounded. This is further reinforced by acknowledging that the exercise stimuli required to promote a prolonged EPOC are unlikely to be tolerated by non-athletic individuals. The role of exercise in the maintenance of body mass is therefore predominantly mediated via the cumulative effect of the energy expenditure during the actual exercise.”

Another downside to all this high-intensity training is that even if you work so hard you stimulate EPOC – and as the researchers noted, this is unlikely – it will take you a day or two to recover. Meanwhile, the person who did a slightly easier session is able to go back out the next day and burn another 450cals. At the end of a month, when you’ve burned 7,000cals and they’ve burned 13,500cals, who is going to look better?

Diet Is Paramount

All this is predicated on eating well. None of it will make any difference if you’re snacking on pizza every night and eating M&M’s by the bucket (even though I swear the peanut ones are totally paleo).

Rule one is that your training, including the associated diet, should make you better and healthier. If you’re trying to eat your way into a bigger deadlift but you don’t compete in a lifting sport, you will probably make things worse for yourself in the long run. Get your eating under control this year and watch how easy it is to nail down your other health and fitness goals.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• Is Your Diet Dirty? 7 Tips To Clean It Up
• Cardio Doesn’t Kill Gains (and You Should Be Doing It)
• The Intelligent Athlete’s Guide to Fueling Performance
• New on Breaking Muscle Right Now

References:

1. Ranasinghe C, et al. “Relationship between Body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage, estimated by bioelectrical impedance, in a group of Sri Lankan adults: a cross sectional study,” BMC Public Health 13(2013): 797.

2. Boyles, S. “’BMI’ a bust for predicting heart risk,” Web MD, Accessed January 2, 2015.

3. “Obesity,” World Heart Federation, Accessed January 2, 2015.

4. LaForgia J, Withers RT, Gore CJ. “Effects of exercise intensity and duration on the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption,” Journal of Sports Science 24 (2006): 1247-1264.

Teaser photo and photo 1 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

Photo 2 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Your Diet Is Ruining Your Fitness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Once we get to standing from all of the fundamental postures (lying, quadruped, and kneeling) we have three options:

1. A bilateral stance (squats and deadlifts)
2. A split stance (lunges)
3. A single leg stance (kicking and running)

There are no other options, and every exercise is a variation on one of those three. If you spend most of your training time in a bilateral stance, you will miss out on about 70 percent of the options available to you. And when it comes to increasing athleticism, you’ll find far more activities are dependent on a split or single-leg stance than they are on a bilateral one.

Loaded carries encompass all possible foot patterns.

The Completeness of Loaded Carries

This is where loaded carries came in. They encompass all possible foot patterns. The movement begins by deadlifting the bells from a bilateral stance and then proceeds to be either single leg or split stance. If you can avoid dropping the bells and also maintain good posture, you prove that you have the following:

• Shoulder stability
• Midline stability
• Resistance to rotation
• Ownership of the other 70 percent of foot patterns – i.e. split and single-leg stance.

Carries exist in a variety of forms. Here is a guide on how to squeeze the most athletic benefit from them.

Farmer’s Carry

Perhaps the simplest carry is the farmer’s carry, or farmer’s walk. Simply begin by grabbing two objects of the same size and weight and carry them for distance or time. At RPT, we aim for every client to be able to handle multiple 20m laps with his or her bodyweight split evenly between each hand. Twenty meters is not a magical number, it is the rough length of the space we have.

The FMS crew is working on a test for postural control as part of their Functional Capacity Test that involves a 75 percent bodyweight farmer’s carry for a specific time. That elevates farmer’s walks on my list of useful movements to perform in the gym. Not only do they hit many functional markers, but they are also a useful systems check we can run on ourselves.

“When it comes to increasing athleticism, you’ll find far more activities are dependent on a split or single-leg stance than they are on a bilateral one.”

However, there are two drawbacks to farmer’s walks. One issue is they seem to help people put on muscle mass. While this is not a disadvantage for those who want it, there are large populations of athletes, such as runners and fighters, who need to be concerned about how much they weigh. In my experience, it is difficult to get people to cut weight while using heavy farmer walks.

Secondly, in terms of challenging the body, the farmer position is the easiest. Just like with foot positions, there are three possible hand positions – hands down, in the rack position, and overhead. These other positions are by far more challenging from a stability point of view.

Suitcase Carry

A suitcase carry may be described most easily as a single-sided farmer’s carry. When I was young, I had to carry my own suitcase if I wanted to travel, rather than just wheel it about. I only mention this because some people may wonder why on earth it’s called a suitcase carry when you no longer need to carry a suitcase.

The reality of a single-sided carry is that it just doesn’t work well. If you use a moderately heavy kettlebell or dumbbell the weight will hit your leg and make it difficult to maintain posture. Your options are either to reduce the weight or choose a different variation, such as the rack or overhead carry.

Rack Carry

The rack carry is perhaps the best combination of all for loaded carries. Keep in mind, the weight on your chest will make breathing difficult. The reason this is so important is that good breath function dictates how well you can do just about everything. If your breathing is compromised under load, you won’t own the necessary stability required in that position, and you will start to cheat elsewhere. If you’re looking to turbo-charge this version, I suggest bottoms-up carries.

If you’re looking to turbo-charge your rack carries, try bottoms-up carries

Overhead Carry

In the list of the hardest things I’ve ever done, log PT at SEALFit is close to number one. Holding something heavy overhead while maintaining good posture is hard. Even people with decent-looking pressing abilities may struggle when they have to hold load overhead for any period of time, and even the smallest glitches in their abilities will be highlighted.

If you decide to go with a double overhead carry, you may well end up with a few shoulder and neck issues from your clients. We discovered this at RPT when we started doing them frequently.

Asymmetrical Loads

I always try to achieve as much as I can with every movement. While a symmetrical carry proves shoulder stability, midline stability, ownership of the three-foot patterns, and anti-rotational ability, we can make it even better by holding different loads in each hand.

By carrying two differently sized weights in each hand, and in particular by using rack holds and walks, we fire up the core musculature. Dr. McGill says of asymmetric carries:

“The asymmetric kettlebell carry uniquely challenges the lateral musculature (quadratus lumborum and oblique abdominal wall) in a way never possible with a squat. Yet this creates necessary ability for any person who runs and cuts, carries a load, and so on. The suitcase carry is another variation suitable for many advanced clients.”¹

If you want to supercharge this movement, try using a large deadball, such as a 45kg+ ball, and placing it on one shoulder while walking or lunging.

Asymmetrical Hand Positions

Once you’ve worked with asymmetrical loads, the next logical step is to add in asymmetrical hand positions. Having one hand in a suitcase carry or overhead while the other does a rack carry is a unique challenge for the core.

You will find it is best to have the lighter bell higher than the heavier one. In other words, if performing an overhead plus rack carry, the overhead bell should be lighter than the rack carry. If performing a rack plus suitcase carry, the rack carry bell will be the lighter of the two.

Having one hand in a suitcase carry or overhead while the other does a rack carry is a unique challenge for the core.

Improve Capacity and Quality

Keep in mind that for certain athletes (for example, those worried about their weight) carries may not be a great choice as they can lead to an overall thickening of the body. But if weight is not a concern, carries are a great way to improve both capacity and quality. By adopting unilateral or asymmetrical carries, you will hit even more qualities than if you opt for an even load in both hands.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• 6-Week Challenge: Loaded Carries for Farmer’s Strength
• The 4 Most Important Exercises You’re Probably Not Doing 
• Strongman Series: The Yoke
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. McGill, S., “Core Training: Evidence Translating to Better Performance and Injury Prevention,” Strength and Conditioning Journal, 32 (2010):3.

Photos courtesy of Andrew Read.

The post Loaded Carries: The Ultimate Functional Exercise appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Training would be easier if we were all honest about our motives. While a few athletes would say they train for sports performance because their livelihood depends upon it, many others would finally be forced to admit the truth. And the truth is, the majority of people train for vanity.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the idea of being more attractive to potential mates is hard to get past. But there’s another reason that comes in a close second place, and that’s delaying the aging process. A lot can be done in the gym to prevent the losses that come with increasing years.

Getting Older Isn’t the End

The decline in physical ability begins in the mid-30s and continues until we die. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s just how it goes. While there are some impressive older athletes around, they’ll be the first to tell you that what they can do now is nowhere near what they could do when they were younger.

The physical slide affects everything, from fitness, to speed, to power. The heart loses roughly a beat per year from its maximum capacity, which is reached in the mid to late 20s. The heart’s ability to pump blood diminishes by 5-10 percent per decade, too. This is matched by a loss of aerobic fitness of roughly 10 percent per decade.¹

Strength has been shown to drop by 25 percent at age 65 after peaking in the mid-30s. That’s about 8 percent per decade.¹ Interestingly, power also drops by about 8 percent per decade from ages 20 to 70.² We also lose 8-10cm of lower back and hip flexibility as we age due to the changes in both lifestyle as well as loss of collagen.

But the news isn’t all bad. Newer research shows much of these age-related declines, like loss of muscle or bone density, could be offset if you continue training. I would assume if you’re reading this, you’re keen on staying as fit and strong as possible for life. So the real question isn’t whether you should continue moving, but what the best choices are to keep as much of your movement as you can for as long as possible.

Looking at the relatively similar losses across the major areas of fitness, it makes sense to address them all equally. To recap, they are:

1. Flexibility
2. Power
3. Strength
4. Aerobic fitness

These elements are not listed in order of importance, because I believe they are all equally important. I have simply listed them in the order they should be performed within a training session. Don’t get tied to a specific program or a group of favorite exercises. Yes, I know you’ll make faster progress if you follow a set plan. But let’s be realistic – unless you’re a rank beginner, you aren’t getting better at 50+.

Flexibility Is Key for All Ages

Flexibility and range of motion are the bedrock of all performance, regardless of age. I recently saw an excellent quote by Alwyn Cosgrove, which read, “I wish I’d spent less time on mobility, flexibility, and soft tissue work when I was younger. Said no one over the age of forty ever.” That pretty much explains how you’ll feel once you turn forty, if you aren’t already feeling that way.

“Your primary goal is to maintain as many physical qualities as possible. For that reason, you should use as many different movements as possible every time you train.”

I have been paying more attention to yoga in my own training. Yoga has been around for 5,000 to 10,000 years. I’m inclined to believe that if something has been around that long it probably works, or else it would have vanished like Nautilus. Along with spending an hour focusing on your movement and breathing, the added bonus of yoga is that it rebalances the nervous system. Many of us operate from a place of stress in daily life, whether we want to admit it or not. Spending time on yoga and breathing practices helps release a lot of the built up tension from the body.

Power and Elasticity Keep You Young

Power is next on the list. Power and its cousin elasticity are important physical attributes. Power can be represented by a single standing broad jump, with a single foot take off and two-foot landing. As a general rule of thumb, the jump should be equal to your height. Elasticity can be represented by a triple jump or triple hop sequence. The sum of the second and third hops should be double the first if you have good elastic qualities.

Gaining power and elasticity is relatively easy and can be accomplished with low-level plyometric drills and medicine ball work. These low-level plyometric drills are what Mike Boyle refers to as Phase One work because they are done only off the floor, with no depth-jumping component.

This Mike Boyle article, complete with videos, is a decent starting point, although I would get rid of the vertical component for older trainees who are new to jumping and completely remove any rebound depth jumping. Begin with the two-leg variations before progressing to single-leg movements, and remember it takes a long time for connective tissue to adapt to new stresses. It may take months to safely progress from double-leg drills to single-leg exercises.

The medicine ball is another fantastic tool to gain both power and elasticity. And I suggest Gray Cook’s book Athletic Body in Balance for some ideas on elasticity training using a medicine ball.⁴

Big Lifts Maintain Bone Density

Strength is quite easy to program, and there are many good systems to use. From Pavel’s 3-5 x 3-5 system from Beyond Bodybuilding to Wendler’s 5/3/1, the basic rules remain the same.^5,6 Pick 3-5 exercises for 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps, and perform this 3-5 days per week.

Choose big exercises such as the squat, deadlift, bent over row, and pull up, over exercises like bicep curls and lateral raises. The only caveat is to pick fewer exercises rather than more. Recovery ability is limited as we age, so you might find you progress faster by doing less. Counterintuitive I know, but when recovery is hampered you need less work to recover and improve.

Don’t Forget Fitness

The final piece of the puzzle is fitness work. An easy formula to remember is three sessions per week for 30-90 minutes at a heart rate of 120-150bpm to enhance cardiac output. This can be done any number of ways – running, rowing, riding, or hiking up a hill. My advice, as with most of the choices, is to not limit yourself to any one method but instead use as many as you can to maintain as much athletic ability as possible.

A Weekly Template for Older Athletes

Remember, your primary goal is to maintain as many physical qualities as possible. For that reason, you should use as many different movements as possible every time you train. If you don’t use a movement pattern for a while, you’ll find getting it back as you age is far tougher than it was in your twenties and thirties. The basic format for a week of training looks like this:

Flexibility, Power, Strength

Three days per week, total time 60-80 minutes

• Flexibility: 30 minutes of yoga
• Power: 2-3 different jumping, bounding, or medicine exercises work to maintain power and elasticity
• Strength: 3 strength exercises for 3-5 sets or 3-5 reps

Strength training examples:

• Session one: Single leg squats, renegade row, single arm bench press
• Session two: Deadlift, bench press, single arm rows
• Session three: Step ups, overhead press, pull ups

Aerobic Fitness

• Three days per week, alternating with flexibility/power/strength
• Perform 30-90 minutes of steady state work at a heart rate of 120-150bpm

Take the seventh day off to relax and enjoy life.

More like this:

• Grow Older and Get Stronger With Our Mature Athlete Workouts
• Getting Older Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Compete
• How to Get After It if You’re Older or Injured
• New on Breaking Muscle AU Today

References:

1. Shephard, R.J., “Aging and Exercise,”Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine and Science, T.D. Fahey (Editor). Internet Society for Sport Science,7 March 1998.

2. Bonnefoy M, Kostka T, Arsac LM, Berthouze SE, Lacour JR, “Peak anaerobic power in elderly men,” Eur J Appl Physiol Occup Physiol,1998;77(1-2):182-8.

3. Boyle, Michael, “Plyometric Training,” Strength Coach.

4. Cook, Gray,Athletic Body in Balance(Human Kinetics, 2003).

5. Tsatsouline, Pavel, Beyond Bodybuilding: Muscle and Strength Training Secrets for the Renissance Man (Minnesota: Dragon Door, 2005).

6. Wendler, Jim, 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System for Raw Strength (Kindle Ebook, 2009).

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post A Simple Plan to Stay Fit as You Grow Old appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Training would be easier if we were all honest about our motives. While a few athletes would say they train for sports performance because their livelihood depends upon it, many others would finally be forced to admit the truth. And the truth is, the majority of people train for vanity.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the idea of being more attractive to potential mates is hard to get past. But there’s another reason that comes in a close second place, and that’s delaying the aging process. A lot can be done in the gym to prevent the losses that come with increasing years.

Getting Older Isn’t the End

The decline in physical ability begins in the mid-30s and continues until we die. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s just how it goes. While there are some impressive older athletes around, they’ll be the first to tell you that what they can do now is nowhere near what they could do when they were younger.

The physical slide affects everything, from fitness, to speed, to power. The heart loses roughly a beat per year from its maximum capacity, which is reached in the mid to late 20s. The heart’s ability to pump blood diminishes by 5-10 percent per decade, too. This is matched by a loss of aerobic fitness of roughly 10 percent per decade.¹

Strength has been shown to drop by 25 percent at age 65 after peaking in the mid-30s. That’s about 8 percent per decade.¹ Interestingly, power also drops by about 8 percent per decade from ages 20 to 70.² We also lose 8-10cm of lower back and hip flexibility as we age due to the changes in both lifestyle as well as loss of collagen.

But the news isn’t all bad. Newer research shows much of these age-related declines, like loss of muscle or bone density, could be offset if you continue training. I would assume if you’re reading this, you’re keen on staying as fit and strong as possible for life. So the real question isn’t whether you should continue moving, but what the best choices are to keep as much of your movement as you can for as long as possible.

Looking at the relatively similar losses across the major areas of fitness, it makes sense to address them all equally. To recap, they are:

1. Flexibility
2. Power
3. Strength
4. Aerobic fitness

These elements are not listed in order of importance, because I believe they are all equally important. I have simply listed them in the order they should be performed within a training session. Don’t get tied to a specific program or a group of favorite exercises. Yes, I know you’ll make faster progress if you follow a set plan. But let’s be realistic – unless you’re a rank beginner, you aren’t getting better at 50+.

Flexibility Is Key for All Ages

Flexibility and range of motion are the bedrock of all performance, regardless of age. I recently saw an excellent quote by Alwyn Cosgrove, which read, “I wish I’d spent less time on mobility, flexibility, and soft tissue work when I was younger. Said no one over the age of forty ever.” That pretty much explains how you’ll feel once you turn forty, if you aren’t already feeling that way.

“Your primary goal is to maintain as many physical qualities as possible. For that reason, you should use as many different movements as possible every time you train.”

I have been paying more attention to yoga in my own training. Yoga has been around for 5,000 to 10,000 years. I’m inclined to believe that if something has been around that long it probably works, or else it would have vanished like Nautilus. Along with spending an hour focusing on your movement and breathing, the added bonus of yoga is that it rebalances the nervous system. Many of us operate from a place of stress in daily life, whether we want to admit it or not. Spending time on yoga and breathing practices helps release a lot of the built up tension from the body.

Power and Elasticity Keep You Young

Power is next on the list. Power and its cousin elasticity are important physical attributes. Power can be represented by a single standing broad jump, with a single foot take off and two-foot landing. As a general rule of thumb, the jump should be equal to your height. Elasticity can be represented by a triple jump or triple hop sequence. The sum of the second and third hops should be double the first if you have good elastic qualities.

Gaining power and elasticity is relatively easy and can be accomplished with low-level plyometric drills and medicine ball work. These low-level plyometric drills are what Mike Boyle refers to as Phase One work because they are done only off the floor, with no depth-jumping component.

This Mike Boyle article, complete with videos, is a decent starting point, although I would get rid of the vertical component for older trainees who are new to jumping and completely remove any rebound depth jumping. Begin with the two-leg variations before progressing to single-leg movements, and remember it takes a long time for connective tissue to adapt to new stresses. It may take months to safely progress from double-leg drills to single-leg exercises.

The medicine ball is another fantastic tool to gain both power and elasticity. And I suggest Gray Cook’s book Athletic Body in Balance for some ideas on elasticity training using a medicine ball.⁴

Big Lifts Maintain Bone Density

Strength is quite easy to program, and there are many good systems to use. From Pavel’s 3-5 x 3-5 system from Beyond Bodybuilding to Wendler’s 5/3/1, the basic rules remain the same.^5,6 Pick 3-5 exercises for 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps, and perform this 3-5 days per week.

Choose big exercises such as the squat, deadlift, bent over row, and pull up, over exercises like bicep curls and lateral raises. The only caveat is to pick fewer exercises rather than more. Recovery ability is limited as we age, so you might find you progress faster by doing less. Counterintuitive I know, but when recovery is hampered you need less work to recover and improve.

Don’t Forget Fitness

The final piece of the puzzle is fitness work. An easy formula to remember is three sessions per week for 30-90 minutes at a heart rate of 120-150bpm to enhance cardiac output. This can be done any number of ways – running, rowing, riding, or hiking up a hill. My advice, as with most of the choices, is to not limit yourself to any one method but instead use as many as you can to maintain as much athletic ability as possible.

A Weekly Template for Older Athletes

Remember, your primary goal is to maintain as many physical qualities as possible. For that reason, you should use as many different movements as possible every time you train. If you don’t use a movement pattern for a while, you’ll find getting it back as you age is far tougher than it was in your twenties and thirties. The basic format for a week of training looks like this:

Flexibility, Power, Strength

Three days per week, total time 60-80 minutes

• Flexibility: 30 minutes of yoga
• Power: 2-3 different jumping, bounding, or medicine exercises work to maintain power and elasticity
• Strength: 3 strength exercises for 3-5 sets or 3-5 reps

Strength training examples:

• Session one: Single leg squats, renegade row, single arm bench press
• Session two: Deadlift, bench press, single arm rows
• Session three: Step ups, overhead press, pull ups

Aerobic Fitness

• Three days per week, alternating with flexibility/power/strength
• Perform 30-90 minutes of steady state work at a heart rate of 120-150bpm

Take the seventh day off to relax and enjoy life.

More like this:

• Grow Older and Get Stronger With Our Mature Athlete Workouts
• Getting Older Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Compete
• How to Get After It if You’re Older or Injured
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. Shephard, R.J., “Aging and Exercise,” Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine and Science, T.D. Fahey (Editor). Internet Society for Sport Science, 7 March 1998.

2. Bonnefoy M, Kostka T, Arsac LM, Berthouze SE, Lacour JR, “Peak anaerobic power in elderly men,” Eur J Appl Physiol Occup Physiol, 1998;77(1-2):182-8.

3. Boyle, Michael, “Plyometric Training,” Strength Coach.

4. Cook, Gray, Athletic Body in Balance (Human Kinetics, 2003).

5. Tsatsouline, Pavel, Beyond Bodybuilding: Muscle and Strength Training Secrets for the Renissance Man (Minnesota: Dragon Door, 2005).

6. Wendler, Jim, 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System for Raw Strength (Kindle Ebook, 2009).

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Simple Path to Being Your Fittest at Any Age appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I see a lot of programs online with tough-guy inspired themes. These plans promise to turn you into a lion, with names like tactical this or operator that. But as I said at the recent Strength Matters Summit in the UK – everybody wants to be a lion until it’s time to do lion shit.

As an example, there is a stock test in the Royal Marines of thirty miles with a pack, webbing, and rifle, obviously done in boots and pants, to be completed in eight hours. If you’re going to go for eight hours, you need to do some training that lasts that long with a similar load.

Right there is the problem: no one really wants to do the lion shit. They fluff about with shorter workouts that focus on HIT and the anaerobic system. But when it comes to doing lion shit, you’re going to need to go long. This isn’t the exclusive domain of the military, either. An MMA fight lasts for three, five-minute rounds. While each round is only five minutes, the total fight length is fifteen minutes.

To understand why longer training is necessary, you’re going to need a quick lesson in energy systems.

Energy Systems in Color

I like to think of the three ways we create energy as traffic lights – green, yellow, and red.

The green stands for the aerobic system, which is primarily responsible for everything you do that takes longer than two minutes. You want the green light all the time because it powers everything. It represents the base layer of how you produce energy. Its drawback is that it can only get you so far. When you really want to turn on the after burners, you need more energy than it can create.

That’s where the anaerobic systems come in. We have two of these – the alactic and glycolytic. In our analogy, the glycolytic system is the yellow light. When we start to get to this point, alarm bells start to go off. Sooner or later you’re going to need to slow down once you enter yellow territory. The glycolytic system will take you from ten seconds out to about fifty before you can’t sustain the workload any longer and are forced to slow down.

The alactic system (also called the ATP/CP system) is the red light. It produces enormous amounts of power, but only for short durations. As an example of how little time can be spent in this red zone, think of Usain Bolt – perhaps the greatest alactic athlete on the planet. His race lasts ten seconds. By the time he reaches the 70m mark at only seven seconds, he is already slowing down. If the best athlete on the planet can last around seven seconds, that means the rest of us have only five or six seconds at best in our red zone.

Take a look at this chart for a clear visual representation of howa bigger aerobic system gives you more potential energy expenditure.

Recover Faster Between Efforts

This is why you must consider the length of activity when you structure your training. It always strikes me as funny that people think of fighters as power athletes and runners as endurance athletes, since their events take the same length of time. At fifteen minutes, an MMA match is just as long as a 5000m race. Yes, a fighter needs to work in and out of their yellow and red zones looking for takedowns and throwing punches and kicks, but so does a runner who surges to break from the pack and then kicks for home. The differences are only in muscular action, not energy output.

“You want the green light all the time because it powers everything. It represents the base layer of how you produce energy.”

Having a more powerful aerobic system isn’t just about being able to work harder for longer. It also allows you to recover faster between efforts. The aerobic system is responsible for clearing the oxygen debt in the early stages of exercise. Oxygen debt is the amount of energy used that couldn’t be created by the aerobic system. The more powerful the aerobic system is, the faster it will deal with the debt.

In a tournament situation such as BJJ competitions, where you have multiple matches to win through to the finals, a powerful aerobic system could be the difference between arriving at the final relatively fresh or well below your best. It’s also what allows you to recover between rounds in an MMA fight. Although the rest periods aren’t long enough to ever fully recover, a powerful aerobic system will allow you better recovery than a HIT trained system.

Do Lion Shit

The Advantages of Couple’s Workouts: If you want to be a lion, you need a powerful aerobic system.

Developing the aerobic system allows you to work harder before going into your yellow or red zones. Let’s pick some arbitrary numbers to use as an example. If we use Maffetone’s heart rate guidelines to give a rough idea of someone’s aerobic ability we get a number that is 180 minus your age. That gives me a rough score of 136bpm before I start to head into my yellow zone and risk burnout.

However, what most people fail to remember with Maffetone’s work is that there are qualifiers for consistent training over time. In fact, Maffetone believes you earn an extra 5bpm if you’ve been training consistently using aerobic means for two years or more. So my MAF number is now 141bpm before I start to struggle – a 3.6% increase. That allows Andrew 2.0 to work harder than Andrew 1.0. A 3.6% increase in ability over a 5km run equates to about 40 seconds faster.

If you really want to do some legit lion shit, likeSEALFit’s Kokoro camp, whereyou’ll be expected to run and run and run some more while being harassed with hundreds of burpees and push ups, you’re definitely going to need a strong aerobic system. When I did it in August we did Murph on the first night, then ran 18 miles up and down a mountain. Then we did 350 burpees. Yes, you read that correctly. Then we ran two miles to a pool where we did about an hour and a half of non-stop swimming races. When we got out we did 450 push ups, and yes, you read that right too. And then we ran back to the camp. The picture is of me at Kokoro.

“The aerobic system allows you to flush all the toxins from hundreds of burpees or push ups so you can do it all again in a little bit.”

If you don’t have a robust aerobic system capable of delivering energy indefinitely, how do you think you’ll cope with that? And it’s not even about all the running. The aerobic system allows you to flush all the toxins from hundreds of burpees or push ups so you can do it all again in a little bit. I watched half our class drop out simply because most of them didn’t have a deep enough gas tank to cope.

One Final Trick

Now that you understand why the aerobic system is so important for anything that lasts longer than two minutes, here’s one final trick – you need 90+ minute sessions. There is a specific reason for this, and it’s a cool little thing called AMPK. AMPK, otherwise known as 5′ adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase, makes you better at using glycogen and fatty acids for fuel. The problem is, this ability is only developed in the absence of glycogen. Endurance athletes know this as “bonking” and avoid it at all costs in race situations. However, there is a big benefit to deliberately bonking in training, or at least undergoing longer sessions designed to run your glycogen reserves dry.

How long do your sessions need to be? Well, we store roughly 1,500 calories of glycogen. At an aerobic heart rate riding a bike, I burn 30 calories per kilometer. That means I need to ride about 50km before I even access this adaptation, which will take about an hour and a half.

But that is just the beginning of the process. To actually develop it, I need to work well into the empty gas tank scenario. That’s why sessions of two hours or more are extremely useful. You can start to develop this during any longer session, not just aerobic ones. At Read Performance Training we have a standard two-hour Saturday morning session designed for just this reason. Those who attend have developed amazing fitness.

Develop Real World Fitness

When it comes to developing real world fitness, there’s a hierarchy of training. Running, riding, rowing, cross country skiing, and the VersaClimber are all at the top of the list. Everything else is simply not as effective.

You may love to train in a variety of ways, but there’s no sense in using methods that can’t develop your fitness as highly as others. Build your aerobic system up so that you, too, can do some lion shit.

Liked this article? You will loveAndrew’s book,Run Strong.

More like this:

• How to Reach Freak Level Fitness
• Combining Strength and Cardio Training: Does it Work?
• Running Is the Killer App of the Human Body
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo 1 courtesy ofShutterstock.

The post So You Want to Be a Lion? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.