As a trainer for firefighters and non-firefighters alike, it has been my pleasure to help people learn how to train for the real world. While the specific demands and levels of urgency may be different for firefighters and non-firefighters, the principles are the same. It doesn’t matter whether it is an overflowing laundry basket, a positive pressure ventilation fan for clearing smoke from a structure, or your backpack; in the real world, we do more than lift. We lift in order to move things to a different location. This continues to be a struggle for people and a source of injury, discomfort, and decreased performance. Thankfully, you can train using incremental skill development to progress into efficient carrying.

Secure Single-Leg Footing

Observe people when they are walking. Many times, they are in a forward lean, with their center of gravity in front of their base of support. This isn’t walking. This is falling and catching yourself with the leading leg. This is a common cause of slips and falls in general, but becomes a tremendous hazard when you go into carrying. When carrying, your center of gravity becomes combined with the object you are transporting. Consequently, your gait and stride is severely impacted and can have a detrimental impact.

While there are several pieces to why you may lean forward, one of the most immediate you can address is your ability to maintain your balance over a single point of support. Developing secure, single-leg footing will train your body to stay upright. You can do this by becoming comfortable standing on one leg for an extended period of time, using the following cues:

• Use your entire foot: Grip the floor with your toes and drive your heel into ground. Minimal shoes or bare feet will be helpful.
• Soften your knees: This will encourage greater posterior chain utilization.
• Stand tall: This will allow your body to become secure over the foot.

When done correctly, your ears, shoulders, hips and feet are aligned in a standing plank. This will allow you to feel your equilibrium over a single point of support in a way that will transfer over to loaded carries later. Practice until you are able to sustain this for 60-90 seconds. Then you can progress further to resist external forces. This comes in the way of leg swinging.

Leg swinging is a great way to train your body to be secure under dynamic interference. Stand upright on a single leg, then allow the other leg to swing freely. This will create resilience in the endurance and reaction ability of the stable leg. As you progress even further, you can add in the arms to continue resisting the momentum that naturally occurs from the motion you create.

Active Hip Stability: Kneeling Around-the-Worlds

When you are carrying, you are moving in all three planes of motion. While it may not seem like it, you are working incredibly hard to resist lateral and rotational forces as you move forward. Developing hip stability will play a key role in resisting these forces. One of the best and most accessible ways is to use the Ultimate Sandbag for kneeling around-the-worlds.

1. Take a kneeling position and hold the Ultimate Sandbag by the outside handles, pulling them apart as aggressively as you can.
2. Drive your hips forward while digging your toes into the ground behind you to engage your posterior.
3. Raise your right forearm over your head, stretching the lat on that side, while pulling downward with your left hand, elongating your left upper trap.
4. Continue passing the Ultimate Sandbag around your head with maximal tension and resistance.
5. Maintain your initial head position until the Ultimate Sandbag is behind your head with your elbows high. Here, pause momentarily, then continue this circular motion until it comes completely around to the front.
6. Alternate directions as you do this again.

To progress this movement even further, add a step forward during this motion. It will further increase your hip stability as you resist the adjusting load while removing a point of support.

1. Step forward with your left leg into a lunge position as you pass the Ultimate Sandbag over the left side of your head.
2. Once it is behind you, hold this position with the same maximal tension, continuing to pull the Ultimate Sandbag apart.
3. Return to the starting position by reversing the path of the bag and returning the front leg to the kneeling position.
4. At this point, switch sides and switch legs.

Rotary Stability: Dead Bugs and Crawling

The ability to resist rotational forces is imperative. While the kneeling around-the-worlds do work on this, you can do even more through crawling. Crawling is irrefutably a foundational skill. As a firefighter, crawling is a skill we use at nearly all major structure fires. In fact, three years ago, crawling literally saved my life. Are you training this fundamental skill? The good thing is that there is a very easy-to-follow template to restore this skill and strengthen your core stability to resist rotational forces.

Dead bugs are a great way to train your body to move in a contralateral and stable fashion while creating intraabdominal forces using the ground as external cueing.

1. Lie on the ground with hands extended above your shoulders and knees bent above your hips.
2. Extend your right arm behind and left leg simultaneously.
3. If you feel your low back begin to arch, draw your belly button into the ground while tucking your hips. This will provide greater security in your spinal alignment as your move into carrying.

To progress this pattern, move into hand-foot crawling. You will have to maintain that same core stability while resisting rotational forces as you reduce your points of support from the ground. This will encourage you to learn to stabilize your spinal alignment as you move forward.

1. Assume a quadruped position with all four limbs on the ground.
2. Lift your knees from the ground.
3. Once in a secure, solid position with knees under hips and hands under shoulders, move forward in a slow and controlled fashion.
4. Continue this for a designated number of strides.

Train Your Body for Heavy Carries

At the end of the day, carrying is something that we need to be able to do. However, there are many people who do it in everyday life inefficiently, in a way that may lead to decreased performance, discomfort and even injury. You can build a solid foundation to carry heavy loads by establishing secure footing using leg swings, stable hips with kneeling around-the-worlds, and rotary stability with dead bugs and crawling.

Want to train like a firefighter? Contact me for more programming strategies.

The post Prepare Your Core for Heavy Carries appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Firefighters are everyday individuals who are trained to protect the people in their community. These men and women have families, faults, and fears like anyone else. Television is great at portraying the human side of firefighters, but it is incapable of presenting the real world of firefighting.

What is the real world of firefighting? It is unsettled, unbridled, and uncertain. An emergency is characterized by disorder. It is the firefighter’s job to operate within uncontrolled variables and unscripted plans that have consequences beyond the next commercial break. This can mean falling debris, elevated temperatures, or building degradation. Fire removes the script from the world we live in and forces us into a world of variables. In short, the real world of firefighting is a lot like the real world, in general.

The Real World is Unscripted

We live in an age marked by excesses of comfort, convenience, and consistency. There is a preset script everywhere we go that limits the amount of concern, confusion, and contemplation we encounter. We can almost sleepwalk through life, with very little physical worry, on our paved sidewalks, with our socially-accepted habits. But is this the real world? Is the physical effortlessness that allows us to mindlessly participate in our daily mundane tasks part of the real world?

Your ancestors have done amazing things to keep you safe and make life comfortable for you. The result has become a world that is carefully constructed to fit our preferences. While convenient, this has left you at a mental and physical deficit. Do you have to think about the steps you are taking when you walk? No, because your ancestors constructed a flat surface for you to walk on that removes nearly all trip hazards. Do you have to be aware of your surroundings as you wash dishes? No, because your ancestors constructed a barrier to keep the outside world out. The world they constructed has desensitized you to the unavoidable, unexpected, and uncertain.

So what happens when there is a deviation from the script? What happens when your dog trips you, or when you see your 13-month-old approaching the stairs? You are required to rapidly react and respond to disorder and chaos. If you are untrained to operate within unexpected circumstances, you are at an elevated risk of traumatic injury, in the same way a poorly trained firefighter would be during an emergency.

How Firefighters Train for Chaos

As the lead fitness trainer for the Milwaukee Fire Department, it has been my pleasure to help our firefighters train for the unexpected, unique demands of our profession. The Firefighter Dynamic Performance Training system I developed is beneficial for firefighters, but at its core, it is about training safely and efficiently for the unpredictable nature of the real world.

The chaos of the fire scene is what makes it dangerous. Unregulated building renovations, smoke conditions, fire behavior, and more are a few of the unscripted components that make any emergency scene irregular. To reduce injuries and improve safety, we train to respond to these irregularities by mimicking the physical demands of our profession. One of the ways we do this is through irregular training implements and modalities.

Regular implements function in a consistent, scripted, and predictable fashion. As a professional, competitive, natural bodybuilder, regular implements allow me to generate consistent hypertrophic tension with little difficulty. However, dumbbells, machines, barbells, and other balanced, regular pieces of equipment do not allow me to train for the unexpected nature of firefighting or the real world. Because they are consistent in their response, they do not properly prepare you for dynamic loads. 

Irregular implements do a superior job of mimicking real world demands. 

Irregular implements function in an inconsistent, unexpected, dynamic fashion. Training with them requires you to learn how operate with loads that are shift and change during motion. As a firefighter, we constantly put irregular implements into motion. Generators, positive pressure ventilation fans, and debris are just a few of the examples. In the real world, the same is true. Carrying laundry baskets, groceries, and struggling to get that nasty dog of yours into the tub are some of the dynamic loads we put into motion on a daily basis.

Irregular implements train you for the real world by helping you develop:

• Greater neurological excitation
• Heightened reactivity
• Increased stability
• Improved biomechanical awareness
• Movement adaptability

How do you choose what irregular implement to utilize? While there are several options, I can say that in 13 years of training for firefighting and the real world, two that continue to stand out are the Ultimate Sandbag and resistance bands.

Sandbag Training

The Sandbag trains you to adapt to asymmetrical and dynamic loads. Even when the Sandbag is at rest, it is not perfectly balanced. Rather, one side is going to be heavier or lighter than the other. When you put the Sandbag into motion, you are immediately subjected to controlled instability because of the shifting sand. Since the filler bags are only half full, the sand continues to slide back and forth inside.

Performing a movement like the high pull with a sandbag puts the filler bags into motion, which causes the sand to shift. Your body must respond to the inconsistency of the load, helping you develop spontaneous resilience. This shift occurs with every repetition you perform, which means that you are never operating in a constant, anticipated state. The result is that your body learns how to function without a script. You can also change the training stimulus by simply changing the combination of the handles you use.

Try Sandbag Drills: Instability Builds Balance And Strength for a sample of workouts and routines.

Resistance Band Training

Resistance bands are another great irregular implement for several reasons. As you place resistance bands into motion, lengthening or shortening them, you are adjusting the tension of the band. This serves several functions. One of them is that you can immediately add resistance to any movement just by changing the starting tension. Want more resistance? Start with more stretch in the band. Regular implements require you to apply more load, which is time-consuming.

Not only does the tension-to-length relationship of resistance bands allow you to easily adjust resistance, but it will train you to accelerate and decelerate. Resistance bands operate on a descending and ascending force curve. Consequently, you learn to finish each movement with the greatest amount of strength. This requires explosiveness and acceleration. Subsequently, when you return the resistance band to its starting tension, you train yourself to decelerate as the tension alleviates.

What does this mean for real world fitness? When do you want to be strongest when you’re putting away groceries? When you have them close to your body, or when you are reaching far away from your body to the top shelf? You want to be strongest at the end of your reach, because this is the place that a lot of people get injured. By doing exercises like the resistance band incline press, you’ll be preparing for exactly this type of real world function.

Go Off-Script With Your Training

The wonderful world we live in has been scripted for maximum efficiency, but it also leaves us ill-prepared for the unscripted and unpredictable. This leaves us vulnerable to injury, and decreases our ability to operate at our fullest ability. Take lessons from firefighter training strategies, and use irregular implements like the Ultimate Sandbag and resistance bands. Doing so will help prepare you for the unpredictable nature of the real world. Not only will you improve your performance, increase your safety, and enhance your energy conservation, but you’ll still be able to enjoy that late-night firefighter drama.

More ways to be ready for chaos:

Train for Uncertainty: It’s Guaranteed

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