Make use of pain

Humans are an odd lot. There’s no denying it.Without wanting to get all touchy feely and start deeply analyzing the human mind (and also because I am not a therapist, nor do I play one on TV) it should be pretty obvious that as a species we really only have two driving forces in our lives.

No BS Stamina

I’m not going to lie to you. I absolutely refuse to fill my blog with BS like what you’ll find in Four Hour Body. Before anyone thinks I have a vendetta against Tim please keep in mind that I know him personally, although it’s not like we’re best buds or anything, and he was in my team for RKCII and I trained with him during several segments. I like the guy, he’s great to talk to and has a sharp wit. But his book is filled with bogus information.

Fortitudine Vincimus

I’ve been writing this blog for some time now. And one of the things I get asked most is why the name? What does it mean?

Well, being a simple lad, it means exactly what it says. However, if you dig just a little deeper you’ll discover that the Latin word fortitudine can be used for both strength and endurance.

In life, both strength – to overpower your prey, and endurance – to outlast your enemies, are key abilities that have seen us survive longer than you may have thought possible. After all, in animal kingdom terms we’re quite useless with our soft pink hides, inability to run within minutes of birth and no natural weapons at all other than our big ol’ brain and opposable thumbs.

In times gone by man would have been very unlikely to have been able to overpower anything. Tools have only been around for about 200,000 years and we’ve existed as a species for about 750,000. So how could we have overcome wild prey with our bare hands?

The answer is that we didn’t. Man, as once explained to me by marathon great Robert de Castella, is the most powerful aerobic creature on the planet. Sooner or later a man can outrun anything. Sure, we may not be able to run fast compared to antelope and buffalo, but we can run long, eventually tiring out a single animal and causing it to literally drop dead from exhaustion (called persistence hunting).

But with our modern, lazy, sit down lifestyle could modern man actually endure running for hours non-stop? The answer, for most people is no. And the reason is simple – not enough strength endurance. See, strength comes in many guises – speed strength, starting strength, explosive strength, maximal strength, relative strength..the list is honestly nearly endless. Strength endurance is the ability to sustain force production for extended periods of time. Exactly what you’d need if you planned to run a buffalo to death over five hours or so. I’m also going to add here that if you planned to run a buffalo to death you’d need to have the strength to run safely without hurting yourself for those five hours.

Looking at injury statistics for runners – 60-85% of runners suffer an injury every year that keeps them off the pavement for four weeks. No one seems to have a specific statistic, likely, in my mind at least, because many will run through pain – distance running is like crack cocaine to the people who do it and they will often continue even when their body is screaming at them to stop. Perhaps this is a throwback to older days – a persistence hunt generally takes four to five hours. How long does it take someone to finish a modern marathon usually? Between four and five hours. And I’ll bet that if you look at how often that kind of hunt would have occurred, likely about every two to three weeks if successful, that the crack addicted, injury infected runner will put their feet up for between two and three weeks before “having” to head out the door again. In their lizard brain they have to get back out, on the hunt, to provide food for the tribe and cement their place as an alpha. Our modern hobbies are all based on primitive survival needs and it strikes me that this is no different.

So if we have this intrinsic, overwhelming urge to move, to hunt, to utilise this powerful aerobic engine we’ve all got, yet we get hurt up to 80% of the time we do it, shouldn’t we do something about that? If the key to human survival was our ability to move and move with strength then having the ability to move better – both in terms of range of movement as well as strength throughout that range, then we should probably address that.

Choose whichever definition you want – but strength does conquer and from tomorrow there will be a new name for this blog and a new address. Strengthconquers. com

I’m in the middle of starting a new project (a phrase which means it is still in the planning stages largely) that focuses on all of this. You and me, we’re built to move, to have what the French call souplesse – suppleness, a springiness that allows us to move well and with strength all day if we need to. And I’m on a journey of discovery. There’s some big things coming and I hope you stick around to learn about them.

Get a Clue or Get a Coach

Just hang on a second while I get up here on my high horse…

This is either going to be very short and sweet or I’m about to sit here all day writing this as I start foaming at the mouth and ranting like a TV evangelist. So take a seat because you may want to get comfortable before I really get stuck into this.

Exercise, for someone who knows what they’re doing, isn’t difficult to program. Most coaches who know their stuff make it all look so easy – like Dan John, Robert Kabbas, Ian King, Charles Poliquin or Pavel Tsatsouline. They take complex ideas and turn them into easy to understand phrases and create these simple looking plans that do a whole bunch of things without having the need to explain it. For instance, s simple “big chest” from Robert while squatting forces me into thoracic extension, keeping my back taught and protected against injury while at the same time forcing my head up which starts to activate the extension reflex needed to get out of the hole.Imagine he had to say all that though? I’d crumple under the bar while trying to adjust all these things and each set would take forever as Robert would have to say about a thousand words per set. Instead I get “big chest” and all is right. Genius.

The mistake people make is that they see a great coach like Robert et al working with a great athlete like Simplice Ribouem they think it all looks so easy. It’s easy for them because training like that is their daily job. Robert has been around weightlifting for eons and has been an Olympic silver medallist and triple commonwealth games gold medallist and been head of the Australian Weightlifting Federation. He is as natural around lifting and elite performance as most people are at making toast – it’s an every day thing to him. In the video below you’ll see how relaxed both of them are, yet look at the weights Simplice uses – staggering!

So what most see is the humour, the relaxed effort and the ease with which they go at their work never once understanding the hidden depths of understanding, technical detail and years of toil to get there in the first place. Like a duck swimming all the effort comes from depths not often glimpsed by many.

Putting this into beginner context, most novice lifters cannot even get themselves into the start position to Deadlift properly. They are unable to maintain a neutral spine, they lack adequate tension in their body and most won’t drive through their feet properly and will turn the exercise into a hybrid Squat/ Good Morning and wonder why they are sore. So, to get better the novice needs to train more, or do they?

What difference does it make if you do a thousand reps if you are not trying to make each rep better than the last? I’ve written about this before, particularly in the Mindful Practice article, but strength training is not the mindless act of moving something in space many treat it as. Like any physical activity it should have a point. If you play tennis, even for fun, the objective is the same – get the ball in the white lines and win the game. To do so means you have to do some things well and we admonish ourselves when we don’t and the ball lands outside the lines (or in my case, over the fence). Yet when it comes to the middle of our pyramid, the strengthening block, we seem to switch off. (Refer to the Building Blocks article for visual reference.) How is it that when we play a sport we seek to increase skill, but then ignore the same desire to improve when working on the foundational elements that build the next, higher block of the functional pyramid? Becasue a thousand reps done poorly and mindlessly is, at the heart of it, still a thousand crappy reps that lead to nothing other than injury (or more likely the Crossfit Games).

The problem lies in people not being at all Zen about what they are doing. Being present in what you do, in every minute aspect of it is the real skill of exercise. The exact positioning of the load in your hands, of your feet pushing into the deck, the haze of chalk dust, knowing the exact position of your spine at every point during your lift, the trajectory of the bar or bell…There’s a lot to think about which is why real lifters don’t talk on their phones during a set. It’s also why in gyms such as Phoenix everyone goes quite when someone goes heavy – the person needs concentration to keep it all together. These are people who spend hours working on the skill of moving load and even they need total concentration on the task at hand. So how are you training in a gym filled with Britney and other soul destroying, testosterone sapping music with TVs shining from every corner and the “whoo’s” of the lycra morons in the Spinning room and expecting to improve?

The next problem lies in your own education. Like it or not, as much as exercise seems uncomplicated, it is quite difficult. When I first started in the industry it wasn’t. The main reason for that was because everyone moved better. These days most people need more rehab than they need training. And understanding what to do when to whom is difficult and requires skill and education. I can’t count how many times I see programs from people that are just all over the place, like throwing grenades into a room blindfolded hoping to hit something, anything. Instead, a good trainer comes along and enters the hazy, smoke filled confusion of the matter and like a ninja SEAL with laser night vision pinpoints the problem and drops a smart bomb on it. Like one of my clients at the moment. She’s been training with us a little while and has just started doing a single thirty minute PT session each week to go with the three group classes she does. Our group classes at Dragon Door Australia are great, mixing the FMS system with kettlebells, but in a group situation you simply can’t address every single issue, and so she does this small amount of PT. In just two hours of PT time we’ve massively improved her core strength to the point where it is a visible difference when she moves as well as having fixed her Squat to be good enough to pass the HKC! The kicker is that she’d had another PT for three years before she came to us. Even though she recognised she wasn’t an expert she hired out the problem, but to no avail. And yet, in the right hands, with a short amount of time expenditure (far shorter than three years!) she’s got a positive result!

Which is the whole point of all of this – if you don’t have the time or background to figure all this stuff out for yourself, and I am yet to meet more than a handful of people who do, then hire it out. I am lucky enough to have some of the absolute best minds in the world in my email system and can ask questions to them at any time. having that kind of back up and coaching has allowed me to make huge leaps in my abilities and understanding even at almost forty years old. So unless you want to spend the entire rest of your life learning how to get in peak shape just save yourself the time and frustration and hire an expert to help you.

 

Building Blocks and Patterns

One of the biggest problems that still exists in today’s fitness training world is trying to convince people of the necessity to think of the body as more than just an assembled collection of parts. Thanks to the bodybuilding craze of the late ’70s and early ’80s and guys like Arnold, Ferrigno and even the later hulks such as Haney, Priest and Yates, gym culture is still caught up in the concept that if you train the body in isolation the whole will get stronger.

In my experience there are definitely times to use isolation exercises – heresy, I know from an RKC, but it’s the truth. For instance, many women in our community will struggle with pull ups. One of the biggest problems is a lack of strength in elbow flexion. For those who don’t know this is the movement caused by doing bicep curls. Now, I’m not suggesting that we need to devote whole days to “Arms” but in certain cases adding in some exercises in training to improve strength in that area will be beneficial. Likewise for guys struggling to finish off their press. For many, at the point the bell clears the head there is a distinct feeling of needing to change gears. What is happening is that emphasis goes from the bicep and shoulder to the triceps. Under max loads the body may not always happily make that leap to the next gear. But adding in some overhead tricep extensions will help. In fact, training logs of top GS competitors will show that during the off season they spend a large amount of time on assistance exercises while boosting General Strength and Conditioning. Their focus during this time is to boost overall strength and iron out any kinks in their movement – and tricep extensions fit this mold.

In Kenneth Jay’s book Perfecting the Press there are a myriad of ways to increase your press solely via pressing. While very clever they are also, in many cases, needlessly complex and time consuming to set up. And didn’t we all start using kettlebells in the first place because they were simple? So why are we trying to make things more complex than they need to be? In a lot of cases a simple solution will work best and if you look at top strength training groups such as Westside Barbell they have a host of assistance exercises to boost shortfalls in the three main lifts. The development of GPP – of being all round strong – is chief among them though and will take you a lot further in your training than seeking out a fancy way of doing things.

This return to simple, to smart programming is why the FMS system makes so much sense to me. The tests themselves are for the most part building blocks of exercise. For instance there are tests to determine internal and external rotation of the shoulder while also testing thoracic rotation and extension. These skills are important for throwers, fighters, swimmers, kayakers and anyone who has to ever rotate and move their arms. Likewise the Active Straight Leg Raise test while looking like a simple hamstring flexibility test is also a test for how active the hip flexors are and also has important links to squat depth. The idea is that, like with a pyramid, a bigger, stronger base of movement skill can lead to a high eventual peak of sport skill.

Movement before Strength before Specific Skill.

These building blocks are so foundational that improving them can lead to instant gains in movements that look completely unrelated. There is an excellent new book out called Becoming Bulletproof by Tim Anderson and Mike McNiff. They’ve spent a lot of time looking at the foundational, so called primitive patterns, within the FMS and integrated them into training sessions. In particular their use of rolling and crawling has reminded me of several things –

We have lost our way as beings. Like it or not we are all still not far out of the trees and our monkey cousins don’t seem to experience all the movement and injury issues we seem to. (Of course, not being able to speak with monkeys, even hand signals with that Coco, I am just guessing at this). I’ve never seen a Chimp complaining to another Chimp that it has plantar fasciitis due to not warming up running away from a Jaguar. As humans we start to learn the skill of movement early in life as we begin exploring. We start with crawling and eventually stand. Sadly, as soon as we start getting the hang of this we are then sent off to school to start “learning”. Sadly the book learning is spent sitting down and we then spend the rest of our lives forgetting everything we learned in the first six!

The drills within Becoming Bulletproof focus on things that we all should spend time doing and the more I look the more I see them everywhere – crawling and rolling can be found in the Get Up and swimming, both of which I have heavily advocated. The Get Up is a no brainer. When great minds like Steve Maxwell (who originally brought it into the RKC system), Pavel Tsatsouline, Gray Cook, Brett Jones, Dave Whitley, Jeff O’Connor, et al all heavily praise the Get Up you’d have to figure that it’s probably a good idea to incorporate it into your own training. But swimming…Wait…that’s not very RKC of me – to advocate both something that is thought of as “cardio” AND non-load bearing.

But think about it – the freestyle stroke IS crawling in water. It IS the climbing pattern that Gray so heavily advocates. It IS the Monkey Bars that Dan John enthuses about. It is all of those things. It is easy on the joints and good for flexibility. It is good for the heart and lungs. And, of course, it is an essential athletic movement that may just save your life some day.

But what about other movements within the RKC system? Where are our breakdowns, or patterning progressions? Well, if you’re a good reader by now you’ve taken me up on my urging to buy Dynami. I’ve written fairly extensively about it over the last month or so and honestly believe that everyone should own a copy. If you’re still sitting on the fence about it consider that within are workouts that show you the building blocks of movements – exercises such as Wall Touches, Single Leg Deadlifts, etc. – are all in there and all in a format that you can use instantly.

Because that’s the funny thing – we’ll all go and spend time doing our FMS correctives to fix building blocks of movement, but we won’t pattern to build the blocks of exercise skill. The exercises themselves, while able to be improved via the addition of foundational movement skills, are also able to improved via the use of breakdown drills that will highlight and improve various aspects of each exercise. My work on simple progressions for the Swing has seen me quickly improve my Snatch numbers with the 32kg – up to 140 reps in two weeks! And I’ve even been Snatching the 36kg for a few reps too. Only a few months ago that all seemed out of reach. I thought those bells were for guys like Dave Whitley – big, massively strong guys. Well, spending some time lining it all up right has shown me that yet again I should raise my expectations of my own training. I don’t actually believe there is an upper limit for how much strength is possible. The gains I have made in the last few moths have been miles beyond anything I had thought I was capable of – from essentially fixing my hamstring issues, to improving my shoulder mobility and thoracic rotation, to increasing performance elements like my hip drive to allow me to snatch bigger weights.

All made possible by simplifying my training, working on the building blocks to recreate my functional pyramid bigger and better than ever.

Simplify and Listen

Some amazing things happen when you remove noise from your life. Experiments in reductionist living have always been successful for me. I was always curious when I used to read Calvin and Hobbes and Calvin’s dad would quote Thoreau, “simplify” (hey, if it gets you interested in classic authors it doesn’t matter the source, right?)

So I’ve always strived for minimilism. That’s why I love my Merrells and Vibrams. That’s why the kettlebell speaks to me so clearly. That’s why the RKC set of exercises is all I believe I need to have my body at or near it’s peak constantly.

But the funny thing is that once you start to simplify, to reduce what is there, to cut away the excess like Bruce Lee did with Jeet Kune Do, you really start to realize how little you actually need. I firmly believe that there should be an RKC only HKC. That once you have learnt and mastered the RKC Basic 6 that there should be a master class on the deepest elements of the core, foundational moves.

Over the last year and a half I have been lucky enough to host four HKCs, with the fifth only three weeks away. Because of the concentration on the three foundational exercises, because of the multitude of introduction, beginner and HKC Preparation workshops I’ve run I’ve really spent a lot of time thinking about these moves, how to teach them better and how to do them better. I actually don’t thik many of my clients really need to be doing anything other than the HKC Big Three and if they really learned to nail them just right would achieve better results from that than they would from all the other exercises lumped together.

And funnily enough the focus on my Swing has given big pay offs in terms of my Clean and Snatch as well as other (somewhat) related lifts like the Deadlift.

Simplifying is never easy. I have long been scolded by friends for having a “simple” life. What seems to escape them is how difficult it really is to have only three things that you give attention to – work, family/ relationships, training. There used to be a fourth which was whichever sport I was doing in en effort to unsuccessfully prove myself unbreakable. But now, it’s just the three. Three skills at HKC, three important elements to life – coincidence?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying if you are into more than three things there’s anything wrong with that. Just that for me, the more I minimize, the more I remove, the better the result.

Which led me back to use of the Program Minimum from Enter the Kettlebell. For some reason my still all-time favorite workout is an hour of alternating Swings (done however you please) and Get Ups. I prefer to go heavy. I like Double Swings for sets of ten and Heavy Get Up singles on each side. I just go as I feel for an hour. A few weeks of this usually makes my body feel fantastic and like I can do just about anything.

But the funny thing about only doing two exercises is that it gives you a lot of focus on how you are doing them, not on actually doing them. What I mean is that you become far more focused on what your body is doing rather than on your rep count. And that leads to all kinds of awesome discoveries about yourself.

For instance, part of my current work which stems largely from Dynami is the to add in Wall Touches. This simple drill is step two in how to teach the Swing after teaching people how to find their hip creases. It forces the student to learn to reach back with their hips and load onto their heels while maintaining balance. What it is ALSO supposed to teach is that you come forward by firing your hips.

However, what I found is that I actually use my quads a fair bit to help create my forward movement. So get this – I usually do Double Swings with 2x32kg bells. At this point in training I am standing about a foot away from a wall and reaching back to touch it with my butt without load. That’s about as simple as you can get. All I’m focused on is the stretching out of my hips, neutral spine, balance on feet and then drive hips forward and finish in a vertical plank. Simple, right?

But that’s not what I was doing. I was cheating. That cheating wasn’t evident with a bell in my hands. Even when I video myself I can’t see that I am not using my hips fully but relying on my quads. But 3 x 20 unloaded Wall Touches showed it to me. The removal of all else showed it quite plainly actually after I’d done this particular drill a few times.

So part of my discovery has been simply solved by doing more reps in a mindful manner. Like I spoke in about in previous articles – when you only have a certain amount of attention to spend on an activity until you master the actions of that movement you will be spending a lot of your attention on simple mechanics. Only when your body is able to do that action on auto pilot will you be able to actually start to notice things – how you grip the bells, what happens when you change your stance slightly, eye position. Or in my case how much I use my hips.

The remainder of my discovery was not from the volume I had done, but from the simplicity of the drill. Having drills in your training that lead to these “a-ha” moments are a cornerstone of the RKC system. Usually these drills are so powerful that a few reps will teach the body, instantly, to do something differently.

In my recent training I have made quite a few discoveries about the Program Minimum, my body, and some eye opening, for me, revelations about kettlebell ballistics. That bit alone deserves it’s own post so I will attend to that later.  The removal of everything other than some FMS drills, stretching (wow, has that taught me a LOT), patterning and then Swings and Partial Get Ups has shown me the simple effectiveness of these exercises. In fact, six weeks of only PM and the FMS/ patterning drills has seen me PR in the Snatch and start to regular use the 32kg for Snatching. The added hip drive, body awareness and mechanics would have been slower to develop had I had to concentrate on more things at once by actually Snatching to gain the same increase. Not only that but it has allowed me to work heavier than my Snatch weight which has built my grip strength meaning that I don’t feel like I’m going to drop the bell on every rep.

When you remove distractions, when you simplify your training, you actually get to hear what your body is saying. Subtracting the non-essential away from life is difficult. In a world filled with iPods, internet chat, email, mobile phones – the whole world is demanding your attention right NOW. With so much noise, so much clutter and distraction it is no wonder that most of us don’t move well or often – we simply can’t hear our bodies telling us what to do!

Trust me on this – remove distraction. People will “what if” you to death. But those same people will be stuck in the same rut in six months while you will be setting new peaks in performance. For some reason people get very uncomfortable when you deliberately remove “stuff”. (And don’t even get me started on the social pressure involved in the Warrior Diet). Resist the peer pressure to go back to kitchen sink training. Stick to the basics and learn to develop high levels of skills that have big payoffs in other areas.

Drills vs Exercise

In the last few posts we’ve looked at some of the things I’m doing to improve my movement, regain some function and still continue increasing my strength.

The downside to all this is some people will see the trees not the forest.

Tees = the “stuff”. You know, the pressing variations, the use of kneeling, half kneeling and other patterning work.

Forest = the purpose of doing the “stuff”. i.e. increase strength and gain from training. To steal a line from a certain other group – to chase a daily PR> While i don’t actually believe that is possible, the mindset has to be that each day in the gym has a purpose attached to it and that purpose is to improve physically. The improvement that comes is dependant on what your eventual goal is and how you’ve laid out your plan. If you don’t have a training plan, stop reading now and go make one. Training without a plan is like the blind leading the blind. In the dark. Blindfolded. Without talking. Underwater.

So what usually happens is that people start to take these assistance exercises and create challenges for themselves with these exercises. I have no issue with working to improve, but the measurement by which you judge training is not whether you improved in an assistance exercise, but whether you improved the main lift (what we are calling the “forest” in this case). Because no one really cares what your Tall Kneeling best press is. Or your best three board Bench  Press. Or your best Power Clean off blocks.

Those exercises are only good and appropriate exercises if they do the one thing you selected them for – improve your main exercise.

The thing I see the most that makes no sense is wrestlers having an unhealthy obsession with their Bench Press. While I agree that having a strong upper body to push opponents away is crucial and that it is a useful judge of upper body strength – it is not the sole determinant in being a successful wrestler. And like with all the baseline physical abilities that are banded about – such as a double bodyweight Squat and Deadlift – at some point that gains slow down and there is no further increase in sport ability from increasing those lifts. When someone first enters the gym and they are relatively weak. Increasing the Big Three will see instant improvements in their sport abilities simply from gaining strength. But as strength increases, the amount of time spent chasing it also needs to. And in general, once you reach double bodyweight in the Squat and Deadlift (and I would think one and a half times bodyweight in the Bench) chasing after more strength and bigger numbers in those lifts will only see you take time away from actually practicing your sport. The thing you’re actually trying to increase your skill at.

I spoke about this in the last article in relation to Bottoms Up Presses. I found as i closed in on my half bodyweight press for Level 2 that taking my BUP from 32kg to 36kg did nothing. I also found that using a 44kg bell for Get Ups did nothing to improve my Press (although that is more because the Get Up is a very good lift for me and I have always been strong at them. As an aside it could also explain why my Rotary Stability score is always so good – the initial move off the ground IS the RS test). What worked for me was highish reps with the 32kg for Presses and another day of low rep work with the 40kg as first written about by Kenneth Jay in his Beast Tamer article (found in the RKC manual).

Because, for us, the BUP is nothing more than a sideshow act. The Get Up is only tested up to 24kg. But the Press is tested at half bodyweight. See? Don’t let the trees get in the way of the forest. And don’t let the Drills take away your focus from the Exercise.

My focus for now is one thing – regain my mobility and do it as fast as possible. That means avoiding things that will either slow me down or see my likely use poor patterns to accomplish them. The CK FMS system comes complete with a list of suggestions for exercises if you screen particular ways – for instance if you screen poorly for Shoulder Mobility it is suggested that you do not do overhead work – avoiding Pressing, Snatches, Windmills etc. So that is what I am doing. I do a few (very few) reps of some Pressing patterns to maintain it. But I am not in the middle of Rites of Passage which sees peak weeks of 150 reps per arm being reached. In contrast I do 30 total for the week and my Get Up work is never truly vertical as I am only performing Partial Get Ups.

Once I have regained my mobility there are some things I have my eyes on doing, but first things first.

Don’t get carried away with trying to become the World Tall Kneeling Press champion. Or the Single Leg Deadlift champion. Use these exercises for what thy are designed for – to improve your abilities in key skills. Like with all programming if they aren’t helping you achieve your goal – which you will know from your training log – then get rid of them and start again. The constant process of check and test, check and test is the only way you will ever truly reach great heights in your training and programming.

And don’t forget to vote for me on Dragon Door TVs blog contest! Just go here to vote – http://www.dragondoor.com/media_center/dragon_door_tv/ scroll down the bottom of the page and then click on Andrew Read.

Pattern to Press

To add on to the last post about patterning I thought I would quickly talk about some variations of pressing that I use for different purposes. The benefit of this is that I still get to train the pattern – “same but different” – while correcting weaknesses or giving some parts of my body a break.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they first come to kettlebells is in asking “what bodypart does this work”? The answer is always the same – all of them. While this is easy to grasp for many getting them to understand this in relation to the press is much, much harder. For some reason everyone’s inner Arnold comes out and they immediately revert back to thinking that the press is just a shoulder exercise. This will lead to two things – injury and failing to press heavy.

I was lucky enough that last year, while training for RKCII, Master RKC Mark Reifkind took me under his knowledgeable wing and helped me out with my pressing. Every week he would send emails about what workout to do, how my form looked (every workout was videoed) and what to change and what to tweak. In a span of two months I learnt more about pressing than I had in years. (Again – that is the number one reason to have a coach/ mentor – immediate and continual progress. For more information on how you can benefit from this go to http://www.dragondooraustralia.com and fill in one of the forms at the top of the page). While following his instructions I began to understand more about the Press but also about the Clean. (While I have some big ideas about the Clean and it’s use as an amazing exercise in this case it is being used as a delivery vehicle for the Press and still needs to be trained well so that you have a solid platform to Press from). What makes all of the following interesting is that I am not particularly gifted for Pressing, certainly not like many of my RKC comrades and, in particular, not like my RKCII comrades. I had to spend a lot of time to figure this out all the while working around shoulder impingement, elbow and shoulder pain and still pass the test.

To get a really good idea about how a master presser goes about it check out this video:

Notice how he coils the body into a tightly wound spring and then his whole body explodes with the effort? The drive actually begins at his feet and the wave of tension flows up through his body into his pressing arm.

However, I have found, through playing around with Brett and Gray’s work in Dynami and Kalos Sthenos that removing parts of the body when trying to groove or improve a pattern is a great idea. Here are some variations and why I would use them:

Straddle Press – Sit on the ground with your legs spread as far as you can comfortably and sit tall. I use this drill with double bells. I find it particularly effective for when I have been sat at the computer for a long time and struggle to feel like my back is extended enough to get a solid overhead lockout position. Completely removing the legs from the equation forces you get your pelvis into the right position beneath you and forces you upright too. When i do this it feels like the middle of my back is about to snap in half I am straining so hard to get it as tall as possible. If you have trouble with double over head lockout this drill is for you. It’s best as a warm up as you can’t really work too heavy on it. I find a couple of sets of five worked in with some Brettzels work great.

Half Kneeling – The Half Kneeling position is useful for many things. If I have a client who struggles with either the Lunge or Hurdle Step in the FMS this will help it as well as the Rotary Stability test. The key is to get the base “as narrow as it can be but as wide as it has to be”. I try to get myself almost on the same line, with maybe a six inch gap between my down knee and the front foot in terms of width. The down leg must be straight down so that the shoulder is over the hip, the hip over the knee. From my position I can work to press either on the down side arm or the up side arm and both do different things. Pressing off the up side arm will be familiar to you if you have done any work with Kalos Sthenos and the Get Up progressions within. It is quite similar to Inline Pressing, except by removing the full legs from the equation people are often able to learn better core stability. Pressing on the down side arm will work very well to teach people to turn off their hip flexors when they sit up. This shows its head during the Get Up when the the straight leg flies up off the ground during the initial phase of the Get Up. By pressing from here, in a hip extended position, the abdominals are forced to switch on as the hip flexor is unable to fire while in extension. Both are great drills and very useful in your arsenal.

Tall Kneeling – I have been quite surprised at how heavy I am able to work up to in Tall Kneeling presses. This week I got three sets of three with the 32kg on both sides and could have done more. However, on both sides on the third rep of each set I noticed a slight pinch in my lower back. This tells me that during my third rep I have lost the stability in my midsection and I’m starting to lean back to get the weight up. The lesson is that my abdominals need to get stronger and I need to get tighter on my last hard reps. From standing this is unnoticeable so using this drill has made me more aware of what exactly is going in through my midsection while pressing.

Bottoms Up – I love Bottoms Up work. Presses, Cleans, Squats – I think they teach you valuable lessons about tension, stability and form. The huge bonus of the BU rack position is that it forces you to get your forearm vertical and keep it there while at the same time forcing you to crush the bell handle. As most will know this development if muscle irradiation is a key component of strength development. I’ve done BU Presses from Half and Tall Kneeling and from standing and believe that the lesson they teach you about how to get tight and stay that way throughout the entirety of your lift is essential to pressing bigger bells. The first time I pressed the 40kg I had not trained with anything heavier than a 24kg but I had been doing ROP with it in BU style. However, I believe that it does start to lose carryover to your regular press at some point, for me this was at the bell size below the target bell. So when I was able to BU Press the 32kg I stopped advancing towards the 40kg. Double BU Presses add their own unique challenge and you will quickly find out if you lack Thoracic extension and shoulder mobility when you start doing these. I have found BU Pressing to be my go to exercise when I am a bit sore in the elbows and shoulders. It forces you to do everything perfectly. Forearms must be vertical, shoulder packed, grip tight, body upright and maximally tensed. At times when my elbows or shoulders have been acting up I have still been able to BU Press and keep progressing – which was vital in the run up to RKCII.

Waiter’s Press – the Waiter’s Press is a press done with the body of the bell resting in the palm of the hand. Getting it there, in my opinion, should be done by flipping it there during the Clean. This extra addition of a little skill requirement in your training is a helpful way to boost motor skills such as hand eye coordination and leads to the WTH effect everyone talks about. The Waiter’s Press is really helpful for feeling shoulder packing. The way the bell rests in your hands seems to push the shoulder in more and it is very easy to feel the lat during the entire press and hold it tight to protect the shoulder. Additionally, Asha Wagner, Iron Maiden, tells me that using Waiter’s Presses is good for firefighters and other tactical personnel because it gets you used to pushing with a bent wrist – something that is forced on you in various situations.

See Saw Press – Pavel wrote about the See Saw Press in Beyond Bodybuilding and it quickly became a favourite of mine. I find it a great way to Press when my shoulders are tight or my body a little too fatigued to handle strict pressing. It allows a more body english to be used to get the bells up and is more like a double Side Press than anything. This means that you can do it with bells one size heavier than normal, or with your normal bells for an active recovery session. What I love most about it is the way it teaches you to drive off your opposite foot when doing it – an essential element of learning to press with the whole body as all actions start at the ground. Learning to produce force into the floor and then withstand the force of that as it goes through the body, linking it with the midsection is vital to both lifting heavy and athletic success.

For those looking at RKCII and struggling with their Press the first point of call has to be Rites of Passage from Enter the Kettlebell. However, at some point progress will stall and you’ll need a new direction. At that point, and you’ll only know when you reach it by keeping a good training journal, you need to swap some things around a little and use some specialised variety to keep your press increasing. I’m fond of workouts that include a set of assistance/ variety exercise then a set with your main bell, such as this:

Warm Up –

• 5,3,2 with progressively heavier bells. So 5 reps with a 16kg, 3 reps with a 24kg and 2 reps with a 32kg.
• 2 sets of 5 Straddle Presses with 16s.
• 1 set of 5 Tall Kneeling Presses with a 28kg.
• 1 set of 3 with 36kg Presses.
• 1 set of 1 BU Presses with 32kg.
• 1 set of 1 40kg Presses.
• 1 set of 3 Half Kneeling Presses with 32kg.
• 1 set of 1 44kg Presses. (Depending on individual ability at your maximal weight – i.e. how many singles you can get with it – would depend on how many of these top sets you may do. My usual goal would be 3-6).

And that’d be it for the whole workout. There is an option here to go through some assistance exercises such as Cleans and One Arm Swings but that is a post for another time. I’ll stress again how useful I think Dynami is – it is an unbeatable resource in helping to figure out some of the variations in pressing and how they tie into making you move better.

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Put the Square Peg in the Square Hole

I’ve received so many questions and comments about the last article I thought I needed to do a good follow up to it.

One of the things I see the most is people getting in their own way with training. You know, they do something and it works well for them. The logic then goes, “if I do X and the result is Y then if I do 2X I’ll get 2Y”. Running is a prime example of this – someone starts to run and they lose weight. So they think to themselves, “hey, if I run twice a week for thirty minutes and I lose a kilo a week then running four times a week will help me lose two kilos”. The reality is that probably won’t happen.

The same often happens even at RKC level. People see “snatch test” and panic. They start trying to snatch daily. No surprise they either wind up hurt or not improving.

I’m not sure who said it but the saying goes “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.  In other words, if you keep hitting your head against one particular wall why on earth would you suddenly one day expect the result to be anything different than the exact same kind of headache? If you’ve been doing a certain workout for a length of time and results have been less than spectacular, why would you continue doing it?

Really. Be honest.

I find the truth, in most people’s cases, is that their ego says “you must…”. And there is nothing worse, long term, than doing what your ego says.

Trust me, as the guy who has spent his life playing Maverick with his body, writing cheques that my frame can’t cash, you don’t want to be in this position. I’m going to, again, have to use me as an example for this as sadly it seems like I am about the dumbest client I have ever had.

In May last year (May!!) I attended CK FMS in St. Paul. At that time it was noticed that I had a fairly big discrepancy between my shoulder mobility on either side. That’s one of the biggest benefits of the FMS – discovering asymmetries.

However, given I was booked for RKCII only a couple of months later in July I was forced to skip addressing it. It’s not that the asymmetry isn’t important because it most definitely is. But strength requires some residual tension in the body and I knew that if I fully addressed my shoulder issues that it was likely my press would drop too.

In between May and July I started having some slight pain in my right shoulder. This was particularly concerning at the time because I recognized it as a smaller version of what I had gone through with my left one which ended up having surgery and part of my clavicle removed to prevent further damage. So when I finished RKCII I laid off the heavy pressing for a while. I don’t think I actually pressed until I attended the Dan John/ Pavel seminar in September and while it was pain free I still recognized that I had restricted movement even though I had been spending far more time on warm ups, mobility and avoiding overhead work (as emphasized in the CK FMS course).

Looking at my training diary I can see that while may not have been pressing I was still doing some overhead work. I had also done a six week stint of Kettlebell Muscle by Geoff Neupert (which I hate in a hate/ hate kind of way. He is truly an evil guy).  As well I started Olympic weightlifting under a fabulous coach and had been working towards a bodyweight full Snatch. So even though I had been taking it easy with overhead pressing I had still been doing plenty of overhead work.

So fast forward to now.

In the last twelve months I have, in a half hearted sort of way, gone about trying to fix my issues. The funny thing is this – if you asked anyone what my biggest problem should be they would tell you it would be my right hamstring which I tore off the bone years ago. At the time I went to CK FMS I was 2/1 for Active Straight Leg Raise (hamstring flexibility test) and a 1/2 for Shoulder Mobility.  But the tightness in my right shoulder had never had major trauma nor been operated on, so surely that should be the “good” asymmetry that is easy to fix?

In the last few months I have really been forced to change my training due to aggravating an old hip injury. This has seen me stop squatting with weight (I still squat to maintain that pattern) and I figured while I was at it that I would get serious about my hamstring flexibility and shoulders.

In three weeks I went from a 2/1 for ASLR to a 3/3! In other words, the injury that has seen me unable to raise my right leg up to hip height, touch my toes or kick above waist height has been fixed in only three weeks. Three weeks to fix a problem I have had for ten years. Three weeks to take me from likely to have an injury due to the imbalance to a safer point of view.

You know what I did?

It’s ground breaking.

I stretched.

Amazing, isn’t it?

I didn’t do any fancy FMS correctives. I didn’t use anything other than passive, relaxed stretching and some easy dynamic stretches that I have been doing since I was ten years old.

Can’t get much simpler than that.

The program I have been using is fairly simple. As Senior RKC Zar Horton says though “simple doesn’t mean easy”. First and foremost I make an effort to stretch regularly. This usually means I get at least four sessions in for the week although I have done as many as six. When you stretch so often it is important not to use the strength stretching methods that Pavel is renowned for too often in my opinion. They are simply too demanding, and like any other kind of strength workout require adequate rest. This ties in well with something I was told years ago by an elite gymnast – you only require one very hard stretch session per week. The others can all be easy relaxed stretches.

Master RKC Mark Reifkind write on his blog recently that once he realized that the greatest benefits in his training currently came from changing his mindset so that mobility and movement was his primary goal, not load. I have to say – it’s a difficult change to accomplish. But once I made the change instant improvement came with it.

Having cured my hamstring issue I am now attacking my shoulder with renewed zeal. Having had a positive result, like anyone, spurs me on to try to match that in another area. Charles Poliquin write years ago that he thought that six hours per week of flexibility for six weeks was what was required to create significant change in flexibility. Seems so easy, doesn’t it? But how many people do you know who stretch for six hours per week?

The changes in my mindset have obviously created changes in my workouts too beyond just stretching. Here’s my current structure –

In my mind I am working on one thing right now and that is the Program Minimum. However, it’s a much different version of the PM than in Enter the Kettlebell. My goal is to be able to hit forty minutes of both One Hand Swings and Get Ups with the 48kg. So maybe we should call this the Program Maximum (originally it’s been titled as the Titan Challenge and was a feature on the Dragon Door forum for a while but people have gone onto far sexier challenges such as whatever book is just out since then).

I break my week into two parts – one Get Up and the other Swing and then repeat both of these workouts. My schedule is Monday and Friday – Get Ups, Wednesday and Saturday – Swings.

Then I started looking into it even more and figured what I was really doing was Grinds and Ballistics and now just name my days that. Either a Grind Day or a Ballistics Day. Beyond those two distinctions I don’t care.

My warm ups are simple –

Super Joints, Indian Clubs and whatever FMS drills I am working on which is likely shoulder related stuff.

I then move to patterning work straight out of Dynami . For anyone who doesn’t have this book you should rush out right now and get it. Honestly, it combines the brilliance of Gray Cook and Brett Jones and as an added bonus has an extra “pro” section with comments from master RKC Jeff O’Connor.

The patterning work in it is brilliant and I’ve found that if I super set each exercise with an FMS drill that my body is incredibly different in performance than if I skip them. I think for many going back to work on patterning is somehow demeaning and they’re “too good” for it. “Too advanced” whatever that means. As the guy who has spent a lifetime throwing slow punches in mirrors to perfect form, or practicing my cleans and snatches with a broom stick I realized I have been patterning for a long, long time. Yet how many people will willingly go back and relearn movements, seek out the deeper skill within them and really master the lifts?

After my Dynami patterning work I spend time on my actual main workout. It’s pretty simple too – it’s either Get Ups or One Hand Swings. With the 40kg at the moment. And the Get Ups are not even full range Get Ups – they are partials up to only halfway.

As you’ll see on the videos here I work reasonably heavy. On the particular day we took the ballistics video I did my patterning and FMS work, did my heavy swings and then I did some other ballistics. You can see I did some double snatches and high pulls as well as some Power Swings. I actually did these as a complex going:

• 5 double snatches with 24s
• 5 double high pulls with 24s
• 10 Power swings with a 32kg.

Then I wrapped it up and cooled own with juggling a 24kg. Why? Cos juggling kettlebells is fun and we have a rubber floor. I don’t suggest doing this is you are one of those people who trains inside your own living room unless you like the inside of your house looking like it was strafed by fighter jets.

Understand that on other ballistic days I may do some heavy snatches, double swings, heavy cleans – any kind of other ballistic – it doesn’t matter as long as I satisfy two criteria. I must do One Hand Swings with the 40kg and the exercises chosen must be ballistics. That’s it. Again, simple, not easy (when was the last time you did ten – twenty minutes of One Hand Swings with the 40kg?)

The results so far have been great. My mobility is improving, my strength is clearly not an issue and overall my body feels strong, connected and fluid. My goal is to run with this for another few months and while fixing my shoulder mobility work my way up to using the 48kg for the same workout. Hopefully by that time I will have cleared my shoulder problems and be able to go back to working on more overhead pressing which will allow me to go back to full Get Ups which at that stage I will be doing with the Beast too (although some of that may depend on how my hip settles down).

So there you go. Watch the videos, buy Dynami, stop training based on your ego and start really looking to fix your mobility issues and create a stronger platform to work from.

If you enjoy my blog, and I sincerely hope you do, if you aren’t already aware of it there is a competition running right now that has me in the final. I’d really appreciate it if you could vote for me and help me to win.Go here to vote and then just go to the bottom of the page and click on Andrew Read. Thanks very much for your help.

Power by movement

Imagine for a moment that you were a drag car. All horsepower and tire shredding acceleration. So powerful that your brakes can’t even stop you and you need a parachute to slow down.

Now imagine you take your drag car out onto the street, in the real world where corners, pedestrians and potholes exist beyond the glass smooth track and safety of the controlled environment of drag racing. What now?

How do you get your fast and powerful car to turn, stop at the traffic lights and even idle for periods waiting your turn? A cursory look at the way a drag car is built will tell you that they are not designed for any of this.

Sure, it's fast and powerful, but how will you go taking this around a corner or to the supermarket?

Sadly, this is what most people are doing to their bodies via their own training. What good is performance if you can’t stop or turn?

Perhaps a better way to look at it, keeping in mind our drag car analogy is: it doesn’t really matter how fast you are unless you have the ability to stop. It sounds silly but I can’t count the number of young athletes I see who get sent to me with various problems and injuries. In a large majority of cases the problem is that they are over powered for their safety mechanisms. In drag car terms – they don’t have big enough brakes to slow down at the end of the strip. Sooner or later there’s going to be a crash and ultimately a bigger faster engine just means you will crash at a higher speed and do more damage.

As we age there is a tendency to think that we have mastered the basics and are able to forget about them and go and drill the more exciting fun stuff. The things that are fun. One of the things I see that annoys me the most is people adding in sport specific training into their regime. For many, they don’t even have enough skill at the basics to handle advanced training methods, yet this is what we see. Take, for example, the case with plyometrics. Everyone will tell you how great they are for explosiveness and speed production. What they won’t tell you is that for safe and even productive plyometric training to occur you need to be able to squat around twice bodyweight. In other words, the forces involved in performing these training methods are so great that unless you can safely handle at least a double bodyweight load you will not benefit from these methods.

Outside of the Olympic weightlifting gym i go to that has national squad members in it I don’t actually know anyone with a double bodyweight squat. Not one. I’m sure there are serious power lifters and olympic lifters who can do it, but outside of those rare few the actual number of people I see who can do it is zero. So how come I know plenty of people who perform plyometric drills? These same people eventually wind up in front of me with some kind of injury. It may be soft tissue, it may be joint related, but at some point injury will come. And it is their training that is solely to blame.

They just kept trying to shove a bigger engine into their chassis without upgrading the brakes, suspension and tires at the same time. One of the problems people face is not being able to figure out a way to get all of this happening all at the same time. Luckily for us, Brett Jones, Master RKC, and Gray Cook of the FMS system have teamed together to create a great product called Dynami. This book/ DVD combination is of the exact same quality as their other work such as the Kettlebells From the Ground Up and the Club Swinging Essentials guide.

What makes Dynami so special is that it provides a clear cut, done for you program to follow. You can choose to work on movement, strength or power following the plan laid out, which can again be tailored to fit individual needs or just followed as a script. The method contained in the manual is very easy to follow and will work for a variety of needs and issues. I’ve spoken with many RKCs who have PR’d in various lifts after spending time working on the quality of movement as laid out in Dynami. With sections devoted to movement symmetry, force production and with a special “coach’s corner: by Master RKC Jeff O’Connor the 100 page manual is filled with great information and detail – exactly what you’ve come to expect from Brett and Gray.

When you read things like Master RKC Mark Reifkind saying that he has taken his training to new levels by coming to understand that it is much more about movement than load, and that he has made new progress in his training, even in his fifties, by changing this focus. The focus on movement in both my case as well as Mark’s was due to a number of injuries, but the catalyst for this change is unimportant – by focusing on movement we are able to overcome obstacles such as movement restrictions and start making real training progress again. The inclusion of movement based patterning drills in your training, of increasing your focus on mobility and being able to move with harmony should be a focus at ALL ages, not just when you start noticing troubles. I view guys like Mark and myself as the crash test dummies for active lifestyles. We’ve been there and got the scars to show how not to do it. Now, we are talking about movement it seems like we are only preaching to the older guys. While it will definitely benefit the older guys, imagine how much more longevity you could have athletically if you started this now at twenty-five or thirty instead of waiting until things started to go awry to try to get back to your baseline?

No sense waiting till your car crashes until you look for ways to make it work better. And Dynami is one of the best resources out there for this. Move better equals move more and that benefits everyone.