Thursday, July 24, 2008

Your Body... The Ultimate Training Tool

Sometimes I like to just leave the kettlebells and medicine balls alone for a few days and just workout using my bodyweight exclusively. There are hundreds of different exercises you can do and they are incredibly effective at increasing your strength, endurance, mobility, power, and agility. I like to pick two or three exercises and just cycle through them for 30 minutes to see how much work I can do in the 30 minutes. This is a great metabolic workout where you work at a high intensity for anywhere from 30 secs to a few minutes at a time with minimal rest. A couple of my favorite workouts are the Hindu Workout and the 30/300/3000 workout..

The Hindu Workout is alternating sets of Hindu Squats and Hindu Pushups. This is a fantastic full body workout that really increases your range of motion and mobility, and it really helps to increase your lactate threshold which is the point at which your body starts to produce more lactic acid then it can clear from the bloodstream. This is also known as the anaerobic threshold. The more you train at this level, the longer you can work at higher intensities, the more lean muscle you build, and the more fat melts off your body. During the Hindu Squats, you really start to feel this in your quads. When I do this workout I try to do as many Hindu Squats as I can in 3 minutes without stopping.. This really burns the quads after a while. Then, with a minimal amount of resting to catch my breath, I go right to Hindu Push-ups for somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds. The most important thing is to make sure that you are maintaining excellent form for the whole set. Right now I'm at 100 squats in about 3 minutes and 30 hindu pushups in about 60-90 seconds and then rest whatever is left until 5 minutes elapses. At this pace I have about 600 squats and 180 hindu pushups in 30 minutes. My goal is to get to 1000 squats and 250 pushups in 30 minutes.. I'll let you know when I get there... These exercises work you through a full range of motion on the feet, ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists, back so it's a fantastic mobility workout. Plus, it really gets your heart rate up and it's a super full body strength workout.. Best part is you need no equipment to do it. Actually, the best part about it is the feeling you have when you're done :)

The 30/300/3000 workout is a workout that my friend Jon Hinds designed for his groups at the Monkey Bar Gym... The idea behind this is to cover 300 yards of power wheel crawl (150 yds forward and backwards) and 3000 revolutions on the jump rope (1500 forward and backwards) in under 30 minutes.. In order to achieve this, you really need to complete the 300 yds of power wheel crawl in about 8 minutes, and then you still need to be able to get about 150 revs per minute on the jump rope.. When I do this workout I set cones 15 yards apart from each other. Then I power wheel crawl 15 yds forward, rest 3-5 breaths, crawl back 15 yds, rest 3-5 breaths... Do that 10x and you have your 300 yards.. By the time you get to the 6th or 7th set, this is very challenging (which is my way of nicely saying "it really starts to suck a lot").. On the last few sets 3-5 breaths isn't even close to enough for recovery but you just suck it up and go.. This is amazing work for your core and it's also very good for your mental toughness.. Then I'll hit the jump rope and I'll typically do sets of either 250 or 500 jumps forwards and backwards with minimal rest.. Last time I did this workout a few weeks ago I got it in 29:37! First time I ever got under 30 minutes. That was pretty exciting and it felt awesome when I was done... Doing this in a 300/3000 format may seem daunting at first, mostly because it is.. But you can start out at different levels. Try 100/1000 first with cones set 5 yds apart for the power wheel crawl.. Once you can do that in 30 minutes go to 200/2000 with cones set 10 yds apart for the crawl.. After that you go all the way to 300/3000.. If you don't have a power wheel (you should get one), or are having trouble getting those kinds of distances on a power wheel crawl you can substitute bear crawls for the power wheel crawls until your core gets strong enough to handle longer distances on the power wheel..

Give these workouts a shot. Set goals for yourself and work at it till you get there. You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. The best part is the results. You feel great and you look great. This is functional conditioning at its best..

Enjoy,
Kevin

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Challenging yourself...

Every now and then we need to challenge ourselves... It also helps when a friend challenges you.. My friend and mentor Jon Hinds, founder of the Monkey Bar Gymnasium put out a challenge a couple weeks ago that he's calling the 100 Yard Power Wheel Challenge. For those of you familiar with the Power Wheel I can see you cringing now with the thought of actually crawling 100 yards with the Power Wheel strapped to your feet. We use the Power Wheel at our fitness sessions regularly. It is easily the best full-body, core trainer available on the planet and it was invented by Jon...

Anyways, the challenge was issued and my first thought was "I think I can do that...". So I went out to a grassy field and paced off 100 yards, strapped on the power wheel and off I went.. I took a relatively slow, controlled pace and made it the 100 yards in a grueling 1:55. This really is a brutal test of physical and mental strength. It tests you physically for obvious reasons and it challenges you mentally because your mind is telling you to stop well before you reach 100 yards. So, armed with the knowledge that I could do it I needed to raise the challenge to myself.. Jon did the 100 yards in 1:37. Steve Maxwell, another of the top functional strength and conditioning trainers in the world is on video completing the challenge at 1:47.. I decided I needed to beat 1:30, cutting my initial time by 25%...

This morning we headed out to Stellos Stadium in Nashua, NH to get the attempt on video.. I was feeling pretty strong and I knew the turf stadium at Stellos would be a little quicker than the grass that I had done it on a couple weeks ago. With the power wheel strapped on I set off on a really quick pace and I knew I would be close to 1:30.. I held the pace for about the first 70 yards when the lactic acid really started building up in my core.. I sucked it up and pushed as hard as I could the last 30 yards and came in at 1:19!! 36 seconds faster than my previous time and well below my goal of 1:30.

I rested for about 2 minutes and decided that I wanted to try to do the 100 yards back to the starting point on the power wheel to see if I could do back to back 100 yard crawls. And then I thought about it for a second longer and wondered how crazy it would be if I could do it backwards after just doing it forwards a couple minutes ago.. Now we're talking a serious challenge. I set off from the goal line backwards.. I was going pretty good, not trying to set any speed records, I just wanted to see how far I could go. Realistically, I thought I would be lucky to make it 50 yards backwards. But I did. And I was hurting at 50, but I knew I could go another 10 yards. So I went 10 more yards and decided I could do 10 more. At 70 yards my body and my mind were pleading with me to stop, but having come this far, there was no way my knees were touching the ground until I passed the goal line.. The last 30 yards were agony and seemed like an eternity but I came across the goal line backwards at 1:58.. What a great feeling to push yourself to that level and succeed! Here's the video. Enjoy...


I highly recommend challenging yourself to new levels every once in a while... It keeps you strong both mentally and physically and it's a great feeling achieving things that you might initially have thought not possible.

Kevin

Thursday, July 17, 2008

You can and you will!!

I believe the two most self defeating words in the English language are "I can't...". Man, if I had a dollar for every time I've heard those two words.. As a personal trainer, I hear them a lot with the people who are coming to me for the first time. We'll get into a workout and I'll demonstrate an exercise or ask somebody to push themself to another level and they'll respond "I can't do that..".. To which I reply, "Of course you can, and you will!".. The body is a very powerful thing, but the mind is even stronger. If you tell yourself that you can't do something then you are done before you even begin. And the worst part is that if you fail you accept it easily because you already decided that you couldn't do it... We were at an early morning workout a few weeks ago doing kettlebell presses and one of the women was really in a groove with an 8kg kettlebell so I asked her to try the 12kg.. Her response was "I can't do that, it's too heavy..", to which I responded "Of course you can".. She really works hard on a daily basis and I knew with the proper motivation and mindset she could easily press the 12kg.. So loaded with the mindset that she could press the heavier weight we started out with just one rep at a time. It's important to focus on just one at a time so the mind has an easy goal to focus on.. She easily got to 6 and then got another 2 reps out of it.. She was very proud, as she should have been, and what's more I don't think I've heard those two words "I can't" come out of her mouth since..

We can all achieve anything with the right attitude.. There are times when we may not be at a point where we can achieve a goal yet, but if we keep trying we can get there. Don't ever give up. I'm reading a book about an old time strongman, Joe Greenstein, who was known as the Mighty Atom. He was a sickly, small boy of 12 years old given no more than a few more years to live when he came across a champion wrestler named Volanko who took him under his wing. When Volanko asked Joe to perform a task and Joe responded "I can't", Volanko showed him an ant carrying something about 10 times it's own weight.. Volanko said, "you know why the ant can carry a burden many times it's own size? because he doesn't know he can't".. The same is true for all of us. Be strong mentally and you can achieve anything..

Kevin

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Getting Results and Having Fun!

We have an outdoor Functional Interval Training workout running at 6:30am at the Town Field in Pepperell.. We started it up on a rainy Monday morning in April with 5 people and this past Monday we were up to 16 participants! At our last workout we had a circuit setup where we were tossing 8-16lb Dynamax balls 10 feet in the air, battling 50 foot 1.5" ropes, performing bodyweight hindu squats, hindu push-ups, and bench dips... Everybody is at a different fitness level but everybody worked each exercise to their own level and everybody is seeing and feeling the results, both physically and mentally. Physically, everyone is getting trimmer and leaner, losing inches while gaining a lean muscular form. Mentally, we're all developing a mental toughness by challenging ourselves and pushing ourselves to new limits. The energy and enthusiasm is contagious and it's really been a great experience for all of us.. Can't wait till the next workout tomorrow morning :)

Kevin
Dynamic Strength and Conditioning

Redefining the fitness world with functional conditioning

Remember when we were young and exercise meant running, jumping, climbing, crawling, wrestling, and playing at the playground? When we used to play sports with our friends at a local field and it wasn't organized? We used to ride our bikes or walk everywhere instead of getting a ride? We used to be in great shape! At some point a lot of us lost that. And when we decided to get back in shape somebody told us we needed to go to a big impersonal gym full of mirrors, juiced-up bodybuilders, and shiny machines. In these gyms, exercise means jumping on a treadmill, elliptical machine or stationary bike while watching TV or reading a book. Or doing sets on weight machines performing isolation exercises on our biceps, triceps, pecs and calves. This is not the type of exercise the human body wants. It's not useful, functional, or even remotely fun.

My goal is to put the fun and function back into getting and staying fit. Using whole body, natural exercise I train the body in the way it was meant to be used. I train with full body movements using bodyweight resistance, kettlebells (the best full body exercise tool ever invented!), medicine balls, resistance bands, power wheels (best core workout, period), climbing ropes, tractor tires, and the list goes on.. The workouts are fun and challenging and I can honestly say I am in the best shape I have ever been in.

Check out Dynamic Strength and Conditioning and get in the best shape of your life...