Great Workout Today

I was in need of a good butt-kicking today. Just one of those days.. But, I need to be careful with my forearm which is in the final stages of rehab with some Active Release Technique, Ultrasound, and Bikram Yoga. Tough to administer a proper beating when you have to be careful with your forearm. My A.R.T. doctor (Dr. Baroody in Manchester.. very good. go see him if you have overuse injuries) says I can do anything as hard as I want as long as it doesn't hurt.. That eliminates heavy kettlebell cleans and snatches and pullups. Luckily, I'm into functional strength training and my toolbox has about 1000 different exercises in it. For todays workout I pieced together a two part workout because I was strapped for time and didn't have two consecutive hours for what I had planned.. 

This morning I started out with the jumprope.. I went for 20 minutes, no breaks, alternating between going forwards and backwards, working in crossovers, skiers, straddles, shuffles, hopping, sets of as many as 50 doubles. I finished the 20 minutes with two 500 revolution sets for speed with my beaded power jump rope from Lifeline. It weighs about a pound and isn't the easiest rope to use for real speed jumping. I did 500 revolutions forward in 2:58 and 500 backwards in 2:54.. Both new personal bests. After the 20 minutes of jumprope I did one set of 500 Hindu Squats.. With legs burning I was off to my A.R.T. appointment in Manchester..

This afternoon I started out with a 50 minute ride on my bike on the rollers. I got off the rollers and put together a killer upper body circuit that included:

Ring pushups with full superman

Jackknifes (V-ups)

Ring Dips

double clubbell shield cast with my homemade 10 pound clubbells. Great exercise for shoulder mobility, core strength and grip strength.. I did 4 rounds of this circuit in a 40:20 work:rest ratio.. Great day of full body conditioning and zero pain to my forearm :)   I'll be snatching the 44kg in no time!! 

Best,

kevin

Intense Day of Kettlebell Training in Nashua NH

I'm going to be running the first kettlebell workshop of its kind in the Southern NH Northern MA area on Saturday March 21 at the Dynamic Strength and Conditioning Gym in Nashua NH. The premier kettlebell gym in NH! The workshop will benefit kettlebell enthusiasts of all levels. Whether you have never lifted a kettlebell but want to realize the incredible strength development and fat burning benefits of kettlebell lifting or if you are an experienced kettlebell lifter looking for an in-depth kettlebell training session to really master your technique from an IKFF certified kettlebell trainer, this workshop will give you what you need.

The workshop will run from 9:00-4:00 on Saturday March 21st. I will cover all the fundamental lifts with the proper execution and breathing techniques for maximum efficiency, strength development, explosive power, and endurance. This is a great opportunity to get exposed to the benefits of training with kettlebells, learn the proper techniques, and/or improve on what you already know. Visit the website for more info. Space is limited.

Best,
kevin

Building a bulletproof core

There's lots of talk about core exercise and there's lots of misperception about what true core strength is. Traditional gyms and health magazines would have you believe that core strength is symbolized by a set of six pack abs obtained by doing lots of crunches. Well, that ain't core strength and your abdomen was not intended to crunch. In fact, on the list of useless core exercises, the crunch is right up there with the "sitting on your ass eating pop tarts" exercise. 

Your core is made up of a large group of muscles around the midsection and spine. The glutes, erector spinae, transverse abdominus, external and internal obliques, and there's a few others that are really Latin sounding and hard to pronounce.. Those are the ones that give you brute core strength so that you can function at a very high level in athletics and real life in general.. All the power you generate starts at the core and works it's way out through the limbs. An analogy of this is when you throw a rock into the water. You see the largest amount of energy right where the rock hit the water. As the ripples move out farther from the point of impact there is less energy.. If there is less energy produced at the center, then there will be less energy at the extremities. It works the same way with your body. The energy is generated from the midsection and works it's way out through the extremities.  The less power you can produce from your core, the less power you will be able to produce period. You do not develop this kind of power isolating the six pack muscles along the front of your abdomen by doing crunches. You develop this kind of power by engaging every muscle in your midsection. One of the most effective tools to do this is the kettlebell. And three of the top kettlebell exercises you can do is the kettlebell swing, the windmill, and the Turkish Getup.

The kettlebell swing is the most fundamental and probably most brutally effective exercise you can do with a kettlebell. It develops phenomenal power from the hips, glutes and hamstrings while engaging every muscle in your upper body to stabilize the weight as you swing it. The windmill is a mixture of a dead lift with a side bend while holding weight in an awkward position above your head. This exercise is also a great mobility exercise for the shoulder as it puts your shoulder through a very wide range of motion under load. People who have done thousands and thousands of useless abdominal crunches will try a windmill for the first time and struggle to perform the exercise with 10 pounds overhead. This is not an exaggeration. One of my favorite ways to do windmills is a double windmill.... Here's a double windmill with 140lbs (95% of my bodyweight). 

 

The Turkish Getup is another exercise that works every muscle in your body and requires a great amount of core strength, stability and mobility in order to perform it properly, especially with heavy weights. Like this one here with a 40kg kettlebell (88lbs).. 

Perform these three exercises regularly and you will develop more full body strength than you ever imagined. You will be amazed at your increase in mobility and you will probably find that any nagging lower back pains you might have suffered will disappear..

And since I was having fun with core exercise I threw this one in there as well. I called it a weighted Superman. Very difficult. Before you try this you definitely want to bombproof your core with a lot of power wheel work, windmills, and turkish getups :)

All the best,

kevin

MMA and First Responder Strength and Conditioning Training

First responders and MMA fighters have the same physical needs to be successful. They need full body explosive power and strength, maximum endurance, and the mental toughness to continue on when you’re up against it and things get extremely difficult, in the first responders case, life threatening. Here's an example given to me by a detective we've had training at the gym. He had to chase a guy down a street one night. It was at least a 1/4 mile sprint. After the 1/4 mile chase he has to subdue the punk with his heart rate through the roof. There's no rest. There's no timeouts.. There's no "Hey asshole, can we take a minute to catch our breath before I try to get these cuffs on you?".. Same thing with MMA. These guys have to go 5 minutes at a time at a super high intensity with no rest. They get 1 minute between rounds to catch their breath. Anybody who's done some of the workouts at my gym where I give you very limited rest knows how difficult this is. One thing is for certain, all else being equal, the person with better strength endurance will be successful. 

At Dynamic Strength and Conditioning we are now offering the only program of its kind in a gym. I've set aside 5 sessions a week open only to first responders and martial artists. These sessions are customized specifically to build strength endurance and explosive power that will translate directly to performance in the field or on the mat. This is done with high intensity functional strength training. Bodyweight training, kettlebells, ropes, tires, sandbags. No machines, no isolation exercises, and absolutely no bullshit workouts that will only help you look better in a mirror (for example, workouts like bi's and tri's, or quads and calves, or whatever else all the posers like to do  to get pumped up at the chrome and fern palaces like Planet Fatness). You will come to the gym and work your entire body harder than you ever have and you will definitely feel the results. Check our website for more details. There is nothing else around like this. This program is the only group program customized specifically for first responder and MMA strength and conditioning training in the NH, MA area.. Come down now and start training your body the way it was meant to be used.

All the best,

kevin

Mix it up with compound exercises

One of the most effective ways to work your entire body is with compound exercises. These are any exercise where you go straight from one move to the next.. Kettlebells are perfect for this. You can mix swings with front squats with presses. Or snatches with overhead squats. Or burpees with renegade rows. This allows you to really blast your entire body by changing the focus of the movement from one kinetic chain to another to another. It builds great strength, endurance, coordination, and explosive power while increasing your range of motion and mobility. In this morning's workout I mixed kettlebell thrusters with windmills. The kettlebell thruster is a great ballistic movement that works the whole body in a very explosive way and the windmill is simply one of the top two or three core exercises you can do. 

I started out this morning with 20 minutes on the jump rope. The last 1o minutes I would do sets of 100 forward and 100 backwards without stopping. The sets consisted of 20 two footed jump, 20 one footed alternating hopping, 20 Ali Shuffle, 20 straddles and 20 double unders.. Awesome cardio workout. I followed this up with 100 kettlebell thruster windmills with a 20kg kettlebell. The whole workout took me about 35 minutes. I felt really great after this one! Give it a try..

All the best,

kevin

Short Term Thinking Causes Long Term Nightmares

You know how we look at some of the stupid stuff teenagers do, shake our heads, laugh and say "they think they're immortal, wait till they're our age". I look around at the people my age and I shake my head, laugh and say, "they think they're immortal, wait till the hammer comes down and they're wishing they made some changes earlier on.". My point is it doesn't matter how old we are, almost all of us suffer from short term thinking. Living for the moment and not worrying about what's coming down the line. This is most obvious with our health. Many of us do a really great job taking care of ourselves. Eating well, staying active, making a positive impact on the people around us through our decisions and actions. Then there's those who wake up in the morning at 40 years old and 40 pounds overweight feeling symptom-free for the moment and decide that 2 for 1 egg mcmuffin deal will be perfect for the drive into the office to get fueled up for the next 9 hours on their ass. "Mmmmm, maybe I can stop at Wendy's for their new Baconator for lunch".. I wonder why they call it the Baconator. Sounds kind of angry. It's possible that half way through the sandwich you can literally hear your arteries start slamming shut as your on your way to your first massive coronary. I was listening to a DJ on the radio the other day bragging about being 100 lbs overweight and feeling great. I think the guy in the car next to me was listening to the same program. He was about 300 lbs, had the remnants of a jelly doughnut on the side of his mouth as he was smiling and nodding his head in approval to whatever he was listening to. 

So let me throw this out there and you can argue it if you'd like. You're not immortal and what you do today will most certainly affect your "golden" years as they like to call them. Want to know who calls them the "golden years"? The doctors and drug companies who reap the benefits of people's poor life decisions. Let me also throw this out there. If you're out of shape today, but feel "symptom-free", it's temporary and you're going to pay for it big time at some point. And it won't be a gradual slide, it will be a sudden plummet. You can choose not to believe this. That's the beauty of denial. Have another Baconator and wash it down with a six pack of Bud. Doctors drive around in Mercedes and live in mansions because of that attitude. 

People complain about not having time or money to workout.. Neither excuse flies. Everybody has time. You don't need to workout 2 hours a day to get a great workout. As we've proven day after day at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning, you can get a phenomenal workout in as little as 20 minutes if you're willing to work really hard.. Here's two examples:

Using just bodyweight do as many rounds as you can in 20 minutes:

10 burpees

10 situps

10 pushups

10 tuck jumps (two footed jump pulling your knees as high as you can, preferably to chest height. you can clap your hands under your shins at the top of your jump if you're getting your knees high enough)

10 pullups (assisted, unassisted, jump negatives or whatever modification you need)

A world class athlete would struggle to get 15 rounds. Somebody who just ate a baconator would struggle to get 2.. 

If you have two kettlebells of the same weight, or even dumbbells, then do the following:

In a 15:15 work:rest ratio, do each of the following exercises for 5 minutes before moving to the next.

double kb swings

double kb thrusters

double kb cleans

double kb front squats

(If you don't have kettlebells, then you can come to the only kettlebell gym in Southern New Hampshire and do workouts like this all the time :)

OK? I think I just destroyed any idea that you don't have enough time to get in a good workout. Everybody has 20 minutes in their busy day.

Another excuse is money. I can't tell you how many times I've had people tell me, "I can't afford it.". Really? Our bodies need certain things. Things we absolutely need are food, clothes, shelter, and exercise. Of the 4 things I just listed there is only one thing on the list that's free. Can you guess which one it is? Problem with exercise is that many of us don't have the motivation or knowledge to get productive workouts on our own which is where the gym comes into play. I'll admit that my gym costs more than Gold's or Planet Fitness.. But those gyms suck, unless of course you want to be a bodybuilder with a bunch of non-functional, range limiting muscle mass that only looks good in a mirror. "Results" like that may be useful at Planet Fitness, but they aren't useful here on Planet Earth. In my gym, every person who has walked through the door and stuck with us has seen real-world results that have led to a positive increase in their quality of life. Every one! That is not an exaggeration or some bold marketing claim. It's a fact. So what is that worth in the long run? In the long run it means less doctors visits, less prescriptions, less time in rehabs or nursing homes. It means better quality of life, more time with your kids and grandkids, it means aging youthfully. It means being as close to immortal as you're going to get. Is all that worth $3 a day to you now? If money is one of the reasons you don't workout, is it time to reconsider and try to figure out how to re-budget $3 a day to give yourself a better life? And that's only if the free method I've already given you doesn't work.. No excuses.. 

Here's my workout from yesterday.. 5 rounds of:

-100 bodyweight squats.. flat foot, "ass to grass" squats

-20 knuckle pushups.. 3 second repetitions. pushups done from knuckles to allow for a deeper range of motion through the shoulders. Slow, controlled negatives with hips, chest and nose touching the mat at the same time on the way down.

-20 jacknifes (aka V-ups)

-10 twisting hanging knee raises from a rope.. i made up this one yesterday because I wanted to make the knee raise harder. Anything done hanging from a rope is really tough on your grip and forearms. Adding the twist in the knee raise and making sure you get your knees up to your elbows every time is amazing core work. Brutal, effective bodyweight exercise.

Care to join me on the road to immortality?

All the best,

kevin

The Art of Resting

Resting. Taking it easy. How the hell do you do it? Those of you following along here or coming to the gym know how hard I push myself. It's an addiction, there's no question about it. Mentally, I have a very hard time letting up and giving myself a rest. Here's an example. In my workout log I haven't written the word "rest" for 9 days. The last 4 days' workouts consisted of:

Sun:25km of skate skiing. 2.5 hours non-stop.

Mon: Prison Workout:10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 

-pullups

-Power wheel rollouts

-25 yd of bear crawls (once per round)

-16kg double kettlebell thrusters

-jumprope x 20 (rounds of 200,180,160,140, etc...)

completed this workout in 23:28 working at about 85-90% max effort

Tue: bike- 60 minutes on trainer with 4x5min tempo intervals 

- 3x5 double getup situps with double 20kgs

-3x10 1 arm strict military press with 20kg

-3x2 kettlebell dragon flag

Wed: bike- 60 minutes on the rollers

50 box jumps on 36" box

100 hindu pushups

50 zercher lunges with a 61# sandbag

10 turkish getups with 24kg

By the time i was on the turkish getups i couldn't get 5 in a row on either arm. I can normally get between 8 and 10 with a 24kg. This tells me it's time to rest. So I rested today. I did nothing. I don't think I even demonstrated anything with heavier than an 8kg kettlebell during my training sessions. But is this enough? 

Overtraining is a real problem for a lot of people. There's plenty of really smart people out there who have done lots of research and written really smart sounding scientific papers to explain what it is and how it affects the body. I'll simplify it for you. When you work your body really hard it interprets this as an attempt to murder it. One of our really cool instincts is a mechanism called self-preservation which demands that we do whatever it takes to survive. Pain is a part of this mechanism. The purpose of pain is so that you are inclined to stop doing whatever it is you're doing to cause this pain. When you are driven and mentally tough you continually push through the pain and this really pisses your body off. In an act of self-preservation, the body reacts to this by adapting to the stress you're putting on it by building muscle mass in order to better defend itself from these crazy workouts you put yourself through. But every time you put yourself through a very difficult, intense workout a certain period of recovery is required. If you give your body enough recovery, then you get really positive adaptations to the stress you're putting on yourself. But if you don't give yourself enough recovery then the opposite happens. You stop making strength gains, you become lethargic, your sleep patterns get thrown off, you start getting nagging injuries, you get sick.

Seems like it would be easy to avoid overtraining, no? But it's not.. Mentally, it's very easy to think you always have to go really hard if you're going to continually make gains. Especially when you have people like me telling you it takes hard work to get strong and fit.. But it's equally as important to rest. I know what you're thinking "c'mon Kevin, who the hell are you to tell us about rest?".. Good point. And I'll be the first to admit that I train harder than I would put any of my clients through. But I'll also say that I'm at a different fitness level than most, and I've been training at a high intensity for years. I also take care to mix my workouts up enough so that I'm not overworking the same movements and muscle groups on consecutive days. Also, I'm usually good about resting completely at least once every 5 days and there'll always be some low intensity days thrown in. My energy level is through the roof most of the time and I don't get sick. When my energy level comes down I back off. 

I have people at the gym who still have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that working at a really high intensity for 20-30 minutes is all the body needs or, in some cases, can handle. But I watch them get stronger and in better shape than they've ever been in their lives. There's no way they can argue with the results.. But there's always the ones who think they need more. I tell them they don't but they'll show up every day at least once and sometimes twice a day, two or three times a week for several weeks in a row.. They start getting tired, they're always sore, their energy goes down, they get sick, they stop seeing gains. Guess what.. It's called overtraining and it sucks and it's time to back off when it happens. As hard as that may be mentally, it's what you have to do if you want to continue to make gains physically. Resting should be the enjoyable part, especially when you spend so much time busting your ass.. Trust me on this one.

Train hard, rest easy,

Kevin

Play Day

I tell people that come into the gym all the time that the best thing about functional conditioning is that what you do in the gym translates to what you want to do outside the gym.. This isn't a marketing ploy. This is a fact. I went skate skiing today for the first time this year.. Also known as ski-skating in Canada, (eh?) and Nordic Skiing in the Olympics.. It's like skating on cross country skis using really long ski poles to help you along. It's an absolutely phenomenal workout. Bicycle racers love it because it's one of the few low impact sports where you can get your heart rate up in the anaerobic zone for extended periods of time. There's a great nordic center at Waterville Valley that we go to. I think they have about 50km of groomed trails.. Today we covered about 20-25km in 2.5 hours. I was wondering what kind of shape I'd be in for skiing since I wasn't able to do as much biking this past year which is a great conditioning complement to the skiing. Instead I've been spending 5 or 6 days a week performing functional strength training at the gym. I'm happy to say that I was in better shape for the start of a ski season than I have ever been before.. I didn't get any of the typical first day shin splints or lower back pains, I was flying up hills.. For anybody out there who has tried to ski uphill, you know how difficult this is. It was an awesome day and I felt fantastic! And it's all because of the type of functional training I do at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning.. So when I tell you that this stuff works and it makes you able to function better at whatever it is you want to do in real life, you better believe it.

All the best,

kevin

Welcoming the New Year Hindu Style

I used to drink on New Year's Eve... Actually I used to drink on pretty much every eve. But that was a long time ago, and this is now... While people were sleeping off their 10th shot and 3rd bottle of champagne from last night's festivities I was doing Hindu Squats and Hindu Pushups this morning.. I started into my set of Hindu Squats and wondered if I could do 2009 without stopping. What better way to start 2009 than to do 2009 Hindu Squats? At about 335 I started questioning whether or not it was a good idea. Somewhere after 600 I decided it definitely wasn't a good idea. Not yet anyways.. I had never done more than 400 Hindu squats in a row, so going from 400 to 2009 is not the smartest way to increase my load without threat of injury.. My legs were pretty much on fire from about 400 on and I decided that I would get to 1000 and stop. It took me about 30 minutes without a break and I was walking funny for about 5 minutes afterwards.. But I hit 1000 without stopping and I'm pretty psyched about that! Then it was onto the Hindu Pushups. I did 200 of them.. First set I made it to 65, which is less than my max continuous of 85. I did the remaining 135 in 4 sets. The 200 Hindu pushups took me under 10 minutes. Not a bad way to start the New Year. 

For any cyclists out there, Hindu squats are a great cross training exercise. During long sets of Hindu squats, you can increase your pace until the lactic acid accumulates in your legs in a way very similar to the way it does during time trials or hill climbs. Doing long sets of Hindu squats is a great way to increase your lactate threshold so that your body gets better at metabolizing the extra lactic acid in your bloodstream when you start going anaerobic.

On another topic, yesterday I was thinking about what makes the gym such a cool place. Is it the old school feel, the kettlebells and gymnastic rings, Jake, the monkey bars??? All those things definitely add to it, but the thing that really makes the gym such a great place to be is the people that are coming. The people we have are awesome. They bring so much positive energy that it's really contagious. Everybody has different backgrounds, perspectives, shapes, sizes, ages, lifestyles and  fitness levels, but they all have one thing in common; they want to feel really good and enjoy their lives to the fullest. Everybody knows everybody else within 5 minutes of coming through the door. They workout together, they laugh together, they support each other. The energy is phenomenal. Compare that to the chrome and fern palaces (as Brooks Kubik calls them) like BF or WOW where you have a bunch of posers and walking poster children for roid rage.. You know the ones I'm talking about.. The apes that have the ripped up tank tops and walk around with their arms out like they're carrying a couple watermelons. They have this perpetual look on their faces like they smelled something bad. I look back on when I used to work out at those places and wish that there was something like Dynamic Strength and Conditioning around back then.. But, better late than never, right?

Keep bringing that energy! And, Alison, if you want to bring more of that home made guacamole and hummus, that works too :)

All the best,

Kevin