I Need to Get in Shape First....

I know hundreds, if not thousands of people from my 18 years of coaching and now the last year of being a gym owner of the top functional conditioning gym in New England. When talking to people, the conversation inevitably turns to fitness and "how are things going at the gym?". Everybody has heard the stories about the gym. How hard the workouts are. The crazy things that people are put through on a daily basis. One of the funnier things I hear from time to time when I ask people when they're going to start working out with us at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning is, "I need to get in shape first". This tells me two things. First, people understand that to REALLY get in shape, they need to be doing what we're doing at Dynamic. They understand that their routines of jogging on the conveyor belt and working one or two muscles at a time on weight benches and machines is doing little more than providing their ego with a false sense that they're actually getting fit. The second thing it tells me is that they really don't want to work as hard as necessary to get in shape. Because if they did, then they would, and they wouldn't spend another second wasting their time "getting in better shape" at Planet Fatness. If you want to get in better shape then you need to do what we're doing. Whether you do it with us, with others, or by yourself doesn't really matter. Whether you use kettlebells, medicine balls, bodyweight exercises, a rowing machine, or some combination of all of it, doesn't really matter. The only thing that will get you in the kind of shape that we're in is to do the type of training that we do. Functional exercise, training full body movements with and without resistance, at high intensity.

In the past week I've realized just how strong my lifestyle has made me. Notice, I'm not calling it a workout routine because it is absolutely not just a workout routine. It is a complete dedication to total health and wellness of the body and mind. It's a lifestyle. The workouts are a subset of the whole package. Anyway, last week I was out on my mountain bike on a loop I created for cyclocross training. Awesome 5 mile loop through single track, fields, fire roads, and some paved section.. Towards the end of the loop, I come out of the woods onto a dirt road with a fast descent. I was coming down the hill at about 30mph and it starts to come into a pretty hard corner with all the big yellow arrows and a sign that "recommends" 15 MPH. But I'm thinking, what the hell, I'm on my MTB with the fat tires, I'm just going to lay into the turn and be fine. So I tried taking the corner at 30 MPH. I laid into the turn and I got my bike to the point where you feel like if you were to turn any tighter your wheels are sure to come out from under you. This point is reached much quicker on a slippery dirt road than it is on paved. Problem was, the road wasn't done turning. I quickly realized I was going to go off the road and immediately started scanning for a safe exit. This all took place in about 10 milliseconds. It was all woods, except the point where I was heading, which was a ditch followed by woods. I started hitting the brakes trying to get as much speed out of the bike as possible before hitting the ditch. I got down to about 20MPH, went straight into the ditch, flipped over the handlebars, landed heavily on my head and hip, had the bike land on my back, did several somersaults for another 10-15 feet and popped right back onto my feet like I did it on purpose. I was standing there and the adrenaline rush felt, and even sounded, like a beehive buzzing in the middle of my head, kind of like where my brain should have been. I immediately realized that I was standing which was a positive. One arm was bleeding from a few places, and my hip was really hurting but other than the quarter sized hole in my shorts that revealed what looked like a piece of cheese pizza with extra tomato sauce, I couldn't really tell how bad the damage was under the shorts. It felt pretty bad. I picked my bike up, checked the wheels, bars, brakes, chain, got back on and rode home which was about a half mile away. The bike was OK thanks to the fact that it landed on me in the crash which did a nice job of cushioning it. When I got home I got off the MTB and jumped on my cyclocross bike for a few laps around the yard. In the yard I've setup some obstacles and chicanes similar to what you find in a 'cross race. This is where I work on my technical skills. I was pretty banged up, but the injury-induced atrophy wasn't going to set in for a day or two so I figured I'd better get the technical work in now while I could. Turned out I was a little too banged up to get anything useful out of it so I gave it up after a few laps. I went inside and got out of my shorts which showed a much bigger piece of cheese pizza with extra tomato sauce on my hip. Got cleaned up, put a healthy dose of neosporin on arms and hips, and ice packs on my my hips and shoulders, sat on the couch and started to dread the fact that I was going to be wrecked for a long time. At 42 years old, it takes what seems like forever to heal from injuries and I figured the impact to my hip and shoulders would be debilitating. This is where the story gets weird....

I know how long injuries used to affect me. I had every expectation to get up Friday morning and not be able to move because I figured my hips would be locked up. But I got up Friday morning and I was OK.. A little tight, but OK. This made no sense. I took the wrapping off my hip and the wound looked half healed. My shoulder had full mobility. The welt on my back from where my bike landed on me was gone and there was hardly a bruise left in its place. I was an X-man. I was healing like Wolverine. It was amazing! I went and ran the morning sessions at the gym. During a break in sessions I did a 20 minute session of 1-arm kettlebell jerks with a 20kg kettlebell where I performed 300 jerks. 13,200 lbs jerked overhead in 20 minutes! I left the gym at 1:00 and did a 75 minute bike ride with a 45 minute tempo interval at 225W. What the hell was going on? I wasn't supposed to be able to move today. Maybe the second day will be worse? The older you get, it almost always takes two days to really feel it, right? Not this time.. The next day I was even better. Shoulder was still a little too unhappy to do more than 10 pushups, but I was able to rip out three sets of 12 pullups pain free.. Took it easy the rest of the day. Sunday I was back on the bike for an absolutely brutal interval session. Wolverine... Except without the really cool foot long swords that come out of his fingers. Those would get in the way of my kettlebell training anyways, so I'm just as happy to only have the healing powers.

Then on Tuesday I was out on the MTB again on a loop that I've done many times in the past. I hit a section a little awkwardly, jammed the front wheel and flipped right straight over the bars again. Jumped up, back on the bike, and finished the loop 4 minutes faster than I've ever done it before. Yesterday I was messing around in the gym on the ropes and a new rope ladder that I just installed...

How many 42 year olds do you suppose can do this? 1 in a 1,000? 10,000? 1 million? Hell, how many 20 year olds do you think can do it?

I'm telling you all of this for one reason, and one reason only. What I have isn't magic and it isn't anything that any of you reading this can't have. It's actually quite simple, which is lucky for me because, really, I'm a simple man who likes simple things. I can do things now that I couldn't ever do before at any age. And it's all because of the choices I make every day and the hard work that I put my body through. It's about eating right and making healthy decisions. It's about working my body hard, and allowing it to recover properly following the hard efforts. These are simple things. There's no pills, no powders, no magic workout secrets that are guaranteed to (insert magic guarantee here) in 30 days!

So let's get back to the person who says "I need to go to the gym to get in shape first, before I start working out with you".. In a word, bullshit. There's no amount of running to nowhere on a conveyor belt, climbing stairs to an imaginary 120th floor, preacher curling, bench pressing, or pec-decking, that is going to get you in shape to do anything useful.. If you want to get in shape, you need to train functionally. Train movements, not muscles. With resistance, without resistance. Get active. Hike, bike, kayak. Climb on things. Crawl around once in a while. Most importantly, have fun. Your training should be a means to an end. It is not an end in and of itself. I don't do functional strength and conditioning workouts so that I can get better at functional strength and conditioning workouts. I do functional strength and conditioning so I can be better at functioning in my real world activities. It makes my life better. It makes it so that I can go out and push the limits in my real world activities, like mountain biking, and if I crash, then it's OK. My body can handle it. My efforts make it so that I can throw a 50 pound pack on my back on any given day and hike out in the woods to see the most beautiful, most remote areas of the country. That's what my training has done for me. That's why functional strength and conditioning makes my life better.. If bench pressing and preacher curling makes your life better then I would argue that, first, you need to get a life. Second, you need to start working out with me and the rest of us at Dynamic Strength and Condtioning :)

All the best,

kevin