In a recent article on Breaking Muscle I outlined Phase One of training and gave some examples as to what a sample session might look like. The thing about Phase One is everyone feels too good, too advanced, too something to allow themselves to go back and do it.

Like with most training people aren’t everything they think they are. They’re not SEAL/ astronaut/ ninjas. They’re forty-something year olds who haven’t done anything active since high school over half heir life ago. And even if they have done something active there’s a fair chance they weren’t really doing it at a high level. Like the people who tell me they’re martial artists. But they train twice a week – sometimes – can’t touch their toes and are overweight. But in their heads they’re the love child of Royce Gracie and Bruce Lee.

The thing is that most people have very black and white ideas about training. They think, for instance, that the FMS is corrective only. No, the screen identifies issues, the corrective work addresses them, but then we segue into performance work. The final correction of the ASLR series (which test active hip flexion and extension) is the deadlift – hardly what most people have in mind when they think “corrective”. And, taken a step further, if we wish to go from slow strength to speed and power production the logical extension of that is the swing.

And that’s the problem – because people don’t understand the extent and range of what these concepts entail they immediately shun them. It’s not helped by most trainers not having much of a clue either. Like those who do RKC and feel that all they learned was some stuff about kettlebells. But like with the secret hidden gems in the FMS system what they really learned was all about sound lifting mechanics, principles of movement and strength production and all those skills are transferable to any type of lifting as well as all sporting actions.

Returning to Phase One isn’t punishment or being overly cautious either. A good friend of mine, Corey Howard, sent me a message today saying how after reading Phase One he went out and crawled for time and has woken up today with the front panel of his body lit up as well as his delts and traps. If that’s what happens to a guy who is in killer shape already gets from Phase One training, what’s stopping you?

The benefits of Phase One are simple – adding athleticism and shoring up weaknesses. Phase One is movement in all directions but often on the floor using quadruped movements and includes rolling of various types. It is animal movements done both fast and slow as well as static holds. Outside the gym it is easy endurance work – hiking and easy runs and rides are usually the easiest ways for people to get this. At RPT we actually have a Sunday session with our clients who are getting ready for the Melbourne Super that is 9+km of walking and running.

One of the most important things about the easy runs is the way they help rebuild the body. Remember, that the aerobic system is the thing that makes sure your immune system is strong, allows you to be a more effective fat burning machine (again highlighting how training for performance will give you aesthetic benefits incidentally) and helps you recover between hard efforts within a session. So having clients now adding in some longer aerobic work it’s interesting to see how their bodies are changing from that one simple addition. Not to mention that learning to continue despite hardship is a valuable lesson from longer sessions. In the gym it’s easy to do ten reps in twenty seconds, feel a bit out of breath and stop. When you’re faced with an enormous steep hill though you just have to keep going and deal with the discomfort. I personally believe that being able to dig in and persevere is an important skill in life, just as much as it is athletically.

So don’t feel like you’re too good for Phase One. If you have any asymmetries or weakness that needs addressing it’s for you. If you need to build base endurance it’s for you. If you need some actual athleticism – such as being able to do cartwheels and turn or step in multiple planes – then it’s for you. It’s even for you if you need to build some mental strength.

With the second Australian Russian Kettlebell Instructors Certification (RKC) being held this past weekend I thought I’d take the time to write a few words to all the trainers out there. This isn’t just for RKCs either, or even for people who just like kettlebell training, but for all personal trainers.

Just like there are many different businesses that cater to every different type of person, there are plenty of ways to be a personal trainer. Some of them may work for others, but there are some that will always work for everyone. What makes it easy for RKCs to figure out how to run their business is that the path has been well trodden by thousands before them, and that we actually even give you a reminder of how to behave on the back of your certificate. It states that as RKCs shall represent both themselves and the RKC with honour and dignity. That we will treat out customers and others we meet with respect and professionalism. To display our strength with modesty and be alright saying “I don’t know” when asked a question we don’t know the answer to. Most importantly it says that we will always seek to continue our learning and education so that we may become even better instructors.

That’s a pretty good starting point if you ask me. No confusion there about some glorious greater good or whether we’re trying to create world peace – just professional instructors who act as decent human beings. That should be the goal of most businesses in my opinion. Obviously, if you work for a big bank, major pharmaceutical company or the government none of those rules apply because the goal for them in their daily work seems to be to act like the biggest assholes possible and give it to everyone around them as hard as possible like it’s their first night in prison. But I digress…

The tricky thing about personal training though is that clients can take on so many forms and psyches that it can be a minefield trying to appeal to your target market. For instance, let’s assume that having done the RKC your business focuses on kettlebell training, like Read Performance Training does, and that the majority of your clients come to you for fat loss. That would be a large percentage of the fitness industry, in terms of the fat loss, and then a special niche for the RKC kettlebell training aspect. So your clients walk in the door expecting to see a lean fat fighting kettlebell expert…are they seeing what they expect to?

I have to say that society as a whole is in worse and worse shape. Standards are lowered across the board from the military to law enforcement and that also trickles down to personal trainers. I can tell you now that the guys and girls I worked with in my first gym were hard bodied studs and studettes. No flabby tummies and no one who didn’t pray at the alter of the squat rack weekly. We all cut our teeth on Arnold and Bruce Lee (even the girls) and it wasn’t unusual for us to train together and really see if we could make each other vomit. I can remember one particular leg session – twenty sets of squats at various weights – that I thought I had survived only to finally pull up outside my house and suddenly realise I needed to get my lunch out of my system immediately, all over the sidewalk, and right almost on my neighbor’s feet as they came by walking their dog. That kind of work environment is hard to find.

But think about your own position as a trainer, role model and leader of fitness to your clients and the world at large. Statistics don’t lie. People can moan about the BMI not being a great measure of many things but the fact is that there is a wealth of research on it and how it correlates to poor health, diabetes, heart disease and many other factors that are tied in with obesity. In Australia (and the USA) the BMI figures show us that roughly sixty percent or two in three adults are overweight or obese. To put this in perspective the cancer statistic in Australia is one in three. I used to think that fat loss training was for trainers who couldn’t figure out how to train people for performance. But looking at the statistics, and at the public health cost of looking after the obese who will ultimately cause far more of a long term strain on our health system, fat loss training IS easily as important as curing cancer. In fact, given that obesity is now classified as a “disease“, as much as I may disagree with it, it makes me wonder what possible role personal trainers have long term in the eyes of health services.

As the front line of obesity treatment – before doctors and dieticians – we need to be setting a positive example for our clients and the rest of society. So let’s ask ourselves two questions:

• Are we setting a good example? And,
• If not, how can we do this better?

Like I mentioned above with the different types of businesses we need to acknowledge that different customers will respond differently to different types of trainer. So, as much as it pains me to say it, I have to admit that a super lean, cover model ready trainer may make some people feel incredibly insecure and actually be too much for them to deal with. But this shouldn’t be an excuse for trainers to be slack with their own professional standards. I often tell new trainers when I lecture that you don’t need to be able to run a sub-three hour marathon, or bench press a house, but you need to look like you could run around the block without dying of a massive infarction (just love that word) or that you don’t even know what a bench press is. So when we’re talking about kettlebell trainers and how new clients will be seeking fat loss and toning advice, what we should see is a personal trainer who clearly knows kettlebells well, and can still their toes. I’d even go so far as to say that RKCs should always be able to spot test any of the skills they’ve previously done instantly and pass. If the test weights are too much for you mostly then you have work to do. Likewise if the snatch test induces fear and loathing in you – that is a warm up., nothing more. A hard warm up, for sure, but still just a warm up.

The body shape thing is always a tough thing to speak about. Society has no problem labeling people as cheaters, drug addicts, gamblers…but if you call someone fat or overweight everyone looks at you like you’re a baby killer. I like to keep it simple – if you can’t pass the RKC tests as a trainer at whatever body weight you currently are then you’re probably too heavy. The RKCII tests in particular are a great way to check your strength to weight as well as whether or not you are actually in what would be an optimal range. I’ve seen plenty of heavy guys press some incredible objects and not even be able to do a single pull-up. Perhaps the thing they should really be trying to press is themselves away from the dessert buffet?

The RKC is very much about athleticism. We’re not concerned about the development of only a single athletic quality, but about overall athleticism, and body fat levels are very much a part of them. Not only that but your clients and colleagues, whether you like it or not, will judge you based on your appearance. While that may seem shallow it need to be remembered that the prime reason for people to seek out personal training is vanity and weight loss so that they gain self-esteem back that may have been lost for decades. Why would they go to an unmarried marriage counselor? If your role is to provide fat loss/ kettlebell training then shouldn’t you look like you are on track with your own diet and handle kettlebells with ease? The best way to do that is to work at them constantly. Every day focus on diet and improving your skills as a trainer, both the physical skills of lifting as well as your communication and interpersonal skills.

So beyond acting like a decent human being, make sure to work hard so that your clients will see you leading from the front and follow suit. The world may depend on it.

I recently wrote an article for Breaking Muscle called the SMMF, or Single Movement Mind Fuck.

The full article is listed here. The purpose of the drill was simple – to test the self-imposed mental limits we often put on ourselves, and by pushing those limits open ourselves up to higher levels of performance. The caveat is that the gates to higher performance are opened only through the passage of suffering. True, great suffering is at the heart of all endurance sport. In fact, most endurance communities are built around a communal love of suffering. But the thing people miss is that truly epic suffering, the kind that really stretches those limits, cannot be an every day event.

Having actually put myself through workouts in the past designed solely to see how much muscle soreness I could generate in myself I can tell you now that even the hardest of hardcore trainees will eventually buckle under daily epic suffering. (How sore was I able to make myself? On this particular body building split I came up with I would be sore for the entire week after with those muscle groups only clearing up the day before I was to train them again. Because I was training five days per week this meant that my entire body was crippled with muscle soreness every day all week long, for weeks straight.) At some point they’re going to have to throttle back out of self-preservation, or they’ll quit because, let’s face it, it’s no fun being so sore you can’t walk for weeks straight. So the SMMF was never something I wanted people to try each week as a built-in test. It was a once every now and then kind of thing, like maybe once a year or every six to eight months.

But like with many things people took a good idea too far. I was getting emails off people asking how to progress it and what kind of program they could follow to get better at it. Only one guy expressed relief when I told him not to repeat the workout for the second week in a row and try it again in about six months. For the same reason I wouldn’t tell anyone to run a marathon for two weeks in a row I wouldn’t suggest following the SMMF as set out in that article as is two weeks in a row. The key is not the workout, but the development of toughness. It’s possible to do other sessions that work the same aspect without bashing yourself into the wall that is that particular SMMF.

Workouts like 300FY, for those familiar with Gym Jones, are a good example. As is something like Tabata work on an Airdyne. Or a body weight movement plus a hold such as burpess plus either a push up or squat hold as the “rest”. A few rounds of those will have you cursing me just as much, and doubting your ability to get through it. But it doesn’t really mater what you use as long as it isn’t the same session. Because all you’re trying to do is boost GPP you need to keep the stimulus general – even the one that is not physical but mental. If all you do is the exact same SMMF you’ll get good at that, but if you then have to do something different you’ll just go through the same mental issues as you would the very first time you did SMMF. So don’t keep just your sessions general, but keep your training within them general too. Work mobility, strength, fitness, and work mental toughness.

I’ve got some wicked SMMF variations that we use for soul crushing at Read Performance Training. The kind that take you from a guy who thinks doing a few kettlebell swings is tough to signing up for Spartan Race and doesn’t even blink. Functional strength isn’t just a physical quality but a mental one too. It’s only when pushed well past your point of comfort that you can discover things about yourself and extend your boundaries. While tests like the five minute RKC snatch test are not a bad test, they are only five minutes. What happens at minute six? There’s something to be said for longer, extended mental tests – because ultimately all feats of endurance are mental. That’s why you need SMMF in training, but why you also need to make sure that the tests are both long and short to round out your toughness.

One of the things I often hear from people is that they don’t have time to get in shape or they don’t know where to start. Living in Melbourne makes getting in shape easy. Whether it’s losing weight, getting stronger, gaining the sort of functional strength and fitness you need to become a firefighter or getting training for a Spartan Race, Melbourne has enough training options to keep you busy for a lifetime.

Let’s cover one of the biggest hurdles for people first. When you were a kid you used to love running around, going until you could barely breathe, quickly recovering and doing it again. Life was fun. There were monkey bars, slides, games to play and hours and hours in the day to move and play. And then adults came along, forced you into a chair and made you stiff and tight. Sitting is our generation’s smoking. There may be nothing we do that is more damaging to our bodies than sitting. Research shows that sitting places more pressure on the lower back than even lifting weights poorly does. Not only that but it shortens and tightens many of the muscles we need for movement making you feel old and stiff. But do you know how to reclaim that youth and that feeling of effortless movement? By moving more. Movement cures lack of movement.

But the biggest problem we’ve got is that because you don’t move much when you do decide to move you’re no good at it – you’re stiff, tight and weak. That’s no fun. And in today’s fitness world no one has a “start sensibly here” plan. They have “Insanity” and “Extreme fat loss” plans that start with very high expectations of your current fitness levels. Did you start with Insanity at age six? Given that’s the last time you may have moved often what makes you think that you’re in better shape after being sedentary for twenty years than you were at age six when you ran daily? No wonder people hate exercise – they begin with something that’s too hard. That’s like walking into a martial arts school for your first class and being expected to spar with the black belt world champion every night. Sure, you’ll get better fast, but man are you going to cop a world class beating before you do. And if you know that once you walk in the door to that training hall for the night that you’re going to cop a world class beating, well, how much will you enjoy the thought of training?

So the very first step to getting in shape is to find something scalable and very definitely within your grasp. Fitness is not a race but a lifelong journey. In the grand scheme of things what good is one salad today versus twenty years of poor eating in comparison to a lifetime of healthy eating and one bad meal which is then just a drop  in the ocean, covered by all the good food you’ve eaten previously? It’s the same with exercise – what we need is to find something that can become your ocean, something that you can build up a massive volume with. The only way to do that is to start with easy. We can get to hard later, but if we have to choose between easy sessions daily and a hard session once per week – the ocean versus the drop – we should pick easy.

The absolute easiest thing that everyone should be doing more of is walking. Walking is not really exercise. It’s transport. And up until only about a hundred years ago when the first mass produced cars started coming out we walked everywhere. But beyond human evolution (as if there could actually be a bigger reason) there are other reasons to walk. Firstly, walking has a massive therapeutic effect. The rhythmic action is good for flushing muscles with fresh blood and removing waste products from harder workouts and has also been shown to be good for spine rehabilitation. Not only that but it is a powerful aerobic exercise. The fitness world is filled with Insanity and other types of HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). The problem with this is that our body is designed to do things at low intensity too. And just like a car we can’t risk running our engine at redline all the time – there needs to be some easy miles done too. Mike Robertson has done a great job in this post here talking about the benefits of aerobic activity over HIIT training. What you should see is that there are a great many reasons to use longer, slower forms of training. From a personal viewpoint I know that I have never felt better than I do now with a good mix of easy runs, some maximal strength work and one or two harder interval type sessions each week. I wrote about my current training split over here on Breaking Muscle and also talked about how useless it is for most people to be training a single specific exercise long term given their goal is actually to “get fitter”. When your goal is something as broad as being in decent shape you’re better off being permanent cross training mode and following something like the split I talk about in that article.

The next step to developing functional fitness and strength – say like the kind you need to get in the MFB, SOG or even the military – is to again look at broad fitness qualities. Strength, for instance, a cording to many seems to only come in one flavour – maximal. These people think that the only rep range you need to work in at all times is from one to five reps. I hate to break it to these guys but what happens if you’re fighting a fire and need to do something that lasts more than ten seconds? While there is carry over and greater efficiency found from high levels of maximal strength I’d rather fight fires with the guy who can lift 100kg twenty times non-stop than the guy who can lift 200kg once. Because while the guy who can shift 200kg is going to look impressive in the gym (and maybe without his shirt on) when we start having to perform hard for extended periods of time he’s going to wilt. That gym strength will seemingly deflate before your eyes like a popped balloon.

When modern fitness started telling people that you could get rid of longer efforts we started implying that the body isn’t comprised of inter related systems. Without my aerobic system working well I won’t recover between maximal bouts – one system under pins another. And just like we have energy systems that allow us to go for varying lengths of time we have ways to train for that too. Working up to five reps is one of them. But beyond maximal strength we also have general strength, which we train for around the ten rep mark, and then we move into varying degrees of strength endurance. And it’s only by working strength endurance that we develop true functional fitness. Fires don’t go out after sixty seconds and recruit training in the military lasts weeks and some of the trials in various selection courses can go for days. I can remember going non-stop for three days with no food or sleep during a particular course I was on. Then we had one good night’s sleep and were expected to march thirty kilometres. That’s strength endurance and to get it you need to train for it.

Luckily Melbourne is blessed with many personal trainers and gyms where you can go and do some of this work. It’s easy enough to do maximal strength work and strength endurance work indoors. But if you really want true fitness that is functional and carries over to real life activities, maybe like fighting fires or getting ready for combat, you need to get outdoors. And Melbourne is lucky in that you have beach areas like Bayside. There’s sand to run on, stairs to climb and even a few well known open water swims such as the Cerberus to do so that you never run out of options for fitness training. But this is where most personal trainers fall down. They won’t tell you to go run and play and move outside. They’ll tell you to come and train more with them in their cosy little studio. Well, life isn’t indoors with a climate controlled environment. Life is outdoors and raw. And if you want that Spartan warrior type of fitness you need to get off the couch and get outdoors.

As we’re training clients for Spartan Race we make a point about telling them to be outside on days they don’t train with us at Read Performance Training. There were no days off for Spartans, just days in battle and easier days marching to the next battle, and so it should be with people looking for the ultimate in functional fitness. Have a hard strength day in the gym and for recovery make sure to get outside, maybe to one of the beaches in Bayside, and walk or run. As the race gets closer the duration and speed of those sessions will need to be brought up – you are training for a race after all. The other thing to realise is that as you get closer to a race you need to do more and more strength endurance work and less and less maximal strength work. Again, you are training for a Spartan Race – it’s not a short event and you’ll need as much stamina as you can muster.

Here’s a list of my favourite training locations in Melbourne:

• Read Performance Training (obviously).
• The trails at Mt. Dandenong (but not the 1000 steps because that’s not even a warm up).
• Black Rock beach for the Cerberus swim (my preferred Ironman training long ocean swim location) as well as the ramps that you can run up.
• Lysterfield for some great trail runs.
• The rest of my own training is made up of runs around Oakleigh, Bentleigh and the Bayside suburbs so that I can run along the beach and get some hill work in.

Favourite training tools:

• Kettlebells for strength endurance work and recovery sessions including light pressing, get ups and mobility work.
• Barbells for maximal strength work.
• My Prowler for assistance leg work and recovery training.
• Concept II rowing machine and Airdyne for high intensity work as well as some strength endurance.
• Naturally I’m quite lucky as I own all this stuff and have daily access to it at Read PT.

That’s a simple enough plan – move often. Move for longer periods of time, which means you need to go slower. Lift some heavy things. Lift some less heavy things a lot of times. Cycle between hard days such as heavy lifting or hard running with easy days such as walking or easy runs. But realise that if you really want to be in great shape, to have the kind of functional fitness that will allow you to breeze through a Spartan Race or get into the MFB that you need to work at it for a long time.

For people who don’t know this week was a pretty good one for me as Dragon Door have brought out my first book, called Beast Tamer.

What makes this kind of special is one big thing – I’m not a Beast Tamer. Personal training is kind of funny – people want you to have done the thing they’re trying to do. So if they’re training for a triathlon they’d look for a trainer who has triathlon experience. Or if they’re into martial arts they’ll look for an ex-fighter. But in the world of sport performance, no one really cares. Think about it – do you think for even half a second that Usain Bolt’s coach can run like him? As an example, Don Talbot, former head coach of the Australian swim team, couldn’t even swim! Didn’t seem to stop his athletes from winning.

And for me that has always been the thing. I am exceptional only in my athletic mediocrity. As much as I would like to have been an Olympian the closest I ever got was coming runner-up at the selection trials in 1988 for Taekwondo. Back then we sent three people for Taekwondo so coming second at the trials didn’t even get me a tracksuit. But because of my desire to become more than an also ran I dedicated myself to becoming a better athlete. Early on I had the same build as a stick figure. I think I was the last one out of my friends to bench 60kgs – kind of a mile stone weight because it was one big plate each side. And even then it was in my final year of high school.

When you’re cursed with ambition and lack of ability you look for ways to improve. I saw early on that aside from fixing my scrawny body that being stronger would help me get back on par with my competition. So I pushed and pulled, I squatted and lifted. Gradually I gained some strength and a little muscle. Along the way I went from being the guy who would get pushed around sparring to being the guy who could push others around. I became the guy who didn’t get tired. I can remember BJJ competition training years ago – I was out classed as a white belt in terms of skills, but during the conditioning period of the class I was king. If only I’d known that ten years later someone would make a sport out of fitness and offer hundreds of thousands of dollars of prize money I’d maybe have just gone after it then. But they didn’t and so I learnt along the way and found ways to fix my problems. Thanks to how useless I was physically I was forced to think my way through things.

And here we are today, after starting lifting weights at age thirteen in 1984 I’ve got almost thirty years of lifting experience. Thirty years of solving my lack of strength and finding out through trial and error what worked and what didn’t. And so when someone turns up in front of me now and says they’re having trouble with a certain thing, there’s a fair chance I’ve dealt with it myself. And if I haven’t experienced it personally, I’ve certainly trained someone who has.

One of the things about the Beast Challenge is that for most it is a solo pursuit. In my book you’ll find at the back interviews with people who have achieved the Beast/ Iron Maiden feat. What you’ll also see is the remarkable similarity between what they all brought to the equation before they started to train specifically for the Challenge. Namely they all had a significant background in strength. There was no one who was pressing a 32kg bell, could barely pistol and was doing a 28kg pull up. In one case Jeff Steinberg was actually warming up before his usual training with 100lb pull ups and pistols (the Beast weighs 107lbs) so even before he started training for it he was doing those weights cold for two of the three lifts. That’s a fairly strong platform to build from and meant he only had to nail down a single element.

In other cases, such as with Beth Andrews who has just completed the Iron Maiden (making her only the fifth female and also the second I’ve trained to do so), she had the pull up and press cold but was unable to find form on the pistol. Instead of following a plan of “do more pistols” I sat back, had a think about it based on what she described (because this was all of email I didn’t even have the luxury of training her in person) and objectively went through ways I thought we could get around her problems. And sure enough, six weeks later we did! I will say though, that my job is extremely easy – it’s not me who has to do the lifting or go through the stiffness the next day from heavy training. I get to sit back, look at the numbers coldly and make decisions based only on what they say. Sometimes, in fact< it can be easier to train people by remote like this because it takes out all the second guessing that you have when you have the person in front of you.

The book is already getting good reviews, as you can see on the product page for the Beast Tamer book. It’s also been well reviewed by Tom Furman, a man who has been around training and kettlebells for longer even than I have. The review is here for anyone who wants to read. I hope that anyone who buys it enjoys it thoroughly. I had a blast writing it, and have had an even bigger blast helping two women achieve this pretty rare strength feat. The big take away for trainers should be that when it comes to programming and fixing problems there;’s always a way around things and that if you look close enough, and read enough, you’ll usually find it. The book is filled with programs. Literally filled It’s got stuff I’ve adapted from Poliquin, Tsatsouline, King and many other sources. it’s got FMS based correctives as well as ways to improve movement from Convict Conditioning too. What makes it funny for me is that since sharing it with a few people between writing it and having it printed I’ve started to hear of other people claiming these ideas as theirs. They’re clearly not, as you can see from the book where I reference the individual creators of all these concepts. It’s always the right thing to do to credit references.

I hope you enjoy it.

Ronin was the term used to define a master less samurai. In times gone by that was a sign of great shame and likely these men were mercenaries. However, the world has changed greatly and these days it is unusual for anyone to stick with a single employer for their entire working lives. And in a job like personal training and with the advent of so much readily available information on the internet it would only be the dogmatic who followed a single information source blindly at the expense of all others.

A few months ago I wrote this piece on Breaking Muscle. People are hell bent on forming groups, cliques and tribes that help them feel better about themselves. They take pride in “owning” certain exercises or modalities of training, as if anyone can own a swing or a push up. They seem to think that if they just stand really close to someone they admire that somehow that person’s intelligence will rub off on them. But that’s not how mirrors work. These people, the sycophants and the suck ups, the best they can ever hope to be is a reflection. And images in a mirror have no substance, no depth. Just like the thousands who have tried to mimic Bruce Lee since his death. Sure, many can move like him, talk like him and maybe even look like him, but how many can actually replace him? None.

Over the last twelve months I’ve spent a lot of time watching the fitness industry, and in particular the little corner that I occupy. It’s actually really easy from Australia to do this these days thanks to Facebook, forums and all the other ways we can stay connected to these little cults and tribes. While it’s easy to stay connected it’s also incredibly easy to be objective, because we are, after all, separated by a vast distance. So when you see someone acting like a dumb ass you recognise that they really are acting like a dumb ass because despite being “friends’ with them on Facebook it’s hard to call someone you met briefly at an event two years ago a genuine friend.

That got me thinking that there’s probably a reason Australian sports science is a world leader and why we win so many medals in international competition – we’re objective. Being so isolated means we’re forced to figure things out on our own, to look in a direction that maybe those close to the source would be too shy to try. Aussie coaches are littered throughout the world now and often the best way to tell is to look for which countries are having break out performances at an Olympics. Chances are you’ll find one of our coaches there.

Back a few years ago it would have been unheard of, a complete act of sporting treason, for a coach to go work for a rival country. But these days it is commonplace. These ronin, formerly working for Australia are now plying their services to the highest bidder. A mercenary strength coach, winning medals for their new boss. Along the way they’ll be learning, taking what works and what doesn’t from those they meet and work with. And because they’re free to take what works and what doesn’t they’ll end up far better off then those who dogmatically adhere to one train of thought. Much like Bruce Lee they take what works and discard what doesn’t. Jeet Kune Do for athletes. And like Jeet Kune Do these results produce hybrid athletes who trample their opposition.With a straight blast training approach that delivers results the dogmatic can only dream of.

The fitness world is a funny one and trainers often mistake their own role in it. I’m sick to death of personal trainers claiming they’re strength coaches. My definition is simple – if you make the majority of your money from working with non-athletes then you are a personal trainer. If you make the majority from working with athletes and helping them win games then you are a strength coach. And because you’re a personal trainer you need to understand one thing and one thing only – your goal is to give your clients a broad GPP base so that they can enjoy their life outside the gym. That means a program that utilises many movements and planes of movement as well as works across multiple fitness qualities. I hate to quote Crossfit but this means broad time and modal domains. That means not boring your clients to death with making them follow a program out of a book. (On another note, why the hell do you deserve to be paid for making people follow a program from a book? It’s called “personal” training for a reason and everyone deserves their own plan).

And because your role is to provide GPP you need to understand a great many ways to provide it. That means there’s not one tool, one method or one man who you should be learning from. This sheep mentality is a death sentence for your clients. Learn to think for yourself and learn from as many sources as you can. I mean, if you’ve been to the course, read the book and you still haven’t grasped whatever the central tenets of a system are then please get out out now because you’re too dumb to be allowed impact anyone’s health and fitness long term. Take what you need and move on.

The greatest samurai who ever lived was a ronin – Miyamoto Musashi. Take the hint. There is no one way nor is there one master to follow.

I originally was going to write this post about how developing more work capacity was going to be good for you. Higher level of general fitness has good carryover to many of the things that most are actually after in their training such as lower levels of body fat and other general health markers.

But then I read this article and it made me pretty mad so I thought I’d better write this out while having a rant. See, the big problem in this article is the use of one word – disease. Calling obesity a disease is likening it to cancer. Except unlike cancer it’s entirely preventable by you. Unless you deliberately stick your head inside a microwave as it’s running, or ask to have x-rays taken without lead shielding there’s a fair chance you’re not going out of your way to get cancer. But obesity isn’t like that. No one wakes up one morning to discover they’ve gained 40kgs overnight. No one goes to the doctor who runs some tests and says, “I hate to tell you but that big lump under your shirt is obesity”. NO. It’s been there all along, present, obvious and totally created by you and you alone.

Before I go too much further I will say that if you’re a little kid and grossly overweight that is your parents’ fault. Let’s not pull punches. No six-year old is going to Safeway and deciding what to eat – the food purchasing and preparation decisions are made entirely by adults. So if your kids are overweight that’s on you. But at some point as they grow up those kids will face the same dilemmas as the rest of us – at what point do they start taking accountability for themselves and their lives and realise that even if they were overfed garbage as a kid that they’re now able to rectify it on their own? I know in today’s world we’re all big on stopping bullying. I’ll get more onto this in a bit, but let’s face it – at some point in time everyone has been bullied. I know I was bullied terribly at school and there were times I was in a fight every day for months when my patience gave out and it was my only means of getting back at my tormentors. Funnily enough, as my skill at martial arts got better and I got stronger and able to really hurt people if I chose the amount of bullying I suffered became substantially less – because I took control of it. And that’s my point – instead of letting what happened to me as a kid shape my life forever and perpetually blame the next fifty years on what happened at school I took charge of  the situation. And kids who grow up overweight need to do the same. No sitting around whinging in years to come how your parents fed you badly when you were ten. Take charge of your life and learn that you need to be the one who looks after yourself.

The world is an increasingly unhealthy place to live. You only need to look at the size of supermarkets and the actual volume of food sold in them to figure this out. In most supermarkets there is only about ten percent of store space given to actual food. For the sake of simplicity let’s call food anything that doesn’t come in a box or packet or doesn’t need manufacturing. That leaves animal protein such as meat, chicken and fish and the fresh fruit and vegetables as the only actual food in these places. Bread, milk, biscuits, snack food, soft drinks, pasta, chips and the entire rest of the supermarket are worthless junk. Oh, I know that the advertising will tell you that you need the goodness of whole grains but you don’t. The only person that benefits from you eating whole grains is the person selling them to you.

And this isn’t something that Australians should be standing on their high horses and smugly thinking that the USA is so much worse than us. It’s not. Last time I checked there was only a minimal difference between obesity statistics in Australia and the USA. (For example, read this 2008 article by The Age which says we are, in fact, worse, or the Wikipedia page for Australian obesity placing it third behind the USA). This is a problem for all of us.

The real issues with obesity is not in being overweight but in what follows after. About a decade after obesity rates rise in a country there is a knock-on effect with other illnesses like diabetes and heart disease following suit. A friend of mine who is a bariatric surgeon in India has told me that India too is now seeing the same phenomenon. As the level of wealth in India has increased the rate of obesity has rapidly increased too and now they’re starting to see a surge in Type II Diabetes and the other issues associated with weight gain. Long term the costs on the public health system for the large percentage of our population that has these issues will cripple us. How bad will it be? Well, given that now sixty percent of Australians and US citizens are overweight or obese it’s time to quit pulling punches. It’s time to quit being PC. Just on odds there’s a fair chance that you’re a fatty. Yes, you. And you can call me a bully or whatever other label you want to pin on me to make yourself feel better until you can get to the ice cream and eat away your pain but you’re still a tubby bitch. Hell, there’s even overweight personal trainers. Well, it’s time to man up. In the case of overweight trainers – what kind of role model are you setting for your clients? Ever wonder why they aren’t getting great results? It’s because of your shitty example showing them that half-assing things is ok. (The same goes for weak and unfit trainers too – clients come to you for knowledge and inspiration. Try actually providing it instead of just providing lip service about a fitness lifestyle).

If you had a friend who was dying of alcohol addiction or drug abuse you’d step in, right? You’d get them counseling or help them kick it I hope. But when it comes to people killing themselves with a food addiction we don’t say a word. Mostly, I believe, we don’t say a word because we don’t want to be branded a bully. The world has gone so over the top with political correctness that we’re worried about denting someone’s delicate feelings. It’s time to stop. It’s not appropriate to label obesity a disease – it’s not. You don’t catch obesity. You give it to yourself. And you gave it to yourself because you have zero self-restraint and take zero responsibility for your health.

Believe it or not, I am still going to talk about GPP. GPP is the best way to combat obesity. GPP, or General Physical Preparation, is basically just doing some exercise. Because you know what? When you’re fat and out of shape you don’t need a specific plan other than get off the couch and get moving. You don’t need periodisation or what the SEALs do. You just need to do something on a regular basis. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Because if you’re 40kg overweight anything will help you lose weight (along with only shopping in the actual food section of the supermarket). Lift some weights, go for a walk, ride a bike, push a sled – it doesn’t matter. Just do it daily for as long as you can until you fall over exhausted. Don’t worry about refueling your body either after your sessions – you’re covered in enough fuel to last a long time. Even at ten percent body fat I have enough fat on me to fuel running for over one hundred hours. So at thirty or more (the number obese people will show) you have enough fat on you to fuel many, many sessions without needing to worry about how much gas you have in the tank.

The biggest thing I see people failing with is how many times per week they train. Look, if you are only managing to barely swing a 20kg bell for a few reps then you need to train more, a lot more. Three sessions per week – a pitiful three hours of exercise – isn’t going to do much versus the other 165 for the week, or even worse, against the years it took you to get out of shape in the first place. You need to get it in your head that if you want significant change you need significant effort. Three hours per week isn’t what I would call significant. And if you go to one of those useless trainers who promises you’ll get results on half hour sessions…? Well, kick him in the place his balls used to be and go find a real trainer who understands that volume is a bigger key driver in the development of foundational fitness than intensity. In other words – you can’t rain hard much when you are out of shape, and it takes years to develop that kind of ability. So you need to rely on volume – go do something daily. Trying to train hard daily will ruin you quickly if you’re an absolute beginner, but moving each day won’t. Split your week up with two to three hard sessions and the days in between as just some moving. Go for a walk, play a game of soccer, hike, do some yoga – but move every day.

If you take some responsibility for yourself, what goes into your body, and how many times per week you move it you’ll find that obesity isn’t something you’re likely to catch. It’s a really simple equation. However, as my friend Dan John said to me recently, “Everyone thinks it looks easy, having this simple outlook. It’s not. It’s incredibly difficult to distill life down to just a few essential things”. Make the hard choices now and watch how it pays off in the long run.

Barely a day goes past when I see someone foam rolling, voodoo flossing, nerve flossing, doing some primitive pattern work or slapping fish together to try to fix one of the most common problems associated with hard training – tendon inflammation.

I’m going to steer clear from any of the definitive semantics, all I care about it that if you train for long enough sooner or later something will start telling you that it needs a rest. Now, given how many moving parts the body has we need to narrow this down a little – what I’m about to say has nothing to do with joint injuries and if you’re suffering from these you absolutely need to go get checked out, have an MRI done and see an orthopedic specialist to make sure you’re following the right plan. But, if the problem is tendon related, then what I’m about to say has massive effect in a short period of time.

Do high rep isolation work for the area.

I know, I know, that is functional movement sacrilege. But there is a lot of benefit to isolated movement during a rehabilitation phase or even long term as a preventative for what we can call structural work (i.e. the work done to maintain structural integrity needed for high intensity training). A with all things we’ve over reacted to what body building and isolation training did in to our performance and made an effort to remove it entirely. But there is such a thing as functional isolation training, and when it comes to rehab it fits perfectly.

Over the last six months I’ve had a terrible case of Achilles issues. This started around Christmas time as I was getting ready for Ironman Melbourne and was a result of a quick jump in my weekly run mileage. It got to the point where I would almost be in tears when I started running because the pain would be so bad. But after a few minutes the pain would subside and I could run pain free. It never got absolutely unbearable but it did get to the point where I was dreading running.

Post Ironman I steered clear of running for about six weeks and the pain had completely gone. But, after a few runs it was back again. By this stage, well and truly sick of the problem, I started looking for THE guy. You know how there’s always A GUY. That one guy who everyone says is the man when it comes to a particular thing. Well, after speaking with a very smart therapist I know and train he sent me to THE GUY.

And you know what THE GUY told me to do for my Achilles problems? Calf raises.

It’s a little more in depth than that, and I developed my own treatment plan based on some of the advice offered in Eric Orton’s The Cool Impossible, but my problem has gone from pretty bad, to minimal in just two weeks.

And this reminded me of a piece of advice an old school meathead once gave me for elbow tendon issues. Namely to do high rep, low load tricep pushdowns for elbows and high rep, low load bicep curls. At the time I had some wicked stuff going on courtesy of heavy benching, pull ups plus BJJ. So I dug out a light band and would do two sets of fifty every day for each. Within two weeks the problem had gone.

Now, I’m not a doctor or physiotherapist, nor do I play one on TV, but this stuff works. To be honest, it’s pretty simple – tendon issues are caused by connective tissue remodeling taking place far slower than muscle tissue (like about three times slower) and becoming annoyed at a certain volume of work to which they’re not accustomed. But the answer isn’t to back it off entirely. The answer is to lightly address it and make it stronger- because movement cures lack of movement. I wish people would look for simpler answers – like more static stretching and easy high rep work to address their issues rather than reach for the voodoo floss bands, lacrosse balls and  whatever other little toy is the rehab trend du jour.

Try it for yourself and see the next time you have a flare up. Back off the intensity and add a lot of volume to get the clean blood flowing in. I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly and easily it works. For older guys )i.e. anyone my age or older) you may want to think about having this kind of stuff in either your warm up or cool down daily as a preventative.

Recently on Breaking Muscle I shared one of my favourite goal plans, the Program Maximum. I say goal plan because I’ve yet to meet anyone who can actually do it. Here’s how the plan looks on its final step:

20 minutes of get ups, doing a get up per minute, alternating hands every minute. So 10 get ups on each hand.

20 minutes of one hand swings, doing 10 reps on the minute, changing hands every minute. So 200 one hand swings.

For those who don’t think that sounds so bad, remember that this is all done with the Beast, the 48kg bell.

So that’s a pretty hard challenge and one that could take you a year or more to build up to. Let me know if anyone gets to it as I’d love to see the results and how it translates to improvements in other areas. I think, for Spartan Racers it may be the ticket to race success when paired with a few heavy pull up or rope climbing sessions each week and running.

One of the things I most enjoy about the mental aspect of my job is creating programs that really cause a big effect. One of my other favourite programs is the Russian Bear program from Power to the People. The basic plan entails working up to twenty sets of five in both the deadlift and bench press two days per week. It’s not a fast workout, even though you obviously use comparatively light weight – the full twenty sets of each, even when super setted can take almost two hours when you start really finding your limits. I’ve used a variation of the same plan to get ready for RKCII, combining a pull and a press for a volume day each week working up to twenty sets of five in both single arm presses and pull ups. (For the record I worked up to 20 x 5 @32kg pressing and 20 x 5 @ 20kg for pull ups).

As someone who actually responds very well to volume, and not so well to intensity, plans like this work very well for me. In fact, I can actually add some training days to this and still make progress. But let’s swap it around a bit to include elements of the Program Maximum and the Bear so that it fits my end goal of zombie war fitness. I want strength, yes, but I want cardio too, so I am always looking for ways to get stronger and keep my body weight down. Here’s the plan:

Two days per week –

Build up to 20 x 5 DLs. Super set the DLs with a heavy get up each side. So you’ll get 100 DLs and 20 get ups per session.

Two other day per week –

Pull ups. Have one workout as a low rep/ heavy day, perhaps something like 5-8 x 2-3 reps, and the other day 10 sets of AMRAP with body weight.

Here’s the real kicker – cardio daily. I would set this up so that I did the DL/ Get Up days on Mon/ Thurs with the Pull Ups days Tues/ Fri. My cardio then would be a second session daily, with Wednesday being a double cardio day (I’d suggest swim/ run). So it might look like this –

Monday – DL + Get Up, Swim

Tuesday – Pull Ups, Bike

Wednesday – Swim, Run

Thursday – DL + Get Up, Swim

Friday – Pull Ups, Bike

Saturday – Long run

Sunday – Long bike, short run.

Yeah, it’s a lot of volume and certainly isn’t a beginner plan. But if you’re looking to really get in shape I guarantee this will get you there. Nothing complicated, nothing too fancy – but it doesn’t need to be. Try the Running Bear and see how fit you get after two months.

I’m not surprised people don’t get great results when it comes to their strength training, fitness training, triathlon training or any other kind of training. I mean, I’m a professional at this, and have honestly never really done anything else, other than spend my entire life learning about exercise and even I get confused about what the hell i should be doing from time to time.

The fitness magazines are filled with all kinds of dumb advice, but the really confusing part is that much of it comes out of a lab. You know “exercise science”. Exercise science is the thing that goes against what jokingly gets called “bro-science”, or what body builders have been saying for years. As it turns out, body builders may well turn out to the be the old wives of the fitness world, and just like your mother’s chicken soup has been shown to be helpful in killing colds, we may well find ourselves more and more heading back to some of the fitness worlds early roots and doing some body building.

I know this seems like a radical departure for me from my normal talk about functional strength training but the reality is that anyone who has been around the iron game for a while will have the same answers for you. Sometimes some selected hypertrophy work is in order and will help you achieve your goals faster.

A good example of this is women and pull ups. Depending on the woman there are two likely weak spots – either at the start when arms are dead straight, or trying to finish and get the chest to the bar. The first problem, believe it or not can be solved simply by adding in some curls. That may sound like functional strength heresy but the reality is that these will solve the problem. The other issue can be solved with any manner of rows – face pulls, bat wings, bent over rows, cable rows – anything that teaches and strengthens the pull of the elbow behind the line of the torso as that is the finish position for the pull up.

The functional strength training world, that of exercise dependent on research, will tell you to squeeze the bar harder, to clench the glutes, or to tighten the abs. You know, those things are fine tips – if you’re really close to the pull up. But if you can’t even go from a dead hang to even a slight bend at the elbow it won’t matter if you tighten your butt cheeks like a Columbian going through customs because it won’t do diddly for you.

This, incidentally, is in my opinion one of the biggest issues with many trainers who label themselves as “functional strength” trainers. They know some tips, tricks and activation drills, but can’t write programs worth a darn. Seriously, if you can’t get a normal female from zero to unassisted pull ups within twelve weeks, quit now and go find a new job you hack, but I digress.

As far back as Arnold there were body builders talking about specific hypertrophy and prioritising muscle groups or even attachments within muscle groups to change the shape of a muscle. But then along came exercise science and said something like, “you can’t change the way the muscles of the pectorals fire no mater what angle you train at. There’s one nerve and muscles activate wholly or not at all, therefore there is no difference between incline pressing and flat pressing”. Funny, because every top body builder has said something different for decades. And you know what? Finally research is starting to back it up. In 2000 Dr, Jose Antonio showed you could target specific areas of muscles via EMG analysis. Moe lately that has been taken up by Bret Contreras who has said, “It is now readily apparent in the literature that muscle groups….contain functional subdivisions which are preferentially activated during different movements…recent research has shown that altering body position such as foot placement…can target different areas of muscles. Bodybuilders were right all along; it just took research some time to catch up to their wisdom”.

Let’s ignore that he just called bodybuilders wise for a second and focus on the important bit – the meatheads in the gym, that the science only crowd have been laughing at for years, were right. They didn’t bother worrying about what research was saying, because they could tell from all the hours they were putting in that they were right.

And that leads me to the real point of all this – if you’ve been training for a while you inherently know when something is right for you versus wrong for you. Like me trying to do full squat snatches. Those just mess me up so fast it’s ridiculous. But power snatch off blocks, or double kettlebell snatch are great variations of that theme for me. The same goes for front squats. I’ve never gotten along with them and it turns out there’s a reason why, that is linked to my snatch issue too – my hips are just not designed to do them. That deep squat action only does one thing for me – destroys my hip joint. But back squats I can do all day long. The change in torso angle, the fact you can never get as low – all those things combine to make the back squat work much better for as an individual. I spent years trying to get along with front squats because a bunch of clever people all said they were vital. Well, a vital exercise doesn’t lead to surgery in my opinion, but front squats will sooner or later.

If you’re a beginner this is a difficult path because you probably lac both mobility as well as body awareness. I’ve had a client swear they had torn a muscle after an initial session. What they were trying to tell me is that their life had been so pampered beforehand that they had never experienced muscle soreness before. But the opposite can happen too – I’ve had a client suffer on silently for months with pain that needed treatment because he thought he was supposed to hurt from training. (Thanks Crossfit).

The moral of the story is you need to think for yourself. Research is good, but if I don’t have to wait for a paper to come out that tells me that getting eight hours of sleep a night, drinking lots of water, stretching often, lifting heavy and walking is good for me because I already know that.

At some point during any event, or even every training session, you’ll question yourself. Why is this so hard today? I’m not sure I can get through this. The nagging voices of self doubt can cripple you if you let them.

These negative thoughts can happen within seconds of beginning a workout. They can happen when your opponent lands his first punch and it rocks you back on your feet. Instantly you start to wonder if he’s to strong, or if you can overcome his power.

One of the benefits of spending time on longer distance stuff is that you learn patience. Maybe that’s old age too, although if you drove with me you’d doubt my patience. In really long things that last more than a few hours you’re going to have ups and downs. There will be times so dark that you’ll be on the verge of tears and others, seemingly seconds later where you feel on top of the world. Distance veterans have a saying – it never always gets worse.

Imagine you start up a steep trail with friends, people you can usually hang with when you train. But for some reason today when you got out of the car to start you hadn’t brought your legs with you. It happens. Blame it on the tides, your biorhythms or whatever you want, we all have bad days from time to time. Today as you start the first climb your breathing is laboured, you strain to keep up with your friends, fighting the trail and trying to push your feet harder into the ground on each step.

But the trail isn’t going anywhere. It’s as long as it is long and it will take you until you get to the top to finish it. Profound, huh? It’s common at the start of something that has even a slightly competitive element to it that people panic a little. They may not recognise it but their pulse will go up, their breathing quickens and their chest tightens. I’m actually convinced that this feeling of anxiety before an event is compounded in triathlon swim starts by the tightness of wetsuits and leads to some of the swim deaths each year, as well as people pulling out of the swim suffering panic attacks.

Just relax and breathe. Woooosaaah.

If we’re talking triathlon and you’re feeling panicked at the start of the swim, just relax. You’ve done the distance many times in training. Instead of thinking you can’t do it, let’s flip that on its head and remind ourselves that we’ve done this many times before and that we want to be here. After all, we paid our entry fees, spent hours training for this event and got up really early to get ready to race.

I remember standing on the beach at Ironman this year looking out in the water. I’ve swum a lot in all kinds of conditions but I can honestly say that I have never swum in worse conditions than we were about to race in. The waves were like roller coasters and the rip was unreal – it pushed me 200m off course on the way back into the beach. But I was relaxed. I’d done the work. I knew I could swim the distance. I might be slower than I’d planned but I knew I could get it done.

That brings me to the next point – belief. Believe in the work you’ve done. Believe in yourself having the strength to push through when things get tough. I see this in the snatch test all the time. It starts to get hard for most people at about the sixty or seventy rep mark. They want to put the bell down and have a rest. But thy don’t need a rest, they need belief. They need to believe in their strength and fitness, in how much work they’ve done to get to this point right now, two thirds of the way through the snatch test that they have enough fitness to do the last forty reps. They need to believe that it won’t hurt any worse at eighty as it does right now and they need to believe that they can withstand the pain, welcome it even. Remember, it doesn’t always get worse, and with fifteen or so reps to go they’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel and they’ll be able to finish strong.

Two nights ago, jet lagged and wheezing for breath because of a change in altitude, I found myself on an Airdyne bike in the middle of a wicked interval session. For people who don’t know an Airdyne is an exercise bike that has fans for a wheel and you push and pull on the handles too so that it becomes a whole body exercise. It’s an awful, evil contraption. What makes it so hard is that due to the nature of air resistance increasing speed by two fold leads to a four times increase in effort. The evil part of this workout was that we were trying to get more work done on each round so effort was increasing each time. And at about the thirty second mark of a one minute interval I found myself nearly up to my last breathing strategy. When things are starting to get really rough I let go of everything and focus on only breathing. But this night I saw that i was only halfway through the interval and my breathing was nearly completely out of control – and I still had half the interval to go. But i just kept at it, as hard as I could, knowing that I would survive. Like anyone in those situations I thought about stopping. I thought about slowing down to a more comfortable level. But I didn’t because of belief.

And that’s the final bit. You have to keep going. The race will finish when you cross the line so just keep putting one foot in front of the other until you get there. Persist. Endure. Accept the suffering and understand that it makes you better. That small thing you just ignored and didn’t quite because of will transform into bigger things. Because fitness is like that. What we do in the gym bleeds into the rest of our life. The discipline and persistence we learn so that we can improve our fitness helps us in other activities too.

A few years ago I was working for my family. The week before end of financial year our payroll system crashed completely. No retrieval possible and no way to fix anything the problem other than to go back through every pay we’d done for the year and re-enter it into the new software we bought. I had two days to get a year’s worth of pays done, on top of normal work and end of year stuff. But I got it done, one at a time, just ticking them off, relaxed and confident that I’d get them done.

Ultimately, you need to know why you’re there and have a sufficient reason. Choosing a race because you think it will make you cool or tough is a bad idea and when the moment comes that you start to doubt yourself, and you will, you’ll be done. But if you’ve got the right reason, have done the work you’ll be relaxed and have belief in yourself that allows you to keep going.

Relax. Believe. Persist. It’ll help you conquer everything from first fights, to Ironman racing to that hard MetCon at the Crossfit Regionals.

One of the perpetually hottest fitness topics is how to get a six-pack. In fact, if you Google the phrase “six-pack abs” you’ll get 18,300,000 results. That’s a lot of people all wanting to know how to get six-pack abs, or trying to sell their six-pack abs program.

The problem is that we got steered away from functional training back in the 70s by the bodybuilding craze that we’re still trying to change perceptions. Many coaches are still fooled by an athlete’s appearance and wonder why their player with the underwear model physique can’t perform like he looks. The short version is that to get six-pack abs you need to train one way but to perform well you need to train another.

Getting that sought after look is actually quite easy. For starters, don’t eat junk. Ever. If you eat clean 99% of the time you’re well on the way to having a visible six-pack. With the abs visible courtesy of low body fat levels we need to also train in a way to make the abs develop into that ridged look. Like with all things body building that means we need to perform isolated training for the abs. And that’s the big difference between aesthetic training and performance training. For performance what you require is that your midsection acts like a stiff brace, keeping your pelvis and spine aligned so that you can produce maximal power. So the exercises we’re looking for are ones that replicate that – planks and their variations such as push ups, mountain climbers, burpees and hollow drills are ideal. For that GI Joe look you require exercises that actually train the body through flexion, rotation and lateral flexion, meaning that sit ups, hanging leg raises and Russian twists are good choices.

Research shows pretty clearly that flexion and rotation of the spine is bad for it long term. So in my mind, if we train exercises that deliberately put ourselves in these positions we are basically playing Russian roulette with our spines. In other words, it’s not a matter of “if” we injure our backs but “when”. Sooner or later you’ll just run out of tolerance for these movements. The bad part about back injuries is that it’s not like we come with warning labels stating that you have so many flexion or rotation incidents that you can cope with during your lifetime. You can be fine for years and then one day you hurt your back bending to tie your shoes.

There is actually an upside to this – the manner which we train our abs for performance is the same way we should train them for protecting our spine. We want a stiff core that transmits power, but also helps deflect potentially damaging forces through our muscles, rather than through our joints. For many they think that doing planks is all that is required. However, there is a big difference between making the shape of a plank and propping yourself up on your elbows and toes and actually performing a plank. A plank is supposed to be a replication of a neutral position, we get more feedback by lying down so that we can feel gravity working against them, rather than from standing.

To set the position we need to do a few things. First we need to set the pelvis. Tense your glutes as hard as you can, then rotate your pelvis forward and back until you find the position where you can generate maximum tension. That’s neutral. Many will find this is pulled far further forward than they imagined. The next step is to brace the abs as if about to get kicked in the stomach. Next imagine locking the ribcage to the pelvis to brace further. Finally, learn to breathe shallow into your belly so that you can do all that while maintaining tension. For many this is as far as it goes. While a good start, and miles better than just propping on the floor all saggy like a worm, it’s still not enough.

To make the plank functional so that the strength gained carries onto the football field, in the ring or out on the trails running, we need to get the body really set up. One of the main things about performance is that the body needs to be stuff and the limbs need the mobility to move freely and produce force. Basically the role of the core is to keep the body stable and counter act all the forces the limbs produce – like in running where there is a rotational element to the arm swing and the body needs to work at anti-rotation to stay straight –  or to stay stable and link that power from one end to the other – as in punching where the foot drives into the ground but the expression of that leg drive is seen in the speed and power of the punch. And we do this by setting the joints in a particular way.

Externally rotating the shoulder and hip allows the body to maintain it’s stability far better than if we just try to keep them loose. That torque created at the joint allows us to keep your neutral pelvis and abdominal brace. The basic premises goes like this – to create torque when the arms or legs are in flexion we need to create external rotation. Exercises such as the back squat require external rotation at the hip to better set the legs and feet and allow better hip mobility and exercises like the plank, where the arms are in flexion, require external rotation at the shoulder. To illustrate, try a push up and corkscrew your hands into the ground. Imagine rotating your fingers out before you start. Feel how that tighten sup not just the shoulder but the entire plank too? And a tighter plank means greater performance. After you’ve tried the hand turnout test try a set of push ups with your glutes completely switched off. You’ll notice it’s much harder to get alignment in your back, maybe even impossible. But you should also notice that it’s hard to get that same screwed in feeling in the shoulders with your glutes switched off – it’s all one piece and the systems all need to be on line for maximum performance.

Check out this video below of a demonstration of this external rotation concept as well as what happens when you try to compensate.

So you’ve gone and done it and signed up for Spartan Race. You were filled with determination when you hit that button but now doubt starts to gnaw at you…

Now what…?

Now the cold light of day dawns and you realise that you need to not only be able to run however far that race is for, but you’ll also need the functional strength to pull yourself up and over obstacles, haul odd objects and perform other crazy feats of strength and fitness. There’s all kinds of crazy challenges in there that will well and truly take you out of the safe confines of Fitness First wearing your pretty Lululemon gear – you’re gonna have to get dirty.

Here’s some rules to live by in preparation for Spartan Race:

1. Run. It is a race and even shortest event is 7km. The Super is 14km and then there’s the Beast at 21km and Ultra Beast at 42km. As I found out during Ironman you can never have too many miles in your legs. But because the race is broken by obstacles the stress on the body is going to be less than it is if you were running a straight  marathon, for instance. This doesn’t mean you need to run daily as for many that will be too much, but you should look to be running three to four days each week with one longer run on the weekend.

2. Strength train. I don’t mean high rep crazy MetCon circuits or killer WODs either. I mean get strong but be smart about it. Traditional gym lifts won’t cut it – you’ll gain too much weight. I’ll be blunt – most trainers have zero idea about performance training. They think that if you look like Rambo you’ll perform better. But let’s look at some stats – Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime was 6’0 100kg in contest shape. In comparison the average male medal winner at the London Olympics was 6’0 80kg. That extra 20kg that Arnie had to drag around in the mud is really going to slow him down on race day. So the exercises you want are those that will see you gain a ton of functional strength but little in the way of body weight.

This is where body weight training comes into its own. Many think that body weight training is solely about high rep calisthenics like you see in the old Army movies, but what about exercises like one arm pull ups? How freaky strong do you have to be to pull off one of those, and how much would that kind of strength help your rope climbing on race day? So let’s avoid barbells and focus on body weight as our main tool for strength. The added bonus here is that most hard body weight exercises are incredible core strength drills. All that core strength you’ll gain from doing them is really going to make you more stable running.

3. Weighted conditioning. While the standard punishment at Spartan race for a missed obstacle is thirty burpees I’m firmly of the opinion that exercises like kettlebell snatches, kettlebell clean and jerks and even kettlebell swings very much have their place. I tend to do very small circuits that have one or two exercises plus a “recovery” run in them. Something like five to ten double clean and jerks and a 400m run works great, as does 25m of sled work plus ten burpees. The key is not to go nuts with the conditioning just yet. Standard strength periodisation would be to work on base fitness and maximal strength this far out from a race and transfer that to power endurance and speed about six to eight weeks out. As you get to that phase out a lot of the maximal strength work, doing only what you need to maintain and devote more and more time to the conditioning work.

4. Long hybrid run. The key to any distance running program is the long run. No long run, no running long on race day and you’ll be reduced to walking and suffering. If your event is to be around two hours I’d suggest that you need at least a ninety minute run each week to build the endurance needed for the race. But because this is an obstacle course race you need to make sure you’re training appropriately. On your long runs intersperse regular bouts of body weight work and stints of much faster running. In our training we tend to walk the steep hills, and run flats and downhill. At track junctions or natural plateaus we do extra conditioning. Learn to love burpees. Again, as we get closer to the race we’ll even take kettlebells with us so that we can run a section and do some hard work like snatching or weighted walks in the middle of running. There’s a big difference between busting out a few snatches all warm and cozy at an RKC or SFG certification and doing it sucking for air after getting up a steep hill.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite conditioning drills, the Spartan Snatch Test, based on the infamous RKC Snatch test. Weights used are as for testing – 24kg for men, 16kg for ladies (or 20kg/ 12kg if over 50 years old).

Snatch 20/ 20 and perform 20 burpees.

Snatch 15/15 and perform 15 burpees.

Snatch 10/ 10 and perform 10 burpees.

Snatch 5/ 5 and perform 5 burpees.

Do this as fast as you can. Goal time is under six minutes. (Note you can do the scaled version of this and use push ups too, but then goal time is under 5 minutes).

There’s always so much going on I often don’t have much time to sit and actually talk about what has happened, only what it going to happen in the future. I mean, the next few months this is my list of courses I’m running (and isn’t actually complete as I’ve got a few more up my sleeve:

• HKC in California at kettlebell South Bay.
• The first ever Progressive Calisthenics Certification in St. Paul.
• Gym Jones certification.
• Run and teach at RKC Melbourne, July.
• Spartan Race coach certification.
• Dragon Door leadership meeting.
• HKC in Brisbane
• Martial Power workshop the day after, led by RKC TL and KMG E1 Matt Beecroft and I.
• A special invite only workshop by Coach Summers of Gymnastic Bodies (please email me at info@readpt.com if you think you deserve an invite).
• Spartan Super race Melbourne.
• Spartan Beast and Ultra Beast Sydney on consecutive days (adding up to 63km of obstacle racing in 48 hours).
• RKC 1 and 2 on consecutive weekends.
• FMS 1 and 2.

That’s a pretty hectic next six months. On top of that I’ve got my usual assortment of articles to write for Blitz, Triathlon and Mutlipsport and Breaking Muscle plus the blog here, as well as normal PT st Read Performance Training – easy, right?

Things you should have read this week:

This article, right here, is part one of a few that will focus on using double kettlebell drills to build muscle and replace barbell lifts for the aging lifter.

If you missed this article here on kettlebell swings, you missed an epic rant by many Crossfitters. Apparently they think the only reason people have heard about kettlebells is because of them. Riiiiight…Like the same way I had no idea what a barbell snatch was until I saw one of them do an “overhead anyhow” and call it a snatch. I will say this for Crossfit, they’ve made terms like SLAP tear and Achilles rupture far more commonly known thanks to their devil may care attitude towards lifting technique. I always fund it funny that a group who use a kettlebell every now and then to do a single exercise poorly feel theyre; in any position to argue about its use with someone who uses them every session, every day and is considered an expert in their use. Arrogant much?

Our YouTube channel is slowly being added to. Make sure to check it out each week so you stay up to date with all the stuff that falls out of my head.

Also make sure to LIKE us on Facebook so you can get all our updates. (www.Facebook.com/ReadPerformanceTraining)

Twitter is another great way to keep up with how many ways I can find to hurt or make myself suffer. 140 characters is sufficient to illustrate how painful training for an Ultra Beast race is. (@AndrewR_ReadPT).

As for the rest of this week it was the same as always – train hard, eat right, continue educating myself every day and making sure that we remain the best functional strength trainers in Australia. Whether you’re training for a Spartan race, a triathlon, special forces selection, MMA or BJJ, volleyball or just wanting to get in shape – we’ve got the tools to make it work for you. Our online training options will be up and running soon enough so that even people who don’t live locally will be able to have access to smart training. I’ve got some great posts coming up on kettlebell training on Breaking Muscle this week so make sure to watch my author page closely.

There’s a saying in the RKC that what we do is an inch wide but a mile deep. What we mean by that is that we focus on a few key movements and work like hell on them to not only understand them better but perform them better. We know that a higher level of ability in these few big moves has a massive payoff.

Recently in a conversation with a sports therapist he told me what the Swedes thought of as the secret to elite success in cross country skiing. Their idea is to find a talented athlete at fifteen years old and then have them train twice per day, seven days per week, all year round, for ten years. If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell you’ll recognise that as the same amount of hours to get to that magic ten thousand, which is usually the tipping point for elite performance in any field.

As I said in this post about spotting fakes and bad trainers the amount of experience a trainer has is vital. In fact, I’d put experience above all the rest of their qualifications. Nothing scares me more than when I hear of someone who has about a year’s experience and has been to five or six different types of courses over the last year. While I applaud their desire to learn more the fact is that learning and understanding these things takes time.

For instance, before I went to the RKC back in 2009 to learn the best way to train with kettlebells I had already been using them for two years. During that time I had gotten rid of everything else I was doing and was only using kettlebells. Apart from a very few performance based clients I had also transitioned the rest of my clients onto using nothing but kettlebells too. For the next three years I did nothing but use kettlebells in my own training and that of my clients, save for a few deadlifts and pull ups. All that time I was perfecting both my own use of kettelebells but also improving my teaching of others in the use of kettlebells. I didn’t go to the RKC, finish the weekend and think to myself, “I’ve got kettlebells now, what’s next?” In my opinion that’s like going to a martial arts school learning a couple of kicks in your first few sessions and assuming you’re black belt standard.

But the fitness industry is made up of white belt trainers who do exactly that. In comparison to the RKC “inch wide but a mile deep” these guys are a “mile wide and an inch deep”. This superficial knowledge and inability to stick to anything long term enough to actually get good at it is exactly why the industry is largely falling to pieces. Because the unspoken link in the 2 x 7 x 52 x 10 theme is that obviously you need to be working on just a few things for it to work. If you’re doing barbell Olympic lifts today, swimming tomorrow, kettlebells the next, boxing after that and rock climbing the next day while you have got an interesting lifestyle what you’ve really got is a low level of skill at any of those things. Like the trainer I know who did the FMS course and then, after seeing it a grand total of once, went back to his studio and taught his staff how to use the system. That he thought he had mastered the fundamental concepts of the course in just a few hours was a sign of massive arrogance, and probably a foreshadowing of injury for his clients. That’s a white belt trying to teach a black belt level skill.

As humans we crave variety yet the only way to actually make great progress is to avoid variety. Find a few exercises that really do good things for you and stick with them for as long as you can. When they stop working and you stop improving change them just a little. This is a great example of what we call specialized variety or the “same but different” approach. If you’ve been doing barbell back squats for sets of five and your progress stalls changing it up slightly will help. Maybe this means changing to sets of ten. Maybe this means swapping to front squats. The goal isn’t to change completely but to change the squat only enough to continue forcing adaptation. A sign of a good trainer is one who knows and understands this and avoids appeasing your need for entertainment but keeps you on the course. A good trainer shouldn’t get bored watching you do the same thing over and over. Imagine if Ian Thorpe’s coach got bored watching him swim freestyle and changed it up every session?

This applies to trainers too in their own education. There’s no need to go and do fifty different courses. A few well selected ones will do. In my nearly twenty years I have really only done a few things. Those things were areas that I specialise in – kettlebells, strength and conditioning training, boxing and corrective exercise. That’s it. Not a very big list, is it? Yet I’ve never once had a client in front of me that I couldn’t help because my knowledge of those few things is so deep. A well selected course is one that gives you room to grow. For instance choosing to start your kettlebell education and specialise in them you might start with the Hardstyle Kettlebell Certification (HKC). You’d learn more at that kettlebell certification and finish as an instructor than you would from any other one day course run in Australia, but you would probably still want more. So then you’d go to the Russian Kettlebell Certification (RKC). And at this point, hopefully, you’d start to realise some things.

At this point I see two big distinctions in types of people. I see one group of people, who don’t know that their knowledge and experience are quite limited, who wander off aimlessly to do another course and add bits of paper to their filing cabinet. The other group take the red pill, realise that there is so much more to learn, both in terms of instruction and personal ability and diligently keep practicing those few things they were doing pre-RKC. Eventually those people will probably choose to do RKCII and learn even more, and usually by then they’ve really understood how much more depth there is within these few skills and they reapply and refocus again and go to even greater heights in terms of their own abilities and understanding. Honestly, with the amount of content provided in the courses, anything more than one of these certifications per year is pushing it for most people. In many cases you could make that one certification every two years and there would still be large gaps in understanding due to simply not having had enough experience at performing the skills.

And this gets me back to my 2 x 7 x 52 x 10. A good trainer is working hard both on their own skills as well as training others which is giving them some time towards their eventual ten thousand hours of mastery. And that’s one of the main reasons why most people make faster progress with a trainer. Let’s say your diligent and disciplined with your training. You train five times per week – an enormous amount of exercise for most people – giving you about two hundred and fifty hours per year of learning. Following that process it’s going to take you a long time to master training – like forty years – but when you get in front of a trainer who has specialized and spent all their hours on a few things they’ll have their own five hours per week of training as well as all the client hours they run. Even if they’re just training ten hours of clients each week – a low number for most personal trainers  – that’s still three times more understanding of the same exercises each year than you’ll have solo.

But if the trainer is busy being the mile wide, inch deep guy they won’t have that. They’ll be doing a thousand different things with clients – sandbags, ropes, TRX, kettlebells, barbell work…and end up with only spending a few minutes on each per week. So looking for a good trainer all comes back to the same thing as it does when looking to make progress on your own – you need to specialise in training. Not in the sense that you should only train for a few activities, because well constructed functional training aids performance across the board in a host of activities, but in the sense that you should only be using exercises that teach skills to the body that are transferable to other activities.

But traveling the 2 x 7 x 52 x 10 path isn’t easy. Many will mistakenly assume that every workout needs to be the same. Even including the concept of specialized variety won’t help you get there if you just run at every session flat out. Training twice per day is where big gains are made but you need to be smart. Most modern humans are so soft around the edges they can barely tolerate even three hard sessions per week, like my client who told me he thought he was over training on that number of sessions per week. Beginning the process of double split training is easy – make the second session of each day easier than the first one. Think of it as active recovery and to begin with do nothing but move around a bit, maybe even go for a walk – yes, we’ll count that. Make every other day easy too so that a heavy session Monday morning is followed by a walk Monday afternoon and then a light session Tuesday morning that is similar to Monday, just lighter. Take another walk that afternoon. Feel free to train harder on Wednesday if you want, but play it by ear. I often find that Thursday is my best day of the week – you’ll soon find your own rhythm as you go.

As I wrote here one of the big keys to actually getting in real shape – the kind of shape needed for any serious goals to be achieved – is to train more. That simple addition of more sessions will quickly help to get you in better shape. My advice is simple – seek out a specialized professional who has a solid background in helping people achieve your goals then work like hell training as much as you can handle until you reach them.

More than a few years ago now I was in Thailand at the famous Pat Pong markets. I was walking through stall after stall looking at fake watches. Back then it was obvious which were fakes and which weren’t.

Maybe the colour of the badge was wrong, or the weight of the watch was too light. But it was always easy to spot them. These days things have changed. I challenge anyone other than a jeweler to tell the difference between any Thai Rolex or Tag and the real thing.

In the world of fitness things aren’t much different. back when I started training people the internet was in it’s infancy. Email was so uncommon that it was odd if someone had an email address. So all the ways that trainers have now to spruik their services didn’t exist. It was easy to spot the good ones – they looked fit and their clients were changing shape every week. Back then there were almost no PT studios so having your clients visibly getting fitter each week was a powerful business card to the rest of the gym.

But things are different these days. I feel bad for people looking for a personal trainer in Bayside where Read Performance Training is located. Around us are the affluent suburbs of Brighton, Hampton, Sandringham and Bentleigh, and within those suburbs are many training locations ranging from laces like Recreation and Fitness First to Crossfit and other functional training studios. If you’re not a jeweler, if you don’t have vast experience in spotting fakes in the fitness world, how on earth are people supposed to know good from bad?

Let me help you…

The first thing you should ask your prospective trainer is how much experience they have. I understand that everyone had to start somewhere but there is never a time when less experience is better than more. And with the way people enter the personal training business these days it is entirely possible that they actually have more relevant experience than most trainers do anyway. Take, for instance, a friend of mine who was a professional boxer and coach, but who had been a police officer for most of his working life. He decided to get into training people. Now, he had about thirty years experience as a coach and athlete at that point, so even though he wasn’t super experienced as a personal trainer he clearly had enough experience to be worth spending your money on.

Make sure that they have coaching experience There’s a world of difference between someone training on their own for decades versus receiving and handing out world class assistance.

Secondly. have a look at their appearance. I’m going to get slammed for this, but so be it. If you are looking for someone to be a role model for your health and fitness journey don’t you think it’s important they can see their own toes and aren’t smoking two packs a day? I have always said that as a trainer you don’t need to look like you can bench a house or run a sub three hour marathon but you should like like you actually are strong and could run around the block without dying.

The next one is also going to be controversial – check how many certifications they have. You may think that the more the better, right? No, it’s actually the opposite. What you’re looking for is a subject mater expert. Someone who has two years experience (the average length of time for most personal trainers to have worked) yet has four or five different types of certification, with perhaps a few levels of each having been done, is not the person you’re looking for. While it does show a desire to educate themselves and learn more – a great thing  – what it also shows is a lack of understanding of any single method or tool. A great trainer knows a few things in great detail. The saying we use in the RKC is that our system is an inch wide but a mile deep. You’ll be much better off if your trainer has done maybe just the HKC or RKC and FMS.

As an example, in my nearly twenty years I’ve only been to five different things – strength and conditioning courses, weightlifting courses, the RKC and some of it’s add on courses (such as RKCII or CICS), FMS and Thump (when I used to work for them). I have to laugh when I hear people say things like they know the RKC system or the FMS system after seeing it once. I’m not so arrogant as to think that I still don’t have anything to learn and can say quite honestly that despite having been to more RKC events in Australia (18 and counting now) than anyone else I am still learning about kettlebell training. The same goes for barbell training. Despite having taught barbell lifting to some of our nation’s greatest athletes and spent time learning under the likes of Robert Kabbas (Olympic silver medalist) I am also still learning that.

If your trainer has been to a huge array of certifications and claims to know everything yet has little work experience be very wary – their arrogance could lead to danger.

Finally, the thing that is most important is that the personal trainer in question should be a professional. Imagine how you’d feel if you went to a dentist and he started cleaning his teeth at the same time as yours? Yet how many trainers do you see training alongside clients? The moment they start to sweat they’ve forgotten all about who is paying their mortgage. A hundred percent of their focus should go on the client all the time. If a regular session involves them looking like they just managed to roll out of bed in time, hugging their coffee or texting their mates then find a new trainer. There are 30,000 in Australia – do not have an emotional attachment to one who is doing an ordinary job no matter how likeable they are.

Make sure they do what they say they’re doing too. I can’t count the number of trainers who talk a good game, like used car salesmen pushing a rusty old heap on an unsuspecting granny. If they claim to be able to help you run better then take note of your times – if they don’t drop then fire them or ask for your money back! (Better yet, ask for proof of people they’ve helped do something similar). By this stage it should be obvious if you’ve found a good one or not – like a mirage in the desert most of the illusions that personal trainers seem to spread will vanish once you look closer. You’ll soon dig deep enough to see that the person who is held up as being great was a real estate agent five years ago, or that military record they spoke of turned out to be time spent working as a computer technician.

Don’t be fooled by a constant changing of programming either. It’s not functional nor does it keep the body guessing. It slows down progress and is the sign of an insecure, inexperienced trainer. Imagine Michael Phelps being told by his coach to do something other than freestyle, butterfly, backstroke or breaststroke? It doesn’t happen because the best coaches know that the way to get the most out of training is to adapt to it and the only way to do that is repeated exposure to the same stimuli.

Don’t feel shy about asking your trainer these questions. A great functional strength coach will be able to answer all these questions the right way – with a proven track record, their professionalism and integrity and by the visible results you’re getting.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what exactly it is I’m doing for training. Given I’ve one of the few people around actually looking to stretch my limits, try new things, and not just sit in my little rut and do the same thing I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising. So what do you do when you’re an Ironman, RKC, want to be spartan racer who needs who needs a huge blend of qualities to just get through a “normal” week?

Some fitness experts will tell you that you should narrow down your focus and do just a few things. Well…yes, if you want the highest level of performance possible in a single thing. I’ve been there. Pre-Ironman I did little else other than swim, ride and run except for some maintenance work and core work to keep me strong enough to handle the long distance work. Before the RKC I did little else other than worry about being strong enough to perform all the skills well with test weights, then I made sure I was fit enough to handle the weekend by doing little else except train with kettlebells. And given I’ve translated that approach into training every single HKC, RKC and SFG in the country that seems to have worked. When i work with elite ahletes like pro beach volleyball player Sange Carter we work on just one thing in each training block. So, if you have a single goal you need a single focus.

But life isn’t single focus. Life is run-across-the-road-carrying-your-bag-and-not-tripping-over. There is never a point where your body says ‘Now I will be strong for the next fifteen seconds. Now I will be fast for ten”. It just blends it all together. And this is where people get it wrong. Functional fitness is about getting the body to do the right thing when it counts.

One of the most important things in getting the body to function right is core work. For a long time I believed that I was getting enough core work indirectly via the variety of training I was doing. Training with a single kettlebell gives you both resistance to flexion and rotation. Training with two kettlebells gives you a lot of anti flexion and is actually used to teach bracing at the RKC. Then add in push ups – more midline stability – and a variety of other drills such as single leg work and in general my power transmission was working well. Because if the core is weak then the force you generate through the limbs will be lost. It must be able to remain stiff enough to oppose those forces so that posture is kept – without posture being ideal balance is lost and power too.

But since Ironman about two months ago my training has been revolving around some very hard bodyweight work. And the thing about hard bodyweight skills like planches, handstands and the like is that every single drill is actually a core exercise. There’s a reason that gymnasts have such amazing midsections – it’s because every training session is non-stop core work from go to whoa. My current training plan has me doing a workout three days per week that is about two hours long. How many of you are doing six hours of core work each week?

So a normal workout may consist of some Primal Move warm ups, including some easy rolling and crawling. Don’t discount these easy core movements. One of the things people forget is that we have both a soft reflexive core – used for movements like crawling and rolling – and we have a harder core, which we use for planks, sit ups and any other higher tension exercise. If you’re like most people you need to go to your higher tension strategies to do what should be simple tasks like crawling, then you really need to spend more time on them. That’s a warning sign that your innermost level of function is under developed and may well be the reason why you struggle with what should be easy moves.

There’s a knock on benefit from this too – time spent on crawling gets the abs to brace the spine properly and means that the hip flexors actually release and do their job properly. That usually means an instant increase in hamstring flexibility and a sudden release of pressure on the lower back as they psoas quits tugging on the vertebrae. Better quality of movement is an instant result for many from a few minutes of these simple drills.

But then where to after the warm up? Well, I do hollow body holds, various forms of planks, handstand holds (which again is hollow position), push up/ planche work (which again is a plank) and finally dips and pull ups (again hollow). All this work is interspersed with mobility drills so that I spend an equal amount of time on movement skills as I do on strength skills – an ideal set up. What good is being as strong as an ox when you can only display your strength over a tiny range of movement? And don’t think that ten minutes done at the end of a workout a few days per week will be enough to keep you moving well. If you only spent thirty minutes on strength each week would you expect to see much improvement? If your answer is a no, and it should be, why do you expect the answer to be any different when to comes to mobility?

What’s been the benefits of all the extra core work? Well, on a limited study, we do two hard body weight sessions per week in our classes. The people coming to these classes who are also attending our regular kettlebell raining classes are seeing massive progress. Girls who have been training only a few months are pressing beyond RKCII requirements, guys are squatting with nearly bodyweight with kettlebells (a huge feat) and everyone is starting to get that WTH kind of thing going on. That’s what happens when everything works together.

For me, I have barely run since Ironman and have only just started again in the last two weeks. The difference it is making in how my body feels running is amazing. Rob de Castella said to me that running fast is all about learning to kick the ground hard. If you don’t have a strong core when you kick the ground you’ll just flop on it instead of bouncing off it. Well, now I can actually feel what he is talking about when I run. Obviously, at distance efforts I am not kicking as hard as I can compared to sprinting so the extra strength gained makes holding that low level of continual tension needed in my midsection easier.

I’m left wondering how come I’ve never felt this way before when I’ve done hard abdominal training blocks and the reason, I think, is down to doing abdominal exercises. You know, standard sit up, V Sit, kind of stuff, that trains you to flex or rotate and not to resist those things. I’ve believed that all the other work I was doing was enough but it’s clear to me now that it wasn’t. And this is why our group classes are so popular – we are still learning. Even though we’ve got the most experienced RKCs and FMS practitioners in the country, even though we’re the leaders in Primal Move, even though we’ve got more experience as trainers than all of the StrongFirst instructors in the country combined we’re still learning and trying to figure out ways to improve. I’m pretty sure that looking at how much my body has improved over the last year that if I’m getting significant fitness improvements in my forties that we’ll be able to make our clients even better,

It must be a Tuesday thing, but somehow at this point every week I am ready to just start throwing bombs at people in the hope that knocking them out cures them of their stupidity, at least for a little while. But more likely it’s probably that I watch Biggest Loser on a Monday night and then struggle to get to sleep because I’m so riled up at the sheer dumb assery involved in whatever they jokingly call training.

See, people want to try to make things better. It’s a problem with man. We see things and try to improve upon it. We farmed to grow food and then we started rationalizing that if we put our crops in climate controlled green houses we could eat that food we craved so much year round. Then we started thinking that maybe we could grow it faster by adding certain chemicals or fiddling with its DNA a little and next thing you know we’re eating a tomato that probably causes cancer. Nothing beats organic produce farmed seasonally or meat fed its natural diet of grass and allowed roam free.

When it comes to exercise we’re no different. Modern man is all about comfort – put a roof on it, turn the AC on and make sure to be seated at all times. So what do we do? We take exercise – a thing that we’ve always done outside and in a standing position and made sure that every single variation of getting sweaty we can think of is done seated, inside and with the AC on. Has it improved it? Not at all. In fact, looking at obesity statistics it’s fairly obvious that we’ve made it worse.

While we’re busy trying to make things better and slip sliding back two steps at the same time, if we just stuck to the original form of things we’d be so much better off. We keep trying to reinvent fire. We’re the caveman who doesn’t accept that it works and spends our time looking for better fuel, a different type of stick – anything to make it work better – yet we’re always in the dark because we don’t have a working way to get the fire started. Meanwhile there are those who saw something that worked and stuck with it – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

We all know that machines are awesome, right? They make everything better. We’ve got machines to switch TV channels for us because that two foot walk to do it ourselves was too much. We’ve got machines to wash dishes and to dry clothes, because those jobs were too hard as well. And when it comes to the gym we’ve got the lot. We’ve got machines that balance the weights for you and others that allow you to watch TV while you peddle away inside in the comfortable climate controlled environment. We’ll know we’ve really gone all in when you see exercise bikes come with remote controls to change the channels while riding.

But have a look at the fittest guys and girls – how much machine based training do you see them doing? And I don’t mean the fittest looking, I mean the fittest – those with strength, endurance, flexibility and good movement. You know what they’re doing? They’re doing compound lifts like the clean, deadlift and squat. They’re running – top fighters from as far back as you can find have always valued road work yet somehow today’s crop of MMA fighters (mostly the ones who lose) seem to think you can get in shape without running. Tito Ortiz has said that he believes that running is excellent for teaching the body to absorb the impact of fighting. Ali felt it gave him the stamina needed for long fights into the championship rounds. Dan Gable felt a long ten mile run gave his wrestlers the edge. Strength and endurance – true functional fitness.

Along with lifting heavy and running you know what else the fittest are doing? They’re doing mobility work of some kind. Whether this is yoga, Primal Move like we teach at Read PT, hard flexibility work like martial artists and gymnasts do or another system like Z Health a smart athlete knows to look after their recovery and mobility too. After strength, endurance and movement they’re done. The fire is lit and they can sit back, relax and enjoy the rest of their lives.

So let’s look at the best fire building methods out there:

The RKC – viewed worldwide as the the gold standard in functional strength training. All of our sessions at Read Performance Training are built around the kettlebell and the RKC system. Contained within are not only kettlebell lifts that allow people to get close to the barbell lifts drills and techniques that allow us to get people to higher level of lifting skill quickly. This is important because many people lack the necessary tools to lift correctly and by using the RKC system we are essentially teaching them how to make fire.

Progressive Calisthenics – What could be more functional, more primal and more foundational to our fitness than learning how to use our own bodies correctly? The answer is nothing. Combined with the kettlebell our system of advanced body weight training combines the brilliance of Paul Wade’s Convict Conditioning as well as Coach Sommers’ Gymnastic Bodies Foundation series we have a tried and true method of getting you from rubbing sticks together for fitness and strength to cooking with kerosene. The strength and suppleness gained from smart body weight training beats any so called functional exercise done in a gym setting.

FMS – There’s a reason I host all FMS events in Australia – it’s because this thing works. It’s the squat of movement. It forms the basis of our functional pyramid as it allows us to create sound foundational movement skills to build strength, speed and endurance on. Any trainer telling you they’re into functional training who isn’t FMS certified is having you on. Trying to build a fitness fire without the FMS is like trying to start a fire without tinder. It is the basis for everything and is why we screen every single client at Read PT.

Running – I’ve heard all the stories. All the lies. All the claims that we shouldn’t run because it’s too hard on the body. For years I believed them too. But we evolved and became apex predators because of running – we can out run any animal on the planet eventually. Failing to recognise and embrace this incredibly primal movement from our ancestry is foolish. 750,000 years of human evolution has hard wired running into our DNA. We ran as kids without all the fuss about running methods and technique coaches – there we go trying to make the fire better again – yet as adults we are supposed to get taught to run? I believe that as long as you take it steady and slowly progress you’ll be back running pain free within six months no matter the shape you started in. And talk about a fat blaster! There’s no exercise on the planet that will burn the fat off you faster or get in you fighting shape than running.

So quit experimenting with sticks. get back to basics and get that fire burning! Lift for strength, mobility work for movement and run for endurance. Simple enough for a Spartan warrior. Aroo!!

Looking around the internet over the last few days since the most recent post I was again at a loss to understand how people can be missing the point by so much. Maybe it’s human nature to rush from one extreme to the other, never able to find balance as we race from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Not so long ago gyms were filled with people training, just like they are today. The only difference was that the equipment was very different – with rings, pommel horses, Indian Clubs, kettlebells, climbing ropes and stall bars. The focus then was on skill acquisition and on making the movements graceful and fluid. The goal wasn’t to be bigger or look better without a shirt. It was to be better. To move better, to be stronger, to be better able to survive what was still a hard life.

Gyms these days are filled with things that shouldn’t never have made it past a watchful eye. Bicycles that don’t go outside? What a ridiculous concept that would have been a hundred years ago. Bikes are made to be ridden outside. Or how about a machine that lets you use more weight than you safely can on your own? Don’t think that machine exists? It’s called a Smith Machine. It allows you to stack more weight onto it for exercises like squats and bench press because you don’t have to balance the load yourself. In the fitness world that seems like a good idea. Yet let’s look at what happens when someone travels further down that path. They enter the gym weak and unable to balance the bar themselves and get put onto a machine. They slowly develop strength there and after a while are told to go onto using a free weight. The only problem now is that they have a muscular system that is far in advance of their stabilizing system and now have a weight they have no idea how to balance. That’s the sort of thing that makes it onto YouTube.

The missing piece of the equation is self-limiting exercises. These are exercises where your body stops you before you can really hurt yourself. Think about how many cases of plantar fasciitis you hear of from runners. All those spongy shoes allow people to run well past the point they should have stopped. If you watch the joggers around your area what you will see will shock and terrify you if you have a good eye for movement. But on they trudge saved by their soft runners that act to protect them as much as possible. But what if we take away those runners and make them run barefoot? How far would they run then? Not very far would be my bet and at a greatly reduced pace. They’d be forced to stop or slow down quickly because of the body protecting itself. That’s self-limiting.

Modern fitness is scared of self-limiting. It’s scared of dropping volume below what we think we need to get a pump. The human body is made to adapt, to learn. But it is only right at the edge of our ability that we gain adaptation. So we should be searching for movements that test us, but that aren’t so challenging we’re overwhelmed by them. For instance, single leg deadlifts are a fantastic exercise. Long before your spinal stabilizers bow out your hips will give up and you’ll be forced to stop until the blow torch like feeling in your support leg goes away. But single leg deadlifts on a BOSU? Too much and the body will be overwhelmed.

Good movement is hard to come by. Good movement under load is even harder. The very best trainers, those who really understand functional training and how to make people move well and be strong, first understand that both are necessary. The raw movement skill is important before we add load, then we add load or speed to challenge the body and force adaptation. Some exercises are better than others when it comes to getting the body to its edge of ability.

• Exercises that involve the squat such as the snatch or overhead squat are amazing.
• Kettlebell and club exercises that allow the body to cross midline such as the get up, bent press and swipes do a lot for our neuro chemistry and skill learning. They involve many joints moving at once too and learning to coordinate parts of the body and when to move what is a vital tool for building functionality.
• Outdoor running. The more primitive your environment can be here the better. Get out on the trails and force yourself to run up and down hills, avoid slipping on loose gravel and keep your balance. Your entire body will thank you for it.

Move, move well, then let it rip with load and speed. But challenge the body for skill before you challenge it’s end point for endurance. When skill degrades you’re done. If that’s one rep that’s ok – that’s your body telling you to stop now before you hurt yourself. Learn to pay attention to those warning signs and watch your movement skill grow.

A few days ago I made this post about what is missing from your training. The response was interesting. I’m a big boy and write for a living so I’m used to people taking exception to what I write. Usually I think a lot of this is down to two things – firstly while I’ve somehow convinced the world that I actually have some decent information to pass on, I’m still the guy who got told that he’d be lucky to pass high school English. In other words I’m not the best writer in the world and often look back later and think how poorly I’ve done conveying my message. Secondly, let’s face it – most people have even worse comprehension skills than I have writing skills and when you combine the two it leads to people misunderstand things or failing entirely to read the subtext of the main message.

So here it is so there’s no confusion:

Modern gym based training exists to give you the illusion of being fit. It’s all about shallow appearance built on minimum effort. True, functional, useable fitness is built from being involved in athletic activities that revolve around multi-planar movement and a wide base of movement skills and base strength and fitness. Even if your training revolves around this concept many are still stuck in “go hard or go home” mode and worry only about how many or how fast they can train, neglecting how well they perform the movements.

The conundrum for many stems, again, from their lack of reading comprehension skills. I remember, when I was in the Army , that whenever a senior NCO would say, “you’ll see this again” it meant that whatever they just said was either going to be on a test or would be needed to survive. So I’d underline that or be sure to remember it. And this skill has proved no less vital later in life as I seek out the truths of training and fitness. When experts say things, that are largely repeated from one to the next, you should sit up and take notice. You should check out the source, notice the context and then chisel that into your brain as being of utmost importance.

When Gray Cook, founder of the FMS system, says, “mobility before stability, movement before strength” you should listen up. But when Dr. Stuart McGill, the world’s leading spine biomechanist, says, “mobility, stability, endurance, strength/ power” you should start paying a little more attention as he also is saying the exact same thing. Ironically enough you can read this article on a website called StrongFirst (//www.strongfirst.com/blog/my-journey-to-the-kettlebell/).

Both of these statements have recently been summarised by Cook again on his new DVD Exploring Functional Movement. He says, “First move well, then move more…We are made to move strong and age gracefully. Reclamation of authentic movement is the starting point”.

So just like my old drill sergeants repeating things that were important for us to know for later on, both of these experts are saying the same thing – it is up to us to take notice. We should be taking notice not of how many, how fast or how heavy we can push clients in training, but of how well. “Move well, then move more”. Not “move more then hope to God you move well so you don’t get hurt”.

The changes are beginning, although they’re occurring with the glacial speed of a melting ice age. NFL teams are taking onboard the theories and methods of the FMS and starting to drastically change the ways they train their players. The Marines have found that by instituting the same ideas their recruits are far less likely to suffer injuries that see people fail to graduate boot camp. Closer to home the Australian Army is looking to change their own recruit training so that less recruits get hurt and more march out having survived the courses. But changes to the rest of the fitness industry is slow. Sadly much of the rest of the industry is still mired in machine based training typically seen in big box gyms. Even those smaller PT studios, while having figured that you don’t need expensive equipment to get in shape, are still stuck in the qualitative mindset – how hard can we push our customers, how fast can they do this workout? They’ve been fooled into buying equipment that looks functional – kettlebells, sandbags, TRX, tires to hit with hammers or flip – but the reality is that your training equipment doesn’t make your training functional. rather it is how you use it and the benefits you derive from it.

If you can’t squat for whatever reason, yet a certain tool helps you squat better and more naturally then it is functional. Notice I said more naturally, so a tool like a Smith machine, which may help you squat with more ease is not fulfilling the natural part of that equation. However, if you’re using any of these so called functional training tools, and your movement isn’t improving then I’d have to say that your training is not functional. Likewise if your trainer is telling you how they follow the FMS principles, runs one screen on you and then proceeds to work the hell out of you regardless of what the screen shows then they’re hardly adhering to the system, are they?

Let’s change the term then from functional training to movement training. The goal of functional training should be to make you move better opening up the opportunity to move more (or do it with more load or faster). Sound movement patterns are constantly changing from a stabilising system to a mobilizing one at all times. Think about it – when you’re moving do you move with a spine that is locked in place as if about to perform a heavy squat at all times? Of course not. The brain is adapting to the environment all the time so that what we have is a reflexively stabilised spine, yet not one that is held rigidly unless necessary. And that’s the real goal of functional training – to create an innate sense of when to be mobile and when to be stable. That’s exactly what we’re training the body to do during functional training using tools like kettlebells, the FMS and Primal Move – to be in a reflexive, natural state that allows us to modify our movement based on the feedback we’re getting from our surroundings.

The best resource I’ve seen on the kind of work needed to achieve this ingrained functionality is Dynami, Kettlebells From the Centre, by Cook and Jones. It runs through the entire spectrum of training from patterning/ mobility to stability before shifting to developing slow grinding strength and finally explosive strength and then worrying about conditioning.

To go back to where I was in the original post I believe that the number one thing people can do to help themselves is to get out of the gym. Connect with nature again and get the body moving. Get your hands dirty – seek the feedback that touching the ground will give you. Use minimal shoes so that your feet can do the same. Force the body to stabilise on changing surfaces and force yourself to use different strides and gait patterns to accommodate moving on different terrains. If you are indoors and training strength – and it does make sense to train indoors for this – ditch the shoes and gloves and pick a training session that challenges many movement qualities instead of just standing still on both feet. Add in lunges, single leg stance and try loading only unilaterally. I’ll tell you now that if you’re in a rebuilding phase because you have poor movement (and when I say movement I mean function) those few tips will go a long way to fixing a lot of your issues.

So don’t be fooled by all the hype surrounding functional training. If it doesn’t have movement in it, it’s not functional at all no matter how hard someone tries to convince you it is.

The fitness world sucks. I’m not even going to try to kiss ass and lie and tell everyone that whatever sissy little thing they’re working on is good for them. Nor am I going to try to make equipment manufacturers some extra cash by saying that you need a brand new rocket fueled hamster mill in your home gym.

What you need is to quit sucking and training like a baby.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXOGS9cilKM

I spent a weekend looking at the Australian fitness scene at Filex and what I saw made me quite depressed. The last time I went was five years ago and despite all the big things going on globally you’d never now it from our industry convention. Never mind that things like the FMS are so big now they have their own convention overseas, when I asked people here only twenty percent of people knew what I was talking about. In one of my presentations, to a group of twenty-five, none had heard of it. Apparently movement quality isn’t a big deal to personal trainers despite all the talk about how they are into functional training. They also don’t seem to have grasped one massive thing about humans – we’re designed to move. Training in an awesome space like we’ve got at Read Performance Training daily I forget how badly designed most gyms are. Filex was a awash with a veritable Noah’s Ark of useless crap. The biggest thing for me is that manufacturers are still keen to put TVs in cardio equipment that mimics something that can be done outside for free. I still can’t believe that people pay to go to a gym to walk on a treadmill – don’t they know walking is free and available at any time of day or night right outside the front door?

And this leads to what I see as the three biggest mistakes people are making in their own training and why they suck so badly. If you want to transform yourself from sucking and mediocrity to outstanding then listen up.

Don’t train by standing still.

I don’t care what the marketing material for anything says – if you want to be athletic you need to move. Think about all of the most athletic people you know – I guarantee the thing that stands out is how well they move and how many ways they can move. There’s an old saying in sport – train slow, go slow. Well, let’s expand that so that we understand that if we slow our movement down so much that we only train by standing still then what we are really doing is ruining our athleticism. If we want to move well then we need to move in training too. If your entire training program involves standing on two legs and only ever lifting something in front of you then you’re not going to be much use if you have to turn a corner, side step, twist or any actual movement. You’ll be stable as a rock on two legs though, but once on one eg or changing balance or direction you’ll be lost.

The body is designed to move in many directions and in a variety of ways – we need to be able to stand on two legs, in a split stance and on one leg. We need to be able to run, jump, turn, twist, crouch, kick, throw, push and pull. How many of those movements are really being addressed in your training? There’s a fair chance that once you enter the safe confines of the gym all you’re doing is a few push/ pull moves and the rest is slowly degrading until you lose all your skills.

Another big problem with this “stand still lift weights” philosophy is that it’s often recommended that people shouldn’t run. Apparently it’s unsafe. Never mind that you did it just fine as a kid, or that humans have been running for about 750,000 years. Apparently it’s unsafe and you shouldn’t do it. What makes this really funny is that this statement is usually said by someone who hasn’t seen their toes in years and looks about five years away from triple bypass surgery. But don’t worry about their health, just focus on them being able to stand still and lift heavy things. Because apparently that’s functional. I don’t know about you but not having heart surgery seems pretty functional to me – so get out and get moving! The easiest way to do this is to connect with nature. Ditch the iPod and get out and run the trails. There’s a lot to be said for how it makes you feel.

Don’t ignore movement quality

Remember how supple and agile you were as a kid? What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. You got stuck in a chair and told to sit still for half your life. As you got older you tried to get back into shape by joining a gym where they stuck you in a bunch of machines or made you stand still and lift some stuff. But did you move around? Did anyone ever talk to you about movement quality over movement quantity? I’ll bet not.

The modern fitness world is built on quantitative training – how many, how fast, how often. No one ever asks about how well. Imagine if the perennial gym question changed from “Bro, how much do you bench?” to “Bro, can you touch your toes?” I’ll tell you now that if we were more concerned about that there would be less bad backs in the world.

There’s a massive change coming. Most can’t see it yet (maybe their the same ones too rotund to see their toes and their vision is blocked by fat eyelids..?) but more and more very smart people are starting to see that we need to worry far more about movement quality than we do quantity. Our training should be viewed like a F1 car’s race time. It’s our opportunity to go all out, to test the limits. The better shape our car is in, via quality work done on it in the garage, the faster it’ll be. Meanwhile most people are trying to get their car around the track fast while it’s missing a wheel and wondering why they can’t get much performance out of it. But get that wheel back on and working right and see how easy it is to go fast…

Don’t be tied to convention

Maybe it’s being an Australian, or maybe it’s just my nature, but I am fine with doing things my own way. I see so many people tied to convention or worrying about how others in their little clique will react to things. And make no mistake – fitness cliques are incredibly tight and almost cult like. The struggle for many for social acceptance began in high school and never left. Given that our time in training is supposed to make us stronger and more resilient, I personally find that sad. So many people keep butting their heads up against things that are no good for them because they’re too scared to stand up for themselves, or think for themselves, and then wonder why they get hurt.

Take barbell lifting, for example. The barbell is a great tool, but these days it’s just not for me. I’ve spent more time hurting myself with it over the last two years than I have progressing with it. At this point I’m pretty much done with them for good. That doesn’t mean I won’t use them when I train others, just that I won’t be using it anymore. Some will say that I “have to” use a bar to gain strength. I go back to point number two and say that what I need to worry about most is moving well and if a single tool is preventing that then it is no longer of use for me. The same goes for front squats. Many in the strength world will tell you how great they are. Not for me. Because of the way my hips are designed I can’t front squat without hurting my back – so why continue doing an exercise that is almost guaranteed to hurt me?

People need to be okay with forging their own path. Every person’s body is unique and individual and what has worked for others may not work for you. While there are many smart paths to take there is no concrete set format for how your training should look. Training is supposed to be fun and if all you’re doing is following what you’ve been told is the right path for you, yet it’s making you miserable, then change it. Certain things just aren’t for some people. Like me and front squats I’ve also had clients who actually can’t work within a structured plan as they get bored, or others who do well with that, but right now isn’t the time for it as their life is in a different stage and training is a secondary priority. It’s okay if you need to go do your own thing. Don’t ever feel like training is like religion and there’s on true way that will solve all your issues and see you live happily ever after.

How do you fic all this? The machines, the standing still, the feeling pressured into having someone else tell you what your dreams and goals really are? I’m not going to do exactly what I’ve just preached against and give you a cookie cutter plan, but I’ll tell you what I’m doing right now. I’m focused on body weight training for strength, train running and climbing for fitness and being outside as much as I can. My competitive focus for the next year is two trail runs (7km and 14km) and three Spartan races and my training needs to support those things. My training matches my goals and takes care of all the elements missing from modern fitness. So quit sucking, get outside and move more, and don’t just blindly follow what some guru tells you.