“If it’s important, do it every day.  If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.”
– World famous wrestling coach Dan Gable

More often than not, when people ask me “what should I be adding to my routine?” I tell them to stop adding and start subtracting.  If you can get rid of all but a few key moves (swings and getups come to mind), why add more?  I think most people reading this blog would probably agree that doing more with less kicks more ass than vice versa.

As always though, there’s an exception.  And it’s not a “move” per se, but an element of training that people ignore: Joint training.

Why joint training?  Simple: You’re only as strong as your weakest point, and since joints are complex, moving parts, for most people they’re susceptible to aches, pains, and injuries.  When I discovered kettlebells in 2008, I also discovered joint mobility and flexibility a la Pavel’s masterworks Super Joints and Relax Into Stretch.  I immediately started adding them to my daily diet of activities, and to great success.  I have a lot better flexibility and mobility than the average muscle head, and that coupled with smart training is what I credit my relative lack of injuries to over the years.  Not surprisingly, the times when I’ve gotten lazy and stopped practicing joint training and flexibility have been the times when I’ve dealt with more aches, pains, immobility and stiffness. 

I’m not one to toot my own horn, but…TOOT TOOT!  My flexibility and mobility is often the envy of friends, fellow trainers and SFGs.  I’ve heard more than a few times “I think a lot of your mobility is genetic.”  There may be some truth to this, just like there may be some truth to the claim “I think a lot of your strength is just genetic.”  It’s mostly a cop-out.  I’m not flexible when I don’t practice, just like I’m not strong when I don’t practice.  If you care about your strength, you practice it.  If you care about improving strength for your whole life, you might want to consider training your joints.

The good news is that you don’t need to add much or devote much time to it.  My whole daily routine looks like this:

·         Super Joints moves
·         The Trifecta (from Convict Conditioning 2)
·         Rolling, rocking, and crawling drills from Becoming Bulletproof

This takes me all of about 17 minutes.  You don’t even have to do it all at once – some days I’ll split it up if I’m short on time.  But I believe in it, and I think a lot of people would be better off if they stopped viewing it as some “sissy” thing and started taking it seriously.  I consistently hit PRs in my training, so joint training and flexibility work obviously hasn’t gotten in the way. 

As I said before, I’m a bigger fan of subtraction than addition, but there are always exceptions.  IF you add just one thing to your physical training, I recommend it be the Trifecta from Convict Conditioning 2.  The Trifecta consists of three calisthenics holds: A bridge hold, a L-sit, and a twist hold.  Check out the video for a tongue-in-cheek demo.

For a lot of people, lack of joint/flexibility training leads to knots, nodules, and other un-fun crap to build up in your muscles.  I had a super tight lower back that a very good chiropractor and massage therapist couldn’t fix, and the Trifecta made short work of it.  I have had no back issues to speak of for weeks, and fixing it up didn’t cost me a damn thing, save for the cost of the book!  Click here to learn more about Convict Conditioning 2 and start becoming a better man or woman.

There’s a good time for it and a bad time for it.

Is it ever okay to hop programs?

Hell yes it is!

But first, let’s qualify when it might NOT be all right:

1) You’re bored.
Oh, boo frickety hoo. Boredom is not a sign that a program is somehow ineffective. In fact, some of the best results I’ve ever gotten were from programs that bored me to tears and really forced me to stick to the plan. If it’s entertainment you want, there are better ways to get it than through fitness training. A personal fave of mine is cat videos on YouTube.

2) The movements aren’t easy.
So? If anything, this should serve as your sign to keep going! The better you fill the gaps in your training (i.e. get better at stuff you’ve ignored or suck at) the greater the likelihood that you’ll get better at everything else. Besides, no one ever got a reward for taking the easy road. Results await you at the end of a challenging program, not a low-balled one.

3) You’re lazy.
Well, at least you’re being honest with yourself. If this is the case, just know that no program will ever fulfill you because you’ll always be playing to your weakness – namely, your inability to finish what you start.

But when MIGHT it be a good idea to switch to a new program before finishing your last one?

1) Your schedule changes.
Five-day-a-week training is my fave. It also happens to be a hard thing to maintain for many people at various times due to various reasons (new baby, bigger workload at work, traveling, etc.). So if you take an all-or-nothing approach to training, do you think you’re more likely to get all…or nothing?

From my experience, it’s definitely the latter. So in lieu of training either 5 days or 0 days a week, switching to a 2 or 3 day a week regimen for as long as you need will keep you going forward slowly and steadily despite your hectic life. Believe it or not, you might even make better progress, as 5 day a week training requires a good amount of recovery, which (let’s face it) most people don’t really prioritize.

2) You start getting a nagging joint/soft tissue problem.
A few years ago after several months of pretty regular overhead kettlebell training, my shoulders started bugging the heck out of me. Rather than push on and risk a more serious shoulder issue, I stopped overhead work all together. This gave me an opportunity to start exploring some stuff I was ignoring before – namely front squats, double kettlebell swings, and perhaps most importantly, straight-arm gymnastics work. In short order my shoulders started feeling much better, and my overall fitness was far better than it was before.

There are other reasons that are perfectly legit, but you don’t need to go searching for ’em. Odds are you fall in at least one of the above categories, so instead of trying to make up new ones, find which one best describes you and take the appropriate action – be it marching forward or changing course.
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Being honest with yourself is the first step in leveling up. You know what to do next.

There are a million reasons. Here are just a few.

If you can’t move your body adequately – and indeed effortlessly – through free space, what business do you have trying to make progressively heavier poundages go airborne when your own fair flesh barely stands a chance under your power?

There’s no clearly demarcated line at which you should start weight training, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s some sort of elite-level activity requiring elite level preparation. Lifting weights is an activity for absolutely EVERYBODY.

But one thing is clear:
Bodyweight training – in any and all of its forms – will teach you more about the discipline of strength training than just about anything else
While this has been my observation for a long time, these aren’t my strictly my words; the above is paraphrased from Russian strength expert and founder of StrongFirst – the inimitable Pavel Tsatsouline.

Why, you might ask?

Let’s start from the lowest rung of the ladder and work our way up.

If you can’t do something as simple as roll, rock, or crawl across the floor comfortably and without wheezing, seizing, and going red in the face, the odds that you’ll be able to express your strength with any modicum of athleticism and real-world power are pretty low.

If it takes 350 lbs on your back to squat deep (not to mention a mini pump-up speech in your head and all sorts of cuing) what does that say about the day-to-day flexibility in your hips, knees, and ankles – not to mention your reflexive stability, which allows you to relax when needed and spring into action in anticipation of the need to move quickly and painlessly?

Think about this for a second. Now ask yourself: do people get hurt when they take up weight training because weight training is dangerous, or because they are woefully underprepared in such basic things as controlling their own unloaded movement?
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On the higher end of things, think of untrained feats of strength that most would consider miracles: individuals benching 350 lbs (160 kgs) a few short weeks after learning the move, or deadlifting up to 2 or 3 TIMES their bodyweight upon their first dance with the barbell? Who else could you expect this from except…gymnasts, whose training “suffers” from a severe iron deficiency (if you’ll excuse the pun) and is populated only with exercises that demand high levels of strength and control of their bodyweight in free space, and often in the most difficult positions to imagine.
By all means, continue to lift weights, and keep your sights set high on your iron-hoisting goals. Your strength and fitness relies heavily on it.
But ask yourself: What could YOU gain by learning to control your body through space in both the most primitive, floor-bound positions and the most high-level, gravity defying moves out there – those commonly shrugged off as being only in the realm of gymnasts and others?

If it’s not hard, what are you resisting, exactly?

Wanna know what works for physically transforming yourself?

Resistance training.

Resistance is defined as “the act or power of resisting, opposing, or withstanding.” The harder you have to work to physically resist something, the more your body necessarily and physiologically has to change to meet the challenge. That means burn more of that fat you encouraged it to store, build more of that muscle you let get soft and mushy, and lift up that mood you let the gravity of day-to-day life and circumstance bring down.
Ponder, then, your fellow man’s seeming obsession with making resistance training easier. What’s the point, exactly? If you’re constantly striving to make the act of resistance easier, what are you even resisting? It’s like wrestling a baby bear, winning, and then publicly patting yourself on the back (so everyone on Facebook can see, of course) for the great work you did. Feel free to brag when you wrestle the mama bear and win by suplex, but don’t equate the two. You might as well make it super easy on yourself and stop altogether. At least that way you’re efficiently making lack of resistance easy and not wasting your time in Fantasy Land by dancing on the fence.

Performing easier or lighter progressions of an exercise that still challenge you with the goal and mindset of building up strength for harder variations in the future is great and is a fool-proof way of building up toward greater resistance and therefore greater results; no criticism there. Going into your fern-laden mirrored paradise and playing with pink rubber bands while you hoist some tiny weight on a blue Swiss ball will not help you lose pesky inches around your waist, but rather around your pocketbook as you send your overpriced trainer laughing all the way to the bank after he’s done counting your nosebleed-high reps.

Resistance isn’t futile. Lack of it is. Hoist something heavy and have a kick-ass week (and pass the word off to your pink rubber band-lifting friends. Trust me, they won’t put up much resistance).

There are many ways to add resistance.  One, as Arnold Schwarzenegger is demonstrating in the picture above, is to add weight to an exercise you’re already performing.  There are other ways to add resistance without adding weight, and the following program for one kettlebell + your own bodyweight will demonstrate how you can squeeze the most strength out of a very small amount of equipment.

Extra Resistance Program

A1) 3-5 Pullups (add a 5 second pause at the top of each rep, and lower to the starting position over the course of 5 seconds)
A2) 5 goblet squats (add a 5 second pause at the bottom, stand up half way, go back down, then stand up fully.  Do this on each rep)
A3) 5 military presses per hand (pause for 5 seconds in the rack, press the bell halfway and pause for 3 seconds, then finish the press to the lockout.  Repeat for each rep)

When you’re done, throw this in for good measure: 

B1) 5 slow leg raises lying on your back
B2) 10 power swings

You’ll find that regardless of your circumstances, you can always find a way to get stronger if your goal is to work both smarter AND harder.

​Enjoy, and happy training!

Shocking, I know, but 100% true.

To get fit and strong, you do NOT need a gym.

You need proper guidance, a goal, and a clear path.

A gym doesn’t hurt, for sure, but it’s no guarantee for success, either. All too often you see people who’s only real, stated fitness-related goal is “I need to get to the gym more often.” If that were all you needed, the secretaries and janitors there would be walking, talking Greek statues! Not to mention a greater amount of the patrons there, as a cursory glance would show that most of them look like they’ve been stuck in shiny-machine-and-elliptical-bike purgatory (or Hell) for the past 5 to 10 years.

There is nothing magical about the gym that ensures any measure of results. The magic comes from following certain set-in-stone paths; paths that serve more as outlines that let you fill in the blanks.

1) Progressive overload + recovery = adaptation.
In laymen’s terms, do a little bit more/better work, recover from it, and the results will start to rear their heads. The key word here is “progressive overload” not “soul-crushing overload” whereby you barely leave your session under your own power after each workout. There’s a time and place for pushing the pedal to the metal, but you know…not EVERY time. Have the courage to not feel the need to prove yourself every workout, but rather to IMPROVE yourself. Improvement takes finesse, not duress.

2) It doesn’t matter how much work you can do – it matters how much work you can recover from.
You can – and should – work hard, but you won’t get far if you sleep 5 hours a night, eat like you’re trapped in a fast food restaurant, and are more stressed out than a turkey the night before Thanksgiving. Get to bed earlier, eat like an adult, and learn how to relax.

3) Two steps forward, one step back.
Everything in life is cyclical, and if it were as easy as “just keep doing more every time”, everybody would be bench pressing 2,000 lbs by now. The only way you’ll control nature is by obeying nature, and the nature of your body requires that you pull the reins on that wild stallion you call “go hard or go home” every once in a while. Once every three weeks, take it a little easier, leave a lot more gas in the tank, and ramp back up slowly but surely, then take ‘er easy again.

4) Leave a few reps in the tank.            
Do you spend every last dime you earn? Do you drive your car until it sputters to a stop from a lack of gas? Do you eat until you can barely breathe? If you answered “yes” to these, you’re probably a mess. If not, ask yourself, Why not extend that same logic to my training? Make your life – and your gains – easier. Build yourself up instead of constantly breaking yourself down.
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As easy as it would be to go on and on, these general guidelines will fit into any intelligently-written program and will help you to squeeze a helluva lot more out of it than another pair of knee wraps and an even heavier dose of smelling salts. Don’t trust me, just try it. In short order you’ll see what I mean.