No joke.  It works like magic (except it’s science).

Wanna make your lifts stronger almost instantly?

If you said “no”, get off my page.

If you said “yes”, this small trick will be right up your alley.

It’s nothing new, it’s nothing fancy, and it’s nothing “X-TREME”, but it gets the job done like “Dayum!” and the difference you’ll notice when you start making this trick a regular part of your routine will be unmistakable.

It’s called pre-tensing the muscles, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Usually when we strength train, we prepare ourselves in RESPONSE to the weight rather than in ANTICIPATION of the weight. Rookie mistake, but one you don’t have to make forever. Pre-tensing the muscles prior to an exercise can increase strength by up to 20%!

How do you do it? You can do it any way you like, but i like to do it in sequence. The sequence in particular is one I picked up from Geoff Neupert. I’m not gonna give away all of his great cues for squeezing the most out of each and every one (You’ll have to attend one of his “Kettlebell Strong” workshops for that), but I *WILL* give you a sneak preview of the ones that will give you the fastest bang for your buck:

1) Push your feet through the floor
2) Squeeze your glutes
3) Tighten your abs
4) Tighten your lats
5) Squeeze your fists

Hold this position for 3-5 seconds, and then without hesitating immediately hit 1-5 of whatever lift/exercise you’re working on.
Doing this will take you from struggle central to epic domination of anything you’re working on, with exercises as varied as barbell, bodyweight, and kettlebell exercises all seeing instant improvement. Personally, my weighted pullups, pistols, front levers, and handstands have all seen massive improvement in a short amount of time.

The caveat (if you even want to call it that)? You will get fatigued more quickly. If that bothers you, ask yourself: Do you want to get stronger, or do you want to mindlessly do more reps?

If your answer is in the first category, you now know what to do.

Here is a simple way you can test it right now.  Go grab a kettlebell or heavy pair of kettlebells.  Clean them to your chest and press them for a few reps (3-5).  Rest for a few minutes, and then go through the above sequence one by one.  Hold that full-body tension for 10 seconds, then relax and shake it out.  After a few seconds, get tight again, clean the kettlebell(s) to your chest, and press for a desired number of reps (3-5, for example).  Your press should be noticeably stronger, easier, and more stable.  You may be slightly out of breath, but that’s a small price to pay for being stronger than before.  

Do this in your regular training and watch as your old PRs fall and get replaced by new ones. 
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Go forth and rock, my friends.

Sound impossible? Think again.

If there’s one thing that people are discovering more and more with the ever-increasing frustration wrought by the multitude of fitness fads pimped by the fitness industry on the daily, it’s that simple is better – not to mention more effective, more time efficient, and friendlier on the wallet than wringing it out every time a shiny new magic bullet screams your way from across the TV inducing you to “call now, supplies are limited!”

What’s more, people have once again begun to look backward to look forward – strength is in vogue again, and hopefully it’ll stay that way. In addition to rediscovering plate-loaded barbells and massive sets of incrementally larger dumbbells, people have begun to discover that these weird looking things called kettlebells and even one’s own bodyweight are being touted as among the best and most underutilized tools for building brute strength on a budget. One big question seasoned gym goers and strength enthusiasts have, however, is “How can you get stronger with kettlebell and bodyweight exercises without incrementally adding more and more weight?”

A great question. Here are the top 3 benefits of training for a fixed weight to get you stronger.

1) Fixed weights help you build a better training base.
If you only ever focus on intensity (i.e. the proximity of the weight you’re lifting to your 1 rep max) and adding it perpetually, you will likely burn out and crash faster than your training partner can shout “ONE MORE REP, BRO, IT’S ALL YOU!” Other training variables, such as volume (number of reps), are an important part of the process.

Rather than simply trying to grind out as many heavy reps as possible, you can do something like the following:

Let’s use the squat as an example. Find a weight heavy enough to allow you to lift it only, say, 6 times with good form. Instead of doing progressively uglier sets of five, work on doing solid sets of 2. Start off working up to doing a total of 3 times the amount of your rep max (18 reps), so 8 sets of 2 reps. Eventually, work your way toward 4 times that amount (24) for 12×2. Then work on getting 24 total reps in fewer sets (i.e. start doing sets of 3). Once you can do 8×3, work your way up to 6×4. You can either continue adding volume, or take a few days off and then test your rep max. Odds are very good it will be far beyond 6. Congratulations! You just got stronger!

2) They make it easier to take advantage of techniques that adding weight won’t allow.
A few examples of this would be rest/pause reps (i.e. pausing for several seconds at the beginning and end of an exercise), sticking point reps (wherein you either start at the sticking point or move in and out of a sticking point before completing a rep). These techniques can definitely be done with barbells and dumbbells, but not if your only focus is on lifting as heavy as possible.

3) It is easier to do complexes with a fixed weight.
Complexes (i.e. doing multiple exercises one right after another) can be done most excellently with barbells, no doubt. But the technical demands of many barbell lifts can make them riskier when done under fatigue – especially so if you have strength imbalances, which barbells most definitely punish. Kettlebells and bodyweight, however, are much more forgiving on strength imbalances and allow for greater opportunities to correct them – even within workouts.

Let’s say you can now squat that weight for 15 reps – good for you, you strong mofo! Here’s an example of how you could put that into a kettlebell/bodyweight combo.

5 squats
5 pullups
3/3 clean and press on each side
5/5 swing per arm
Crawl 20 yards

There are many other benefits – learning the value of patience in your training, learning how to create and follow and intelligently written training program, treating your strength training as a skill and not merely a cheap thrill, and in the case of bodyweight, learning how to move your body more powerfully through space, etc. The list goes on, as do the benefits, but you get the point.
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If getting strong is your goal, don’t keep adding weight until you get pinned by it. Sneak up on it and attack it through such time honored methods as mentioned above, and before you know it you’ll be mastering both the iron and your fair flesh faster – and easier – than you ever thought possible.

Discover the secret of old time strongmen for building badass overhead pressing strength

Handstand pushups: for LEGENDARY upper body power

Putting heavy stuff over your head is the ultimate show of strength.  Always has been, always will be.  Deadlifting, squatting, and every other worthy strength move will always be useful and important, but no exercise separates the men from the boys quite like the military press.  Powerlifting coach extraordinaire Marty Gallagher once made an interesting observation.  Go to an island populated by natives who had never seen strength equipment before and leave a barbell there.  Come back in a week and they would have figured out how to put it over their heads.  It would never occur to most people to lie down to try to lift it a la the bench press.  But putting it over their heads military press style?  It appeals to seemingly everyone the world over.  No wonder it still remains as the classic test of upper body strength – even in a bench press-obsessed world.

So how – if at all – can you replicate the amazing benefits of the military press in your calisthenics training?  How can you sculpt the broad-shouldered doers physique of the dimensionally perfect Greek statues so well that you’re almost mistaken for one – WITHOUT external weight?  The answer is simple, and it lies within your hands.

I’m talking, of course, about handstand pushups.

Many people overlook handstand pushups as a novelty of sorts – a harder variation of regular pushups that you just kick up against the wall and go to town with.  Not something they think of training seriously.  However, when trained with single-minded determination and focus to make them progressively more difficult , they become an indispensable tool in your arsenal of upper body brute strength.  American strength legend Paul Anderson – known by the hard-to-impress Russians as the Wonder of Nature – was a big proponent of them, and he used them as an assistance exercise to help him achieve his 400+ lb military press.  When was the last time YOU pressed that much overhead?  Don’t answer.

So where do you start?

First things first: your mobility.  If you have a difficult time putting both arms overhead, elbows locked, without wincing and making an ugly face, then you’re not ready for handstands or handstand pushups.  Take some time and improve your thoracic spine mobility and shoulder mobility before you tackle this exercise.  Your joints will thank you.  

If that’s not an issue and you’re ready to give it a shot, start off by stretching your forearms and fingers.  Pull your fingers gently out of their sockets, stretch your hands out and lift your forearms.  Think “jazz hands”, only more manly.

Next, your hand placement.  It should be the same as it would be for a strict pushup.  Let your arms hang by your sides and flare your lats.  Then put your hands up at about chest level.  That’ll likely be your most comfortable handstand pushup position.

As far as your actual training goes, you’ll want to start off slowly.  This is important, because many people aren’t used to being inverted, and it often takes a long time to get adapted to it.  This article may be a crash course in handstand pushups, but don’t take liberties with the whole “crashing” part.  Trust me.  If things go South because you were impatient and did too much too soon, handstand pushups will suddenly seem much less appealing. 

You’ll train these next two steps at the same time – first, headstands.  Get your hands about a foot away from the wall, place your head on the floor somewhere in front of your hands (it will vary from person to person based on your build) and get accustomed to the groove of holding yourself there.  Use a training partner if needed.

PRO-TIP: your groove should feel like you’re part of the way through a barbell military press

Next, pike pushups.  First, start with your knees bent and elevated on a chair and hands flat on the floor.  The position should feel stable.  If you feel like you’re going to fall, you’re probably not in the right position.  Change it before you start pressing.  Once you’ve found your position, push!  Practice a few of these in between your headstands – either on different days or within the same session.  Once you’re comfortable doing these on your knees, you’ll move on to elevating your feet on the chair and doing the same thing.  Practice your pike pushups well – they’ll be invaluable to you in building dynamic strength needed to build up to handstand pushups.

Progression 2: from the feet

PRO-TIP: Your forearms will stay more or less vertical, so your head will touch the ground somewhere in front of your hands, NOT between them.

Once pike pushups and headstands are a piece of cake, you’re ready for handstands!  You will keep practicing your pike pushups and headstands, but the addition of handstands will build up some extra upper body strength in short order.  Once you are good at these, everything else will seem a lot easier.  The same rules apply: use a partner if necessary, and keep your hands at the same width as before.  With arms as straight as possible (imagine you are pushing your hands hard through the floor), kick yourself up onto the wall.  Stay.  Practice this in between pike pushups and make the mind-muscle connection between the two moves.

Now we’ll add another element: the Russian negative.  It is like a regular negative, but more awful.  These are a bit tricky at first as they require some extra concentration and an emphasis on controlling the descent (you’re not Buzz Lightyear, so no “falling with style”!).  From the handstand, “unlock” your triceps while keeping your delts and pecs tight and lower yourself until your head touches the ground (imagine pulling yourself down).  If you’re strong enough already, push yourself back up.  Congrats!  You’ve just done your first handstand pushup!  If you are not yet strong enough, hold the headstand position, lower your feet, and repeat.  Do enough negatives and pike pushups and you’ll be banging out handstand pushups like it was your job in no time.

Handstand pushups against a wall are great, but you’re leaving a lot of strength on the table if you only push from the top of your head to lockout.  Once 5+ handstand pushups are no big deal, it’s time to go beyond.

Step one: Increase the range of motion.  My preferred weapon is what I call the souped-up pike pushup.  Check out the video below for a quick tutorial.

From here the process toward greater depth follows the same route as before. Practice the souped-up pike pushups as deep as you can go, as well as handstand pushups with your hands slightly elevated (use Russian negatives to build up the strength if needed).

Another tool I’ve used is full range of motion handstand pushup holds at the bottom position (I don’t have a pithy name for it yet, so if you come up with one you can name it after yourself).  These suck and will really challenge your balance, but they’ll give you exactly the physical feedback you need to groove the bottom position of your future full ROM handstand pushups.

And (if you’re really insane), you can take it even further by adding weight.  Ankle weights and weight vests are both good choices.  That, or you could just squat more so your legs get bigger and make the movement more challenging for you.  Pick your poison. 

There you have it.  A crash course in handstand pushup excellence.  As far as programming is concerned, don’t overthink it – just practice making them perfect and the reps – and strength – will come.  Best yet: your military press will more than likely go up as a result.  And don’t forget the wise words of Tae Kwon Do grandmaster and Master SFG Jon Engum: The meaning of life is to put heavy stuff over your head.

Give your life some added meaning; get cracking on your handstand pushups today!

Aleks Salkin is a level 2 StrongFirst-certified kettlebell instructor (SFG II), StrongFirst-certified bodyweight Instructor (SFB), and an Original Strength Certified Coach. He grew up scrawny, unathletic, weak, and goofy, until he was exposed to kettlebells and the teachings and methodology of Pavel in his early 20s. He is currently based out of Jerusalem, Israel and spends his time teaching clients both in person and online as well as spreading the word of StrongFirst and calisthenics. He regularly writes about strength and health both on his website and as a guest author on other websites. Find him on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/alekssalkintraining and online at https://alekssalkin.com.

“I said look you need to crawl before you ball”
– Kanye West

Every exercise has a standard to accomplish before you can rightfully say you’ve gone from “suck” to “entry level good.” For the deadlift it’s double bodyweight. For the one-arm press it’s half your bodyweight. And for crawling it’s moving your bodyweight non-stop for 10 minutes.

Why 10 minutes? Simple: it’s daunting, but doable. No matter what variation(s) you’re using, you’ve hit a new level of ability both physically and mentally after crawling for that amount of time – and unlike other 10 minute challenges, such as the Secret Service Snatch Test, crawling for 10 minutes non-stop can ostensibly be done daily with zero ill effects. 10 minutes non-stop of a lot of other things is more of a gut-check than anything and the training required to get you there is where the benefits lie. With crawling, the benefits lie in both the training to get you to that 10 minute mark AND in the test itself. Win-win.

So no matter what your goals were before, here’s your new goal: get mentally and physically prepared to crawl for 10 minutes.

What are some of the advantages of crawling for long periods?

Quite simply, long periods of crawling provide unique advantages over shorter bouts.

First of all when you know and accept that you’re going to be crawling for long periods of time you have no choice but to relax and settle into the experience. It has to happen or you just aren’t going to make it. This is one of the best things that can happen because it encourages your reflexes to take over. You learn to get the job done by using less. Ultimately this will increase your reflexive strength. The better your reflexive strength, the better your brute strength. The better your brute strength, the easier it is to accomplish other athletic goals. In our opinion, there’s no reason any athlete, recreational or professional, should NOT be able to crawl for 10 minutes. Better yet, it won’t get in the way of your other goals; it will scaffold them (how, exactly, we’ll mention in a second).

Long periods of crawling increase your movement and work capacity, making you a more useful human being. They also foster heightened awareness within the movement as there is no auto pilot in crawling.

Forward crawling has almost zero eccentric stress and even reverse crawling has very little eccentric stress. The nature of the movement is not very taxing to the central nervous system but quite the opposite; it’s actually refreshing after the fact. These distinct traits lend crawling to high amounts of volume and make it hard to overdo. Best of all you can wake up the next day without feeling like you’ve been hit by two trucks and a train carrying trucks. Any exercise that increases both your work capacity and strength while improving your movement without taking more than it gives to you is a rare gem. We truly believe it’s in a league of its own.

(Before going any further, we would like to point out that people with wrist or big toe issues may need to tread with caution. High amounts of crawling can be stressful for the surrounding connective tissue and capsules of those joints. As with anything else in life you need to be smart and realistic with what your body is telling you.)

Two things that tend to give people problems are high volume on unstable surfaces. Sand, soft AstroTurf or even grass can cause weight bearing load to be distributed at awkward angles on the tiny bones in the hand and wrist.

Another is improper hand posture. The hand is much like the foot and when it needs to weight bear, it should have some semblance of an arch.This is achieved by attention to weight placement and literally “grabbing” the ground.

Quick video on hand posture:

So once you have committed to the goal of being able move on all fours for 10 minutes straight, how do you train for it?

Let’s go over some recommend perquisites.

You should be able to competently leopard or spider crawl for at least 1 minute. If you can’t, stop reading this, hit “favorite” and come back and finish the article when you can. No sense in putting the cart before the horse…or however that saying goes.

The standard for crawling through any variation means you can keep your head higher than your butt and have minimal to no hip drop in your hips while doing it. If that’s not the case work on your baby crawls and other resets. Slowly incorporate leopard crawls until you can meet the criteria comfortably. Another recommendation is to work on as many varieties of crawling as you comfortably can, such as backward crawling, crawling in circles, crawling at angles, and crawling up and down hills. This too will be explained in more detail momentarily, but for now just know that limiting yourself on your crawls is unnecessary and boring.

You need to mentally want to do it. Once a good baseline crawl pattern has been established, the biggest limiting factor will be your mental fortitude for the uncomfortable.

So to simplify this journey, one of the most obvious ways to reach this goal is to do more of it. Find ways to incorporate crawling into your training and daily routine. Not just in your warm up but use it as a form of active rest between strength sets or make it a station in a conditioning circuit. It can be your training for the day, or in the case of Josh it can be the main bulk of all your training. The bottom line is that the more you do it the stronger you get and the less daunting the 10 minute goal becomes.

Another way to overcome the mental block (which will be the biggest block for most people) is by regularly following the advice of Alon, a tough-talking army officer in one of Aleks’s favorite Israeli comedy films, Operation Grandma:

Sergio: Alon, can you give these swimmers a tip on how to improve their swimming?
Alon: Swim as fast as you possibly can and then slowly but surely swim faster.

In other words: crawl as much as you can, and then crawl a little more. As we mentioned earlier, this carries no ill effects and can be done regularly. Let’s say your “threshold” is 5 minutes. If you squeeze out just one more minute you’ll start to see that your thresholds are mostly in your mind. Your body is waiting for you to get over it.

Enough talk. Let’s crawl.

Aleks’s personal favorite strategy is to pick a few varieties of crawling and put them together in a circuit. Why? For two reasons: 1) it reduces the monotony of doing 10 minutes of anything, and 2) as Pavel Tsatsouline has pointed out, a change is a form of rest. If you’re switching from crawling backward to crawling forward, you’ll be amazed at how much extra gas you’ll “find” in your tank when the going gets tough. Even if the activity is more or less the same, the presence of a slight variation will distract your mind just enough to get your body to forget about its whining and keep going.

Another effective strategy for getting to 10 minutes is to make the current time you can crawl for harder. Here we are going to apply the time tested concept of progressive overload to crawling. So if you can crawl for 4 minutes straight, trying crawling for that time while dragging weight behind you. It can be a sled, chains, a heavy bag attached to a rope around your waist. It doesn’t have to be super heavy, 25-35% of body weight will be sufficient for the weary. For the brave 50-75% of body weight will do the trick. If equipment isn’t possible find a steep hill and hit various crawls up and down without stopping.

As Aleks’s antidote alluded to, when you get to the point where you can’t go any longer, go a little further. Using a mixed approach of both overload strategies propelled Josh to the point of being able to forward and reverse spider crawl with 115lbs (70% of Bodyweight) for 15 minutes straight. Well, with a 1 minute rest at the 8 minute mark.

Just to give you an idea of what resisted crawling looks like:

So to sum up before moving on, you have two strategies:
1) A continuous circuit of crawling variants
2) Working up toward crawling at your current limit with anywhere between 25%-75% of your bodyweight added.

And now comes the question we’ve all been waiting for…

“But how do I program this?”
And here’s our answer – don’t! Don’t program anything, you don’t need to. Keep in mind that one of the take away messages of Original Strength is the importance of play, and play you must. If you’re not convinced, keep in mind what we mentioned earlier in the article: unlike some of your favorite strength exercises, crawling induces no eccentric stress on your body. While all those awesome traditional strength exercises require a thought-out approach to keep your endless ambition and your body’s finite ability to handle stress from meeting in a dark alley and having a nasty altercation, you won’t find this problem in crawling, so programming is always going to be mercifully simple. The name of the game here is play, exploration, variety and a fun challenge. So try this on for size:

Day 1: Crawl with weights for your current limit (or thereabouts)
Day 2: Crawl past your limit with a variety circuit
Repeat days 1 and 2 ad nauseum until you hit 10 minutes or more. If you focus on having fun while doing it and constantly ask yourself, “I wonder how many ways I can crawl between here and there” or “I wonder how far I can crawl if I load myself up with X amount of weight” and you make enjoying the experience your goal, you’re going to hit your mark. The point here is the journey, not staying up late at night and mapping out what you think might be the fastest, easiest route to get there.

The above suggestions may seem very basic, but think of all the variety you have in front of you to keep moving boldly forward.
1) Crawling variations: baby, leopard, spiderman, narrow, wide, axial crawls, angled crawls, backward for any of the aforementioned crawls, up or down hills for any of the aforementioned crawls, BACKWARD up hills for any of the aforementioned crawls
2) Add weight to any of the crawls listed above. How much weight? A lot, a little, via chains, chains dragging an object, a weighted vest, a little person on your back, etc.
3) When to do your crawls: before your strength/sport training, after your strength/sport training, between sets as active rest, whenever you’re feeling bored, whenever you want to show off randomly to your friend, etc.

If you can’t find a place to do the dozens and dozens of crawling variations and combinations listed above, then read the above list again and get crackin’. The faster you get rid of the mental block of “but I don’t know where/when/how to fit the crawls into my programming,” the faster you’ll start to get rid of other mental blocks, among them the challenge of crawling for 10 minutes. We’ve left the options wide open simply by virtue of the fact that the benefits of crawling have such wide implications and applications that being too specific obscures the purpose behind the exercise and unnecessarily restricts you and your ability to explore what works best for you and what gives you the fastest and best results.

Your goal now: Go forth and find the maximum amount of time you can crawl – any which way you like. Every day, add a little variety into the mix and enjoy yourself. What seem like drops in the bucket now will help your cup runneth over in time – and probably less time than you might think.

Your only limits are the ones you impose upon yourself. Go forth and be awesome!

There are about a million reasons – I’ll give you just a chosen few.

Think back to a time in your life when your car got a scratch on it, so you decided to stop driving it, keep it parked in the garage, and never drive it again, preferring instead to let it rust out and fall apart.

Or perhaps to a time when your favorite pants got a rip in them, so you decided to stop wearing your entire wardrobe, choosing instead to just wear the clothes you still had on until they went ratty and turned into rags.

What’s that? You’ve never completely given up on a slightly dinged-up car or a wardrobe with a torn-up item or two?

Of course you haven’t.

So why are so many of us so quick to hang up our gym shoes, throw our workout clothes in the back of the closet, and simply stop moving entirely when we get a tweak, a strain, a cut, or even a full-blown injury?

Here’s the deal: You are made to move – and in more ways than you can imagine (the sheer magnitude of sports, physical activities, athletic events, and other things out there should be proof enough of that). So what do you do if your car gets a scratch in it? You drive it anyway! What do you do if an item of clothing gets a tear in it? You wear other things!

The same goes with movement. Foot bothering you when you run? Take up rolling, rocking, and crawling on the ground until it’s no longer an issue (I’m serious). Shoulder bothering you when you press? Find a variation that doesn’t bother it while you work on getting the issue fixed. Is literally *anything* bothering you to the point of being worrisome? THEN WORK AROUND IT! But keep moving!

I’ve worked with a very wide array of people over the past few years, and I can tell you categorically that those who have kept moving no matter what – despite injuries, despite not being as good as they once were, and despite any other host of issues – are always – without exception – better able to bounce back and often become better than ever when they get some top-notch coaching. Those who have spent the better part of a few decades almost completely sedentary have a much, much harder time making major progress, and if it’s not their bodies rebelling against their new-found goals, it’s their habits, which are now about as easy to change as the oil on that now-antique car you left in your garage for 30 years.
Training smart will limit your risk of injury, but sh*t happens. Not moving at all, however, is an absolute guarantee not merely of a dearth of fitness, but of a slow and steady decay that at some point becomes seemingly irreversible unless you throw yourself into it almost full time.

If you’re dealing with a tweak, sprain, injury, or otherwise “bump in the road” in your training, train around it, put your goals on pause if necessary, but for God’s sake KEEP MOVING!
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You’ll have enough time to be sedentary when you’re dead, and it’s much harder for Death to hit a moving target. Keep yourself out of his crosshairs and move boldly forward, even when you reach a bump in the road.