Bulletproof Body Training Plan

This program was originally designed for a Midshipman at the US Naval Academy who was  about a year away from participating in the SEAL Screener.  Because he was a Midshipman, and a water polo player, he had little extra time and energy to devote to a supplemental conditioning program for the screener.  However, he needed supplemental work to ensure that he was rugged and strong enough to survive the screener and so that he could perform well on the physical tests.  It turns out that many warriors are in a similar situation.   They need a strong, resilient body but have little time and energy left to accomplish this goal with heavy job commitments.  With a well designed program, these goals are achievable without too much time commitment.  Quality trumps quantity.  This is a sustainable, day to day, year round type of plan.  Many warriors will use this as a baseline plan, with some additional running or rucking and will from time to time ramp things up for a special event or school.

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Confusing Cost and Benefit: METCON, mass and strength

Strength Coach Charles Staley said that everything has a cost, but not everything has a benefit.  There is a lot of training wisdom in that statement.  This is the most common mistake most trainers and trainees make.  Just because something is hard, does not mean it is going to get you closer to your goals.  METCON is perhaps the most widely abused training method that comes to mind.  If you have done any METCON training, the cost is obvious.  METCON is really, really hard.  But what are the benefits?  METCON is not effective for building muscle mass (beyond beginners).  METCON is not effective for building strength.  In fact METCON can interfere with both strength and muscle hypertrophy.  METCON loading is not heavy enough for either and it is taking away recovery reserves that would be used to grow muscle.  It is hard (cost), but for some, it may move them further away from their goals (negative benefit).   A skinny guy looking to get big and strong should be doing very little METCON.  Very little.  When I see groups of skinny guys doing air squats and burpees I often wonder what they are trying to achieve.  I see this often.  Most likely they are confusing cost with benefit.  They assume that since the workout is really, really hard it must be good, right?  Good for what?  Mostly good for keeping skinny guys skinny.  For a skinny guy, METCON has a definite cost, but may not have the benefit they want, unless they want to stay skinny.

Training (as opposed to just working out) is a process of applying progressive overload to get from your current condition (point A) to your goal condition (point B).  It is not about cost, it is about benefit (getting to point B)!  It is easy to be hard, but it is hard to be smart (USMC quote).

So what is METCON good for?

1. Burning calories, weight loss
2. Conditioning for high intensity work
3. Building mental toughness
4. Non-specific cardio training

What is METCON not good for?

1. Muscle hypertrophy
2. Building strength

Every thing you do in training should be scrutinized from the perspective of whether it helps to get you from point A to point B.  Never add in something just to increase the cost of your training session unless that cost is associated with a benefit.  It is better to think in terms of adding benefit.  As simple as this concept is, few trainees, and sadly, few trainers get this right.  Train smart. 

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Demonstrating VS Building Strength

I learned from Coach Dan John that the first thing you do in a fitness consultation is establish point A and point B.  Point A is where you are now (level of fitness, time available, experience, knowledge, injuries etc.) and point B is your goal.  This sounds easy, but it is harder than you think.  A young man came to see me for a fitness consultation recently to get some help with is goal of doing muscle ups.  After scratching the surface a bit more, it turns out that his real goal was to get stronger.  As it turns out, he figured that if he could do muscle ups, he would be strong.  He was confusing demonstrating strength with building strength.  I blame YouTube.  Coach Steve Maxwell does a much better job of explaining this concept than I could.  You should read what he has to say about it here:  http://www.maxwellsc.com/blog.cfm?blogID=125

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Two of my Favorite gym equipment hacks

As soon as a crash-landed in a real gym way back in September, I quickly gained a reputation as being an unusual, unconventional, and just outright crazy guy in the gym.  Free from any restraints of being in a lifting sport at the moment and enriched with a decade, or so, of strength training improvisation I look at things differently.  These are a few tricks of my trade that I've employed lately.

Fat Gripz...or just thick grip training
It's easily been years since I've done anything resembling a normal-diameter bar for pull-ups with any regularity.  I've avoided them like I had an allergy to them...if I've even used a bar at all.  Venture far enough into this blog and you'll find numerous example of me using towels, balls, ropes, suspension rigs, or just a plain thick bar to do pull-ups with.  Early on in my training I developed a rich respect for training with some sort of grip challenge and couldn't conceive of a week going by without one. 

While I love adding grip challenges into my training, I only do grip training only when I can do no other form of work (ie:  CoC training when I'm in a plane or car).  At this point of life, I've got  a house falling apart and a child to make sure doesn't turn into a misbehaved, rabid baby gorilla in the manners department grip training-only isn't the most judicious use of my precious training time. 

I've been asked in the gym before how to train my grip.  Too many go out of their way to avoid using their hands in any meaningful manner and then ponder why they can't do shit when they're not sitting on comfortably-padded piece of a machinery.

The antidote is simple:  get some fat gripz.  I long avoided buying these because I never actually had a pair in my hands.  On their web site, they look like some sort of cheap shit, even when not deforming under the pressure of weight plates.

Yes, they are tougher than they look

That was a horrible misconception.  I tried a pair in Florida and loved them so much for months that I bumped up to the Extremes as soon as they became available.  They recommend these only if you have a lot of experience with standard fat gripping work (2-2 3/8" diameter) and I cannot disagree with that.  The big boys are brOOtal!  They sliced my Pull-ups from 20 reps on a 2 3/8" bar down to 13!  They also make a barbell curl with a set of plates stupid-difficult.  The latter makes a great stupid human challenge in a gym. 

Frankly, they are so humiliating to use that I refuse to be photographed with the stupid-small amounts of weight I can use while working out with them. 

Anyway, if you've got a light night with a particular movement then consider throwing some sort of grip challenge element into the training mixture.  Another advantage that few know about to fat grip work is that it's also easier on your calluses.  The fat handle's increased surface area won't put nearly the pressure on your precious hand skin and reduces the likelihood of a tear.   Should you tear a callus, super glue it back on, go back to bed, and the next day do some work in the gym with thick bar training. 

Or if your gym has a thick bar, then use it.  Look for ways to add grip work in anywhere you see an opening for it. 

25 lbs Plates
Next to using a stack of 5 lbs bumper plates on a barbell to hide the fact that you're weaker than a prepubescent girl, using 25 lbs plates when you could use 45's is the most reliable manner to look like a gym-douche.  Still, that's exactly what I did for the bulk of my squat work after coming off my ACL rehab work. 

...and I was picked on in a corresponding manner for using them. 

My choice squats these days have been belt squats and Zercher lifting (Deadlift-to-zercher squat...and back again).  For both of these lifts, I use a  prodigious stack of 25 lbs plates for one simple reason:  they're shorter than 45's.  While the few true adherents to squatting  (and generally shun off the leg press as an acceptable squat substitute) can't seem to step away from the squat cage, I enthusiastically start my barbells on the floor.  The shorter plates start everything lower, thus adding much-needed depth to belt squatting and creating a deficit for the deadlift portion of the Zercher lift. I've also used these for lateral/hockey deadlifts and barbell hack squats as well. 

Belt squatting.  This actually made my knee feel good while getting some quad strength back!

 

Or, they could be used for a conventional deficit deadlift.  If memory serves me correctly, you can get about 350 lbs on a bar with just quarter plates.  My hamstrings are still shit from lack of training due to my knee that led to some muscle tightness and imbalance that culminated in an irritated disc in my lumbar spine.  So, my hamstrings are crying for stimulation and this was their way of throwing a fit at me.  So, I've tried to wring as much hamstring action out of the conventional deadlift by doing them in medium volume with 25 lbs plates.  It's been sore going but it's working. 

What is comprehensible to me about gyms is how needlessly dogmatic everyone can be about how they train and what they train with.  There is as little deviation from norms as there is hell to pay for straying from those norms. 

A bit of the hell I caught for a video I did on belt squatting and a perfect example of how to make the ultimate douchebag:  throw a Masshole in South Florida and let him make a living perving out to figure model clients dumb enough to hire him. 

 

The rest of the gym world can go fuck themselves. Yes, some of the shit they do works and a lot of it doesn't.  There's plenty of perfectly good gym hacks that go unnoticed and unused because of the horrid lack of anything resembling free thought or imagination while training.  Don't fall prey to this.  Use what works well, even if it's a bit weird.  

 

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Escape from the gym workout. A simple, functional workout with minimal equipment

I designed this workout to take a 6-8 week break from the gym.  The goal was to work on a few simple, functional movements with minimal equipment on my own, away from the gym.  Workout A was very, very tough.  Workout B was not much easier, especially after the sprints.  This simple workout is very effective and is better than what 95% of gym goers are doing, despite having access to lots of equipment.  This is something that you can do in your garage or back yard with minimal equipment and space.  Because my goals are always about remaining resilient and performing outside of the gym, this workout was focused on loading the fundamental human movement patterns and developing a body that is harder to break and more resistant to injury.  As always with my programming, it is a quality over quantity approach.   I hope you enjoy it.

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Fear and Respect the Sandbag Push-up

 

Is it better to be feared or respected? 

 

 

Is it too much to ask for both?

 

 

That above statement could easily apply to strengthening the chest and keeping the shoulders healthy simultaneously.   My bench press-pushup articles have become so heavily hit on by Google searches by now that they've also become the single biggest source of SPAM on my site.   For some reason, if people want strength and/or big pecs, they bench press and put up with shoulder pain until they can't.  If they want conditioning and healthy shoulders, they push-up and then pretend that conditioning is so much more important than strength. 

 

So, I ask:  IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR BOTH?

 

 For some reason, weighted push-ups elude just about everyone's mind as a great compromise to getting strong without turning the shoulder joint into tendon-graters.  That may well be due to the difficulty of loading up the body with weight to perform them.  The pull-up and the dip are more straightforward since an inexpensive and easy method of adding weight to them exists in nearly every serious gym:  the dip belt.  The push-up is a bit more tricky.  The weight cant hang from the torso.  Weighted vests are expensive with any serious amount of mass to them. 

 

Those are not the only means to weight a push-up.  I've used chains around my neck and had a friend load plates on my upper back (CAUTION:  use rubber coated or bumper plates.  they stay stacked much better!   Few sensations will induce un-needed panic like the feel of 3 plates falling off your back).  My choice pick has been sandbags.  Alpha Strong Sandbags.  These are the easiest weight I've found to get on the back alone and stay in place without beating the shit out of the body.

 

I've used the smaller, Beast sandbag (50-60 lbs) as well as the larger Kraken (135-to-who-the-fuck-knows-left-it-in-the-rain-again pounds).  The little guy is pretty simple to get into position since it can just be dangled around the neck.  I'm sure the fine readers remember this one from a several months ago...

 

 

That This was good for sets of 15-20 reps.  That can still build some strength and it's also a great neck and trap work-out simultaneously. 

 

Since being set free to try tempt fate with my knees again, I've resorted to throwing the big one on my back and doing push-ups pretty often.  Figuring out the best way to get that bulky blob of sand back there as efficiently as possible looked like a Three Stooges prank but I came up with the following sequence:

• Clean the sandbag off the ground
• place the sandbag on one shoulder while doing some twerking and holding the bag to the neck.
• squat down and let the sandbag slide down the back a bit.
• get into the push-up position at the bottom of the squat

Clearly, should have let this one slide farther down my back

Since I wasn't interested in challenging my midsection strength on either of these weighted push-ups, I usually spread my feet to impart a bit more stability.  Since there is no rule book to doing these sandbag push-ups, I also mess around with hand placement.  Regardless of where my hands go (wide or narrow) I don't like to flare my elbows out. 

On either of these push-ups I just demonstrated, getting rid of the weight is as easy as dropping one shoulder and letting it slide off. 

Since I brought up a key point of doing a push-up right, Another virtue of slinging some weight on the back and pushing some extra bodyweight off the ground is that it also can help clean up bad push-up form.  Rather than take the word of some wing-nut blogger on the internet, here's a guy who actually, successfully, trains people for a living on how to do one right:

See that around 7:26?  I'm kind of re-enacting the same thing with 135 lbs of sand instead of 135 lbs of super-cool, kick-ass woman.  It's not particularly feasible to do these sandbag push-ups with bad form.  Something will give out too soon.  So, I've found that I either have to do them right, or they just won't get done. 

Life is already too full of compromises and dogmatic adherence to traditions for no good reason.  There is no excuse for the bench presses hegemonic domination of chest training.  There's no reason why a push-up have to sit in the neglected strength-endurance-conditioning bin of tools, collecting figurative dust.  So, grab a sandbag and get your fear and respect in one move. 

 



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Getting Back to the Basics

If you spend enough time cruising around the internets in search of midget porn, the best deals on  anchor chain on ebay, and that ever-elusive Rob Zombie, "Fuck off", t-shirt like I do, you'll eventually come across some sort of training article that calls on the reader to return to the basics.  I like the basics and while my training has morphed dramatically in the past, several months since I've actually been in one spot long enough to join a gym, I still like to keep things simple. 

Simple training and getting back to basics.  That should be easy to do.  It's also an understandable sentiment for me to relate to.  After all, the history of the past 40 years of strength training was kind of bizarre.  For some reason, we decided that we needed all of this...

Because this...

Was somehow inadequate for the job of building a strong body.

Somehow worked for her.

A call to get rid of machinery seems totally natural.  After all, the contemporary house of strength and fitness is such a hopeless cluster-fuck of implements chained to training so mind-numbingly dull and boring McFitness gym owners have to install TV's just to get people to stay there for an hour.  Something had to give in and someone had to demand an end to the clutter. 

So, we need to get back to basics but that also raises an interesting question:  does anyone still know what that is anymore?  I've heard several renditions of what the basics are in strength training.  Depending on which source you choose to worship as the best source of the basics, that could break down into two categories:

1.  Moving simply with lots of objects.  This is the most common one that you'll likely see.  While it's not McFitness as we know it in equipment overload and excess, this category of, "basic but brutal," still needs mats, barbells, dumbbells, racks, some odd objects, etc.  From there, it's basic exercises, usually the "big four" with some accessory movements. 

2.  Moving complexly with less objects.  Here you'll get some weird movements to make up for the lack of training equipment.  This tends to be the refuge of Penitentiary strength training, Parkour, Bodyweight guys, etc. 

We can, and may, debate which of thee basic approaches is the best answer to making gyms better, there's more to this issue than just how we move and we use to move to get stronger.  It relates back to those TV's to soothe the monotony of being in the latest rendition of a gym.  It's about what Steve Pulcinella touches on a bit here: 

 

 

and here...

 

 

 

To further steal other ideas so I don't have to compel myself to actually write well,  getting back to basics is largely all about is my buddy Chip's summation:  train hard, eat well, rest hard.  While you're doing those, make sure you're doing something that you enjoy doing!  I've got news for people:  if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're going to be hard pressed to do it hard.  You're just going to be compelled by the boredom to get it over with as fast as possible, thereby missing the party (and results).  Basics have far less to do with the equipment you use and even the exercises you choose to do.  It's mostly about the attitude that you bring to what you're doing.  The two outlines for basic training I put up above will both produce results.  Simply pick one, add Chip's big three and don't forget what Steve said in the last video. 

You don't need a glorified scrap pile with pads to get results.  You just need to get busy with something you enjoy doing. 

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The Science of Muscle Hypertrophy

In an exhaustive review of the research literature on muscle hypertrophy, 3 Swedish researchers (Wernbom, Augustsson, and Thomee, 2007), came to the following conclusions about how to optimally train for muscular hypertrophy based on the available science:

Load: 75-80% of one rep max
Volume: 8-10 repetitions, 3-6 sets per muscle group
Rest: 60-90 seconds between sets
Frequency: 2-3 sessions per muscle group per week
Contraction type:  emphasize both the concentric and eccentric part of the lift
Lift speed: 1-2 seconds up, 1-2 seconds down

These simple recommendations are the foundations of all good drug free bodybuilding programs.

Sports Medicine, 2007 37(3), 225-264

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Natural Bodybuilder's Template - A training template for effectively building muscle without steroids

Drug free bodybuilders cannot follow the same training programs used by bodybuilders who take performance enhancing drugs.  The drugs dramatically change the body’s physiology and alter recovery patterns.  What a drug using bodybuilder does in training is completely irrelevant for the natural bodybuilder.  The day to day, basic routine of most successful natural bodybuilders is very similar.  It is a simple template.  Frequently, the simplest training templates are the most effective. This is a simple, but effective template for the natural bodybuilder.  

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Eccentric Contractions the Key to Muscle Strength / Growth?

There are 3 basic types of muscle contractions, concentric, isometric, and eccentric.  Concentric contractions are when the muscle is contracting while shortening.  Think of the up portion of a one arm dumbbell curl.  An isometric contraction is when the muscle contracts without shortening.  In this case if we curl the dumbbell up half way and hold it, we would be doing an isometric contraction during the static hold portion.  The muscle is contracting, but not shortening.  If we lower the dumbbell slowly, under control, we are executing an eccentric contraction.  In this case, the muscle is engaged and contracting, but it is lengthening, not shortening.

A muscle can produce more force during an eccentric contraction.  However, when executing a lift in a normal fashion, the eccentric portion of the lift results in less force than the concentric portion.  If you think about this, it makes sense.  During a normal lift, you are having to produce more force to lift a weight than to lower it.  Still, research has shown that if you eliminate the eccentric portion of a lift (i.e., drop deadlifts, where you drop the weight from the top position, rather than lower it), strength and hypertrophy (muscle growth) gains are reduced.

Tension is a powerful stimulus for increases in muscle strength and hypertrophy.  Even a muscle that is bathed in anabolic steroids will not grow at all unless there is a tension stimulus.  Eccentric contractions can produce a powerful tension stimulus if done correctly.  The way to do this is to perform forced negatives, or partner assisted negatives.  For example, to perform partner assisted negatives on a biceps curl, the weight would be curled up into the top position, then the partner would push down on the bar, while the lifter resists and tries to keep the bar from lowering.  In this case the eccentric contraction is producing MORE force than the concentric contraction.  This  provides a very powerful tension stimulus.  It is so powerful in fact, that it can easily be overdone.  Only a few repetitions should be performed in this manner.  It can produce incredible soreness if overdone.  Eccentric contractions can produce lots of micro damage in the muscles.  Also, the eccentric contraction should be done slowly and under control.  Explosive eccentric contractions can result in tearing of the muscle.

A good strategy is to perform a few forced eccentric contractions each week in 2-3 muscles that are lagging and are being targeted specifically for extra work.  Trying to train the whole body this way would likely lead to over-training quickly.  For example, if we are trying to bring up lagging arms, we might add 5-6 forced negative preacher curls, and 5-6 forced negative dumbbell overhead triceps extensions.  Forced negatives are technically difficult to perform.  Not all exercises can accomodate forced negatives.  For example, forced negatives for deadlifts or barbell squats are very much a varsity move and should be attempted by the most experienced lifters only, and even then only after careful planning and with experienced spotters.

Be cautious when performing eccentric contractions.  Make sure that you are warmed up thoroughly first.  Use a partner for spotting and assistance.  Do the eccentric portion slowly and under control.  Do fewer reps than you think you need.  You will be very sore the next day. Trust me on this one!

With forced negatives, just a little is enough.

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