Jamie Simmonds, 2019, the Third Fittest Woman on Earth, is an international CrossFit Games champion and ambassador for plant-based nutrition company Nuzest.
Formerly a gymnast and rugby player, Jamie made her name in the CrossFit competition scene in 2016 when she became a podium finisher with team CrossFit Yas.
Read From Being a Mom to the Podium at the CrossFit Games at its original source Breaking Muscle:
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/from-being-a-mom-to-the-podium-at-the-crossfit-games
Prince Philip was spry and walking without a cane right up until he died at 99 in April. What kept him walking tall? It was probably 5BX, the original functional fitness routine. Standing for Five Basic Exercises, it’s an 11-minute workout created for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1956.
“[It] is designed to show you how to develop and hold a high level of physical fitness, regardless of where you are located,” reads the introduction booklet to the workout. “The 5BX Plan puts physical fitness within reach of every member of the RCAF.”
Several sources report the Duke of Edinburgh completed the simple regime of equipment-free exercises on a daily basis—the workout even made an appearance in an episode of The Crown, a Netflix series about the reign of Prince Philip’s wife, Queen Elizabeth II.
Canadian Bill Orban developed the routine based on research he conducted at the University of Illinois in the 1950s. By testing oxygen intake he realized duration of exercise was less important to overall fitness than intensity. The RCAF knew its personnel were not fighting-fit and hired Orban to develop an exercise regimen that troops could do anywhere, even in their barracks, and was short enough to do every day.
“To develop physical fitness, exercises must be balanced and planned,” explains the narrator in a 5BX promotional film. “They must be progressive. And, above all, vigorous and regular.”
The Five Basic Exercises include toe touches, situps, back extensions, pushups and running. To make it accessible and encourage continuous intensification, Orban included six charts that prescribed modification of each exercise and progress the number of reps. While the fitness, strength and stamina demands increase, the time spent on each exercise and the total workout length does not. For instance, on Chart One, the situp is done with legs flat and demands lifting the head “just high enough to see your heels.” A ‘D’ score is 3 reps in 1 minute; an ‘A’ is 18. On Chart Six, the hardest, it’s 35 to 50 V-sits in 1 minute.
The 11-minute duration and equipment-free nature of the workout were both controversial at the time, but RCAF testing bore out its effectiveness. Orban went on to develop a women’s-specific version called XBX, which included six moves completed in 12 minutes. And 5BX became popular inside the military and out.
In 1961, the RCAF released the workout to civilians by publishing a book called Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plans For Physical Fitness. Over the next 30 years it was translated into 13 languages and sold 23 million copies. Some credit it for kicking off the modern fitness culture and it definitely inspired modern fitness gurus and trends—it sounds like a CrossFit workout.
While Prince Philip may not be 5BXing anymore, his daily workout lives on. Prince Charles and Prince William reportedly practice the routine too.
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If we learned anything from our time in quarantine when gyms were closed, we learned we could make do without a gym. We can train to get stronger and more fit in our living rooms, backyards, or garages without machines or even barbells.
We can use bodyweight exercises and something simple, like a medicine ball, for a great workout.
The medicine ball clean and squats are powerful and athletic movements that you can use in place of individual barbell movements like deadlifts and squats.
This exercise saves time by linking some basic compound lifts you’d normally do separately into a smooth movement.
It’s a practical way to train your general conditioning and develop strength and skill to move athletically.
This is a result of the dexterity you develop while moving through the clean and squat repeatedly.
Gripping and moving a heavy object that’s not easy to grab will build your ability to quickly stabilize your trunk, something you won’t always train doing conventional barbell lifts.
You can learn this pretty quickly and easily with this exercise if you understand the basics of balance, stability, and movement. And if you don’t, check out my course.
Doing a similar movement with a barbell takes more skill and much more dedicated time.
But with the med ball clean and squat, you can build full-body strength, improve endurance, and practice two basic compound movements.
It’s a great choice for:
Even the heaviest medicine balls won’t do much damage to a floor if you drop them.
Medicine balls are sold in many sizes and weights. You can start pretty light and buy heavier ones over time, so you can slowly but consistently progress just like you would with a barbell when you’d add more plates.
They’re also great as an alternative for anyone who doesn’t quite like the idea of doing barbell lifts. Barbells don’t sit well with some.
Some have a movement practice where barbell lifts don’t quite fit in, and there’s really nothing wrong with that.
They can still do resistance exercises. Resistance doesn’t mean barbells or dumbbells; we need to remember what we’re really doing with barbell lifts.
It’s a loaded movement, and It doesn’t matter where or what the load is.
Maybe you’re more comfortable with the idea of hugging a heavy med ball close to your chest rather than balancing a bar on your shoulders. It may seem more intuitive to you.
And that’s just fine because exercises like this can do just as much good for you, maybe even more.
I call this exercise a clean and squat to call attention to the two separate movements.
This exercise really trains three distinct movement patterns:
That means we’re creating coordination in our body and developing timing.
We also train our trunk muscles in a way that a barbell or dumbbell often can’t.
Hugging an object close to your body and keeping your upper-back from rounding forward demands you completely engage your trunk, building stability and strength.
Place the medicine ball on the ground between your feet a little closer to your toes than your heels.
Make sure to set your feet wide enough to get down into the squat without your elbows hitting your knees.
Hinge over keeping your back flat just as you would in a deadlift.
You will have to drop your hips slightly lower than a conventional barbell deadlift to keep your hips from shooting up and letting your chest drop on the clean.
Breathe, brace, grab, and go. As you stand from the squat with the ball in your hands, start by bending your elbows and using your upper back to pull the ball close to your hips.
As you stand further, shrug your shoulders and shoot your elbows up, keeping the ball so close you feel it lightly brush against your body.
Pause at the top before you squat to make sure your elbows are high, balance is set, and that you’re braced.
Complete the squat focusing on keeping your elbows high and making sure they fit between your knees at the bottom of the squat. Drop the ball if you can, or squat down and lower it with control.
There’s a couple of reasons you may want to change things up.
A heavy medicine ball can be difficult to move. It’s oddly shaped and hard to grab. So it’s important to keep the movement fluid to keep from getting hurt. After you grab the ball, make sure you keep your back in a good position and drive it up with your legs.
The closer you keep the ball to your body, the more efficient the exercise will be.
Too much space between your body and the ball, and you’ll catch it in a bad position putting needless stress on your back.
If you’ve practiced quick dynamic exercises like this before, try doing a full clean instead of separating the movement.
You may want to rush into doing the exercise like this initially, but you should really see this as progression if you’ve never practiced other loaded movements like this.
We want to separate the two movements when first practicing these because of how important it is to make sure that we’re balanced and braced before going down into the squat with the ball at chest height.
It’s not easy to first relax the tension in your body only just enough to explosively shrug a ball upward and then immediately become rigid under its weight to reverse back into a squat.
But if you’re ready for it, give it a shot with the heaviest medicine ball you can find.
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