If you are into strength training, you’ve heard about the fundamental movement patterns—the natural human movements that most trainers believe all humans would, ideally, be able to demonstrate and load.
According to Dan John, there are five fundamental movements:
Read Go Beyond the 5 Fundamental Movement Patterns at its original source Breaking Muscle:
https://breakingmuscle.com/news/go-beyond-the-5-fundamental-movement-patterns
I’m the laziest, hyperactive, lethargic, ambitious, idle person you’ll meet. As breathing contradictions go, I get by. I’ve learned how to deal with myself by finally admitting just how much wiggle room I need to allow for the plans I create.
It took me a while to admit. I’d throw that deep self-shame shade on myself because I should have been able to keep to my intentions, schedules, and plans, right? Probably, but I (and you) need to handle ourselves tactfully. If we don’t, the belligerent toddler inside makes things even worse.
Read Prevent Self-Sabotage With a Flexible Framework at its original source Breaking Muscle:
http://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/prevent-self-sabotage-with-a-flexible-framework
Building long-term motivation and consistent exercise habits are the most valuable things you can do for yourself. Many mindset shifts can help you achieve those goals, and here I’ll address an important one: taking ownership of your exercise.
The feeling that you are in control of your choices and actions is known as autonomy.
Read Take Ownership of Your Exercise Habits To Build Better Motivation at its original source Breaking Muscle:
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/take-ownership-of-your-exercise-habits-to-build-better-motivation
Becoming a college strength and conditioning coach isn’t easy, but it was the young guy Jesse’s dream. There wasn’t time to sit and revel in my epic triumph as I had dreamed. I was thrown right into the thick of it.
On day one, I was the head strength and conditioning coach for three teams.
Read No Legs, No Worries- Keep Your Upper Body Strong and Quick at its original source Breaking Muscle:
https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/no-legs-no-worries-keep-your-upper-body-strong-and-quick
I’m a rower – on water and in the gym. I regularly watch rowers and trainers work out on their rowing machines with growing frustration. Why am I frustrated?
Because they could be getting much better scores if only they knew one key technique.
Go into the average gym, CrossFit, or a rowing club, and you will see a lot of great athletes using the rowing machines.
What difference does it make?
They are an order of magnitude different. Somehow those on-water rowers seem to coax more and more out of a rowing machine and leave most gym rowers for dead.
Two reasons why this happens:
Rowing is comprised of two main parts:
An effective power phase uses legs, back, and arms to accelerate the handle and chain. So far, so good., but that isn’t what I’m seeing being done in the gym.
Most gym rowers fail to use their back muscles to accelerate the handle and chain.
This is a critical difference compared to the on-water rowers. This is what I teach my clients.
First, learn which muscles to activate. Finding them and feeling these muscles, and knowing how to make them activate is probably the hardest part of this technique improvement.
Then, I would like to show you how to recruit them into your rowing stroke cycle and give you a drill to practice, which will enable you to add your back muscles into your rowing stroke.
On-water rowers learn technique and effective power using drills and exercises. And so I’m going to show you a drill called Body Swing Only Rowing.
On-water rowers call this position the catch position. It’s achieved by hinging through your hips with a straight back. If you have tight glutes and hamstrings, you may find this challenging.
If you cannot achieve this position, don’t do the exercise. You won’t gain anything until you can stretch forward in this posture.
A strong mid-section helps you connect your backswing to the handle and chain without any slippage.
This is a critical skill for developing stroke power.
Stage one is the back. Add stage two, which is the arms, and then add stage three, the legs.
You are now moving the handle and chain faster because more body parts are accelerating the flywheel.
The critical component is the transition from one body part to the next.
Keeping this smooth and keeping the chain taut, and continuing to accelerate will give you the best results.
Stay focused on legs-back-arms and the reverse sequence when you return to start another stroke.
Learning this will reinforce the big muscles before the small muscles rule.
Do the drill with 10 strokes at each stage. Then move to full slide and use a full leg drive; try to make the second half of your power phase feel like when you did the drill.
Use the mirror to check your posture. The first half of your power should be using only your leg drive. Check your torso is leaning forwards with shoulders forward from the hips. This is an unnatural posture and has to be learned – but it reinforces the big before small muscle rule, and that’s why it’s effective.
The last thing you can practice is rowing and try to finish your legs, back and arms simultaneously. This is an exaggeration from normal rowing technique – but it’s a good way to get a seriously powerful end of the rowing stroke.
And a good way to continue practicing or use it to do a 10 stroke power push during a workout when you want more power and that split to go down.
Next is learning that second thing… ratio and rhythm. But we’ll leave that for another day.
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.
Powered by WordPress