training

The ONE Thing…

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The first week of the new year is almost over.

For some, the exuberance and promise of potential change is wearing off as they face the mundane routines of daily life.

Bummer.

Here’s the ONE thing you can do and it’s the ONLY thing you need to do in order to achieve your goals –

MEASURE.

It’s that simple.

I think it was Peter Drucker, a social ecologist, who said, “What’s gets measured gets managed.”

Where do you want to go?

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know where you currently are.

Take fat loss.

It’s a popular topic this time of year. Lots of people are not only trying to lose those extra pounds they put on over the past 6 weeks of 2010, but also those same 6 weeks in 2009, 2008, 2007…

And there’s a lot of confusion about what diet to be on, what workouts to do, etc.

But none of that really matters if you don’t have a starting point – or more importantly, the most accurate starting point available to you.

For fat loss, the traditional form of measurement is the scale. Which is ok and better than nothing. Another form of measurement is the tape measure.

What Do You Have To Measure?

The important stuff.

The stuff that matters.

The stuff that actually creates change.

Stuff like –

– Food portions
– Weight used in workouts
– Sets and reps in workouts
– Rest

Simple things.

Bad News – Good News

The bad news is that when you look at those types of things you may panic.

How are you going to fit all that stuff into your current hectic schedule – work, kids, meetings, kids, time with spouse, kids, “honey-do” lists, on, and on, and on…

The good news is that if you pause, take a deep breath, and think for a minute, you already do these things – you know how much money is in your bank account, how many groceries you need each week, and how much gas is in your car.

And if you just take what you already know, what you already do, and apply it to your quest for a leaner, meaner, tighter, lighter you – you’ll be massively successful.

How To Get Measuring Now

1. Find your starting point. Step on the scale. Measure your waist with a tape measure.

2. Record that number. Preferably right next to your target or goal number.

3. Measure how much (in calories) you need to eat each day. This of course will be less than you are currently eating.

Good starting points are –

– bodyweight *13 if 10lbs or less
– bodyweight *12 if between 10-20lbs to lose
– bodyweight *10 if between 20-30lbs to lose
– bodyweight * 9 if more than 30lbs to lose

And then actually measure the amount of food you eat each day. (If you don’t know for sure, you’re just guessing…)

4. Measure your workouts by recording the sets, rest, weights, and reps in a log. If you don’t have one, get one, otherwise, how will you be able to tell if your making progress?

5. Repeat this process as often as necessary.

– Weighing in: 1x week
– Measuring food: Every meal
– Recording workouts: Every workout

“But It’s So Inconvenient!”

I know what you may be thinking – this will be really inconvenient and take too much time.

Yeah, it may be, but you know what’s REALLY inconvenient?

Flying to your parents house in a foreign country and having to take unpaid leave to do so because your dad has to have heart bypass surgery.

What most people don’t know is the heart bypass surgery is actually “elective” not “necessary.”

You see, you can “elect” to avoid it or you can choose to have it.

The choice to avoid it is based on making those minor inconveniences now as opposed to inconveniencing your spouse and your children when the doctor tells you that your shortness of breath is due to your excessively high levels of bodyfat and blood pressure that can no longer be “controlled” with just a pill (or 5).

That’s inconvenient.

Another inconvenience is when your admitted to the hospital to have one of your organs removed (like a kidney) because it’s riddled with cancer due to the choices you made earlier in life.

(It’s also very inconvenient for your family…)

The point is, you can choose when you’ll be inconvenienced – now or later, but the point is, you will at some point be inconvenienced.

The Solution.

Fortunately, there are really lots of solutions.

They’re pre-written kettlebell programs – just pick a kettlebell program and follow it.

Just one is fine. Don’t try to outsmart the professionals who wrote the programs by mixing this program with that one. Just follow one. And measure your progress.

(Here’s a great fat loss program with kettlebells.)

The important point is that you actually follow it, and measure your results.

And that’s it – the ONLY thing you need to do to start achieving your goals – MEASURE.

The “Law” of Training Results, Part 2

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In my last post, I shared the first part of the Law of Training Results, which is really the Law of Compensation. The first part, the Law of Sowing and Reaping, was simply that whatever you plant (sow), you harvest (reap).

Part two is similar, but much more powerful. It should, when fully understood, make us pay much more attention to Part 1.

It is the Law of Increasing Returns.

It states that not only will you reap what you sow, but you will reap more than you sow. And this is a very important point. This is the essence, I believe, of training. You don’t just train to train, you train for a purpose. And usually that purpose is much greater than any current training session or workout. Your goal is to always have more, yield more than you currently have.

Here’s a great example.

Last night I set a PR on the Kalos Sthenos Get Up. (For those of you who don’t know about the Kalos Sthenos Get Up, it is a method of evaluating your body and increasing it’s performance -it’s output – by making the Get Up harder. This in turn makes everything else easier. If you don’t have, get it – now – here – one of the best investments in yourself you can ever make.) By PR, I it was how the GU was performed, and what it felt like in my body at the time.

The reason I was able to yield such a high quality result – and arguably it was the best Get Up I have ever performed – was because of the amount of time and effort I put into this exercise and all it’s components. The time I spent working on these parts of the whole, yielded a much bigger and better “whole” than I imagined it would at this point in time.

Similarly, when training for a weightlifting meet, it’s all the pieces invested into the process that yields the result, which, if sown correctly, yields a PR.

Let’s take a closer look though at what you sow and what you reap.

  1. You must be congruent, or in alignment, with what you hope to reap in the future, otherwise what you harvest will be “more” but not necessarily more of what you want.

For example, there is a popular fitness subculture right now that popularized the Workout of the Day. This subculture is good in theory, and they have some good training tools. The way they organize training yields some pretty good positive results. But, and it’s a BIG but, this system yields something else and it’s highly undesirable – Injuries. And lots of them. The reason is simple – they weren’t methodical and intentional enough in their planting.

2. You must be discriminant in what you sow.

If you want to be good at some sport, you must practice that sport. You must seek to incorporate or add only those things to your sporting practice which will make you better at that sport. It seems like common sense. But, unfortunately, it’s not. Too many times we get distracted by the bright shiny object. And before we know it, we’re off our chosen path. That’s not the bad part though. The bad part is that we fail to recognize that our distraction will not only show up in the future as not reaching our goals, but as much more than not reaching our goals.

So whatever it is you are training for, know exactly why it is your doing what you are doing and what you hope to accomplish by doing what you are doing. Sometimes, not doing something may actually be the best choice to make on any given day.

For example, I was snatching the other day wearing my weightlifting shoes. Even though my speed was up, my left knee was popping on several reps. This is the telltale sign that my left hip has started to shut down. I could’ve pushed it and adjusted my body positioning to get my knee not to pop, (which I did several times), or shut it down for the day and move on to something else. So I did. I moved on to the exercise I use to open my hip back up. In fact, as it turned out, both my hips had shut down. So, even though I wanted to snatch and could’ve willed myself to keep going, I stopped because I didn’t want to reap something negative in the future. (Been there, done that. No fun.)

Remember, not only is it important to map out your training, like we discussed last time, but it is also important to know why you are doing what you are doing. You must always keep in mind that what you plant in today’s training program will show up in one way or another in abundance in the future.

Next time, we’ll look at the third and final law of training.

Let me know what your experiences have been with the Law of Increasing Returns.

The “Law” of Training Results, Part 1

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There’s a lot of talk lately about training results. And that’s a great thing. It’s getting people excited about training again.

But really, there is nothing magical or mystical about getting results from your training.

To get results from your training, you must simply follow the Law of Compensation, which is comprised of three parts.

The first part is the the Law of Sowing and Reaping. (Yeah, sounds like I’m a farmer, but in a way, we all are…)

This law simply states that whatever you sow or plant, you will reap in like manner.

For example, if you want to get strong, you must actually exercise against a form of resistance to get stronger.

But let’s take a closer look…

Sowing. This is the idea of planting, or investing, time, energy, or money, or some combination of the three. Sowing is not done haphazardly. When a farmer plants a crop for future harvest, he must first know what crop he wants to harvest. He must then know where he wants to plant it. He must prepare the land for the sowing. Usually the preparation time takes longer than the actual planting. I remember as a kid, growing up in England on a farm, watching the tractors repeatedly till the fields with bigger and bigger tills, creating massive furrows, to plant sugar beet. The way they prepped the fields for barley or wheat were different. They used different plows and different tractors. (Usually smaller in each case.) The preparation was specific to the desired outcome. Sure, on the surface, it looked very similar, but the details varied.

The same is true with your training program. You must prepare your body for the desired outcome. Which of course means that you must have a desired and specific outcome in mind.

For example, I still have the dream that I’ve been chasing for the last 10 years of competing in the Weightlifting National Championships. (I qualified in 2000, but failed to go.) I am prepping my body to be able to withstand the rigors of weightlifting training. I am using both kettlebells and barbells to do so. And I am using a series of checks to not only guide my progress, but make sure I stay on track and keep moving forward.

Let’s say your goal is to press half your bodyweight in one hand, which is a measure of strength we use in the RKC to achieve your RKC2 standard. You need to make sure your body is able to press. You must have a standard of measuring it’s ability. And then once you can press, you must make sure your pressing in the most efficient manner possible, which is what we teach you how to do in the RKC and through Pavel’s various texts.

Then you must have a method of overload that will get you stronger. But, that is the least important part of the whole equation. You must first prepare your body for effective force transfer to the arm that will be doing the pressing. Mastering, or at least being able to “own” the Get Up is a great place to start.

Reaping. This is the actual harvesting. In most cases, what you harvest or reap, is the manifestation of what you planted. For example, if you want to grow an apple orchard, you have to plant apple seeds, so that they can grow into the actual apple trees. You wouldn’t expect to yield orange trees if you planted apple seeds. To do so would mean you are out of touch with reality.

The same thing holds true with your training program. In order to achieve a desired result, you must first have planted the “seeds” for that result. That includes not only the actual planting of the seed, remember, but also the preparation of the “ground” for that seed to grow in. Let’s use me as an example again, since I don’t know what it is that you want to accomplish. I want to compete again in Weightlifting. I must have a very strong core, healthy mobile, but stabile shoulders, and I must have mobile hips. To say that I should just start squatting, cleaning, snatching, and jerking without ensuring these things are in place, would be to reap not just heavier squats, cleans, jerks, and snatches, but also some injuries too. (Ask me how I know that… 🙂 )

So in order to reap exactly what we want, we must be very deliberate in the preparation of the sowing process.

In order to start seeing progress, or results in your training again, make sure you are very deliberate and precise in mapping out your training goals and how you plan on achieving those goals.

Next time, I’ll talk about a process that will help you do just that.

Pain v. Performance: An Interesting Paradox

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Just got back from training where I experienced some very interesting results.

I am programming my Olympic lifting training back in.

Yesterday I snatched lightly and performed a snatch-based chain.

Today, I performed Presses and barbell FSQs.

Neither day was anything to write home about performance-wise. But both days felt “interesting.” I felt more solid – more grounded than I have in a very long time. The last 6 weeks paid off apparently. But as I said, nothing special in the gym except this:

Pain inhibits performance.

Today, it didn’t.

When working back into barbell FSQs, the pressure in my elbows is less than comfortable. I’m able to block it out while under the bar, but afterward, it’s, well, painful.

Knowing this, I tested various ranges of motion: unilateral shoulder flexion, both arms, and then the torso flexion with locked knees. Both tested better after each successive set of FSQs. Except for the last one, where my gut was telling me not to do it, but I did it anyway. (You’d think I’d learn…)

What does this mean?

I have no idea.

Really, I don’t care to either. I’m just going to note it and move on.

I guess sometimes theory is just theory.

We’ll see how this holds up day-to-day and with a substantial increase in load. Of course I will be testing everything each training session and reporting back.