“I have a bit of of a funny story for you. My boss couldn’t believe that I was able to do one handed swings for 30 seconds on 30 seconds off for 10 minutes because he didn’t think I would be able to do that without blowing out my shoulder.”(as is done in phase 2 of the Kettlebell Burn program)

Now when she said it, it didn’t quite click for a moment and I had to actually ask her to repeat it. Read the quote again…especially the part about the shoulder. Now keep in mind that this client of mine moonlights as a personal trainer at the gym. She was the one that recognized her limitations and sought me out as a coach and now that she has seen the light and is “in the know” she is a bit of a spy on my behalf and tells me some of the horror stories in her gym. One other fact I would like to throw in there is she has access to a full gym but takes my kettlebell classes and does no other training because the kettlebell classes are “complete.” Complete without having to combine it with other stuff.

Watch this quick demo of the kettlebell swing. Even though this was performed with two hands you can see that the power is generated with my hips, not my shoulders.

Watch Kettlebell Swings in Educational & How-To  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
(this movement alone can provide pretty much complete fitness…but it is NOT a shoulder exercise.)

Well anyways her boss is a trainer at the gym and couldn’t believe that she would have enough “shoulder power” to do a single handed swing for that many reps (about 20 per minute) for 10 minutes. That’s precisely the problem because the kettlebell swing is a hip driven movement, not a shoulder one. In his eyes the swing is nothing more then a squatting front raise with a faddish weight and there is a good chance he learned that bit of BS from Bob Harper or Jillian Micheals (and you thought they might be doing a good thing by inspiring people).

That’s one reason I tend to get bent out of shape. You see people look up to Bob Harper and Jillian Micheals and that douchebag that is trademarked as the “leader in global kettlebell fitness” and they think that those people are the people to listen to. The reality is that those people that are being looked up to took a good concept created by smart people and ran in a direction that makes it lose the forest from the trees, and that gets me bent out of shape.

(This is me getting bent out of shape…or should I say bent into shape?)

It happens literally everywhere and with everything in the fitness industry. When the Tabata Protocol came about it was famous for the fact that it was only 4 minutes long and for the fact that it produced rapid changes in conditioning. The original program used an exercise bike done with maximum effort for 20 seconds work 10 seconds rest up to 4 mins. Dan John used the timing of it to do front squats which was a good idea. A million others did it by substituting crunches and any exercise you can think of in it’s place which was a bad idea. (I have been guilty of this but at the time I didn’t know who to listen to so I was a victim as well.)

Yuri Verkoshansky came up with plyometrics. He found that his methods of shock training worked well at generating power in experienced athletes. The prerequisites of plyometrics was to have around a double bodyweight squat. It was never intended to be used on severely obese people via the idiot trainers on the Biggest Loser. The original methods did include jumping but the parameters behind the jumping was a lot different then teaching people how to jump around their living rooms with “air guitar squats” and “ski jumps”. You can read exactly what I have to say about that in my review of p90x plyometrics x (Oh by the way every time someone says the secret is muscle confusion or implies that confusing the muscles is the pinnacle of training theory a dolphin gets run over by a jet ski)

Everytime you say the secret is muscle confusion a dolphin gets hit by a jet ski. They go on the watch list everytime beach body does an infomerical campaign.

Kettlebells and kettlebell training is looked at the same way usually by people who just don’t know any better. Wow kettlebell training burns 20 calories a minute! Let’s go buy some shitty walmart brand kettlebells and do some curls and crunches with them and we will be burning 20 calories a minute because of the magic power of kettlebells! Whoa not so fast there bro, that bit about kettlebells burning 20 calories a minute was because they tested kettlebell snatches done to the guidelines outlined in the book Viking Warrior Conditioning

Unless that is the exact program you are using then unless you are measuring the caloric expenditure yourself you are just guessing. Not everything is created equal in every way with all kettlebell exercises…especially not the way most people do the exercises (squatting front raises cough cough cough).

I work part time in a gym where some mixed martial artists and boxers train. One guy runs a “mma conditioning class”. Now this guy is trying to tell me that I am doing swings in a manner that is dangerous for my back (because they are performed explosively which is apparently dangerous). This guy thinks he is an expert because he watched a youtube video or two. His idea of training his “athletes” is to recreate the movements that mma people do (like throwing a punch) and make them hold 8lbs weights while they do it. Basically sport specific training gone bad. His students form and the fact that they can’t even do a decent looking pushup speaks volumes about what kind of coach he is. Well anyways he tried asking for my advice because I am the head kettlebell instructor there and he tries recreating the movements with a kettlebell to give me ideas (I don’t take advice from trainers who’s “athletes” can’t even do a decent pushup). I can’t teach him because his “cup” is already full (unteachable). Kettlebells being used to train mixed martial artists. A good idea gone bad. He took one thing and ran in the wrong direction with it…hence I won’t be affiliated with him.

So I guess what I am trying to teach you here because even though this started as a bit of a rant there are lessons to be learned. Look at the roots of whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish. I love taking existing programs and mixing and matching the different concepts of them for the sake of learning and trying to improve upon them but what I am doing is taking the general idea and basing what I do off of that rather then the details and messing with those. It pays to look to the root of the matter.

Here is where p90x succeeds. It is a diet and exercise program that gets people off their asses and exercising. Any exercise program that is followed is going to get some results…especially beginners.

BeachBody has million dollar investors putting out megabucks to push this thing out to the market. p90x has 2 million searches per month on google alone…think about that a second 2 million A MONTH!. Do you think you might get a couple decent before and after pics with that many people trying it out? Exactly.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, on to the topic at hand. Plyometrics X

Plyometrics are used by many pro athletes to improve their explosive power for sports performance applications. The problem is that all too often coaches take a great concept and mutate it to get it away from it’s original purpose. They aren’t seeing the forest for the trees. “Plyos” have been especially victimized in this regard.

This is how BeachBody.com explained plyometrics

Explosive jumping cardio routine proven to dramatically improve athletic performance.

Here is the thing. Plyometrics are intended to take advantage of the myotatic reflex which in non geek speak refers to the automatic contraction of muscles done as a reaction to a quick stretch. It is like an automatic muscular reflex and it has to be very “touch and go”. Oh yeah and it has to be done for low reps. Let me illustrate the reflex analogy. You know that thing they do when you go to the doctor’s office and they whack you on the knee with a tiny rubber hammer and your knee kicks up? If they did that a bunch of times your knee would stop kicking up as high and eventually not do it at all. Plyometrics kind of work the same way and you need it to be fresh as a daisy.

You can also think of it like a ball bouncing on the floor. The force of the ground pushes the side of the ball in and the balls natural reaction is to push back out propelling it up. If it stays there it doesn’t bounce.

If you watch MMA superstar Georges St.Pierre in this video at around 2 minutes and 42 seconds you can see that he instigates the drill by first jumping over a hurdle and IMMEDIATELY bouncing up over the next one and the next one. Like I said “touch and go” and the keyword is “immediately”.

The key is “bouncing”. If you don’t bounce immediately up you lose that effect. Any time on the ground and it’s wasted. THAT is how it is used on professional athletes and as you can see it is A LOT more involved than simply jumping around your living room like a fool.

Plyometrics X is glorified aerobics made to sound scientific and cool. It doesn’t take advantage of that myotatic reflex which makes it lose sight of how plyometrics works. It’s like picking up a couple light dumbbells, doing a bunch of different curls with them and telling people you train like Arnold.

I watched the p90x plyometrics x dvd all the way through because I was curious about what they were doing. I actually laughed harder at some of the moves then I did at some of the comedies that came out this year (there really aren’t a whole lot of funny movies anymore). I can’t fathom how some people can do some of these exercises and think that’s the same thing that they are doing in NFL, NHL, NBA and UFC.

Surely they must be kidding me.

Every day I hear about people making excuses about their training. I hear people making other things a priority constantly. They’ll say anything to justify it to themselves. It’s very easy to come up with something.

Here is a short list.
_____tv show is on.
There isn’t enough variety.
It’s raining
It’s too early
It’s too late.
I’m too old.
I’m too young.
I am hungry.
My food is getting cold.
But I don’t have a kettlebell.
I’m going out to dinner with friends.
blah blah blah

Now I am all for balancing your training along with the rest of your life. Sometimes you do need time off where you don’t even look at a weight for a week.

And sometimes you just need to shut the f’ up and do the work.

It isn’t always fun. It isn’t always convenient but if it was everyone would be doing it.

To get your goals you have to have a laser focus. I like to call it the “terminator mentality”. A terminator doesn’t allow anything to get in it’s way. The only thing that matter’s to a terminator is it’s mission. Try taking a terminator off it’s task and you might get a response like

“That is not one of my mission parameters.” That is if it doesn’t just ignore you completely.
Or you might get this as a response.

The point is the terminator doesn’t make excuses, doesn’t try to justify ways out in it’s head. The mission is the mission and that is the only thing that matters.

My mission is to get stronger. It sometimes means that my dinner will get cold while it waits for me to get my necessary repetitions in. It sometimes means I won’t go out for lunch. It sometimes means that I can’t play video games or go do something that doesn’t take priority. Very few things take priority over my strength practice.

Like I said it might not always be fun but I love achieving new feats and it allows me to do this.

Can you do that? The fun is in continuing to get better. The fun is knowing you are accomplishing something. The end justifies the means.

Get a laser focus. Have a die hard terminator mentality and achieve what you previously thought impossible. It isn’t in everybody which is why people rarely achieve their results. The question is….

Is it in you?

2) Running is great for fat loss. Only for a period of time. The fact of the matter is your body adapts to every thing you do to become better at it. In the case of running it adapts by becoming more efficient at it and using less energy (calories) to do so.

3) High reps for toning/Low reps for building. Sorry but when you go into higher reps you inflate your muscles with sarcoplasmic goo. That gives the muscles a bit of a bloated appearance and leads to size gains the fastest and strength gains the slowest. Low reps done with heavy weight lead to myofibrillar hypertrophy which takes much longer to build but is much stronger.

4) Squatting below parallel is bad for you knees. No it isn’t. Joints just like everything else need to be strengthened as well. I used to fall for the not squatting deep myth and had only aching knees to show for it. I can pistol squat ass to ankle with 48kgs (106lbs) now and my knees never felt better (including one that had an acl reconstruction years ago). My ego feels pretty good too.

5) Don’t lock out your elbows or knees. See above.

6) You have to confuse a muscle to make it grow. If you are constantly trying to confuse your muscles, guess what you get…stupid muscles. Would you feel good going into court if your lawyer was confused? Seriously though…when is confusion ever a good thing? Think about that one a sec.

7) Chicks dig giant muscles. No they don’t…well most of them. Go ask John Barban who wrote the Adonis Effect. They have a bunch of studies that blow this one out of the water. Girls don’t normally like it when a guy’s boobs are bigger then theirs.

nice....wait a second

8 ) You have to isolate muscles. Sorry but it isn’t really physically possible with the exception of having an extreme amount of muscle control which takes a lot of practice. I have only known one person in my life that could isolate individual muscles and that was because he was able to concentrate extremely well at it. When he uses his muscles as a team he rips chains apart with his hands. When he isolates he concentrates really hard…he doesn’t fool himself into thinking he’s isolating by only going part way up on a crunch.

9) You can spot reduce. Go to any gym or turn on tv late at night and see different people and gadgets trying to burn the fat off of their abs by doing ab exercises. As if the body works that way.

10) You can’t spot reduce. What’s this? I just contradicted myself? The fact of the matter is you can spot reduce but it is in such minuscule quantities that it isn’t worth doing.

11) Machines before free weights for beginners. Machines under train the stabilizing muscles. The stabilizing muscles are what keep your primary mover muscles safe when under a lot of pressure. This is why we do turkish getups before pressing.

12) Pulling your navel (belly button) in supports the spine. Uhm…how? Inflate your stomach and tense the abs when moving a lot of weight and try it the other way and tell me how supported you feel.

Think it would be safe for Captain Kirk to pull his navel in to support his spine when he has 1000lbs on his back?

14) A muscle needs at least 36 hours to recover. Only if you crush it every time you train. Train well below failure daily and give it a month or two and watch how much stronger you become. This crushing it and recovering started right around the same time steroids became popular in gyms. Coincidence? I doubt it.

So there you go…14 fitness fallacies. These were either created, taken out of context and taken as gospel or just born from clever marketing. Next time someone says something don’t take it as gospel, check to see if it is phallic in nature or if it actually makes sense and can be backed up.

Eric Moss out

I thought to myself “wtf?” (and yes I actually thought out the letters instead of what they represent), so I did a little digging to see if I could find it.

Scheming Crafty Aggressive Malicious

Essentially what they paid for is the ability to lie to you.

If you are pissed off too I want to hear about it. Or if you disagree with me. I want you to tell the truth about what you are thinking.