Archive for spartan training
Pirates of the Carribbean, balancing everything to stay fit, ripped and strong
Posted by: | CommentsHave you ever seen the first Pirates of the Carribbean? Well if not don’t read any further if you don’t want me to ruin it, oh yeah and go watch it because that series is excellent. If you have then you might understand this metaphor I plan on using.
In one of the early fight scenes Johnny Dep and Orlando Bloom start sword fighting in Orlando Bloom’s character’s (is that proper English??? I have no idea 
) blacksmith shop.
At around 3:06 into that you see that the sword fighting ends up on opposite sides of a wagon which acts as a bit of a see saw. The pirate Johnny Depp’s character (Captain Jack Sparrow) is locked in constant combat with Orlando Bloom’s character (Will Turner) where they have to remain in balance with each other and life and fitness can be very similar to this situation. Let’s imagine for a moment that Orlando Bloom is the fitness side of us and that Johnny Depp is the “rest of life” side to us. If one gains the upper hand they can quickly start to take over and the wagon itself loses it’s balance.
For most people, the pirate Johnny Depp wins. They start out their training programs with the best of intentions but life takes over and their diet and exercise program goes to Davey Jones’ locker.
For others (definitely not the majority) the “goody goody” Orlando Bloom wins. These are the people who never ever cheat on their diet and their friends run off because they have become so unbelievably boring. fitness has taken over their life.
I was out at a bar this past Friday celebrating a friend’s 30th birthday. I was drinking beer and eating buffalo wings and for whatever reason people always want to do shots with me just like a regular guy and yet I am able to stay ripped and keep my friends. The next day was back to normal and I had a maximal strength training session. I was keeping life balanced with my fitness.
At that same birthday party I was reflecting with some friends about a wedding we went to earlier this year where the groom had gone through a fat loss program a couple years back and to this day doesn’t cheat…ever. He didn’t even have any of his wedding cake. Does that sound balanced to you? Not to me and it certainly doesn’t sound like fun.
The fact of the matter is we do all this training and eating right stuff to improve our quality of life. What good is being fit ripped and strong if you are unable to ever enjoy it? Sure going all Spartan is great when you have to achieve a goal but if you come back to the see saw analogy it’s because one side (the life side) was starting to take over and balance would have been lost if you weren’t able to lean harder to one side to regain it.
Cheating on your diet can do more then just prevent yourself from going crazy. The author of the Xtreme Fat Loss Diet Joel Marion uses it to replenish your Leptin levels (which he believes is the missing part of the puzzle in many fat loss diets and I can’t say I disagree with him). Remember that whole thing about your body adapting to what you do.
I stay ripped 24/7. It actually isn’t that hard when you are well balanced. The first part that you need to do is realize your life has taken your fitness out of balance. Lean hard (attack fat like an all out war) to one side till you get to where you want to be fitness and body composition wise. When you feel like you have lost enough fat you can start to reintroduce the things that make life fun again…like beer and cheeseburgers (unless you are following Joel’s diet at which point just do what he tells you and remember to only stay on it for 25 days.)
When you are where you want to be, keep track of where you are. I weigh myself pretty much daily and try to stay within 5lbs of my target weight. If I start to get a little soft in the midsection or notice my strength is lacking I dedicate myself harder till I am within a comfortable range again. I am able to stay good “most of the time” so that when my friends come over for that other “some of the time” I can have a beer or 4 of them without feeling guilty.
I'm only about 5lbs heavier then this normally.
Remember, as cool as it sounds to be a hardcore lifter you are just another form of “geek” if you aren’t able to balance it out with some of life’s more enjoyable things.
The Truth About The Spartan 300 Workout
Posted by: | CommentsSo the movie 300 came out in 2006 and to this day people still ask me about the Spartan 300 workout. I can’t say I blame them really because every once in a while if I seem to be lacking in motivation I’ll watch a couple of the fight scenes from that movie and it gets me in the mood to find the first person I see, kick them in the nuts and scream “Madness?!?! THIS IS SPARTA!!!”
Now the fact that the Spartan’s were known to be an extreme society of badasses and their fitness levels remain legendary some couple thousand years later a rather extreme physical fitness program had to be put on the actors portraying the warriors. When people went to the theaters and looked at the actor’s unique physiques they saw that instead of looking like bodybuilders they were lean, ripped and athletic looking so naturally guys wanting to be supreme badasses started looking into what they did…and I was no exception.
In the bonus dvd that comes with the movie there is a section where they give a short glimpse into what they did.
And around the same time the 300 workout surfaced straight from the guy that trained the crew.
Here is the original 300 workout
Pullups – 25 repsDeadlifts with 135lbs – 50 reps
Pushups – 50 reps
24-inch Box jumps – 50 reps
Floor wipers – 50 reps
Single-arm Clean-and-Press with 36lbs Kettlebell – 50 reps
Pullups – 25 reps
And that is where the confusion started.
You see this workout is not what they did until they went from the before picture to the after. It is what they did as sort of a “graduation”. Gym Jones “the place where they all trained” periodically uses training sessions as challenges. Do that training session as fast as you can within the guidelines (ex. during the kettlebell clean and press the kettlebell has to touch the floor between reps). If you can do it quickly it means that you have great levels of fitness. The 300 workout was the destination, not the road.
Me being a guy with too much damn time on his hands and a burning desire to learn about what they did I dug deep into their training logs (which at the time was free) to find the areas where the actors trained. What I found was crossfit style workouts but geared towards individual goals (what makes them better imho). It however isn’t really something you are likely to be able to do in your home. I’ll give an example of what I mean by this. One training session may consist of alternating between deadlifts of 3 different bars. Do you have 3 different bars with the amount of weight necessary? Neither do I.
Just because you don’t have access to the equipment that they do doesn’t mean you can’t achieve the same types of results. The key is in the principles of what they did…not the details.
Here are the key principles.
1) Train hard. If they were wussing out Mark Twight (the trainer of the cast) would “smash them”.
2) Eat Right. One member was said something about grapes and cottage cheese and you can’t out train a bad diet.
3) Fitness over aesthetics. I am paraphrasing here but “the look of fitness will come with actual fitness”
As you may have seen in some of my before and after shots I used those same principles to get myself all ripped up. The thing is I had very limited equipment when I had left the gym. The kettlebell was my main tool (when I completed the 300 workout in a little over 16mins I had to borrow the deadlift equipment from a friend).
So try testing yourself with the 300 workout. If you can even get through it that’s pretty darn good but time yourself. Train by applying those 3 concepts and watch the bodyfat fall off of you and retest yourself to see if you scored higher. Madness? That’s the real secret.
p90x Plyometrics X … Are you kidding me?
Posted by: | CommentsOoh this one is probably going to ruffle some feathers. How do I know this? Because anyone who has anything negative to say about anything p90x gets attacked. Not even uber strength coach Charles Staley is safe from the “p90 xplorers” cult. For some reason, I don’t know maybe it’s just clever marketing or something, people on the p90x program walk around acting like they are a Navy Seal going through Buds. Some of them act like they are on an elite program used on cage fighters and NFL draft picks.
Now here let me just get this out in the open before I start. Yes p90x helps you burn fat. Yes p90x is hard. Yes I know it can get you down right exhausted. Yes I know that they get in better shape…usually. Yes I know that p90x has a lot of tremendous before and after pictures (real too…congrats to them) Yes I know that pro athletes use plyometrics to increase their power.
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.
Is it in you?
Posted by: | CommentsDo you have the willingness to stay the course?
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?
Should you train while on vacation?
Posted by: | CommentsI don’t know how long you have been keeping up with my blog but a little while back I took my girlfriend on a cruise where I proposed to her (and she said yes). Well the time has come for us to book our honeymoon because our wedding is coming up in November. Well for me being the stingy bastard that I am I wanted to get a high bang for my buck place (kind of like my exercise programs) and checked a lot of places and what they have to offer. One thing I noticed under the amenities was that just about all of them have a “fitness facility” listed under a place that could have very easily been titled “Here are a bunch of reasons you should stay here.”
Now I have a hard time understanding a lot of people’s mindsets. For one thing is pushing yourself through a workout while you could be on a beautiful beach or an excursion really the way you want to spend your vacation? Contrary to popular belief you aren’t going to lose your results after a single week of indulgence and relaxation. Actually you could come back refreshed since back off weeks are a part of just about every strength and conditioning programs out there. Some of my clients even ask me right before they leave what they should do while on vacation. I answer “Whatever you want. Relax and we can undue whatever damage was done when you get back.” Most of the facilities don’t give me the eye of the tiger anyways.
Would you rather be here or in the gym.
One thing I have also noticed is that some people will avoid training just about every other week of the year and suddenly while they are on vacation they get the inspiration to train. Hey I guess late is better then never but the major problem here is that they spend their entire vacation limping around from delayed onset muscle soreness. Not a pleasant way to spend the vacation and you aren’t going to have any visible results from the single workout that pretty nearly ruined your trip.
So to wrap it up what I recommend is to pay your dues BEFORE your trip. Spend the vacation enjoying the fruits of your labor.
The fruits of my labor
