Condition Kettlebell Gym

It is 8 weeks out from Fitness-Dixie show and so now I have to really get serious.  I am going to see what can happen with the Return of the Kettlebell protocol and try to gain a little lean mass.

DAY ONE 7/27

LIGHT DAY:

3 x (1,2,3) ladders 16kg+8kg - switching sides each time.  Except I got distracted and did (1,3,3) for the second ladder

5 squats in between each ladder

2×4 40kg sumo deadlifts

Warrior Diet:

Coffee w/ a little cream

J. Robb shake with a banana

Greek yogurt

DINNER:

roasted brussel sprouts (olive oil, salt, and pepper)

Rice pilaf/lentils with vegetable stock/hummus

2 glasses of wine

Where I went wrong: Cream instead of milk in my coffee but the coffee house I was meeting someone in didn’t have any milk option, I should have had a salad before the brussel sprouts and had planned on legally cheating with Arden’s Garden “Salad in a Glass” (unpasteurized beet, carrot, and parsley juice) but both stores by my place were out.  It also said that wine was best had with the high fat or high protein days and this is detox week, but I took the “best” to mean that it was “ok” this week.

Day Two 7/28

VARIETY DAY:

Z Joint mobility drills - RTK says to take it really easy on variety days.

Warrior Diet:

Coffee w/milk

banana

fruit cup

cold leftover brussel sprouts

DINNER 4:45PM:

roasted brussel sprouts

rice pilaf/jasmine rice/red lentils/hummus

Kombucha

Where I went wrong: again not eating (or drinking) a salad first, eating cooked brussel sprouts during undereating phase.  Even though they were cold.  Still have 45 minutes in my overeating 4 hour window… May have a glass of wine.  Still debating.

Last weekend at the RKC II, I was having a discussion with some of the other participants.  We noticed that a good many attendees were extremely tense throughout their entire body in their swings.  We also recognized how great we felt after Senior RKC Jeff O’Connor’s movement-based section that included a piece on “taking the brakes off” which we did while swinging.  So the question seemed to be “How ‘hard’ is Hardstyle” in relation to the kettlebell swing?

There were people with solid, tense arms, hands crushing the handle, scrunched up faces, and necks jutting out.  These RKC’s looked like they were in massive amounts of pain – and if they weren’t at the moment they would be later if they continued to swing that way.  Swinging “hardstyle” doesn’t mean tense up every muscle in your entire body as hard as you can.  There should be a balance of tension and relaxation.  If you find yourself swinging with every muscle in your arms, neck, shoulder, and face tightened, you may have an overactive startle reflex.  Do you find yourself making awful faces when drills get tough in your training?  Or outside of the iron game, do you get overly tense in your neck and shoulders when stuck in traffic or working on an important assignment for the day job?  If so, be conscious of that and purposefully relax bin your face, neck and shoulders.  Whether it’s sitting still on the highway or military pressing your 1 rep max, relax your face – I promise you’ll still get the weight up and you’ll feel better driving in your car.

Use the plank to swing analogy.  Get into a plank.  Your glutes are tight.  Your abs are tight.  You are flexing your quads and hamstrings.  But what about your face and neck?  Your face should be relaxed and your neck should be loose enough to be able to shake your head.  Apply that to your swing.  At the top of your swing you’re driving force into the ground with quads and hamstrings tight, glutes tight to lock your hips, abs tight to not leak power and to protect your back.  But then what?  Your shoulders are connected in the socket acting as a pivot point – connected but not squeezing so tight to be as tense as possible to the point of inhibiting the movement.  Your arms are like ropes and your hands like hooks – not crush gripping the handle.  Now check your neck and face.  Your spine should be neutral not allowing your neck to jut out like a chicken or pull back to give you a triple chin and your face should be relaxed, not squished up in what looks like agonizing pain.
Losing that balance of tension and relaxation is the first step on the pathway to inefficiency.  Once that balance is gone you’ll begin to lose your synchronized breathing, then your posture goes.  What are you left with then?  Really bad form.  And since you get good at what you practice doing you are getting good at doing really bad swings.
Catch the problem on the first step and correct it.  By being conscious of tensing when and where necessary and relaxing at the right place and time, your swings will be still tough and effective and you should feel “ready to battle a kingdom” (not ready to fall over dead) at the end of your training session.

             At the end of our beginner’s workshop, people often ask “Are your classes just those 5 exercises over and over?”  No.  There are countless combinations and varieties of those 5 exercises so you don’t get bored.  But how different REALLY is each class?  I mean fundamentally, how different?  The answer should be “not very.”  For our general fitness classes we always follow the same protocol: get-ups, swings and/or snatches, a pull, a press, a squat, and some bodyweight exercises thrown in.  Just because we do seesaw presses on Monday and 2KB presses on Tuesday doesnt mean we are truly varying the workout just for the sake of variety.  To train pulls we might do one armed rows one day and renegade rows the next, but the basic template is the same.  The key is to maintain the student’s attention to prevent boredom without mixing it up so much that the exercises become random and more for entertainment than focused training.

           I got my R-phase certification a little over a year ago and Z Health principles have shaped my training philosophies and have had a substantial impact on how things are done at Condition.  We always start and end with pieces of the neural warm-up and apply Z principles to our strength training, but until yesterday I had never done an actual assessment for someone who just came in to have a Z mobility assessment.  I have helped people in classes and worked with them on drills to help with strength increases and regaining mobility but if someone just wanted a straight up mobility assessment, I would always pass them on to Katie “the Brain” Bigelow.  But now that Katie is no longer on the East Coast, I had to step up and take it myself.

Z project #1 came in and had limited shoulder mobility and could not tilt her head laterally without pain.  I started with ankle tilts and toe pulls but while we were doing them she said “This is fun!  I do stuff like this all the time.”  No surprise that those exercises didn’t give much improvement.  I then moved to hip circles in rehab position.  Shoulder range of motion increased about 3 inches.  Aha.  Then we went onto work on the neck mobility.  We started with pelvis tilts (a/p and lateral) and pelvis circles.  Her range of motion didnt increase but the range that she COULD move into was now pain free!

She was so happy!  It was great to be able to help someone move pain free and as a bonus regain a little Z confidence in myself.

     When attempting a kettlebell swing of any variety, make sure you have your shoulder locked in the socket and that the bell isn’t pulling you forward.  A linked in shoulder is going to provide you with the most efficient swing possible.  Efficiency leads to being able to swing heavier and longer because you aren’t leaking strength and as a bonus, your swings will be much safer.  If you have your shoulder linked in, you are more likely to “tame the arc” and keep the bell in closer to your body at the bottom of the back swing.  Taming the arc leads to proper hip loading whereas if you let the bell swing down closer to the ground than to you, you will end up compensating with your back and that is neither safe nor efficient.  For more info on Linkage vs Leakage read Pavel’s The Naked Warrior, and to learn more about taming the arc, check out Enter the Kettlebell.

Hello everyone.  It is an exciting time here at Condition! 

First of all, congratulations to our newest RKC, Katie Bigelow, who won the Form and Technique Challenge at the June RKC.  Way to go!

Secondly, we are in the process of getting an Alpharetta location open by the end of August.  We are looking at Old Milton Parkway close to 400, so if you have any suggestions or comments on location they are appreciated!  Just shoot over an email.

 Last but definitely NOT least, Master RKC Brett Jones will be holding a workshop here at Condition this Winter.  More details to come in the next few weeks…

Have a safe Fourth of July weekend!

The following is an article on wellness and family by Sparkpeople.com.

 Sometimes the Littlest People Know the Most

Forget about talk radio, research labs, late night TV, or a magazine rack full of scantily clad cover models. Everything you need to know about fitness and nutrition, you can learn from your kids.

Last night my friend and Martial Fitness Coach, Sule Welch, invited me to a capoeira class at Studio Dionne. Excited, but nervous, I decided to give the Brazilian martial art a try. And what a great time it was!

Capoeira seems like a mixture of playing, fighting, and dancing and really looks like a graceful form of breakdancing. Watching others can really be captivating, too. The class was very intimidating at first since the advanced and the beginners are all together, but everyone was very nice and reassured me that they felt the same way at their first class.

To top it off, Contra Mestre Muriel is a phenomenal teacher and I spent a good hour on YouTube after class watching him. As the Cordão de Ouro Atlanta website states, it really was a treat to learn from someone of his caliber.

Since I’m brand new to capoeira, I don’t really know a lot about it’s history, but more information can be found on the Cordão de Ouro Atlanta website.

Earlier this week when I had a kettlebell class do a series of presses I found myself saying, “Keep pressing like that but don’t make faces.”  One lady asked, “Why?  Because it will get stuck like that?”  NO!  Because making faces is a sign that your balance of tension and relaxation is gone and that is the first step to inefficiency.  As a Z-Trainer, we learn that the path to efficiency is:

1. Perfect Form

2. Dynamic Postural Alignment

3. Synchronized Respiration

4. Balanced Tension/Relaxation

When you start a press, you should begin with proper form, then you make sure you are standing up straight with an elongated spine.  As you press you should sniff in at the bottom and blow (or hiss) out as you press.  Your abs, glutes, and quads should be full of tension, but your face and neck should be relaxed.

The pathway of ineffiency is the exact opposite.  The first thing to go is your balance of tension/relaxation, then your breathing gets off, and first posture, then form goes.  The best way to keep from having bad form is to stop and correct it before you get to that point.  When you notice that you are making faces, stop and fix your balance of tension and relaxation then proceed with your press.

Last week I was at Whole Foods and something caught my eye.  On the shelf were these brown, grainy, interesting tortillas.  Usually I stay away from wraps of any kind because of their nutritional content (or, more like lack of nutrition in their content) but these looked like they could be an exception.  I read the ingredients and the first one was stone ground whole wheat flour and there was no sugar of any kind on the list.  Let’s move onto the nutrition facts.  110 calories, 2g fat and more than 3g of dietary fiber - the real test of any product that claims to be “whole wheat.”  And these were some big tortillas!  I was excited to find something new and went to the checkout.  As I was walking to my car, I couldn’t help thinking that it was too good to be true.  So I double checked the label.  All of that data was for HALF OF A TORTILLA!  Who eats half of a tortilla???  Well, the content of this product still ended up being an ok choice, but I have even seen desserts at Trader Joe’s labeled “serving size: 1/2 a muffin”  I bet even less people eat half a muffin than half a tortilla!  So, my advice is that if you read anything on a label, make sure that you’re also checking the serving size.