Gubernatrix sneaks a go with the 100kg sleeper

Hey, this functional training stuff really works! I’ve just spend the weekend moving house and apart from some help unloading  (including from my awesome 80-year-old aunty who is of a generation that could actually do stuff) I basically did it all myself.

I was expecting to feel very tired and achey afterwards but this didn’t happen. I put it down to the fact that as well as good ol’ powerlifting training I’ve been doing a lot more lifting and carrying recently. Inspired by the great DVDs from my main men Dan John and Chip Conrad and the world of strongman, I’ve been incorporating more overhead work, farmer’s walks, super heavy holds and the like into my workouts and it is definitely having an effect.

Of course the real test will come in the Crossfit Reading/FKUK strongman event that will see me strutting my heavy stuff on November 21st but in the meantime, I shall continue to shift things around as I try to fit my life into ever smaller spaces.

If you’re not incorporating the lifting and carrying of heavy objects into your training, I highly recommend it. It will make your life easier (believe me) and it’s a lot of fun.

Farmer’s walk

Here’s a tip if you are short of space in your gym for walking and carrying: use the stairs. Going up and down the stairs a few times carrying a set of heavy dumbbells will burn your legs and fry your grip. Not unlike my cooking.

Use farmer’s walks at the end of a workout as a bit of GPP and grip training combined.

One-handed deadlift

One-handed deadlift

Have you ever tried a one-handed deadlift? This classic used to be a popular competition lift – and is still practised by fans of the old time or ‘odd’ lifts. Indeed a Left Handed Deadlift was the BWLA Lift of the Quarter last quarter.

It is possible to lift with one hand more than half of your regular two-handed deadlift and you might surprise yourself with what you can achieve. Standing astride the bar (as I am doing in the picture above) is allowed, as well as the normal straight-on stance shown to the right.

Suitcase deadlift

A great idea for core training: get up off that mat and do a suitcase carry instead. Simply carry a heavy weight in one hand while keeping your body perfectly perpendicular to the ground and feel how much the muscles of your torso need to engage to keep you from collapsing sideways.

If 80-year-old Aunty Olga can pick up my 14kg kettlebell in one hand, you can too.

DVD inspiration

I pimp these DVDs because I love them and they demonstrate a great variety of lifts and workouts with a strength bias.

Everything’s Over My Head from Dan John has, as the name suggests, a lot of olympic lifting-inspired overhead work but my favourite part is Carried Away which features every possible combination of carrying you can think of. Seriously, when was the last time you actually lifted a weight and moved around with it? We tend to do all our lifting rooted to the ground like ancient trees. Let’s make like the Forest of Fangorn and start moving.
Read the full review here.

Strength Rituals from Bodytribe features an exciting array of odd and one-handed lifts. Windmills, bent press, one-handed snatchs and turkish get ups sit alongside one-handed work with clubs and kettlebells. It’s all heavy and therefore all good. There is also an explanation of how such lifts can usefully be incorporated into a workout programme.
Read the full review here.

Get these DVDs together at a 15% discount! See here for details.

A shout out for The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban, whence I obtained the one-handed deadlift picture above, a wonderful compendium of old time lifting and physical culture.

A typical surf lesson lasts 2 hours. In that time, people go from never having touched a surfboard before to standing up in a wobbly sort of way in two-foot deep white water ‘riding’ a wave.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is way cool. I know, I’ve been there. Managing to get to your feet on a surfboard while being propelled along by a tiny white wave is the biggest stoke!

My first surf lesson, spring 2007

But it is about as close to real surfing as London Zoo is to the Serengeti. Getting even to the point of being able to paddle out beyond the white water, catch a real wave before it breaks and actually ride the thing can take years to master properly.

The majority of people will never get past the wobbling-in-the-white-water stage. They will go in the water a few times over the course of the weekend or week they are on holiday. They will have a whale of a time and then they will go home. The next time they come down, they won’t have had a chance to build on what they learned in their first lesson so they will basically be at the same stage they were before.

They haven’t been surfing, they’ve had a ‘surfing experience’.

This is analogous to the majority of people’s attempts at training. Typically someone will go to the gym for a few weeks with a not very clearly defined goal in mind (“lose a bit of weight”, “get fit”), they will perform a bog standard programme given to them by a fitness instructor and after a few weeks they’ll get too busy or lose motivation or get distracted by something shiny and they’ll stop going.

Will they see any changes? Yes, of course! If you go from doing nothing to going to the gym a couple of times a week, even if doing the most basic perfunctory things, you are likely to see some changes. This is very exciting, like your first experience of ‘surf stoke’. But really all you are doing is learning how to hold a surf board the right way up and clamber onto it without immediately falling off again. It’s fun, but it’s hardly the stuff of legend.

People in this situation aren’t training, they are having a ‘training experience’, which gives them a taster of what real training might actually be like.

It’s a great feeling of achievement – but really you’ve only just dipped your toe into the water of what you can achieve if you pursue training properly.

A typical surfing experience

So what is it to pursue training ‘properly’?

This goes beyond simply teaching you what training feels like, getting used to the equipment and so on. It goes beyond those first few exciting results when you need relatively little effort to achieve relatively significant changes – although the effort may feel big because you are not used to it.

Training properly means working towards a clearly defined goal in a sensible and systematic way. That doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated but there has to be some logic from session to session that works towards the goal.

Consistency of effort and prioritisation are very important. What you do outside the training session (eating, recovery etc) becomes almost as important as what you do within the training session.

You also need to push yourself and regularly move out of your comfort zone. Sometimes you may have to step back to fix a problem – progress isn’t always linear.

That said, the big picture must show progress.  Things need to change over a period of time and stay like that. The biggest mistake made by most people is that through the wide angle lens, nothing much changes. Training periods are like holidays; in between times, all the progress is lost and they must start over again.

Training modalities

Something similar happens when you change training modalities. If you go from a typical hypertrophy gym programme to a boot camp-style, high intensity group training session, you will be blown away. It will almost kill you but you will be so stoked you can’t wait to come back for more!

Again, not to take anything away from this experience, it is great fun and very motivating. But after that initial euphoria wears off, where will you be? I have seen people at boot camps simply coast along at a level where they are reasonably comfortable. The training stopped working months ago but they feel good so why do anything about it?

They are turning up for the ‘experience’, the social side, the feeling that they are doing something useful with their evening. But they are still just messing about in the white water.

When you do something new, you appear to make lots of progress in a short space of time and it is natural to be stoked by the experience. But this is a taster, it’s not what training looks like over a consistent period. I’m not saying you can’t have fun (in a way) every time you train but it’s useful to recognise when you are going for the training ‘experience’ and when you are simply training.

Constant excitement, constant buzz can lead to false expectations. In real training there are long periods where nothing much seems to be happening and you have to keep faith with yourself. Sometimes you might feel that you are going backwards.

But you need to keep in mind the big picture. Have a goal, do sensible things to try to meet it and be consistent. Try not to dabble in a plethora of new experiences in search of a new workout ‘high’. Work hard, eat right and then as Dan John often says good things are going to happen.

That said, we might also harbour a notion of a corporeal geometry, a desired shape or look that bespeaks the things we want to project about ourselves.

Looks are important for two reasons, neither of which need have anything to do with vanity:

1. They are part of how we present ourselves to the world
2. They are often the first sign that something might be awry

It might seem noble not to care at all what you look like to other people, but turning up to someone’s wedding, for example, unwashed, unkempt, in your oldest jeans might be disrespectful to your hosts. So, on some level it does matter what you look like.

Likewise if you notice you are gaining a little extra podge, this might be a useful signal that you’ve let your discipline falter on your diet.

The great thing about training is that if you do it right (and that includes the recovery and eating part too), you’ll look better. But often it is helpful to have the visual signal to tell you how well you are doing…or not.

Body composition

Being sensitive to changes in your body, whether or not they are easily visible, is important in measuring and understanding progress. It’s not as simple as picking a number.

Take me, for example. I am stronger, fitter and hotter than I was ten years ago. As it happens, though, I am heavier in terms of scale weight and my body shape is different (hips are smaller, shoulders are bigger).

So if I’d said to myself back then that I wanted to be x weight and fit into x dress, I would have needed to take a different path. Frankly I probably wouldn’t look as good – and I probably wouldn’t be as strong, fit or happy about my physicality.

In other words, rather than picking a number, I just got on with it (“it” being getting fitter and slimmer) and used the changes I saw in the mirror as feedback with which to refine my tactics.

For me, visual feedback worked and it taught me a lot about body composition along the way. How did I truly comprehend, for example, that adding muscle mass actually makes it easier to lose fat? Because I saw the results in the mirror.

Visual indicators

I remember the first time my abs starting showing. I hadn’t been aiming for this as a goal and it took me by surprise. I’d been working hard (I was doing a lot of break dancing at the time) and counting my calories and suddenly there they were. So then I had a marker for what it takes to get to that point.

I’ve got a similar marker with diet. I wonder if any of you experience this? I can draw a conceptual line, a meridian if you like, where on one side I’m happy with the way I look and on the other side I am dissatisfied.

This meridian isn’t in an unhealthy place; it’s a place where my weight is normal and my dress size is normal for my height. It’s even in a place where several bits of me aren’t exactly how I’d choose but I gave up those battles long ago.

This meridian denotes a place where I feel happy enough to walk tall, to dress up if I choose, not feel inadequate in social situations, smile, laugh and generally be relaxed in my own skin.

Staying on the right side of the meridian isn’t difficult but it does take some concentration and discipline. It requires the embedding of good habits to maintain.

Do you know what you need to do to stay on the right side of that meridian, without taking it to an unhealthy extreme? Do you know what your diet and training look like to keep you there?

Body image

There are obvious dangers to relying on visuals to tell you about yourself. People who become unhealthily obsessed with body image can end up with eating disorders or body dysmorphia.

There are some people who end up on the extreme side of the issue, like there are some people who exceed the speed limit, or train to exhaustion. There has even been a new disorder coined, orthorexia, for people who are obsessed with eating healthy food.

Obsessive-compulsive behaviour is rarely healthy, whether it manifests itself in how we eat or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement.

But a healthy interest in how we look can alert us to issues that might turn into health problems later. If my dad had been more concerned about his weight earlier in life, he might still be here instead of shuffling off this mortal coil at the age of sixty.

Grace

So how do we do it? How do we maintain a healthy relationship between our bodies and our psyche? Something written by Dr Steve Bratman, who coined the term ‘orthorexia’, caught my eye:

Orthorexia begins, innocently enough, as a desire to overcome chronic illness or to improve general health. But because it requires considerable willpower to adopt a diet that differs radically from the food habits of childhood and the surrounding culture, few accomplish the change gracefully [my emphasis]. Most must resort to an iron self-discipline bolstered by a hefty dose of superiority over those who eat junk food. Over time, what to eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and greater proportion of the orthorexic’s day.

That notion of accomplishing it gracefully is an interesting one. Whether it is health, body image, athletic performance or something else that motivates people to start paying attention to diet and training, if you go at it desperately, violently, guiltily or angrily, you might well become unhealthily obsessed or at least piss everyone else off in the process.

To follow the path with grace means both to accept yourself now and the better you that you want to become. We need to have patience with those around us who don’t understand what we’re trying to do and try to explain our actions while not imposing our views.

We need to be fair to ourselves too: it’s tempting to beat yourself around the head when you screw up, but that doesn’t seem to help in the long run although it relieves a bit of frustration at the time.

There’s also a need to accept the learning process. You probably won’t get it right first time and there’s no reason why you must. What else comes that easily in life? So learn, use feedback, keep an open mind and try things out. Over time you find out what works for you, and those things gradually become habits and are embedded into your life.

More from gubernatrix

• How to be a better version of yourself
• Is it really about looks?
• What’s your food personality?

Inspiration and motivation in neat little packages!

• A philosophy of strength training – Lecture DVD by Dan John
• Strength Rituals – Training methods and movement philosophy DVD from Bodytribe
• Everything’s over my head – Training methods DVD by Dan John

I love strength training. You know it, but I’ll say it anyway, I bloody love it. It’s one of the most happy, positive things in my life. I like knowing I’m strong and I’m only getting stronger.

Why the sudden strength affirmation?

Well a number of things have occurred in the last couple of days. My wise friend Andrew asked me to give a talk on ‘women and strength training’. Then my tovarisch Chip Conrad posted an essay about gender strength (an extract from his book which you should seriously consider buying). Plus a couple of forum conversations I had all combined to get me thinking about this notion of strong women.

We are all aware of the issue, I expect. I’ve talked about it many times on this blog: the mismatch between the stereotypical bodybuilder-inspired image of a weight training woman which every chick thinks she will turn into, and the reality of women who do train with weights.

Chip sums it up in his piece, like a man who has been to this land before and knows how to communicate with the natives but still carries a revolver, just in case:

“Physical strength is held as a male trait. Wait… drop it. Do not throw anything at me yet. If this isn’t true then why is the common stereotype of a strong woman riddled with words like ‘butch’, ‘bulky,’ ‘steroids’, or any number of terms that have very male connotations? And why are women’s ‘fitness’ magazines so bent on perpetuating a soft, helpless version of a woman who should only do petite Pilates moves or move little colored weights around that weigh less then a kitten? And why does the cover always feature a waif-ish model who looks like a 12-year old boy with make-up on as some sort of icon to what a ‘fit’ woman is?”

I don’t disagree with this. But since it isn’t news, I suspect, to any of you, I want to go beyond the magazines and media images and examine exactly what happens when you do train.

Personally I have had nothing but positive reaction to my ever developing strength abilities. Either that or I’ve just grown completely oblivious to any negative reactions. But I think it’s the former.

The point being that there’s a difference between what images people associate if you fling the term “strong woman” at them, and what they think when you are standing in front of them.

Yeah, no-one looks their best in the middle of a max deadlift, but I’m cute when I smile!

I find that what people see in front of them starts to modify the mental images. Here’s a real living breathing person who looks normal (apart from the weirdly fluffy hairdo), saying she lifts this and presses that and heaves the other. And she looks pretty happy about it. Maybe the media fed images aren’t true after all.

Obviously the light bulb doesn’t always go on immediately as the media images are very powerful. But a seed has been planted.

Numbers

To a certain extent, it’s a numbers game. There aren’t enough women lifting weights in gyms across the land for any other images to take hold.

Most people don’t see women lifting heavy in the gym. They don’t believe it happens. They don’t know how it happens. Therefore you can stick any image you like on the cover of a magazine and people won’t know whether it is true or not.

Men who say women don’t work hard in the gym haven’t done some empirical study of the phenomenon. They’ve just never seen it happen (or more specifically they’ve not seen women training hard in a particular way which they class as ‘real training’; busting a gut in spinning class or yoga apparently doesn’t count).

However once people see women training with weights properly, I find that they start to get it. And they like it! I’ve had nothing but positive vibes from people. I’ve been accepted and respected by the ‘meatheads’ at every single gym I’ve belonged to – yeah it takes a few weeks but it happens eventually.

Who’da thunk it? Reality wins!

Men

Let’s talk about what men think for a second. Hey, most of you reading this are men anyways.

I am sure we’ve all seen the comments: the claims that women don’t work hard in the gym, women with muscles and six packs are ugly, women shouldn’t lift weights because it’s not ladylike blah blah.

Here’s the truth about women’s weight training: men are, on the whole, pretty impressed.

I’ve never had so many compliments on my physique or attitude as when I’m training. Seriously, if you care about such things, squatting heavy is a guy magnet.

I don’t care if the interest is flirty or technical – both are fine by me. If the interest is technical, I’ve got rather more to say, but I’m not fussed.

Yeah, the world isn’t perfect but there’s plenty of spare respect to go around. Women can choose to dance around in their panties on youtube and pander to male chauvinist images of what they should look like, or women can respect themselves and pursue what they think is right for them (and if that is dancing around in your panties, why not consider competitive pole dancing?).

Pretty girls are everywhere, strong women are rare! I’ll never stand out as being pretty (I have a brilliant mind of course but that doesn’t show up in a club) but put me in a squat cage with a pair of black leggings on and I’ll show you who’s your daddy.

Women

In all the years I’ve been going to the gym I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of women who have come up to me and asked me about training. This bothers me. In the past I’ve just shrugged my shoulders and carried on with what I was doing. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

Am I even leading the horse to water though? Or am I just leaving it in the dusty street to find its own way to the water trough (which is surrounded by thirsty bulls slurping all the water and farting).

Before I lose you all in that metaphor, what I mean is, have I myself done enough to create the opportunity for women to ask about strength training and actually get to do it properly? Not doing the dumbbell shoulder press on a swiss ball exercise that the PT gave them but getting under an olympic bar in the squat rack.

Perhaps the wise friend who has asked me to give a seminar is on the right track. Let’s give some talks and start some women-only sessions round the power cage!

Heroes

When I think back to what got me into strength training, I don’t remember it being anything external. There wasn’t anyone that I wanted to be like or become, it was just the way I felt inside when performing a feat of strength (at that time a relatively wimpy feat, but still a feat).

Women don’t have physical strength heroes in the way that men do. Women don’t have the pressure to be bigger, stronger and tougher the way that men do. This has its advantages (men don’t escape unscathed either) but it does mean that women are less likely to explore feats of physical strength as a method of self improvement, empowerment and happiness – especially when becoming strong is apparently contraindicated for beauty, if we believe the magazine images.

There’s no particular reason why men should be the protectors and women the carers. The roles can be interchangeable.

Beauty

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
- John Keats’ talking urn

We can ask ‘what is strength?’ and try to define it for ourselves.

We can also ask ‘what is beauty?’ and try to define this for ourselves, since many of us (all of us?) first stepped inside a gym because we wanted to be some kind of beautiful.

I’m not talking about inner beauty either – or not just about inner beauty. I mean real, visceral, gorgeous, physical beauty made even more intense by its truth.

Call me sceptical but I look at magazine images and although I can see that they are put together pleasingly, they might as well be pencil sketches for all the relationship they bear to reality (and that’s not being fair to pencil sketches).

For me, strength is a vital component of beauty – physical as well as metaphysical and intellectual.

We shouldn’t get hung up about images of beauty or what other people think is beautiful or not beautiful. We need to know what beauty looks and feels like for ourselves.

Need a hero? Watch this great video. And then go here.

More from gubernatrix

• Strength standards for women
• The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to weight training
• Is it really about looks?

Dan John is a wonderful public speaker, a very knowledgeable strength coach and a warm, generous person. I can’t think of a better combination for a training seminar.

Although he loves to experiment and to learn himself, Dan John is in fact the opposite of faddy. He has this uncanny ability to pick out the eternal, simple truths from whatever system or method he is discussing.

I don’t think there’s much point my going into the details of what he talks about (but see end of this post anyway!). This sounds odd but it’s not really relevant. Saying Dan John covers ‘goal management’ and ‘phasic and tonic muscles’ in his lecture is like saying that Shakespeare covers ‘bereavement’ and ‘fencing’ in Hamlet. Technically this is true, but that doesn’t explain what the lecture is about or what you will get out of it.

It is worth saying however that, although much of Dan John’s experience is in coaching athletes, he does have a lot to say to people who are simply training for muscle building and/or fat loss and their long term physical health. His advice isn’t sports specific, it is general and applicable to a number of different scenarios (including one that seems to have been inspired by Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. I’m not asking any questions…).

So this DVD is for anyone who has been strength training for a while and who wants to carry on training for the rest of their life. In other words, for people who take their training seriously, even if it’s just a hobby. I think it is particularly useful for people who coach themselves as it will equip you with methods and concepts that can be drawn on throughout your training life.

Dan John makes me want to dedicate myself to training for life, or reinforces that desire. I am sure he could also instill that desire in some people, but this is not the DVD where he does that. I think you have to have the desire already, but even if it is dormant or intermittent, this DVD will bring it out and rejuvenate it.

The premise of this movie is ‘point camera at Dan John and let him talk for over two hours’. I could have listened to two hours more – heck, two days more. The good news for me, and all of you, is that there is more! This is only part one of a four part series filmed over two days. My cup is gonna runneth over, I can tell you.

This DVD is now on sale in the shop. Get it here. Sign up to my newsletter to hear about more new products as they come in stock.

Watch clips from the DVD:

• Dan on goal setting
• Dan on the role of the strength coach

What’s on the DVD:

Erm, having said there’s no point telling you exactly what’s on the DVD, here is a list of topics covered in case you really want to know.

• The role of the strength coach
• Levels of strength coaching
• How a home trainer becomes his own coach
• The influence of strength coaching on performance
• Strength and athletic performance
• How to narrow your training focus
• Systematic learning
• Setting a non-competitive training goal
• Phasic vs tonic muscles
• How to stay youthful while aging
• Movements not muscles
• Dan’s hip displacement continuum

More Dan John

• Dan John’s earlier DVD Everything’s Over My Head
• The wisdom of Dan John

For me this is like watching old Bones Brigade movies. You can giggle at the low budget, dated production values for about two seconds before the content takes over and you are mesmerised.

Carried Away is the first film on the DVD and it is mainly about walking with weights. It doesn’t get simpler and it doesn’t get harder than this. I just wrote a lengthy and detailed post about assistance exercises; I’m thinking about deleting it and writing “do everything in Carried Away”.

If you work out at home and you love the low tech, you will be particularly inspired by this short film. I was also gobsmacked by the mountains in the background (we don’t have anything like that in the UK).

The next film is From The Ground Up. Some people will recognise the title as also being that of Dan John’s free ebook on olympic weightlifting. Personally I think the third film follows on more naturally from Carried Away but there you go. From The Ground Up is a family affair in the backyard. Mom and Dad do Olympic lifting in the garden while teenage daughters look on indulgently.

Coach Dan John, back in the day

If you coach athletes (and that includes you – if you train yourself at home you are Head Coach of Team You) this film will be useful, giving very sensible drills, progressions and coaching cues. I don’t know enough about Olympic weightlifting to know whether it is ‘good’ but it all makes sense to me.

There are exercises in here that I have seen popping up in various other contexts, including Crossfit workouts, so I’m not the only one who thinks, “darn that looks useful”. If you’ve done little or no Olympic lifting before, this film will get you putting stuff over your head with confidence.

The third film is Everything’s Over My Head, which continues the milieu of the first movie – outdoor training at home, very low tech, but focussing on overhead, Olympic lifting-inspired training.

Throughout the films, Dan John’s delivery – mostly in voiceover, sometimes to camera – is perfect: funny, clear, authoritative, warm-hearted. Anyone who has read his articles or his book will know what to expect. Simple, sensible, inspirational advice. Stuff that you know isn’t going to go out of fashion.

Carried Away might well be genius. It’s so simple, you almost wonder why Dan John even made a DVD of it, because most people wouldn’t even recognise it as ‘training’. But once you see people actually doing it, it makes sense and that is possibly the genius part.

Recently a lot of people have been catching onto this idea. Olympic lifting and sprints? Dan John has been talking about it for years – go straight to the source.

More Dan John

I am happy to say that I now have the Everything’s Over My Head DVD for sale in my shop. Get your copy here.

Unfortunately I don’t have a clip from Everything’s Over my Head to show you but if you are unfamiliar with Dan John’s teaching style or you just want to watch something cool, take a look at this clip of Dan teaching the turkish get up from one of the new DVDs (which I will be getting in stock soon!).

Review of A Philosophy of Strength Training DVD from Dan John

My post on The wisdom of Dan John

What’s on the DVD

Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn from Everything’s Over My Head DVD:

If so, you should consider adding assistance exercises into your training programme.

Good morning - a superior assistance exercise

What are assistance exercises?

Assistance exercises develop movements and parts of the body associated with the events in your sport or the main exercises in your programme if you are not training for a particular sport.

For example, in Mark Rippetoe’s popular Starting Strength programme, the main exercises are squat, bench press, deadlift, press and power clean. If you are a powerlifter, your events are squat, bench press and deadlift. If your sport is Olympic weightlifting, the events are snatch and clean and jerk, and the squat would be an assistance exercise. If you play rugby or badminton or do triathlon then any strength training is going to be assistance.

Why do assistance exercises?

Dip

If you are completely new to training, the main exercises such as those mentioned above are plenty to begin with.

They are the main exercises for a reason: full body movements working every aspect of your physical capability and quite a lot of your mental capability too. They are the foundation for all strength training, indeed for daily life itself.

However there will come a point in training when your initial progress slows down and perhaps even plateaus, since your body has adapted to the demands of these exercises. You’ve learned the technique and developed the necessary mobility to perform the exercises well and efficiently; you’ve developed enough strength and energy to perform a number of reps at a decent weight. The point at which this happens is different for everyone. It might take months, it might take years.

Something else that happens is that your body learns to perform the exercise using the path of least resistance. You might be using good technique, but if there is any weakness in the system the body will automatically compensate. For example, if you happen to have much stronger legs than back, your body will work this out pretty quickly and will perhaps use more leg strength in, say, the deadlift than back strength. Your technique might be perfectly acceptable from the outside, but your body is still compensating for a weakness, therefore this area might lag behind in development.

This happens to everyone, it is because the body is highly efficient and adaptable. Mostly this efficiency is to be celebrated but sometimes we need to get in there and override this tendency in order to progress even further.

To use the deadlift example, if you’ve reached a point where the relative paucity of back strength is preventing you from making progress, this is a good time to consider introducing assistance work. Consider it Continuing Professional Development for the back. Send it on a training course and get it a certificate so that it can contribute more to the team and feel better about itself.

You can do assistance work right from the start of your training career but most trainers will try to give their clients a good grounding in the basic exercises first, otherwise you’re just overloading the programme with stuff you don’t really need. There’s no point taking advanced calculus if you haven’t mastered long division yet.

Types of assistance

Assistance exercises can assist in various ways.

• They can focus on a particular area involved in the main exercise, for example focussing on the hamstrings, which are a vital component of squatting and deadlifting.
• They can focus on a particular part of the event exercise where you are weak. For example, if you are finding it hard to lock out your deadlifts, you might start doing partial deadlifts (like rack pulls) to strengthen this part of the lift.
• Assistance exercises can also be those that complement the main exercise by working the same muscles or body parts in a slightly different way – for example, an overhead press or a dip to assist the bench press.

What type of assistance exercise you choose depends on the problems you are trying to fix and the aspects you want to develop.

If you are training for general strength and fitness, you could even argue that for you there is no such thing as assistance exercises and main exercises – all good exercises have equal standing. That’s cool, I’m happy with that too.

But if you have any kind of specialisation or bias, you’ll probably end up with a programme that has key exercises or events that you particularly want to improve and other exercises that have a more supporting role.

Favourite assistance exercises

We are a la carte rather than prix fixe where assistance exercises are concerned and it is an extensive menu. When I was putting together my current, powerlifting-specific programme I came up with 32 assistance exercises (see end of this post) – and these were just my favourites!

I can’t tell you which assistance exercises to choose as it depends on your goals and your own assessment of what you need. Don’t let this faze you, enjoy it as a learning opportunity.

What I can do, however, is tell you which exercises I think give you the most bang for your buck. The table below shows these exercises and what they can help with.

There really are so many more but I don’t think you can go wrong with these eight unless you have very specific requirements.

Unusual assistance exercises

Is this all meat and potatoes to you? Well here are some exercises you may not have tried

• Bent press
• Windmill
• Farmers walks/carries
• Tire flipping/crash mat flipping
• Box squats
• Adding bands and chains to your main exercises for extra resistance

All of the above will challenge your body in many useful ways. You’ll notice that many of the exercises are taken from or inspired by strongman training (bent press, farmers walks) or use objects such as mats, boxes or chains to enhance the basic exercises.

Add kettlebells, clubs or gymnastic rings into the mix and you have even more options. There is a mind-boggling array of movements you can do to increase strength, fitness and prowess in your chosen sport or active past-time. There is no reason ever to be bored or jaded in the gym.

This post isn’t the place to go through every assistance exercise in detail. And if I did that it would spoil the fun for you. My second favourite thing in strength training is discovering a new exercise (you can guess what my first is, can’t you?) so let’s leave a bit of mystery and intrigue in place. There are some links at the bottom of this post to help you on your way.

How to use assistance exercises in training

You can either simply add in a variety of assistance work to improve everything or attempt to identify specific weaknesses and choose exercises to improve these. Both methods are sensible.

If you are not sure which exercises would be best, try some and see whether they help. Honestly, even experienced coaches need to do the trial-and-error approach sometimes. Choose some exercises, do them for a few weeks, then test your main event/outcome. Did it improve?

I find with powerlifting assistance work that you can generally tell whether something is working in about four weeks. It’s not always the case, but that’s a rule of thumb I would recommend.

There are a number of ways you can incorporate assistance exercises into your training sessions. Here are a few ideas

• Add unweighted or light exercises into your warm up, such as one legged bodyweight squats
• Do your main lift, then do one or two assistance exercises related to the main lift, for example squat and then front squat and romanian deadlift
• Pick a handful of exercises and make a workout from them. Do them in a circuit or one after the other. The popular Crossfit workout Fran is basically front squat, push press and pull up done in sequence.
• How about picking one new exercise to try per session? If you train three times a week, that’s three new exercises, three new challenges for the body.

If you are curious, these are the assistance exercises I identified for my current powerlifting programme.

Resources from gubernatrix

Bodyweight or bust! – all of the exercises in this article can be used as assistance

Speed work – a useful way to enhance performance

Best exercises for core – I’ll give you a clue: not sit ups

Strength Rituals DVD – a cornucopia of new lifts, movements and combinations (especially the oldtime strongman stuff)

Elite Fitness Manual ebook – a smorgasbord of exercise instruction, including Crossfit skills

My take on this is that I prefer to define myself in terms of what I am training for, the ultimate goal of my training, rather than what method I use to do it. For example, “I train for strength”, “I train for my health”, “I train to be a better human being.”

I am sure that anyone who trains ‘functionally’ (doing what we do) is going to get people asking them questions. And it is important to think about how to answer those questions because you can be an ambassador for your style and purpose of training and perhaps open a few doors in a few minds.

To be honest, though, sometimes I forget to do this. I am often asked what I am training for and sometimes I just say what my next goal is: “I’m training for a powerlifting competition in November”. But actually that’s not true. My priority might be an upcoming meet but that’s not all I am training for, not in the slightest.

All that mobility and stretching isn’t just so that I can go lift some heavy weights in two months time without tweaking a muscle. That sweaty GPP stuff isn’t just so that I can do my warm up without feeling tired. If you knew about powerlifting you might even question my decision to do GPP at all.

Somebody asked me on this blog recently what my goals were and this is what I said – the salient bits anyway:

“for me strength training is a path to personal development and empowerment, a constant and never-ending adventure. There isn’t an end point as such – I am a seeker and always will be. I guess becoming physically stronger helps me to be a better person in other ways…

…At the moment I am enjoying competing in powerlifting but I can’t say whether I will be doing this in two years’ time. I might be trying some other sport. A lot of the time my choices are to do with what I find fun and engaging at any given time.”

Okay, it takes longer to say that than it takes to say “I’m a powerlifter”, especially since I actually rambled on more than that. Nevertheless I need to be better at recognising that if someone I don’t know comes up to me in the gym and asks me about my training then either they are trying to chat me up or they have a genuine desire to know more about it. It takes courage to ask a stranger about what they are doing so why should I assume that they can’t handle a fuller answer than, “I’m a [insert group affiliation here]“?

What would my training look like if I was just training for my next meet? It might look like most of the other powerlifters in my gym (bless ‘em). Come in, jump on bench or cage, do some warm up reps, do some heavy reps, maybe do a couple of assistance exercises, munch protein bar, go home.

Instead, it looks like this:

• Mobility warm up including exercises specific to that day’s main lift or some light skill work on a technical lift
• Big lift e.g. squat, deadlift, including warm up sets and work sets
• Assistance lifts e.g. good mornings, Romanian deadlifts, rows
• GPP workout, some kind of short, high intensity circuit
• Warm down and stretch
• Foam rolling and any necessary rehab work (usually do this later at home)

And on non-gyms days I often do sport, or short GPP workouts, or bodyweight stuff like pull ups and general messing about on bars.

Many people will read about what I do, in the gym and out of it, and think, “Gosh that seems like a lot of time”. I spend 2 hours in the gym three times a week, plus the stuff I do at home. Sound like a lot? I’ll wager it is less time than 90% of the population spends watching TV per week. Heck, it’s less time than I spend watching TV per week!

I can’t think of one area of my life that isn’t enhanced by my physical training. My friends will have noticed that I have taken to bemoaning my life of late (it’s all gone a bit pete tong) but the gym is the one place where I look like I might actually have a handle on this ‘life’ stuff.

Back to group affiliations. There’s nothing wrong with defining yourself in terms of your membership of a group or organisation, like Crossfit. Something that came out in the forum discussion is that it can be useful shorthand. The name itself is quite illustrative of the principles behind the concept – training across a number of different domains and so on. I agree that the name is genius, but it only tells a small part of the story.

I don’t know what you’d think if I said “I’m a Catholic” but you could assume any number of things, from my attitude to abortion to what I wore at school. Labels aren’t always a useful way to define people. I think we are finding in the UK community that monikers such as ‘Crossfitter’ can have negative or unintended connotations, due to the behaviour of some members of the community.

So I think it is useful to define what your training is for you, away from labels and groups and also be prepared to share this with other people who show an interest.

Then perhaps we won’t be the only people doing weird things in the gym.

Do more weird stuff in the gym with:
Strength Rituals DVD from Bodytribe
Elite Fitness Manual from Crossfit London
Pretty kettlebells
Gymnastic rings

If you want to receive this newsletter direct to your inbox, sign up using the form over on the right hand side.

Newsletters will also go up on the site under the ‘News’ tab after they have been sent out.

I’d like to keep it global, although since I am based in the UK there will be a bit of a UK bias. So help me solve this problem: let me know what strength activity is going down in your part of the world. Been to any events recently? Belong to any groups holding it down in a distant land? Drop me a line and tell me your story. You could be featured in a future newsletter.

For now, enjoy the first of many packed updates right here.

I am often asked why bother using kettlebells as opposed to dumbbells or any other implement commonly found in gyms. It’s a good question so let’s talk about it a bit.

There’s been a huge buzz about kettlebells in the last few years and many people have embraced the kettlebell culture enthusiastically. Kettlebells have also had significant impact in the arena of women’s fitness and I’m still not sure why. Possibly some very effective marketing, possibly the colour pink.

A kettlebell is one tool among many. If your ultimate goals are fitness, strength and health, there are any number of tools, toys and techniques you can use to achieve these. Andrew Stemler, author of the Kettlebell Training Guide, whom you would suppose has an interest in bigging up the kettlebell, in fact says:

“A kettlebell, in spite of the hype, is neither a gym in the palm of your hand, an item that flenses fat from your body, nor builds indestructible bullet-proof abs: that’s done by hard work, skill, determination and diet.”

All this is true. And yet, I am falling for my kettlebell.

Movement

First of all, it’s way sexier looking than a dumbbell (no, I don’t get out much). Dumbbells are shaped for convenience, to fit around your hand, but they look clumsy. A kettlebell is a thing of curved beauty and its shape is complete without you. You have to work around it.

This is a significant difference between kettlebells and dumbbells: the relationship between your body and the way it moves around the kettlebell. You can do this because the kettlebell swings from a handle, so it’s an extension of the limb, a dance partner.

A dumbbell doesn’t swing free, it’s just something you have to carry. You can’t move around it in the same way.

With the kettlebell handle, you can fairly easily let go of the kettlebell and catch it again, making your moves flow better. If you’re really adept, you can let go of a flying kettlebell and move your body around it before catching again. Check out Chip Conrad’s spectacular Strength Rituals DVD to see this in action.

So you’ve got a broader range of exercises you can perform with a kettlebell and you can create better flow between them. I bet you never heard that argument before: you can dance with a kettlebell (no, I really don’t get out much).

Challenge

There are some kettlebell-exclusive exercises. But any exercise that you can do with either a dumbbell or a kettlebell will be that bit harder with a kettlebell. In fitness terms, harder is generally better. The kettlebell is harder to control so provides all sorts of stabilisation and grip challenges as well as resistance.

What’s more, the folks at Bodytribe have discovered that using kettlebells with bands takes your training to a whole other level.

They’ve tried using bands with dumbbells but it doesn’t quite work. The shape of the kettlebell handle, on the other hand, is ideal for attaching a band and getting some serious resistance going (see Strength Rituals DVD for more on this; yes I’m pimping this yet again. There’s a good reason for it!).

Home workouts

Kettlebells have been enthusiastically taken up by the home workout crowd. Perhaps this is another reason for their popularity with sensible women who eschew wii fit and the val slide (don’t get me started!!!).

A kettlebell is a very useful workout tool to have around the house and you can easily get away with just having two different weights rather than the full range of every weight ever made. See A Girl’s Guide to Choosing A Kettlebell for some good advice on what weights to choose.

A set of kettlebells is cheaper than gym membership, will last longer and is never closed or full of nincompoops.

I can’t see myself ever using just kettlebells for my training but for some people they could easily be the sole tool for the job. Kettlebells will give you fitness, mobility, stability, strength endurance and explosive power. They can do wonders for fat loss (as long as your diet is right) and maybe a bit of muscle growth. They won’t make you super strong – for that you need barbells.

Will dumbbells do the same thing? Yes. But they’re not as much fun! Josh Hanagarne, the World’s Strongest Librarian, knows what I’m talking about.

Getting started

The best way to decide whether a kettlebell is for you is to get yourself to a decent workshop, something like the Crossfit Reading kettlebell workshop which I went to recently (I believe they are doing the next one in November so keep an eye out).

You do need to have someone teach you the exercises properly. A kettlebell is an awkward shaped object and there’s a bit of technique involved even in the simplest exercises.

But once you’ve mastered those, there is a whole world of groovy kettlebell moves to try which are quite advanced.

Roll up, get yer kettlebells here!

• Cast iron kettlebells
• Steel kettlebells
• Sets of kettlebells

Are you a kettlebell fan? Are you a sceptic? Share your thoughts below!