Workout of the Week

For Time:

100 SumoDeadliftHighPull
10 Push press
75 SDHP
20 Push press
50 SDHP
30 Push press
25 SDHP
40 Push press

Suggested Loads: Men 45# olympic bar. Women 30# straight bar.

.5mi sprint

Saturday NIght Blowout

Just another reminder, Saturday Night has turned into Thursday Blowout. We ended up taking a little break last week, but we're on this Thursday at 8pm, West River Health & Racquet Club. 424 West End Ave at W81st St.

The sigh up sheet goes out on Tuesdays, so you can email me, jtnett@gmail.com or post a comment to the blog to reserve your space.

Come on out. You never know how much you can accomplish until you try!

Tip & Technique: SumoDeadliftHighPull

Plain and simple. A rowing machine is one of the best things you can use to help your body. You’re going to see huge improvements in your cardiovascular capacity, posture, anaerobic threshold, neuromuscular connection, you name it. Find a rowing machine. Use it. If you can’t, well, that’s where the SumoDeadliftHighPull (SDHP) comes in. This is how we get all those benefits and joint movements when we don’t have easy access to a rower. Like a burpee or thruster, these are performed one after another with no pause in between. As with anything you’re attempting in your training, proceed with caution! Begin with a wide stance, toes rotated slightly out (Sumo). Hold the bar (Men begin with 45# Olympic bar. Women begin with 30# straight bar) down in front of you with your hands very close together, pronated grip (palms facing back towards your body in this posture). As far as hand spacing goes, if you extend your thumbs out towards each other while you’re holding the bar, the tips should just barely touch each other. From here, keeping a neutral spine, move your hips straight out behind you as far as you can, allowing the knees to bend as they have to (as in a deadlift). The bar should be hanging at about the midpoint of your shin. Now, to begin the movement, explosively thrust your hips forward into full upright (extended) position. When, and ONLY WHEN, your hips snap back to full extension, shrug and row the bar up with speed so that by the time you’ve pulled it to your sternum, it has enough momentum of its own to travel up to chin level (high pull). Allow the bar to float back down to its start position at shin level and do it all over again. TIPS:

• Keep the bar as close to your body as possible! Elbows come up and out to the sides of your body during the row. This is not a reverse curl folks.
• In the downward phase, make triple sure that you’re bending from the hip, not the back. The spine should remain neutral the whole time.
• Do not let the bar jerk you or your arms down. You’ll injure your elbows and shoulders like that. Allow it to fall as quickly as possible, staying right with it the whole way.
• The bar should float up to the chin. Don’t be rowing it at the point your elbows come up above the shoulder. They’re just along for the ride at that point.

“Hey Cabbie, how do ya get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.

What Are You Doing Here Anyway?

60 days to Memorial Day

Why are you training?

No really. Why, specifically, are you training?

I was talking to an old friend the other day about their goals and ambitions to go for her pro card as an ultra endurance athlete. She's made tons of progress recently and I was curious as to the particulars of her training program; where strength training came in, where an how she got most of her cardio conditioning. It was so amazingly specific and precise. Anyway, the whole thing got my brain to working.

I got to thinking of my workout last summer. No real goal, no real inspiration, no real excitement or progress, the exact opposite of what I was listening to. I personally was working out just 'cause. 'Cause I'm supposed to. 'Cause I'm used to working out more often than not. 'Cause... I didn't really know why I was there.

Why are you here anyway? I don't mean that in the existential meaning of life kind of way. Why are you here on this blog? Why are you in the gym 3 or 4 times a week? 'Cause you know it's good for you or (my favorite, the so very ambiguous) 'cause "I need to?" Time to find a direction my friend. Memorial Day is only 72 days away. Maybe that helps. Maybe not.

Sit with a piece of paper and work out your priorities. Work out your goals for yourself. You'll never get anywhere if you can't even decide where you're going. I've said it before and I'll say it again, goals are the markers that keep us on track and point the way to our own success. Find your goals. Find your purpose. Get somewhere.

Workout of the Week

62 days to Memorial Day

FYI everyone, we're changing class night. Saturday Night Blowout has a new home. Starting this week, The Blowout is moving to Thursday nights at 8pm. Sign up sheets will be out by Tuesday afternoon. As always, call or email me or post in comments here on the blog to reserve your spot!

Four rounds of the following.

2 minutes jump rope
15 burpees
10 Single arm overhead DB squats (10 for each arm)
20 DB Pushpress (same DB weigth from squat)

Post time to comments.

Feel out the weights first. Make sure you've picked one that is reasonable, yet really pushes you out of your comfort zone.

Comfort Zones kill fitness.

Saturday Night Blowout

Saturday Night Blowout took a break this week. Look for a recap of next week's class on Sunday, March 29th.

Tip & Technique: Pushpress

Contrary to more traditional thought, a pushpress is not a cheaters over head press. One of the central tenants that we keep coming back to is that the body was created and built as one piece. It functions best that way. So, let's train it that way.

So, in a pushpress, we're working coordination, neuromuscular connection, power and proprioception. The hips elp provide momentum and power through the torso (core) to the shoulders. And yes, it's a killer "core" workout too. By now, you probably get just how much I hate that word.

This starts off just like thr thruster from last week. Stand with a weight frontloaded across your shoulders at about collarbone level. If you're using a barbell, palms should be facing away from you (pronated grip). If you're using DBs, neutral grip (palms facing each other) or pronated is fine. Now, instead of sinking into a full squat, just take a quick dip of the hips, out behind and slightly down below you, and with speed pop them back into neutral position. Right when your hips come to full extension, begin pressing the weight up above your head with as much force as possible. You should be able to feel the weight begin to float up from the power your hips have already provided.

Lock the elbows out. Your arm should be extending over your head slightly behind the line of your ear. Bring the weight back to your chest. Reset, rinse and repeat.

You: The Athlete

67 Days to Memorial Day

When looking at implementing any of the training tools we talk about here, or reorienting your training program to incorporate more of these ideas, already we’ve made a shift. What we’re doing here is looking at you, not as gym goer, lawyer or sales professional, but rather as an athlete. We’re adapting the principles of athletic performance coaching to enhance your performance through your day. You are a functional athlete. Your events, your tournaments happen every single day.

To this end, we have to treat our training and the way we approach it as an athlete approaches hers/his. How do athletes prep themselves all year to make sure they’re performing at the highest possible level?

First and above all else, is the athlete’s mindset. Remember Jen, the triathlete I mentioned a couple of weeks ago? If she has not decided well in advance of her long mid February bike ride up The Pallisades that come hell or high water, she will succeed, she will find some area in which she can improve, she doesn’t stand a change against the cold and the wind. She’ll never finish. I know. You’re not running a triathlon. But you’re not training for one either. Everything is scalable. To get the results we want, relatively speaking, we all have to train just as hard for our own lives and our own events as any serious athlete trains for theirs. When you get your mind in the right place, decide that you will, in fact, succeed, you’ve just quadrupled your chances.

Set your goals. S.M.A.R.T. ones. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound goals. You are going to push your program and fitness to a specific place, to accomplish a certain reasonable thing by a pre determined date. What’s important to you? What do you need? What are you training for? Set those goals. Then when you get to that date, be honest with yourself. Did you hit them? If you’ve made specific and measurable goals, it won’t be hard to tell. Hit them? Good. Now, reset and make new ones. Onwards and upwards. Didn’t hit them? Where did you fall short? How can you now incorporate that into the next phase of your training to make sure you hit them next time? Remember these intermediate, progressive goals are benchmarks and way signs that keep you enroute to your ultimate goals.

Workout of the Week

69 Days to Memorial Day.

No breaks between rounds.  No built in rests.  Just go.

50x thruster

10 pullups

thrusters decrease by 10 and pullups decrease by 2 over 5 rounds. 

Record and post your time to comments. 

Take stock and be honest about your thruster weight here. Experienced gym rats might want to start with an empty 45# olympic bar. If you're just now getting into this type of workout, it's more than possible that 20# or 30# will be more than enough.

Saturday Night Blowout

Why do we push so hard? Why do we crank the intensity up to 11 and just leave it there? "Working out doesn't have to be so...intense"

You know what? It didn't. Unfortunately for many, it does now. The National Academy of Sports Medicine now says that the standard, accepted fitness guidelines are no longer adequate to get America fit. They may maintain the status quo of an increasingly obese and pre diabetic society, but they can't make it better.

"But I don't want to work so hard." Since when did we get to tell the dentist that we really don't like the way that root canal feels and that he should stop 'cuase we say so? We as a nation haven't been brushing and flossing. Now, on the whole, we've earned ourselves a mouth full of cavities and we have to pay the price for it. We have to do the hard work to get ourselves, our bodies out of this whole we've dug.

Checking out for 20 minutes on the treadmill doesn't cut it anymore. Sitting on the gym floor, watching TV and pumping out a couple of reps during the commercial break doesn't cut it any more. We've got to dig a little deeper. We've got to work a little harder. There isn't a gadget at Brookstone or a pill at GNC that'll make it any easier. 

That's why we push so hard.

Tip & Technique: Thruster

72 days to Memorial Day.

If you haven't perfected your squat (don't even start to tell me we haven't broken down the squat here enough already) then don't even think about this one. Period.

For the rest of you:

Front load a weight across your shoulders. To begin the movement, you're going to sink into a full depth front squat. Once you hit the bottom, shoot straight up with as much force as possible. When your hips and knees hit full extension, you'll feel the weight want to keep following its momentum straight up. That's when you kick it in at the shoulders and press that weight up as hard as you can. As soon as you hit full extension up in the air, immediately bring it back down to the front loaded position and drop into a squat to begin the next one.

There is no pause at either the top of the movement, or at the start of the next. This is a continuous, explosive movement.

Kid Fit!

74 Days to Memorial Day

The sign up sheet for this week's Saturday Night Blowout is up. Post to comments or contact me if you want to reserve a space.

I’ve been doing some reading up on a program that Dave Ruff (ruff-fitness.com), a colleague of mine, is running down in the D.C. area. He’s organized a whole program called Fit Kids. With childhood obesity growing at an ever increasing rate, Dave has organized a good old fashioned strength and conditioning program for kids that cuts right to the heart of the matter. He’s incorporating cardio conditioning, coordination, strength training, fun and the kind of tools that can help these kids make this a lasting lifestyle choice in a well balanced and organized way.

I gotta give it to Dave. He’s doing an awesome thing there. It seems like any time I mention training and kids, I immediately hit a wall of static and resistance. “But wait, you’ll fuse their growth plates.” Somewhere along the line there’s been a disconnect of mammoth proportions. For decades now health professionals and the fitness research communities have known just how beneficial strength training can be for children, even very young ones. In fact, children that start an organized and sensible conditioning program before puberty will be able to achieve strength, coordination and conditioning levels far beyond anything that could be reasonably attributed to natural growth and hormone cycles.

The danger comes in not from a kid working to develop strength and conditioning. The problem comes in when they aren’t coached or overseen properly. Bad form or technique is just as bad for a 10 year old as it is for a 40 year old. However, sound technique and good form may be far more beneficial in a shorter amount of time at 10 than they are at 40. When we look at documented child and adolescent gains in motor coordination, proprioception, and motor coordination, one does have to start to wonder how it is that this message is being communicated so poorly, especially in times like these.

Dave man, keep up the good work. Parents, get your kids moving now. Only 1 state has an obesity rate less that 20% of total population. 30 stated have obesity rates of over 25%. The diabetes epidemic is growing by almost 5% every year. Good habits start now.

Workout of the Week

76 Days to Memorial Day

Complete as many rounds of the following as possible in 30 minutes.

5 pullups
10 pushups
15 body weight squats


Record (and post to comments section) number of pullups. Were they dead hang or kipping? If you can't do pullups, use a gravitron/dip assist machine.

Deceptively simple.

Evolution

I’ve been getting a lot of awesome feedback lately stemming from recent postings. Thank you so much. I absolutely love hearing from you. In order to best respond to those areas that seem to be resonating most with our regulars, I’m actually going to change the blog format a bit. We're...evolving.

I’m going from an every 48 hour post cycle to a 4 day/week cycle. Each specific day’s post is going to have a very specific purpose. Several people have been asking for more workouts, so I’m very happy to say that one of the changes will be the addition of a Workout of the Week !

Here’s the breakdown.

Sunday: Saturday Night Blowout recap
Tuesday: Workout of the Week
Thursday: Blog article
Saturday: Exercise Technique or Tip posting.

Sunday we’ll take a look at the weekly program our athletes here in Manhattan got to play with. Tuesday, we’ll jump into the workout of the week. As many posts and feedback on the workouts as we can get, the better. As a community we are our own best resources. Not to mention the fact that generating a little competition never hurts. Thursday will be an article of the type you’re used to seeing here on Netterville Fitness. Saturday is going to focus on one specific movement or technique that you’ll be able to incorporate into your own program.

Again, always happy to hear from you, so please let me know what you think about the changes.

Now…. Get to work. Breathe later!

Which Diet? Wrong Question.

80 days to Memorial Day

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29393995/#storyContinued

Read it. I'll wait.

Atkins, Zone, whatever. People, it just doesn't matter. This story just came out last week. I know you all didn't read it so I'll summarize just a bit. two year study that examined the principle concepts of four major and popular diet programs. In the end, the results were all the same. The diet doesn't matter. Everybody made just about the same progress. 

Keys to success?

1. DON'T EAT SO MUCH. We as a culture need to learn portion control. If we're headed out to the Cheesecake Factory and Chili's every week for dinner, snarfing down a 1,791 calorie plate of orange chicken (that's an actual calorie value as reported by Cheesecake Factory themselves), and hoping that the 15 minutes of treadmill walking twice a week is going to get us anywhere, we're going to double the $117 billion we spent on obesity in '06 before long. Eat less, burn more. 
   
2. Support. Gym rats like myself know just exactly how much more can be accomplished with someone there to encourage you. Anyone who's ever been involved with a 12 step program knows all about accountability to another. Participants that attended weight loss counseling and meetings lost over 2 times the weight and were able to keep it off better. 
3. Journaling. Think you know what you're eating. I would bet you that you actually don't. Spend a week...scratch that. Start by spending a day. Any time something passes your lips, no latter how insignificant you may think it is, write down what it is, what time you ate it and how much of it you ate. Add up the caloric, fat, sugar, protein and fiber totals at the end of the day. Now compare that against the government's RDA for someone your size. Unless you've spent time journaling this kind of thing before, I guarantee you're going to be surprised. 

What they didn't really focus on here was the fact that no one, not even the counseling group could completely hold on to their gains. That's because a diet isn't going to get you anywhere. A diet won't get you anywhere. Look back to my New Year's post. Lifestyle choices, making one better choice for yourself every day, turning one healthy choice at a time, one day at a time and making that a way of life and not beating yourself up when you stray off track a little is the only way we're going to do this. You can make a difference in  your life. You can positively effect your health and fitness.

Jenny doesn't have the answer. Dr. Atkins doesn't have the answer. You do. You have the answer. You have the power to say I don't need the foot long, six inches will do just fine thank you. You have the power to realize that you were satiated on the first round and that the second plate is a learned behavioral event as opposed to your body needing more. 

Mahatma Ghandi said "Be the change you want to see in the world." Make that more personal. Don't look to someone else to solve your problems. Be the change you want to see in your own life.

Saturday Night Blowout

The sign up sheet for Saturday night just went out. Stop into West River or contact me to reserve your spot.

Squat: Home

82 Days to Memorial Day

Being as in favor of home and garage workouts as I am, let's bring this down and look at loading a squat at home. If you've been following the blog very long at all (thanks Mom) you might remember the post a few weeks back where I talked about picking up a suitcase or bag full of heavy books. Well, that's it right there. That's the application. And that's also why I don't program back loaded squats for people very often. Think of everything you lift and move in the course of a day. When you're moving it, where it is in relation to your body? You're holding it in front of you somewhere between hip and shoulder height, or pushing it up & relatively over your shoulders. The latter may come in the form of bending at the hips & reaching out to push something all the way to the back of the car trunk or just putting the big box of Christmas decorations back up on the top shelf.

At any rate, very rarely is the weight loaded across the back of your shoulders. So, if we're going to be efficient in our time & efforts, to create the kind of change that sticks with us over time, that improves the quality of movement in the body and by virtue of that gives us both functionality and aesthetic gains, we train in those ways that we actually move every single day.

Here's a home style progression that has immediate application for all of us. Once you've gotten used to your front squat, load up a bag of books, grab at least a 5lbs bag of rice (they regularly sell bags as large as 20lbs at the store if u need some quick & cheap weights) or a gallon jug of water. Standing with feet about hips width apart, left foot slightly forward. Hug the object to your chest with your right arm. Rotate slightly so from the hips up you're facing slightly to the right. Now reach down with your left hand and stick your hips out as far behind you as possible as your knees start to bend. In this case, go ahead and spot the ceiling. Go down until you feel the ground with your left hand. Now stand up & face front.

Let's call that a one handed squat. You've got a kid, a bag, or some load in one arm, you've dropped your keys & you've got to pick 'em up. Well, there you go. I've actually shown you a picture of a progression of this exact move before.

Arthur Saxon. Turns out those old school strongmen weren't so far off the mark after all.

Saturday Night Blowout

We've got one more look at the squat coming up, so that'll be next time. Right now I want to recognize this week's Saturday Night Blowout. 

"It's one of the first times that I felt like I can...I can do this." 

Adaptation: The body's response to elevated demands. 

That's what it's all about. You push, you push and you push. Your body thanks you by growing

 stronger, faster, more coordinated and more efficient. It's also what Steve over at Extreme Fitness Concepts and I like to call evolving. 

Evolve: To undergo gradual change; develop

One becomes something new, something bigger and better in certain aspects than they were before. Not better in terms of one is better than another, but better in terms of personal growth, beating and achieving more than what you were. Attaining

 more. Achieving progressively higher goals. 

The athletes at each week's Saturday Night Blowout have committed themselves to a

 process of evolution. Last week's first timer identified how after recovery from the workout, he felt stronger, more in control of the movements. Sometimes evolution isn't so gradual. Sometimes it progresses in leaps and bounds. 

We were introduced to the 6th Beast yesterday. One round building upon the intensity of the last, taking advantage of the fatigue. As you grow wearier and wearier, you have to draw deeper and deeper from that energy reserve. You have to ask yourself how badly you want to achieve success.  A perfect example of how real fitness includes so much more than just ones physicality. 

Out to the courts and into the loving embrace of the Barbarian. This is fitness you don't get by sitting in a soft cushy easy chair with a weight stack attached. This is the kind of fitness you earn with sweat, determination and a rejection of the idea of personal failure. I will succeed. I will push myself. I will achieve. I will grow. I will evolve.

In the courts, "can't" disappears. You figure out how. You find a way. And you know what? It works. If at first glance your task looks impossible, take a closer look. Clues to the path

through to your achievement lie just below the surface. What is the goal? What must be done? What do I have to do in order to make that possible? It's like the saying my wife is so fond of. "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

No excuses. Achieve. 

Post results in the comments section.