IOL Strength and Conditioning

Much of the current kettlebell enthusiasm is focused on time and endurance, and with good reason because for conditioning a kettlebell is a remarkable tool. But old-school strong man devotee David Whitley has gone in the other direction: He’s using these chunks of weight to create exercises and combinations each one more difficult than the previous to execute, sometimes using a single kettlebell, but more often doubles, and occasionally two of differing weights, and sometimes even both of those in the same hand.

It’s a grin to watch Dave perform, and it’s also a pleasure to learn from him, as I did recently via his Full Body Power, Beyond the Basics intermediate and advanced kettlebell drill dvd. My notes are intense, three pages of mashed scribbles, as I studied his techniques covering variations of what he calls Follow the Leaders Series and his burpee combinations – think burpees with a single kettlebell or double kettlebells used for deadlifts, swings, cleans, high pulls, snatches, clean and press and clean, squat and press, all artfully tossed together to wipe out even the neediest Rocky fan.

The next day I joined the dvd for clean, squat and press variations, and after his refresher demonstrations, on to his advanced skills with the windmill and the Turkish get-ups. Next, he taught the kettlebell bent press and the two-hands anyhow. Shoulders plenty fatigued, I skipped out on the two-hands, but got fairly comfortable with the bentover screw-press, something I never in this lifetime expected to try, and more than a strongman circus lift, what it felt like was a significant shoulder stabilization exercise combined with unusual coordination. This twist, the screw-press, is a torso rotation you’ve probably never felt, and when coupled with stabilizing a heavy weight overhead is quite an experience if you notice those kind of things.

Throughout the dvd, Dave’s providing commentary; for instance, at one point he stopped to explain what he called the two sides of performance:

Tension is strength. Tension is power. Tension is slow. Tension is fatigue.

Relaxation is speed. Relaxation is mobility and flexibility, and it’s also a weakness. It’s endurance, but it’s weakness.

Tension is stronger, faster, but you give out sooner. Relaxation can go longer, but you’re not as strong. Work tension and relaxation equally.

Now, I have to add at first I was a little disappointed in the editing. I was watching it as a lecture instead of a workshop, and wished the student participation breaks had been edited out. But then I realized I could get off the couch, ya lazy bum, and go get a couple of kettlebells to follow along, and suddenly those unedited breaks became a bonus opportunity to practice each exercise in real time. Note to self: When it’s a workshop, do a little work, whydontcha.

At the end of the approximately 100-minute dvd – I apologize; I timed it for you, just under two hours, but forgot to make note of the minutes I stopped to scribble, and the dvd or website don’t give the runtime – my final thoughts were simple: This is an outstanding dvd for a kettlebell lifter who wants to move beyond the common and into the physically demanding and unusual. Dave’s a great teacher, and the exercise ideas and combinations are superb.

You can order this intermediate/advanced kettlebell workshop dvd here at fullbodypower.com, $49.95.

In this Fox Morning Show clip from Nashville, Dave explains kettlebell exercise and demonstrates with the reporter.

Linking around:

In this article over at Pavel Tsatsouline’s Dragon Door, Dave gives examples of how to extend your kettlebell drills in ways similar to some of the combinations found on the dvd.

His IronTamer site is here, where you can also sign up for the free IronTamer newsletter. Those interested in kettlebell training variety can grab Dave’s free ebook of 101 different kettlebell workouts on signup.

Catch this strongman’s regularly updated IronTamer blog here.

Ten years ago I realized my pains and lifetime injuries were all on my right side: right foot metatarsal pain, right heel pain, right hip, right shoulder, right elbow, right jaw. Did that mean anything, I asked my doctor, who shrugged back a who-knows response. What a disappointment to come home telling Dave my brilliant insight had come up empty.

Today, with that list of right-side problems relieved through successful mobility, flexibility and corrective exercise work, I look back and wonder how a trained medical doctor wouldn’t have known something was amiss.

Ten years is not that long, really, but consider how far we’ve come in the fitness and athletic industry. Today you could ask your doctor the same question and probably get the same shrugging response, yet if you asked a personal trainer—at least one who pursues continuing education—you’d probably get a knowing nod, and certainly you would if you asked an athletic trainer. The medical profession is focused and remarkable at curing disease, but not that good at building health and fitness.

What happened in the case above, mine, was a cascade of compensations stemming from a dysfunctional hip. In order to move around as needed, the body does whatever it takes to get the job done, creating tightness, pain and eventually injuries along the way.

According to Gray Cook and Lee Burton in The Importance of Primitive Movement Patterns,

“However, many individuals lose the ability to naturally stabilize as they age due to asymmetries, injuries, poor training or daily activities. The individuals who do this develop compensatory movements, which then create inefficiencies and asymmetries in fundamental movements.

“Compensation is a survival mechanism and your clients and athletes will opt for compensation when you neglect to identify problems with mobility and stability. In many cases it is the lack of sufficient mobility and stability that leads to dysfunction in basic movements, which then causes decreased performance or potential injury.”

Bodybuilders were the leaders of both nutrition and weight training during Dave’s era a few decades ago, a time when athletic coaches scorned weight training as muscle-binding and as athletes had set aside the beef in favor of scarfing plates of pasta.

Yet these days athletics have taken the forefront in optimizing movement quality through corrective measures, and we in the muscle-building field need to learn to be more open to the strides taken by others. Think of how great we could all feel in middle age if doctors were trained in nutrition, strength training and human movement. Those elements are so basic when compared with their intense education as to seem unimportant, and perhaps that contributes to why there isn’t more attention given to fitness in medical schools.

Regardless, fitness professionals and writers have eagerly bought into using corrective exercise to bring up asymmetrical movements, and even if you can’t find a local trainer to help, you can still make good progress on your own without learning physical anatomy.

Here’s a list of my favorite corrective exercise blogs, and here’s a good place for a beginner to tap a toe into joint mobility, an excellent first step that will help you discover your best and worst functions.

Next: Let Gray Cook walk you through elementary movement screening and teach you how to correct any weaknesses you discover. I could have saved myself ten years of low-level, chronic pain had I only trusted my intuition and tracked down these answers way back when.

Is it your understanding moving your body by foot over a mile distance will burn up just under a hundred calories? Isn’t that what we’ve always been told, whether running or walking, covering a mile clocks between 98 and 104 calories?

I’ve heard those figures given at least a dozen times in lectures over the past twenty years. It never made any sense and every time had me scratching my head, but given the authority behind the statements, I found myself repeating the 100-calories-per-mile average throughout my time in the gym business.

Apparently all that credulity was strained for a reason: According to Dr. David Swain, author of Exercise Prescription: A Case Study Approach to the ACSM Guidelines, calorie expenditure while walking at a 17-minute-per-mile pace burns 3.3 calories per minute on top of resting, while running at about twice that pace burns about twice as many calories, and if the person works the same duration covering twice the distance, he or she gains a fourfold greater caloric expenditure.

In his article Interval Training, HIIT or Miss, Mike Boyle writes,

“Further evidence for the superiority of higher intensity work can be found in the September/October 2006 issue of the ACSM Journal. Dr. David Swain stated running burns twice as many calories as walking. This is great news for those who want to lose body fat. I am not a running advocate, but we can put to rest another high intensity (running) versus low intensity (walking) debate.

“Do the math. Swain states that a 136-pound person walking will burn 50 calories per mile and proportionally more as the subject’s weight increases. In other words, a 163-pound person, weighing 20 percent more, would burn 20 percent more calories. This means that expenditure goes from 50 to 60 calories, also a 20-percent increase. Swain goes on to state that running at seven miles per hour burns twice as many calories as walking at four mph. This means a runner would burn 100 calories in roughly eight and one half minutes or about 11 calories a minute. The walker at four miles per hour would burn 50 calories in 15 minutes (the time it would take to walk a mile at four miles per hour). That’s less than four calories per minute of exercise.”

The study Mike’s referring to was done to determine whether moderate or vigorous exercise was better for improving cardiovascular fitness, which seems like a no-brainer and barely worth a second look, but the striking point was how this turns the mileage debate upside-down.

This doesn’t mean many of us should trot out the door and head out on a run, because the truth is, most of us aren’t built for running; we’re too heavy to be good at it, or our joints aren’t acclimated for it, or, in the case of women, there’s likely to be hip or knee issues that make running sub-optimal.

How about if we swap that joint-destruction for some harder work on an incline? What about pulling something, pushing or dragging and, heck, let’s add a weight vest and traverse the hills while we’re at it.

If the point is intensity, we can provide that without the impact of running, and if we can work harder, longer—and this is separate from the discussion of interval work, which you should read and consider in Mike’s thorough article—we can gain cardiovascular improvement at the same time as we burn more calories.

Here’s a truth; see if you don’t see a little of yourself in this one: When we first start doing regular cardio for a purpose, we’re not very good at it; it hurts, we hate it and head back to the weight room in a hurry. No more of that! It’s boring, and cardio’s for wimps. Isn’t that what most of us settle on?

We sell ourselves a lie, because it’s easier to hate cardio for life than go through the pain of the conditioning phase. It’s a lesson we’d best re-teach ourselves, to learn a better version of the truth.

Take home message: Work your cardio a littler harder, a little longer and a little more often.

At the back of the Spa Fitness Center, circa 1980, behind the thick, steamed-up glass, across the gold shag carpet and past the blue machine with the wooden fat rollers, picture a well-populated pool, steam and sauna area. Between the pool and the simmering whirlpool, a small, deep cold plunge. Why it was there, I never knew, but since it was, it must have been there for a reason, so I used it—sauna, steam, then cold plunge to whirlpool.

Thirty years later, the cold plunge is back in vogue, and perhaps there really is something to it, something more than Scandinavian history involving a sauna and the local snowpack.

Byron Chandler, one of our main educators over in the forum, writes, “Weightlifting coach Mike Burgener’s method of training is based on the Bulgarian system: It involves hard, heavy training on the Olympic lifts and variants on consecutive days, and he swears by cold baths after training to speed recovery. He reports it takes some cajoling at first to get people to dunk in an ice cold bath after training, but when they find they are recovered the next day, they are willing to keep at it. I decided to try it and I think it does reduce soreness the next day. While it doesn’t feel good shivering in the shower, it does feel good after.”

Okay, so Byron suggests it to me; I’ve seen it over and over in workout recovery articles, and of course I understand the value of icing an injury to bring down the inflammation, so I take it a little seriously, but not so serious it held longer than a single heart-stopping trial run.

Then a couple other people I trust, Suzie Lundgren, my miracle-working Feldenkrais teacher, followed by Laurel Wolfe, a knowledgeable myofascial massage therapist, recommended trying alternating hot and cold water in the post-workout shower.

A month later, with a contrast shower shaking up my skin and jolting my circulatory system daily, let’s start with the obvious part: This gets easier with practice.

One thing I’m working on is to calm the breathing, calm the shock factor. It’s fascinating to feel the difference between a fast plunge, the instant switch from hot to cold, vs a slower change involving several steps from the hottest to the coldest. Obviously, the slower changes are less of a jolt and easier to handle, but I also think the method might be a little more useful, too, because there are multiple surges of circulatory stimulation, and if you take your time, breathe calmly with eyes closed, you can clearly feel the systemic wave of circulation, entirely different from the breath-taking jolt as the water switches from the hottest to the iciest.

I’ll have to practice both techniques more to be certain; one thing’s for sure: working on the slower switches between hot and cold have made the instant switch a lot easier to handle, so at the very least, you can use that to ease yourself into contrast bath post-workout therapy.

The longer and hotter you stay in the heat, the more cold you can handle… longer.

Says Mike Nelson, “Remember, the body uses sympathetic and parasympathetic stimulation. Think of sympathetic as the accelerator (increases heart rate, among other effects) and parasympathetic as the brake (slows down heart rate).

The body likes to have a balance of parasympathetic and sympathetic at all times. Acute exercise (in general) increases sympathetic stimulation. A proposed way to faster recovery (ability to do more work with a shorter period of rest) is to increase parasympathetic, the “rest and digest” component of the nervous system.”

Mike continues, “I am not currently sold on cold water immersion for recovery purposes. This study is very interesting, but other data is conflicting.”

The paper The Effect of Cold Water Immersion on Postexercise Parasympathetic Reactivation, Buchheit, Peiffer, Abbiss, Laursen, (2009), implies success: “CWI may serve as a simple and effective means to accelerate parasympathetic reactivation during the immediate period following supramaximal exercise.”

As does, The Effect of Contrast Water Therapy on Symptoms of Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, Vaile, Gill & Blazevich, (2007):  “Contrast water therapy seems to be effective in reducing and improving the recovery of functional deficiencies that result from DOMS, as opposed to passive recovery.”

Over at Mark Verstegen’s Core Performance, their group suggests, “By immersing the body in alternating temperature extremes, you can increase blood flow and promote muscle recovery. The hot water causes your blood to rush away from your internal organs and towards your skin. The cold water causes the blood to rush away from your skin to keep your internal organs safe and warm. … Not only will the increased blood flow promote muscle recovery, the cold water in particular will decrease the natural post-workout inflammation.”

Here’s an opposing viewpoint on page 232 of Therapeutic Modalities (Kenneth Knight), who believes the contrast bath therapy is flawed, and suggests general workout soreness is best treated in a warm whirlpool.

Contrasting heat and cold hydrotherapy is contraindicated for patients with kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and possibly hyperthyroid conditions.

Here’s the deal—no big surprise: You have to try it and decide for yourself. If you have thoughts, please contribute to our community here: Hot and Cold Plunge thread.

During my 1980 Spa time, I didn’t use the fat rollers, so I guess “because it’s there” wasn’t really the reason for the cold-plunge use now that I think of it. I wonder if in retrospect the rollers worked better than expected, too. No… no… I’ll have to draw the line there.