IOL Strength and Conditioning

I don’t have to tell you my favorite part of the day is a morning cup of Leo’s java and an hour clicking around our forum for a visit with my great friends there. Still, for those who haven’t been around since the beginning and don’t know the players, sometimes it’s a little daunting to jump right in. Who’s who, and do they really know what they’re talking about? Is that guy joking or is this a serious argument? Once in a while it’s hard to tell, especially for newcomers.

So how about a sweet little intro to show you around? These are a few of the notable threads from August.

In the Main Flight Deck:

• Let’s begin with our memory thread of Arthur Jones, who, as you already know, died yesterday. Perhaps you have a memory of your own, something he wrote that triggered your training evolution back in the ’70s? Give us the scoop!

• Do you wake up with a numb arm sometimes? What’s causing that and how do you fix it? Michelle gets us going here in “Nighttime Numbness.”

• Farmer’s Walks — what’s not to like? Who’s doing what, and how; we’ll find out in this thread started by Tim Tyler of tylergrip.com.

• Up next: Quitting Smoking. Time for you to get onboard? Here’s some encouragement you can print out and tape to your carton of cigs. Getcha goin’.

• Kyle invites the Southern California locals to join him in this year’s Volkslauf October 13th. It’s an obstacle loop, either a 10k or a 5k; he knows the course from last year and has a training plan to get you in shape for the event. Ya got 6 weeks, go for it!

• We talked about this last week, still it’s a notable thread going strong. Whether you’re interested in fasting or not, the discussion is intriguing: Intermittent Fasting.

• Boris’ Squat RX instruction videos again topped the charts, and I’d be remiss to slide past this one, even though this, too, was pointed out earlier this month.

In the Bodybuilding Hangar:

• Well, heck, let’s tackle the toughest one first: Is Bodybuilding Healthy? If not, and we’re aging yet in it for the long haul, what can we change to be strong all the way into our longevity?

• Mark would like to know about squat depth, in particular how far past parallel should he go when doing a 20-rep squat program. Once he gets the answer, he then needs to know how exactly to get there.

In the Training Logs Forum:

Now here in the training log section, I couldn’t begin to select a few favored links for you. Some of the logs have been going strong since we brought the email discussion group over to the forum board back in spring of 2004. Other people started a new log each January, or when changing training focus for a variety of reasons. What began as an exercise in accountability became, I think for nearly everyone, a private place for group camaraderie. This is where individual attention is given when times are tough, PRs are abundant — or sparse — and consistency in training is paramount.

Pick a few training logs to read through; you’re sure to find one you can either learn from or contribute to, and perhaps you’ll get the bug to start a report of your own. You’re welcome here.

In the IOL APO/FPO Military Barracks:

• Over in the APO/FPO Barracks forum we’re happy to welcome a couple of Afghanistan-based troops to our military support space. From his plastic tent, Sgt. Clifton expands on his questions of diet and exercise; we welcome your Q&A assistance, our way of supporting these guys and gals (actually, so far it’s just gal, our Army Mom, who’s on her way home to the kids in slightly less than a month).

In the Kettlebell Training Forum:

• In the kettlebell forum, Stella, a veteran gymrat new to kettlebell training, requests our favorite kettlebell workouts in a thread that ranges from a simple swings ladder to a Tabata-style kettlebell snatch workout on video.

In the Vince Gironda Wild Physique Forum:

• Jack triggers a hearty discussion in, “Gironda Bench Press to Neck,” wherein, as you might expect, not too many are in favor of the exercise. The discussion, however, is illuminating, as was the rest of the study of Vince Gironda and his Wild Physique.

And now, I bid you adieu. Dave is finished with his part of the newsletter, so I’m up to bat in the clean-up position. There are countless more terrific threads in the forum, so many in fact, I think I’ll dig you out more treasures next month.

This simple device is a T-Handle. Dan John calls this bad boy a Hungarian Core Blaster, a name that obviously has a lot more panache than “t-handle.” Legend has it this device was the secret of the Hungarian hammer throwers’ success years ago. I like that name, but it is so flashy I think it may give people unrealistic expectations. They may be let down when they see the simple device to the left. It just can’t compete with the dozens of core gadgets on late night infomercials for flash and glitz, and to date lacks bikini clad miracle makeover endorsements.

But for results, I’ll stack the T-handle against anything you can make in five minutes for ten bucks. Nobody is let down by the effects of the swing, the exercise for which this tool is ideally suited.

If you are considering buying kettlebells, by all means make a t-handle and swing away. The swing is one of the most basic kettlebell movements. With a t-handle, you can decide what weight kettlebell will suit you.

Even if you aren’t interested in kettlebells, just about anyone can benefit from some swings. You can do swings Tabata style - eight sets of eight with ten seconds rest between sets - for a four minute, minimum cost, minimum footprint interval workout. You can do light swings as part of your warmup.
Directions for making a T-handle (for those of you who use directions) can be found in the IOL Wiki.

In Will You Keep it Up? we saw how easy it is to test our home gym sticktoitiveness with a single kettlebell. Okay, let’s say you’re game. Now all you need is an example of a simple kettlebell workout.

Swings.

Wow, that’s pretty simple, alright.

Will it get boring? Maybe. Especially at first when your head tells you to do more, as the swing workout’s got your heart ramming through your chest and your lungs can’t gain any traction.

There’s not much to a swing workout if you’re putting in the time physically, but your head’s still wrapped around your work project — a common enough symptom with first-time home gym trainees. Kettlebell swings can be very taxing, each single rep at a time; the movement also lends itself to mindlessness, and it may take purposeful attention to excel rep by rep.

That’s what makes it such a good testing ground for a beginning home gym workout program. After all, we’re trying to find out if you’ll last at home training before you invest the money and space in a home gym.

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The biggest downside of switching from a commercial gym to a home gym? You can’t borrow your bud’s to give it a test run.

How are you going to discover if this home gym stuff is for you? Will you use it or hate it? If you’re not sure you’ll use your home gym equipment, you’ll be afraid to let your gym membership go, afraid to commit the money for workout equipment you won’t use. Heck, you won’t even want to clean out the garage.

Well. For sure you don’t want to clean the garage. What’s that got to do with anything?

Bill’s three-part series on setting up a home gym opened with his minimalist option, but I’d like to back that off further, all the way back to one single item: a kettlebell.

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Scouring the ‘net, the best I can figure is goblet squats were invented by Dan John a couple of years ago to teach his student athletes how to squat well, his favorite overhead squats specifically. The thinking was the goblet groove would help the athlete learn to squat between the legs, rather than with the upper body stiff at the hips. I suspect it also works very, very well for teaching women how to squat.

You see, we have a hip thing going on. In case you didn’t know.

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