Current PBs at a bodyweight of about 76kg:

• Snatch:  95kg
• C&J:  120kg  (clean:  122.5kg)
• Back squat:  160kg

So, the goals of 2012:

Miscellaneous

In a study of weightlifters, powerlifters, and bodybuilders, weightlifters had the greatest values for isometric and dynamic strength, rate of force development, and the greatest utilisation of stored elastic energy.  The last two are particularly important in sporting performance, for example, parkour.

Warming up is rarely fun, and I try and get away with doing as little of it as possible, believing that a dogmatic and routine-like approach to warming up is as pointless as wrecking yourself by completely ignoring it.  Here, I just want to bash through the different ways in which we can maximise our actual training, including and outside of the ‘warm-up’.

Pre-activity Preparation:

First of all, is a warm up necessary?  Personally, occasionally I can jump straight into training without any kind of preparation, this being especially true of parkour.  Other days or training, particularly any kind of strength training, I can take as long as 20-30 minutes to get adequately prepared.  This variation is due to a number of factors which influence and are influenced by warming up:

• Warming up of the tissues – It is known that muscles contract more rapidly and intensely when its temperature has been raised.  Without trying to drag in a bunch of references lets just say that from a purely tissue level, activity of a warm-up nature prepares the body for the training to follow.
• Neural priming – Warming up also engages neural pathways responsible for technique and coordination pre-training, so that safe optimal work can be done during the actual training.
• Psychological engagement – As important as the above two, warming up helps us get our head in the right place, especially when the thought of even just lifting and empty bar or doing a climb-up seems like a challenge.

A warm-up is NOT a crossfit-style tally-wacker of a WOD; it should only be preparing you for the real training to come.  It shows the ignorance of the coach/practitioner who is getting his athletes to smash through 100 burpees or some convoluted calisthenic gymnastic routine.  A warm-up should just serve its purpose and be suitable for the training, strenuous or ill-chosen warmups can hinder motor skills required in training/performance.  The warm-up can be divided into two parts:

1. General:  To take the body from a stage of inactivity to one of general, whole-body preparedness.  Eg)  Jogging, different gait drills, putting the limbs and joints through a full range of motion via dynamic movements.
2. Specific:  A sport/activity specific component which further primes the body/nervous system/mind for the training to follow.  Eg)  For snatches, exercises with an empty bar such as triple extension, high pulls, muscle snatches, snatch drops, hang snatches (ie. the The Burgener warm-up).

An example for a general parkour-session may be:

General:  Light jogging, joint rotations, squats, crawling drills.

Specific:  Climb-ups, low-height drops, jump drills, balance drills.

 

In essence, sometimes we feel like can get away without doing a great deal of ‘warming up’, but if so, we can be missing out on a chance to really enhance and prime the actual training that will subsequently take place.

 

Potentiation:

A motor neuron.  Pretty cool.

 

Following some kind of strength training, subsequent activity can be positively affected as to improve performance by varying degrees, a phenomenon known as potentiation.  This concept highlights the well-known fact that strength and performance are utterly dictated by the central nervous system, an apparatus that can be stimulated or inhibited by different measures.  Taken directly from “Supertraining”, this quote best illustrate the point:

 

“Despite fatigue following isometric tension, the effectiveness of dynamic work increases, usually by up to 20% when compared with work executed without preliminary isometric tension”.

 

What this means in real life is that, for example, preceding a jump with some kind of isometric tension directed toward the lower body, particularly the posterior chain, may help to increase output and consequently distance achieved.  Not to be confused with pre-tension where muscular tension is employed immediately before jumping (5) in order to decrease the time in order to reach maximal force production (increase RFD).  Instead, the aim is to complete an isometric tension exercise, then proceed to complete the jump, hopefully with increased output.

So, next time you are eyeing a jump, try completing around a 6 second isometric contraction by pushing against an object as hard as possible using your legs, ideally it would be in a standing position pushing upward against something such as getting under a rail and trying to back squat the thing out of the ground.

As well as isometric tension, dynamic resistance exercise can also achieve the same increase in performance (again quoted from “Supertraining”):

“…after tonic work (with barbell squats) the following changes…may be obseverved:  maximum force increases significantly over the first minute, by 25% of the initial level (and) after 4 to 5 minutes the force continues to grow to 65%.”

This observed increasing potentiation after-effect not only serves as a compelling enhancer of subsequent activity, but also highlights the significance of buildup sets in order to attack higher intensity weights or try for personal bests.  Time interval between potentiating activity and subsequent activity seems an important factor, with some studies (6) suggesting 8-12 minutes for optimal output.

Training history is also an aspect that must be taken into consideration, with those athletes of lower qualification or recreationally trained individuals deriving less benefit from postactivation potentiation (7).

 

To conclude:

Below is a video (youtube for western viewers/youku for eastern viewers) of a couple of training sessions spliced together.  Training definitely proved the best way to fight against the freezing temperatures out in the countryside.  For some reason I was struggling to snatch 10kg under my personal best whilst outside, and was finally able to clean for the first time in a month as my ongoing shoulder issue is finally allowing a rack position without pain.  The bar path on the snatches looks pretty all over the place and I’ll need to fight more to keep it tracking backward and closer to my body on the second pull especially.

I hope to update the site more often now that mid-year finals are out of the way.

Current PBs:  C&J:  120kg, Snatch: 95kg

As is natural with pursuing other things in life, like work and study (ie. being a normal person), time for other things such as training or flower arranging are not in overflowing abundance.  As such, my current aim of practicing both the classical olympic lifts as well as parkour with the aim of seeing any decent development in both is proving to be somewhat hindered.

Clearly, the people of this world are not crying for want of activities to fill their time.  People are busy, and physical/trivial pursuits are oftentimes neglected or crowded out.  Without turning into a lament of ‘society’ and how obese/inept we have become, it is pretty apparent that we are probably the lamest animal on the planet when it comes to physical ability.

On the flip side of saying that a lot of people are very busy, its also apparent that many do not choose to move.  There is a lot to be said for remaining child-like in this way.  Just the other day Xu Yun and I were training parkour at the University campus, classic joy-provoking sunshine weather.  As such, many of the locals were milling about chilling as well.  She made the observation, ‘I think we are the happiest people in this whole area’.  Obviously we can’t read minds, but just from a physical perspective, EVERYONE was sitting down or standing in one place, something that I would find unbearable.  People do tend to bring old age prematurely unto themselves through just choosing to move less and less.  After 10 years of declining activity, when your kid wants to play with you, your mind is saying ‘come on now, we cant do that anymore’.  You feel stiff, heavy, uncoordinated and apathetic to the idea of ‘play’.  If you keep moving throughout life, you will not only retain that energy and ability, but improve.  I am determined to be the Granddad who is more energetic and capable than all the dads.

I think the excuse “I don’t have enough time” is a pretty poor reason not to train, rather it should be, “that is not very high on my priorities list”.  In saying this, I realise I DO have the time to go after both disciplines, but everyone has their own tolerance for sacrifices made in other areas, and personally if I were to make the time for both to be trained in any meaningful way, I would be taking time from other important areas which I am not willing to do.  Despite this, everyone has the same amount of time each day!  It just depends on your tolerance for the other things that need to be cut down, so no more saying “but I don’t have the time”.

Most sports or physical pursuits are fairly narrow in their scope of trained abilities.  Clearly some sports will prepare people better for a wide range of challenges than others, but most of the time, the sports only prepare the practitioners for that specific activity.  ”So why don’t you just train crossfit then you goon?”  Because:

• Most of the movements are fairly low-level skills (except the olympic lifts).
• Its too much a diluted form of training for me (in terms of more focused development of just a few ‘fitness’ capacities).
• Because I am not infatuated by the pursuit of work capacity and would rather invest in skill and strength.
• While I think crossfit may be superior in metabolic work/work capacity building, I believe parkour is superior in mastering one’s own body.

With this said, I am now reassessing what my goals are for training as a whole:

• To be stronger (not in the vague sense, but in measurable terms such as a barbell).
• To be able to have a decent crack at most physical challenges.
• To ‘play’ and have an ability to ‘move’ unrestricted.
• To have some kind of physical culture to pass to others/my own kids.
• ie)…

To not be rubbish.

Nice and vague.

I’d feel like a badass too if I was dominating a vaulting horse after cutting a sheep in half with a sword.

Two Pillars:  Capacity and Expression

One thing to get out of the way first, strength training related;  weights are superior for lower body development, whereas gymnastic strength exercises and their variants are arguably better for upper body development.  This is the assumption that will proceed.

With strength being the foundation and precursor through which technique and ability is best expressed, the obvious solution to these criteria is a mixture of parkour and predominantly weight-based strength training.

Capacity can be defined as your body’s engine.  Your ability and scope of expression through movement is only as much as your basic physical capacities allow.  Your neuromuscular system is going to determine the width and breadth of expression; the more detrained an individual, the less scope or ‘horsepower’ they have available at their disposal, whether its in sport or life.  Capacity encompasses an awful lot of traits, basically the traits of fitness, including endurance, stamina, coordination, agility, power, and so on.  One thing that is agreed upon is the role that strength training plays in performance improvement, as well as the all-round benefits it has on bone, joint, general musculoskeletal health.  Strength and conditioning is the mother of capacity.

Expression is the outworking of the body’s engine, usually a specific sport where the fruits gained from hours and hours of strength and conditioning will be visible.  This is something harder to define than capacity, which is something very measurable by distance, weight, time, and other variables.  Expression is slightly more intangible, but still something that can be judged.  Its the technique and mastery of movement, like running gait, a racket swing, throwing a punch, turning a somersault, etc.  Capacity is like the vocabulary and grammar structures of a language, whereas expression is actually going out and speaking that language; your ability is only as good as your foundations.

With these two components of movement outlined, efforts must be made in order to improve at both, capacity clearly serving as a foundation for expression.  Also, the question arises, ‘what is the most effective and efficient way to improve without faffing around, wasting as minimal time as possible‘?

…in part II.

This month in tasty wee bullet points:

-  Tried to 1RM squat everyday with interesting results.

-  Began coaching in the university.

-  Haven’t been able to shove enough food in for love nor money.

1RM Squatting

To make it short and sweet, this has been a very beneficial exercise, adding 10kg onto my previous back squat 1RM.  I actually found the physical nature of it to be very manageable, but arguably that is because one month just isn’t long enough to enter ‘the dark times’.

I got lazy to carry the sheet over into 5th Nov so I stopped recording here.

Absolutely the most challenging aspect of this task was getting to the gym!  As is evident from the snapshot of my excel spreadsheet, I missed a bunch of days due to last minute things stealing my evenings, ranging from meeting the director for a bodyguard part in a film starring Andy Lau (not joking), to spending all evening trekking around looking for a new apartment to move into (the saga continues).  Everyday that was missed proceeded with a day of sub-maximal effort squatting, due to the inherent dangers to soft tissues.  In this regard, I don’t think I ever managed to get to a state of real fatigue, and instead felt pretty good most days, hence the substantial jump in 1RM.

Enough excuses, some numbers:

Back squat: 150kg –> 160kg

Snatch: 85kg –> 90kg

C&J:  An easier 120kg

Bearing all the above crap in mind, for only a month, I am pretty happy with the progressions.  As such, I have sliced down my lifting to a very simple formula:

a) Snatch OR Clean and Jerk

b) Back / Front squat

c) Upper body:  Overhead press / weighted pullups.

Days are essentially determined by auto-regulation; working in singles/doubles/triples depending on the feeling that day.

In terms of exercise selection, this is still fairly in sync with a ‘bulgarian-style’ method, ie) the stark absence of accessory work.  I will no longer be busting my ass to make it to the gym every single day, but I will certainly be doing some kind of squatting everyday that I train, so around 4-5 days a week.

COACHING

I have begun coaching at the official university “come-in-and-lift-weights-an’-that” club every saturday.  The reason for the self-prescribed title is the ambiguous nature of the whole affair, but nonetheless it is a nice opportunity to get 10+ pretty deconditioned individuals and try and get them more capable.  The lack of frequency in face-to-face time with them and the general organisation means that there tend to be a lot of new faces and a concurrent inability to really see overall trends in deficiencies of movement etc.

Standard session looks like this:

a)  General coordination – quadrupedal + ground work / stabilisation drills / balance drills / movement challenges

b)  Review of previous movements, introduction of new ones

c)  Training

 Two General Issues

 Hip Bend – Having the coordination to differentiate between a hip bend and a squat seems to be an issue encountered by a lot of the people.  Funnily enough only a small handful have needed tweaking on squat technique, probably because of the fact that in China, you literally need to have a full squat just to be able to go to the toilet.  The hip bend difficulties for the most part get sorted by:

-  Standing 1/2 feet away from a wall, back facing the wall, then just bending back to touch ass only to wall, much like a romanian/straight-leg deadlift.

-  Constantly cueing to stick ones junk back and out as much as possible and to try and exaggerate the ‘duck-ass’ effect.

 Midline Stabilisation – has been immediately diagnosable in pushups and variations thereof.  The first thing I get anyone new to do is squats and pushups to see for any basic deviations or problems.  I am sure coming to overhead squat will open up a fresh can of worms.  First thing is just hitting a solid pushup support position, a surprising amount of people do not have the awareness to keep a solid line throughout the body.  The real test comes when they are asked to take one arm or leg off the floor, which I have yet to see anyone do without any trouble.  This is just good indication of the deficit in coordination (inter and intramuscular), as well as stabilising ability and general strength endurance.

Kelly Starret recently did a series of videos on using ‘functional movement’ to diagnose for problems in movement, classifying them into four categories:

1) Pathological – serious disease that needs medical treatment

2) Catastrophic – I got hit by a car/beaten up/fell off a building etc

3) Over tension – areas of tightness around joints

4) Open circuit faulting – technical breakdown during movement

His comments on achieving a solid start position before ‘going through the tunnel’ of the movement to end in a good finish position also rings very true.  If you set up a front squat all rounded with elbows facing down and knees facing inward before you even go down, there is no way to rectify these things halfway through the movement (if working at any meaningful intensity).  Start well to finish well.

FOOD

Having some issues recently with eating enough food, insofar as, I cant seem to pack it in quick enough or in large enough amounts.

China really does not lend itself well to healthy snacking, and as such, if you don’t check yourself food wise before leaving the house, then its game over.  Dairy is completely OUT except eggs, and finding trustworthy meat is like trying to catch a leprechaun.

This has meant that for the past week, just to stave off feelings of imminent death from starvation and to try and remotely meet my caloric demands, I have been crushing Snickers on the daily.  Clearly, less than ideal, but I figure that if the doc over at Project Goliath can spend £150 on a week supply of chocolate, then a few Snickers isn’t going to kill a man.

Right here, I issue a challenge to anyone to find SOMETHING in those small supermarkets here that a) has decent calorie content, b) isn’t going to kill me via chemical ingredients I can’t pronounce, and c) is immediately edible.  And DONT SAY NUTS because I can’t get any glucose from nuts which is what I need when my brain is about to melt.

This situation has now been vastly improved with the discovery of affordable varieties of nuts online accompanied by a box of oatmeal wherever I go.  One thing that is reliable in China is the fact that there is boiling water everywhere just for drinking purposes.

And that is that for the now.

I have been following the 5/3/1 protocol for just over 5 months with consistent results, some exercises faring better than others.  Some stats from the start of the program:

Deadlift 1rm:  170kg / Back squat:  117.5kg for 6 reps / Front squat:  95kg for 8 reps / Military press: 51.5kg for 10 reps

After finishing 5 months, I have made some decent gains:

Deadlift 1rm:  195kg / Back squat:  130kg for 7 reps / Front squat:  100kg for 8 reps / Military press:  57.5kg for 10 reps.

The deadlift and squat have seen the biggest jumps, with my front squat not budging an awful lot, only 5 kilos within the same 8 rep scheme.  Regardless, I am very happy with the gains overall.  Why, then, am I changing the program?  I agree, 5 months is not a very long time for a protocol, and I could probably squeeze some more gains for a while.  Thing is, I have stopped deadlifting since I found it was limiting my olympic lifts, and well, the back squat is the only thing that is making much progress now.

Reasons for change:

-  I have put some decent time into 5/3/1 to not be called a ‘program-hopper’ (not much of one anyway)

-  I have dropped the deadlift and feel a change in protocol would not hinder the now halting progress of my other exercises.

-  I am up for trying something totally new and challenging.

Pat Mendes, 20 years old, front squatting 272kg.  Squats everyday.

PRESENTING THE MAX EFFORT, SQUAT EVERYDAY PROTOCOL

Without going into great depth about what the above link already covers, the idea is really pretty simple.  Work up to a 1RM back squat every day, proceeding with back-off sets or subsequent 1RM reps.  Back off sets overall volume is anything from 3×2 upwards to 50 repetitions.  This is basically Bulgarian method training, where maximal effort training is performed every single day with a minimal of assistance exercises.

MAIN POINTS:

1)  Be able to squat.  If you haven’t got a silky-smooth, uninhibited and technically proficient squat, then this madness is not for the likes of ye.  We are talking narrow, olympic stance, high bar position, FULL range of motion (ass to calves) squatting.  Save your patellas and vertebrae for a rainy day if this is not you.

2)  Work up to a 1RM squat everyday, adding in as much volume as is needed afterward.

3)  DON’T jump straight back into 1RM if you have taken a day off.  The tissues have different healing times due to vascularity etc, and so after a day of rest, your muscles have recovered more than your tendons and other connective tissues.  This be fertile ground for injury.

4)  Subjective 1RMs.  Work up to the 1RM for THAT day.  Days are not all going to be the same and there will not be linear progression.  Go with what you are capable of that day, don’t try and hit an objective number everytime.

5)  ”Training lifts will eventually start to go backwards as you enter into the “dark times”. When you are so sore and fatigued that you cant even imagine lifting weights. This time is CRUCIAL to training. You MUST persevere and continue to train! Eventually your lifts will begin to improve and you will make progress and PR’s while in a totally fatigued state.” – John Broz.

Looking for some reason to this apparent madness?  John Broz, the advocate and implementer of this method gives an analogy:

If you got a job as a garbage man and had to pick up heavy cans all day long, the first day would probably be very difficult, possibly almost impossible for some to complete. So what do you do, take three days off and possibly lose your job?

No, you’d take your sore, beaten self to work the next day. You’d mope around and be fatigued, much less energetic than the previous day, but you’d make yourself get through it. Then you’d get home, soak in the tub, take aspirin, etc. The next day would be even worse.

But eventually you’d be running down the street tossing cans around and joking with your coworkers. How did this happen? You forced your body to adapt to the job at hand! If you can’t’ squat and lift heavy every day you’re not overtrained, you’re undertrained! Could a random person off the street come to the gym with you and do your exact workout? Probably not, because they’re undertrained. Same goes with most lifters when compared to elite athletes.

 

I am very interested to see how squat numbers fluctuate as time goes on, as well as the challenge of prioritising time in order to get the squats done.  I must admit that I am wary about training parkour IN ADDITION to the olympic lifting that I am doing, since joint stress is certainly going to be a factor to take into consideration.  I am also especially interested in the distinguishing of ‘floating pains’ in the body that John Broz says are ever-changing and always present, from that of acute injury.  Reading on the training history of people like Dave Tate, John and others brings to light that those who are really devoting themselves to their craft very rarely feel 100%, and that EVERYONE gets injuries and niggling, chronic pain that just comes with the territory and has to be worked around.

DAY 1 (5/10/11)

Doubles up to 130kg.  145kg 1RM.  130kg 3×2

Onwards and downwards upwards.