Archive March 2011

I’m not sure how you will get this, but it is good.

It’s funny: this week, I am sifting through some of the best things I have seen in my career. The last blog post, I summed Josh Hillis’s System Six and freely admitted I had no idea how you will get it. After my review, I decided that one of the things Josh does really well is sum things. That’s right and it is that simple: he looks at things, pulls out the gems, and assembles them so that the steps to success are so simple (not easy, necessarily) to follow, you have the courage to leap in and try it.

So, over at Park Road Fitness the other day, I was training with my Personal Trainer, Buddy Walker, and Nathan Flores tossed me a copy of his new DVD, “KettleBell Foundations.” Two things: yes, I have a trainer. The worst person I work with on a regular basis is me: I don’t work my weaknesses and I refuse to follow my good advice. So, if you are an “expert,” my first question would be: “who trains YOU?” The other thing is that the picture of the guy on the cover of the DVD looks so badass, not the kind and gentle Nate that I know. But, Buddy was cracking the whip and I was back to training.

I get a LOT of stuff every week to review. What people don’t notice is that I often don’t review things online. Sometimes, and I will be honest, it is personal. Maybe something in the DVD or book “bugs” me and that can be all over the place. If the person is nude, for example, I struggle with recommending it or there is a wide range of things that bother me. If you ever hear me rant on a topic, it might be one of them. So, Nate’s DVD is in that small group of “worthy” products.

Basically, Nathan is giving you an HKC workshop with the Get Up, the Swing, Goblet Squats and Mobility Drills. I would recommend this for someone interested in the HKC or RKC as it is going to give you the most recent materials from our work. His technique is outstanding, but I really like the way he breaks down the elements of each move. You know, on “paper,” the HKC moves are simple, but the mastery of these movements is a lifelong task. Nathan has a very disciplined technique and you would be wise to model the small safety cues that Nathan shows us.

Nathan is charging twenty dollars for this and he told me he made it so his clients could review the concepts at home. I think his audience is bigger than this, so I will be encouraging him to expand this base. It really is a perfect companion to Josh’s System Six, by the way.

Nathan’s website is here and I don’t know if you can get it. But, I’m happy to see quality work in this field and I support it when I can.

Addition: please don’t email me! Contact Nathan at kettlebellcrush@me.com

I’m glad you like my advice, but I barely can keep up with the normal volume…

Josh Hillis and “System Six”

I’m not sure how you get it and the product isn’t finished yet, but Josh HIllis knocked it out of the park with his new six part system on fat loss. I spent time with Josh in November (I think) and I came away with lots of insights about fat loss. Josh has discovered that its own best clients (those who got their body fat down to “rockstar” levels and, more important, kept it there) didn’t necessarily work harder…

And, you should think about that. What held body fat down (and superb athletic performance up, by the way) isn’t smashing your face against the wall. Yes, there is hard work, but more important is “smart work.” Josh discovered that his best people had a basic level of strength. As I tell everyone, after I heard Brett Jones say it, absolute strength is the glass. Everything else is what you can put in the glass. If you have a thimble of strength, you can’t make a single bad nutritional choice to stay ahead of fat gain. If you have a barrel of strength, you can make a few more mistakes!

Josh’s new program is unique…no question about that. He uses two simple tools to measure that you are staying on track and one of them is simply some strength tests (and so is the other, really). He also advocates a food journal, of course, as this is Josh’s signature in this community: Have a food journal! But, as I discovered with my personal trainer, Buddy Walker, you need someone to help you hold yourself accountable to it. It’s a game changer for me, by the way.

There is more. I was honored to be credited by Josh for one of his ideas and I think the idea works seamlessly with his other five. If fat loss can be made simpler, well, I want to see it. It is an amazingly simple toolkit and it is not filled with gimmicks. It is real. It is simple. It is true.

Josh has three pdfs with the program and the workouts are very good. I took his advice and eased off a bit on some things and, well, I am following his advice here. The workouts are very good and the videos are funny and informative.

I like Josh. I have always liked him. His influence on me might not be noticed by many, but simply count the number of times I reference him in a typical workshop (a lot!).

System Six is a game changer. It is very good and I am going to be stealing these ideas for a long time.

This just makes me happy

I am working on a bunch of things, but I love this picture with me and Dave Draper, one of my heroes and mentors:

Life IS Squatting

On Bar Speed

“It just can’t be that simple, Tiff.”

“Well, think about it.”

Okay, so I did. The proceeding little dialogue was from my living room a few days ago. I have been battling this hip injury for a few years and I discovered that two things keep me pain free: a tiny little stretch and avoiding beer. It’s not science, certainly, but it is true…for me. The discussion actually began when my wife, Tiffini, had discovered that adding a small amount of Iodine, in the form of a supplement, had changed her figure in a few weeks.

She had been dieting hard, training hard and living lean for a while and had been frustrated by the lack of progress. In fact, things were going the opposite way. Her doctor suggested, in passing, that a minor problem she was having with her skin “might” be helped with iodine. Within days, the skin issue cleared, but she and I also noticed “less than subtle” body composition changes. She told me: “It just can’t be that simple.”

My hip pain is being “cured” by about a minute of stretching and avoiding beer. My wife has had a “game changing” experience from simply adding about a nickel’s worth of supplements to her diet.

“It can’t be that easy” is also something that has been changing my athlete’s training for the last few years. Although I disagree with the test, my football players have to do this “thing” where they need to bench press a weight for as many times as possible. The NFL makes a big deal of it with the annual Combine as the rookies bench press 225 for reps. It’s not a contest and it probably has little value. It has been around longer than people can remember as Dick Notmeyer used to have us do it as a fun diversion and most of us got into the 23-25 rep range with 225 weighing just over 200.

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Hotel Workouts

March 1, 2010, I started working on a blog post called “You seemed stressed.” I can’t believe it was a year ago that I was at the RKC II, track had just started and Tiff told me that I might/should/could move in two months! Well, a year later and my life is pretty exciting and fun. I feel great and can’t believe the progress I made in one year.