Well, I’m back and getting into the flow of being back working with clients in the gym rather than playing with the kids on the beach. Sometimes, the two aren’t that different….
“The Daddy Bear is going to eat you!”
After all, if you spend any time around kids, or remember yourself as a child, think of all the ways in which you used your body.
You’d run, crawl, jump, roll, climb and pretty much whatever else took your fancy. And these are all elements I throw into the training of adults here at WG, while yes, we stick mostly to good solid strength and conditioning practices, but often times we play and try to find the childlike pleasure of simple movement.
And thats most of what we got up to on our holiday with the kids, it was great fun.
And then just this morning after the Bootcamp one of my lads is chatting to me about his weak points and what he feels he needs to work more to improve his Kettlebell Sport performance.
This lad is with me less than a year but has made great progress, which includes having a crack at kettlebell sport, one of the most gruelling sports out there.
He said he needed to work his legs more.
I said that is no surprise, consider your previous five years of training and what you did.
You see he came to me from the “standard” gym, mainstream commercial fitness, where pretty much everything is done seated.
Bench press, seated military press, seated lat pull downs, seated leg extensions, seated leg press…….
And I thought, just imagine you were having a conversation with a being from another planet.
Imagine this being asked you how we humans maintained and improved upon our physical capacity, how we built strength and stamina to keep strong and useful. Now think about most people’s answer:
“Yeah, I go to this place we call a gym.”
“Oh really, that sounds cool, what do you do there?”
“When I’m there I lie down and work my chest, then I sit on this machine to work my back.”
“Oh, you sit and lie down?”
“erm yeah, and them for my legs,”
“those skinny things you stand on?”
“yeah these things I’m standing on.”
“Are they how you move around, say chasing stuff?”
“What was that? Oh, yeah, these are my natural method of locomotion. So anyway to make these strong, I sit down on the leg press”
“Sorry, did you just say you sit down to train them, you don’t move about like their natural function indicates?”
Can you imagine the confusion.
You sit down to get fitter and stronger?
Especially our lower body, the very things that are designed to carry us around, we sit down to train them?
If you want to genuinely improve you strength and fitness, to genuinely increase your quality of movement and athletic ability get off your fucking arses and learn something from the kids.
Kids don’t sit still. In fact keeping them sat at all is a challenge (at least with my two, and I wasn’t much different!)
In August I’ll be running the bodyweight training course, which looks at real movement. We look at how to regain lost movement patterns, such as the squat and hip hinge. We talk about using bodyweight to develop the strength and agility that is your birthright.
We also look at more playful movements from the animal world, the kind of things we did as kids without a second thought.
I’ll be posting dates and location by the end of the week, keep an eye out here for it.
Regards
Dave Hedges www.WG-Fit.com