But what’s the best way to go about it?

Mastery takes years and years. It has been said that acquisition of elite skill in anything takes about 10,000 hours. If you do the math that means that if you trained every day for an hour, then you’d train 350 hours per year. To acquire your 10,000 hours would therefore take 28.5 years. So if we’re talking about a sport it may take you almost your entire athletic career to “master” the thing.

The obvious thing that many then try to do, to try to shorten the time to mastery, is double or even triple their training time. If you instead take that number from an hour a day to 3 hours per day then you get roughly 1000 hours per year. Done this way it will only take you 10 years to attain mastery.

But can you actually withstand tripling your training investment? Is your body robust enough? Do you have a good enough recovery strategy? For most people, myself included, the answer is a firm and definite no. I know that if I try to train strength more than 4-5 hours per week that I can’t cope beyond that anymore.

So how do you get around this physically imposed limit so you can increase skill quickly?

Again, it doesn’t matter whether your sport is MMA, BJJ or like mine is and the only real event I am training for now is to be better at my job and a better kettlebell coach. So my main training right now is lifting. I am in preparation for RKCII and frankly the training for that is hard enough, and my time is limited enough that I have little left for anything else.

The secret, for starters, is to treat practice exactly as that – practice. Practice isn’t for going all out. That’s what competing is for. Practice is for building skill and ability to withstand the rigours of competing. Lance Armstrong has been quoted as saying that training is for building the body, not breaking it down and that has become my training catch cry too.

Every time you go to your limit you stress the body forcing it to need time to recover and repair. If your training is so stressful that you essentially compete every time you train, how long can you withstand that for?

To use an example – say you have a car. A good, fast little car. Even though its fast you won’t drive it at redline every time you go out for a drive. And why not? Because it’ll blow up. Yet for some reason people assume that our bodies, so much more intricately delicate than any machine, can handle it. Not surprisingly people often spend a great deal of their training time on rehabilitation because they’ve blown their engines!

So what’s the solution? Because there needs to be hard training to force the body to the next level, it’s just that not all of your training can afford to be at “race pace” all the time.

The solution is to have easy and hard sessions. Or in classic strength lingo you’d have easy, medium and hard days. Now, these could be done in a variety of ways – hard could be taken as highest volume, highest intensity (heaviest weight), medium would be a step below that and easy another step, or two below that.

In Pavel’s classic kettlebell book Enter the Kettlebell he uses a system of Clean Press ladders to enhance strength. Building to a series of 5 x 1,2,3,4,5 reps on the heavy day he uses the medium day to go to 5 x 1,2,3,4 and the light day to go to 5 x 1,2,3. In percentage terms it means that you lift roughly 60% of your heavy day on the light day.

Another way to do this is to deliberately use 60% of the load. Interestingly, Pavel also mentions this in another book Return of the Kettlebell. In this book instead of reducing total volume he instead reduces the load used on the heavy, light and medium days. So the light day features presses with kettlebells that are lighter than the medium day, which in turn are lighter again than the heavy day. (There are some other very clever bits of programming going on too, but the manipulation of intensity is the most common throughout the program).

This too can be applied to any sport. Using BJJ as an example there is no need to “fight” every day. In fact, great minds in BJJ say that the greatest gains come from rolling in a relaxed manner and taking the time to figure out moves and strategy.

It’s like this – imagine that you have attention to “spend” on tasks. Let’s make it $10 for simplicity. If you are going all out – spending all of your $10 on the fight then how much can you afford to spend on things like when to use a new move or how your opponent reacts to another move? Instead if you choose to go at a slower, more relaxed pace, perhaps spending only $7 then you have $3 to spend on new moves and your opponents reactions. This is actually why, when you learn a new technique, everything is removed so there are less distractions and you can spend mor of your attention on getting the new movement pattern right. When you learn a new move your partner doesn’ resist at first, instead allowing you the time and space to move around and put yourself in the right position. As you gain proficiency and need to spend less on the physical movement you have some leftover to spend on now overcoming your opponent’s movement. Then finally, once you have spent time at lower intensity you are ready to see if it actually works in a fight/tournament scenario at 100%. But it will only work there if you’ve drilled it many times at the lower speed where you can optimally focus on getting it right.

And so it is with training. You can’t expect to lift a heavy weight well if you can’t lift a light one well. The skill needed to lift heavy can only be gained by Greasing the Groove with a lighter weight. When I used to teach motor bike racing we would say the same – if you can’t do it slow, there’s no way you can do it fast.

Training is about building the body, building the skill you are seeking. It is not about getting sweaty and out of breath. That is merely a byproduct of the type of training you are doing. It is about developing a plan where your effort is modulated so that you increase skill/fitness while managing fatigue so that you can constantly improve. For many people this will mean taking what will feel like massive steps back in their training to reap enormous reward later.

Try it and see. Schedule recovery sessions, and recovery weeks. See how incorporating the heavy, light and medium principle into your training goes. I guarantee that you’ll get a better result, stay injury free and enjoy your training more as you’ll progress faster.

In it, he describes various manly endeavours from jumping out of planes, bar fighting, drinking and carousing with women to what kind of person it takes to get into the SEALs in the first place. One quote that has always stuck with me is this:

“You don’t test the water with your toe if you want to be a frogman”.

What he means is that during testing candidates spend more time wet than dry and they swim, swim, swim. They swim when its dark. When its cold. When there are sharks in the water. After all, in combat you have to get the job done no matter what the conditions. So frogmen don’t worry too much about water temperature. They just dive right in and get to work.

And so it is with fitness.

Too many people want to “test the water”. They do this by trialling a training system, perhaps adding in a day a week of something or other, maybe doing a single session per week with a trainer.

Here’s the thing – “testing the water” doesn’t lead to anything. No trainer in the world, no matter how gifted and smart can bring about substantial change with just a single session per week unless that client is killing themselves outside of training. But the water testers won’t be doing that. They’ll hold back, scared to commit, saying they’re just “seeing if they like it”.

Exercise, like most rewarding things in life is very simple – you get out of it exactly what you put into it. If you work at being lean, fit and strong by training hard often then you’ll end up being lean, fit and strong. But, if you show up once a week and drag your out of shape ass through a workout you probably won’t see much change.

The reason is simple exercise science. A thing called Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand comes into play. Think of a tennis player wanting to play in a Grand Slam event. Do they train one day a week, hitting the ball just a few times? Or do they practice for hours and hours daily, training 6-7 days a week? The answer is obvious. To become better at tennis you need to play tennis a lot.

In the RKC, where pressing strength is prized, we have a saying too “To press a lot, you must press a lot”. In other words, to improve our press, not only do you need to press multiple days per week but you need to press both in high volume and with heavy weights.

So in fitness terms if you want to become better at particular fitness qualities – such as leaner, fitter and stronger – then you need to practice those skills like someone who is leaner, fitter and stronger would do. In other words, you need to get to training, train every day and work your ass off.

If you’re already in shape then these things aren’t so hard to do. If you accidentally overate you can fix it by training a bit more or dropping your food intake for the rest of the day. But, if you’re out of shape then you need to do the right thing all day, every day, until you reach your goal. That doesn’t mean that you ”try” to watch what you eat. That means you eat exactly what you’ve been told to eat every single meal until the sight of your tubby stomach in the mirror no longer repulses you. It means you kill yourself training until you’re not the person laying on the ground at the end gasping like a fish out of water. Then it means you grab the next weight up and start the process all over again.  

People often wonder why they don’t reach their fitness goals. It all comes down to one word – commitment. Losing weight, while it can be a struggle, is quite easy once people actually commit to it. Once they stop making excuses, hiding behind their fear of hard work and discipline. I have watched people lose enormous amounts of weight in very short periods of time – up to 21kg in 17 weeks! – and all down to a single factor. Commitment.

This is why I refuse to train people less than twice per week. People who only commit to the process half heartedly and want to train only once per week will not make progress. I know this from experience. People who listen, commit and make the effort multiple times per week will reach their goals.

So, if you wonder why you aren’t getting anywhere, ask yourself how committed you really are. I’ll bet you’re not really doing as much as you think you are.

And if you think this post might be about you, you’re probably right. So get off your ass and go train.

But to go back to where I was heading last time I want to talk more about this amazing system called the Functional Movement System. Developed by Gray Cook and Brett Jones it has become an athletic revelation. Used in the NFL to predict injury rates it is now starting to find its way into the US military too.

But a strange thing happened along the way…Brett was already a Master RKC, one of Pavel Tsatsouline’s select elite trainers, and a well know strength and conditioning trainer in his own right. But then Gray Cook, already considered a world leader in his field attended the RKC.

So what you have now is the FMS on steroids, or Certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Screen. Combining amazing corrective exercise strategies with the school of strength and movement, the RKC, has seen it take on a new life all of its own.

I do a lot of corrective work with various people. I do it with world champion athletes such as Sophia McDermott and Robert Drysdale. I do it with Hall of Fame martial artists like John Will. And I do it with “average” BJJ black belts too (funny how a BJJ black belt could ever be seen as average, yet in that company it does seem apt). And on top of that I do it with Average Joe’s – guys who have had knee surgery, women with back problems, shoulder problems… Basically anyone who has had any injuries from a lifetime of enjoying themselves I spend time with.

And you know what?

Using the drills from the CK FMS. I have had great success with all of them. People who were scared to squat, afraid to press overhead or even just get on the mat again – all fixed.

The CK FMS is a must have tool for trainers. It contains 15 DVDs and every single hour of them is jam packed with priceless information. Even top level physiotherapists like Andrew Lock have a series and can’t believe the wealth of information contained inside.

The downside is that you don’t get to physically be there to practice all the moves with the brains trust behind it all. But when you consider that the entire set only costs $650 compared to a trip to the US plus attending a four day, $2800US course, it seems a fair trade off. I’m actually attending the real CK FMS course in May this year and I own a set of these DVDs. They’re simply too good to pass up on for any serious trainer.

Well, not really.

Just like any job it takes a long time to really get good at it. To learn what to watch for, even to understand why you’re watching for particular things and to communicate these problems to people effectively. And given most trainers have less than five years experience you need to ask yourself if what you’re reading on the net is really such good advice.

Now, I’m happy to admit that there ar plenty of people out there that make my knowledge look pedestrian, especially in certain areas that aren’t my forte, but I’ll also admit that when it comes to getting people ready to fight I’m pretty darn good.

I recently wrote about my work with women’s no Gi world champ Sophia McDermott and more recently I was asked to work with her coach and six time world champ Robert Drysdale.

Just an average day of work - two world champs!

And this is where I start to get upset with people. Robert, like most people who have world champion after their names, is a stellar athlete. He’s 6′3″ and 100kg yet moves with the grace and speed that only the true elite really have. However Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a rough sport and after many years of competing at the highest level his body has some aches and pains that need to be dealt with.

The first step was to find out what, if anything caused him pain. Relying on my trusty FMS kit to run him through his paces and see if he had any movement issues I was happy to find out that his body, although a bit banged up, was actually in very good shape! Using the FMS test as the corner-stone to our work we pinpointed his biggest issue, and one that is shared by a lot of grapplers – his hips.

Robert Drsydale performing the Deep Squat test

Just like sitting for long periods of time can shorten and weaken the hip flexors, so can playing an aggressive guard. Continually using the feet to hook behind the opponents legs and then pull them towards you has the effect of tightening the hip flexors. This is compounded by BJJ being played on the ground where the muscles involved in keeping posture standing – the Glutes – not having to work.

FMS lunge test

His only other problem, and another one that plagues many grapplers, was that his neck was a bit stiff and was causing nerve impingement into one of his arms.

And so at this point, after having established that he was in essence pain free, most trainers would go nuts and pull out the big guns – Squat, Power Clean, Clean and Jerk, etc. Meanwhile I decided to do some stretching with him and teach him how to switch off his hip flexors.

See, Robert is a big strong guy already. Truthfully we didn’t even talk about his lifting program. Whatever he’s been doing it works – he’s won the world championships 6 times! So my job was to try to and iron out some of the kinks in his movement and try to get him as close to pain free as possible. Adding in high risk movements, even with kettlebells where the total load is relatively light, was just going to take him the other way.

So here’s what we did:

Brettzel stretch

• Kneeling hip flexor stretch
• Brettzel

At this point he would go off and do a few Get Ups to see how his body was moving. See, there are telltale signs when your hips are over active in the Get Up and using it in this way tells Robert if he’s ready to really train or whether he needs more work to free up his hips before getting into training.

Robert performing the RKC style Get Up

Most likely we found that he needed some more work to teach his body correct recruitment patterns so we performed some FMS corrections based around abdominal recruitment to further shut off his hips.

He would then perform Get Ups again. Usually we found that this time his hips were behaving and he would do 12-15 minutes of Get Ups.

After these he would move onto some single leg work – stick DLs and single leg DLs to fire up his hip extensors which again, would help to switch off his hip flexors more.

Robert Drysdale performing stick deadlifts

Noting too complex, nothing extraordinary. But when a guy is in front of you who has trouble walking around the shops for an hour because it hurts his back so much says that the above makes it better why would you do anymore?

Single leg deadlifts

His last problem – the neck stiffness – I’ve been doing some work with Melbourne based physiotherapist Andrew Lock on. Andrew is a clever guy and has hit upon some misfirings which seem present in most grapplers. Because of how much the head is pulled and twisted in grappling the neck develops some inherent tension to reduce the chance of injury to the cervical spine. This inbuilt tension, while great for grappling due to its protective nature, can create problems like headaches and upper back stiffness when not training.

Andrew’s fix for this is to place the neck in a stable position where gravity can’t affect it and work to regain full movement. Instead of doing neck work standing, like most do, I had Robert lie on the ground and perform neck rotations and ear to shoulder movements. With his head fully supported he regained, instantly, a few inches more of movement. Not only that but continual regrooving of the correct pattern will eventually result in his neck being pain free and mobile. It may take some time to achieve this but to see it improve by inches immediately was gratifying.

And that’s not unusual if you’re working with the right person. A skilled trainer who has a big tool box of corrective drills can get from A to almost Z in a jiffy.

Don’t waste your training time trying to follow someone else’s plan. Go speak to someone truly skilled at athletic preparation and get a program that will help you. Perhaps all you need is some more movement. Maybe you do need to be stronger, but aren’t yet ready to perform ballistic movements. Maybe you’re fats, but have no joint stability. Everyone is different and you would do well to steer clear of cookie cutter internet programs.

I won’t write about it twice as I think the article speaks for itself. But it ties in nicely with what my last post was about – this girl is a world champ and one of the best athletes I’ve ever seen, male or female. She is strong, lean, fast and fit – yet she needs to be trained like a beginner because that’s what she is when it comes to strength training. In fact, we spend more time ironing out the kinks in her body than we do performing “traditional” strength work.

For instance, right now she is barely raising a sweat in her training and we do more FMS drills, Z health and focus on postural training. Like any good athlete we have scheduled in time to relax and work on injury prevention or rehab – now is that time.

But my point is still the same. It always strikes me as funny that there are several groups around all claiming to be great trainers with combat sport athletes. They make up all kinds of ridiculous exercises claiming they are “sport specific” yet I never see their athletes do that well on the big stage. My results with Sophia prove my point about exercise programming – it doesn’t have to be bells and whistles and complicated. Her training is bare bones simple and it works.

For anyone serious about their training – either for combat sports or general population – Dragon Door Australia runs regular classes and the schedule is available here. Don’t accept substitutes. If you want to be the best, train with the best.

One of the things that has made a world of diference to my combat clients in particular is the use of the FMS (Functional Movement Screen). Its an awesome tool to help me pinpoint movement problems, address them quickly and  keep my clients moving forward. I’ve been doing a lot of work with some elite grapplers and you’re going to see some big articles very soon about it all, but if you’re in a hurry and live near Adelaide don’t miss the chance to head to Dr. Mark Cheng’s seminar on January 23 and 24. He’ll be teaching Hardstyle concepts mixed with FMS drills to sky rocket your chances of success in your own training. For more information go here

Also, Dragon Door Australia is now running HKC preparation classes. If you have signed up for the HKC now is the time to start making sure your technique is squared away. Don’t miss out on all this top quality kettlebell instruction that is now available in Australia!

You see, people want to feel like they are something special. It grates at them to be labelled anything other than fantastic. That’s why we have kids sport where everyone gets a medal, or in the case of martial arts, frequent gradings so we can break belt grades into smaller chunks so people feel recognised for their efforts. Boo hoo.

In the world of strength training it is often written that if you’ve been training less than a year you’re a novice. Fair enough, no argument from me there. But then it start to get a bit hazy. Intermediate is somewhere between 1 and 2 years and after that it is generally thought that if you’ve been steadily training for two or more years that you’re advanced.

I’d just like to say that that is total unadulterated BS.

So to start 2010 with some home truth here are my recommendations for what should be considered beginner, intermediate and advanced. I will include standard resistance training, kettlebells plus conditioning.

Beginner:

• < bodyweight bench press, squat and deadlift
• Cannot perform multiple reps of chin ups
• Cannot perform > 20 push ups.
• Cannot properly squat, deadlift, lunge or perform push ups.
• For men cannot press or snatch a 16kg kettlebell for multiple reps. For women a 12kg.
• Cannot run 5km in under 25 minutes.

Intermediate:

• 1.5 x bodyweight bench press, squat and deadlift.
• Can perform multiple bodyweight chins.
• Can perform 50 push ups non-stop.
• Can maintain correct form on all exercises even when fatigued.
• For men can press and snatch a 24kg kettlebell for multiple reps. For women a 16kg.
• Can run 5km in under 20min.
• 100 burpees in less than 10 minutes.

Advanced:

• Double bodyweight bench press, squat and deadlift
• Multiple chin ups with extra weight added.
• Exceptional form.
• Can press a kettlebell equal to half their bodyweight one-handed, and perform double clean and jerks with double 32s equal to their weight in pounds/10 (e.g. a 185 pound man would have to perform 19 continuous reps). Exceeds 200 reps in the 10 minute snatch test with a 24kg kettlebell. For women, press the 24kg, perform single clean and jerks with one hand switch equal to their bodyweight/10 and exceed 200 reps in 10 minute snatch test with the 16.
• Run 5km in 18 minutes or less.
• 100 burpees in less than 7 minutes.

Now, I realise I’ve just pissed off nearly everyone who trains at this point. Tough luck. If you can’t hit all the criteria for each category then you’re not as good as you think you are. It is possible to be advanced in one area but a novice in another (ahem…powerlifters take note – go for a damn walk!!). That means that your training should take into account your weaknesses and work to rectify them.

I write a lot of programs and people often comment that my programs aren’t complicated because they feature lots of squats and deadlifts. They then ask me for a more “advanced” routine. I tell them when they can squat and deadlift double their bodyweight it’ll be an advanced routine.

For those of you who say things like “I can’t squat, I’ve never been able to”. Well, go fix it. It’s a basic athletic move and its a disgrace that you’d call yourself athletic without being able to perform such a simple move. Likewise with being able to hold your form during exercise. The set stops when your form deteriorates, not when you reach some arbitrarily decided number. I actually have a friend who thinks he’s too advanced to drill simple things – he wants to juggle and do double this and that. Yet he can’t squat and his Get Up is just horrible. I think I made about 15 corrections on him, without even having any weight in his hand, in under 5 minutes. But he’s too advanced for all that…

Meanwhile, my guys are all still progressing. My own training just keeps plowing ahead like a glacier. Every week I am stronger than the one before and all I do is basics – Get Ups, Armbars, Brettzels, Clean and Press, Chins, Squats and Snatches/ Swings. Given the results these few are getting me it’d be hard to imagine needing to use anything else for quite some time.

And its the same with combat sports too. I don’t see Roger Gracie doing anything much more complicated than Cross Lapel choke from mount. Seems to have been good enough to win a few world titles. I don’t see Tiger doing anything crazy and far fetched on the links either. The top guys do the basics very, very well. They don’t look for crazy stuff. They do the basics at such a high level they don’t need to. One of the most important traits for a boxer is not to get hit. In his first 18 pro fights Mike Tyson didn’t get cut once – an almost unbelievable statistic. His head movement was simply too good for anyone to lay a glove on him. But who practices head movement round after round after round? Well, the champs do.

So stick with the basics. Chances are its all you’re ready for anyway.

Dragon Door Australia has announced that for the first time ever a fully approved, 100% Dragon Door instructor course will be held in Australia!

For anyone who is looking to learn about kettlebells, either for themselves or in a professional sense to use with clients, this is the course you need to do. I can’t stress enough how deep the pool of knowledge is within the RKC community when it comes to physical performance training via the kettlebell. To have one of the top dozen kettlebell instructors in the world coming to our shores is amazing.

Click here for more details: http://dragondooraustralia.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/the-russians-are-coming/

You’d be crazy to miss this. With only thirty spots up for grabs it will be first in best dressed.

One thing that became apparent this year, during my preparation for the RKC, was that I have limited elbow flexion. Elbow flexion is what happens when you bend your arm, at the elbow, as much as you can. For most, even those guys with big guns, this means they can touch their shoulders with their hands or fingers. I can’t.

Not only can I not bend my arms as much as everyone else but the problem shows itself going the other way too. Where most people struggle to get their arms straight mine will actually hyperextend and go just beyond straight.

When the arm goes beyond straight the bicep completely relaxes to avoid tearing. Once completely relaxed it isn’t doing its job to support the joint and the I wind up having my elbow jam up on itself. So I need to be carefull when doing anything where my arm goes straight – this can include heavy snatches or even heavy get ups where my arm is held straight for periods of time, essentially resting bone on bone.

Doing anything heavy into flexion is also a problem. Heavy cleans, because of my restricted motion, tend to jam the joint the other way too.

All of this, plus the resulting elbow pain got me to thinking about ways to not only cope, but maximise what I can do with my training given these physical limitations.

I’d been messing around with Bottoms Up work for a while, mostly doing it as a way to either switch the neural system on prior to a workout, or to work my grip. The BU Press is a really great drill. One of the main things I like about it is its self-correcting nature. If your body isn’t tight, isn’t lined up, if your shoulder isn’t packed – it will fail.

One of my key training concepts is that we should seek to minimise the load on the body during training. You’re all probably thinking I’m nuts right now, but if my sport include a lot of body contact why should I seek to add to it in training? Training is to build the body up, not break it down or challenge it to near extremes. Using a lighter kettlebell to achieve the same effect helps me do this – great workout, minimal load on the body. Perfect.

And then a thought struck me. Over ten years ago Poliquin and King did some research on using very low reps (1-2) to fire up the nervous system before doing maximal strength work using slightly higher reps (5-6). They found that the resulting increase in nervous excitation allowed for heavier than normal weights to be used in the maximal strength sets. I won’t go into rep ranges too much here except to say that many, many researchers have found that the 5-6 range is the most beneficial in terms of overall effects – from strength to size gains.

For this to be effective it turns out that the low rep sets don’t even need to be a true 1 or 2RM. As long as they are around 90% of the day’s working max they will be sufficient to boost the firing of motor units.

And this led me to what I have been using for the last month or so. Given that I start to have elbow problems when I perform Cleans with 32kg, and not having anything between a 24 and a 32 I started my experiment with the 24. I started with 5 super sets of a single BUP Clean and Press with the 24kg on each hand, rested around a minute and then performed sets of 6 normal Clean and Presses.

The results have been good. My elbows are not inflamed. My Press strength is up – I am now able to BU Clean and Press the 28kg for reps. I have even also done a 20kg BU TGU. I am sure that if I decided to use this routine to add size it would work just as well as the original King/ Poliquin workouts did in terms of size and strength. The only difference is that I would use double kettlebells instead of singles.

This has led me to further experiment with using the BU work in place of switching to a heavier kettlebell. Not everyone has 200 kettlebells at their disposal like I do at Dragon Door Australia, nor do they have the intermediate weights (20kg, 28kg, 36kg, etc.) This allows someone to really maximise the benefits of the single kettlebell that they likely started with before worrying about spending the money on a second one. I am even sure that programs such as ROP from Enter the Kettlebell (
available here). This last part is actually going to form a large part of my preparation for the RKC II – it allows me to build strength without weight gain (which is not necessarily something I am keen on as I like the fitness I have at my current weight. Gaining weight in the past has always led to a loss of fitness). Plus it will allow my elbows to be healthy to perform the necessary Snatch training to stay certified.

So don’t automatically assume you need a bigger bell. Just turn it upside down and see what you can do with it.

Allow me to explain…

After the age of 35 in humans brain chemistry does indeed change, making it harder to learn new things. This is across the board from learning a language to a musical instrument, a martial art or any physical skill.

So, to a point it is true that older people will struggle to learn new skills.

But that’s not the whole story.

You see, researchers have found that if a person has kept an open mind about things during their life span that their brain chemistry doesn’t go through the same change. This allows them to continue learning new skills and evolving.

Things they have found to be helpful to keep this youthful brain chemistry are lifelong study habits (although not centred on a single subject but rather on a wide variety of subjects) and continuing to play some sports.

The choice of sport is important too because some sports have more learning qualities in them than others. Traditional endurance sports for instance – running, swimming and cycling – are not good choices. These sports require only a few motor patterns to be learnt and then repeated over and over ad nauseum. A better choice is a sport requiring large amounts of skills to be used during the course of play. Sports such as beach volleyball, martial arts, gymnastics/ circus training, mountain biking, trail running and soccer are all good choices.

So you really are (chemically) only as old as you feel. It may also help to explain how people who have lived the most amazing lives filled with adventure seem to live the longest and keep their marbles too. I’ve long said that your body can only go where the mind leads it. If you act and think young, always trying new things and keeping an open mind – stopping to smell the roses of life, as it were – you will indeed stay young.

And this is where I get to talk about me for a bit. I’m 38, have done martial arts since I was 10 as well as played a variety of sports from field hockey to swimming to volleyball but these days the majority of my training is martial/ combat related and all things kettlebell.

So where does the kettlebell fit into this?

As a tool I’m obviously in love with them. Apart from just recently where I have been barbell squatting for the first time in years as an experiment I haven’t trained in a normal gym or with anything other than kettleblls, chin ups and push ups for over three years. The kettlebell is a unique tool in that it teaches your body not just to move things up and down, as normal weights do, but also to absorb shock, stay balanced and to move the kettlebell around itself to properly and safely execute the lifts. In short, they are motor pattern rich.

In terms of training longevity, things that we should all be looking to do as we get older and can continue for a long time I believe that kettlebells have a place right near the head of the table. I’ll reserve the place at the head of the table, the most important piece of the training puzzle, to creating correct movement. This comes in the form of joint health drills – either Z health, IntuFlow or Pavel’s Super Joints all fit the bill – plus activation drills and stretching.

To get Super Joints, Pavel Tsatsouline’s amazing book, go here:
Super Joints
Russian Longevity Secrets for Pain-Free Movement, Maximum Mobility & Flexible Stength

I know many will disagree with me but if you don’t have a full range of motion sooner or later you’re going to end up looking like a hunchback and moving about as well. Most of my time spent training people is an effort to get them back to correct posture, get the joints moving through a full pain-free range, get the body balanced from front to back, left to right and top to bottom, then build strength on top of that.

Gray Cook, one of the greatest minds in sports training, has a great saying “Dont try to build fitness on top of dysfunction”. In other words, get everything moving right first, then seek increases in performance. Don’t worry about how hard you can hit, how fast you can run or how high you jump before you know the body is right. If you imagine your body is a car, in most people’s cases the tires are bald and the wheels may not even be pointing in the same direction! Imagine what happens when you drop a bigger engine in that car and go to the track…? Boom. Something is going to let go. Now instead imagine that we get new tires on the car, get the wheels balanced, put new brakes in before we drop the big engine in. Is that car ready to go faster now? You betcha.

The problem most people have is that the fine tuning of the car – preparing the body to really work hard – isn’t sexy at all. It’s slow, tedious and won’t generally lead to big changes in body composition. Most people want to lose weight and get stronger. So this is a hard place to be in as a trainer. To earn a living basic business sense says we need to give clients what they want even though we know they really need something else. But once we have affected these seemingly minor changes, all of a sudden people’s progress can go through the roof.

If your posture is bad because you’re tight through your upper back and shoulders, it will stop you working hard on overhead pressing. But imagine we fix your tightness so you can stand straight and press correctly. I’m not kidding when I say I have seen someone double their press in only a few weeks, all from gaining mobility, not strength. I’ve watched someone go from barely a quarter squat to a full depth squat over a few weeks. In both cases – using more weight, or using more range – more work is being done. More work done = better results. So the time spent on these issues, while not seeming as if they will bring you closer to your goal actually make it much faster to achieve it in the long run.

Not only that, but reclaiming fuller ranges of motion satisfy one of my training longevity goals – the learning of new skills – enabling our body to feel as if it were ten years younger. Most of my clients are younger than me and don’t have my injury history yet I move better than all of them. While I’m in no hurry, I’m keen to see what difference another ten years makes.

In the last few weeks I’ve had guys competing all over the world in BJJ tournaments. For starters, a client of mine, Sophie McDermott, won the No Gi World Championship!

Sophia McDermott winning the world champs

Sophie has been on the scene for about 8 years in BJJ. She has been training with the best in the world and is the first female to ever be accepted to train at Rickson Gracie’s. Look out for my interview with her to be featured in an upcoming Oxygen magazine where we go over her competition career, diet and training.

On top of that we have just had the ADCC Gi trials here. With only 7 spots up for grabs – 2 female and 5 male – the guys from Dominance Mixed Martial Arts won 2 of them! With two other competitors making the final the results of dedicated competition practice are already showing themselves. Next year will see some massive changes in the way our academy approaches tournaments based on the success we have already had in the last few months.

I am also hard at work getting Dragon Door Australia up and running. Starting any new business is never easy, but I believe in the products having used them with such great results both personally and with my clients. To read the kind of thing people say about working with an RKC go here: http://www.dragondoor.com/instructor/1720 

The new website for all Dragon Door products will be located here: www.dragondooraustralia.com Our first order of books and dvd’s will be available soon and we expect our kettlebells before Christmas.

The new HQ for Dragon Door Australia

Obviously I am also busy training my clients, performing my own training (can barely walk thanks to a new squat specialisation program) and fitting out my new space which will be the HQ of Dragon Door Australia. It is located upstairs at 555 Victoria Street, Richmond. From here I will be able to train people and house all the books, DVD’s and kettlebells required.

Next year is going to be very exciting. With a new business – both PT and retail – along with two trips to the US to attend various courses I’ll barely have time to scratch myself. But just to make things a bit more complicated I plan to bring one of the best kettlebell instructors in the world, Senior RKC Shaun Cairns, to Australia to host a series of HKC’s. (For information on the HKC go here: http://www.dragondoor.com/hkc/hkc015.html). The HKC is a one day, 3 lift instructor certification. It is not a watered down RKC rather an eye opener for people who may be hesitant to commit to the rigours of RKC training – its nr everyone – but see the value in a shorter course to learn the principles of safe, hardstyle training and want to learn from the best kettlebell instructors in the world.

So everything is just great, sorry for not getting more words down sooner, but life has been hectic. I am hoping that now my office is set up I will have time during the day again to work on various online projects such as this.

With Christmas just around the corner I urge everyone to keep up their training, don’t get sloppy over the holidays and ruin all your good work. For anyone who wants a kick in the butt check this out: fat loss redux 2