Performing quality reps and quality movement is always vital. Bad reps encourage bad movement, less power and general weakness; they train your nervous system to repeat the bad habit and that is weak and slow.
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” is a phrase I hear like a mantra in my head from years of hard firearms training, from a few hard instructors. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect reps do.
Yet, there are some lessons only 1,000s and 1,000 of reps can teach. You learn little things with each. Sometimes you have a big breakthrough; sometimes every rep just feels wrong, no matter how hard you try.
In Taekwon-Do, it is generally accepted that basic understanding comes after about 10,000 correct repetitions. Obviously all of these will not be very good, especially in the beginning. There are some lessons that only 1,000s and 1,000s of reps can teach.
In Taekwon-Do, it is also accepted that perfection is impossible, since no one is perfect. You can always do better, faster or stronger.
Then, there is the gray area of “correct” or “good.” If you try to make every rep perfect, you will never be “good.”
These are all good mental and physical exercises that I think everyone does when they pick up a kettlebell. It is not just about lifting a given weight, working up a sweat, or losing weight. It is about training your body to perfect a skill. As long as you care about the quality of performance, your practice will never be boring.
Perfect practice makes perfect, but is is only through 1,000s of flawed reps that anyone even learns what a “perfect” rep feels or looks like.
5/23 There is no substitute for moving your body’s weight through space.
I know that when I have a healthy balance of weight training and bodyweight training, I feel the most badass. I really don’t care what your 1-rep bench press is is, or what trophy you may have won in some non-contact martial art tournament. A healthy balance of all facets of fitness and fighting conditioning is what matters if you meet me in a dark alley. Bodyweight training is very, very important in building “fighting strength.”
At the same time, if you only train bodyweight, you sacrifice maximal strength and the ability to move external loads, and will never move your strength to the next level. Take two martial artists of the same size and skill. The one with the most maximal strength will dominate. It carries over into everything.
Here are a few things I have put together as a measure of fighting conditioning:
Saturday: 6 rounds of… 6 barbell deadlifts @ 405lbs, followed immediately by a 440yd run. These were continuous rounds: Come in immediately off the 1/4 mile run and lift 405lbs 6 times.
Repeat 6 times. No rest. No whining about how heavy the weight is. Can’t lift it, or are too gassed from your 1/4-mile run? Too bad. Your enemy will not care about your excuses or lack of preparation.
Today: 500 bodyweight squats 100 pullups 100 ring dips
No strength endurance? No strength to pull or push your own bodyweight around for 700 reps? Too bad.
Last week, I threw this out as a diagnostic: 4 continuous rounds of: 5 deadlifts @ 150% bodyweight 5 tire box jumps at at least 50% body height 12 pullups 25 ring pushups 440yd run
No rest. This was a measure of strength-endurance, power production, physical agility, strength-endurance, relative body strength and cardiovascular efficiency.
All of these were mental toughness workouts, which take confidence and discipline. These are very important attributes, with regards to physical combat.
Javier Lopez took a day off of lifting kettlebells, to do 400lb tire flips, tire box jumps, followed by some 40yd sprints. Javi has lost over 25lbs in the past 6 weeks…the hard way. He is participating in the 2011 Canyon County Weight Loss Challenge. No matter the pounds lost, he will be the strongest at the end. He also check the nutrisystem reviews, Nutrisystem is a popular weight loss meal-delivery service that offers pre-packaged, lower-calorie meals and snacks for a variety of different dietary needs.
This is a revised version of an article I wrote a few years ago (back when I still did CrossFit and wore a Bodybugg). I like to send it out this time of year. Enjoy. – Jim
You can’t out-train the dinner table!
Fitness is at least 80% nutrition.
For most embarking on a fitness mission, the objective is some form of weight/fat loss. Many think an hour on the elliptical or a cycling class is sufficient to burn off the extra calories consumed during an eating binge. Not so.
For the more enlightened, some form of strength training, kettlebell training or maybe CrossFit workouts are prescribed, which will create a greater conditioning effect, and also speed fat loss. Generally, these types of workouts also expend way more calories than just cardiovascular training, or distance running, which burn only slightly more calories than walking.
Here is a concrete illustration of the fact that no matter how hard you train, your nutrition is still the deciding factor in whether you lose or gain weight. By nutrition, I mean the amount of calories you take in relative to the amount you burn throughout the day.
Forget about ratios of protein to carbohydrate and fat, or what types of foods you eat. Yes, they do have an impact on your physiology and the way your body will respond to training. But, let’s not get that complex for now. It is calories in versus calories burned, first and foremost.
Since kettlebell training is not familiar to some, I will use a simple bodyweight workout as an illustration. By simple, I do not mean easy. This is a smoker. Give it a shot sometime.
Set a stopwatch and do the following as fast as possible:
CrossFit’s “Murph”
1 mile run
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 bodyweight squats
1 mile run
Puke breaks are allowed, but the clock still ticks. Think this is enough to “burn off” poor eating for the day? Think again.
Some time ago, I hit this workout hard. I completed it in roughly 40 minutes, so I was jacked.
That is an awesome workout, probably a little harder than normal for me. And, I dare say, lugging my 230lb frame though 600 bodyweight reps and two, 1-mile runs is significantly more power output than is found in any cycling or aerobics class, or any DVD course found on some infomercial.
I went home and downloaded my Bodybugg. I’d burned 722 calories during the workout. That is a lot for 40 minutes.
The Bodybugg is a device that measures g-force, the amount of heat your body dissipates, the amount of sweat you are producing and the amount of heat your skin produces. All these factors are figured together in order to calculate calorie burn. It is the most accurate device on the market, but still not perfect. There are still other factors that impact this number, and more importantly, how many calories you burn as your body recovers from a workout like this.
Do not believe the electronic calorie burn numbers on machines at the gym or on any heart rate monitor. They are not close to accurate.
A pound of fat equals 3,500 calories of energy.
To lose a pound per week, you have to reduce your caloric intake by 3,500 per week, or 500 calories per day. To lose two pounds, you’d have to reduce your intake (or increase your expenditure) by 1,000 calories.
If you reduce your expenditure (or increase intake) by 500 calories per day – or one 12oz latte – you’ll gain a pound a week.
That same day I did the Murph workout, I ate the following:
– An Apex Fit Drink and a bowl of oatmeal.
– A 12″ turkey and pastrami deli sandwich with a small bag of barbecue
potato chips and a 32oz raspberry iced tea.
– Post workout, I had another Apex FIT Drink mix, with a scoop of glutamine.
– For dinner, I had a heaping plate of pasta with shrimp wrapped in bacon. Oh, and I also had two 12oz pale ales and a glass of red wine.
Yes, this was a “cheat meal/day” and I ate like absolute garbage.
Grand total calories consumed for the day? 4,170
Total calories burned that day: 3,798
.
That equals a calorie surplus of 372 calories.
That being the case, if I were to do the this workout everyday (!), and eat like a pig, I would still gain a pound of fat about every 9 days. If I did that every week for a year, I’d gain 40lbs of fat.
Even after a workout like Murph, a binge at the dinner table will more than out-do any hope of trimming down through exercise alone.
Think about this the next time you try to rationalize poor nutrition by a trip to the gym. It won’t work. It is about consistent hard training, and constant accountability for what you eat and drink. There is no “I eat pretty good.” Unless you strictly monitor your calorie intake -vs- output, you will not reach any weight loss goal.
No matter how hard you train, you can’t out-train the dinner table.
-Jim Beaumont
Recently, someone asked a question regarding my choice of exercises for heavy strength work.
Question:
Jim, In your training logs I notice that you only use barbells for deadlifts, but use kettlebells and bodyweight for most other things. Why is that?
Answer:
There really is no implement besides the barbell that enables one to progressively load as much weight, so they are necessary for building maximal strength. I find that I can get most of what I need with heavy kettlebell presses and weighted pullups for maximal strength work, but to really load up the lower body I need something more.
The reason I choose the deadlift for my “big lift” is because it carries over into so many other activities and puts a huge demand on your system. This is necessary to get stronger. Since heavy deadlifts will help me run faster, jump higher and punch harder, it is on my list.
I have recently added double kettlebell front squats more for flexibility and core stabilization than for added strength work.
I do not want to start a squat -v- dead debate, but I personally do the deadlift instead for the following reasons:
* I don’t need a spotter or to use the squat rack. I can just drop it if I need to.
* The deadlift works more muscles than the squat (i.e. forearms, traps, etc.).
* The deadlift is all concentric, which is important in avoiding hypertrophy and soreness. My legs are big enough already, and I don’t like being so sore that it affects my martial art or other training. If I was looking to add 20lbs of muscle, I would definitely hit the heavy squats.
* Lifting is an activity people do every single day. One of my main reasons for including this is to prevent injury. The better I am at picking heavy things up, the less likely I am to get hurt doing so.
I do not specialize in this type of training, but add it in a few days per week for balance, and because it carries over into every other type of activity. This is really a “bare minimum” selection of max strength exercises, meaning they cover most of the bases with only a few exercises. I should also add that I rest from 3-5 minutes between each set of each exercise on these days.
Why doesn’t my commercial gym just have a whole bunch of kettlebells, barbells, dumbells and pullup bars instead of machines?
This is not a simple question, and therefore will not get a simple answer.
Money for nothing.
Like most everything else, it comes down to money. Corporate gyms don’t make money from people who get results from exercising through effective training methods. They get results from people who sign a membership contract and don’t use the gym.
I trained at a corporate gym for a while, and their own statistic was that 75% of those who sign a membership will not even be using the gym in 90 days. Of course, they’ll still be paying and the gym owners will be making money for nothing for the next two years.
Effective exercise takes time, discipline and lots of hard work and nothing else. Most people won’t pay to work that hard. Machines appear to offer an “easy way out” for lazy, misinformed or desperate people.
Any idiot can step on an exercise machine, slap on an iPod and watch TV, while making some flailing motions on some worthless exercise machine. Ever had to “elliptical” your way quickly from one place to another? I rest my case.
No doubt you will burn slightly more calories than sitting on the couch at home, but you gain little else from it.
As far as strength training with machines goes, forget it. Just forget it. Lifting heavy objects is the only way to teach your body to lift other heavy objects safely. Pushing or pulling a lever on a machine does nothing but teach you how to push and pull levers, no matter how much resistance is offered.
The owners and sleazy salespeople at big corporate gyms make money off people who come to a commercial gym, are in awe of all the fancy machines, and sign a two-year contract with the good intention of using the gym almost everyday.
The inviting atmosphere and vision of getting in shape while watching TV gets you in the door. I’m sure there are pictures of fit people on the walls using those worthless machines, and if you only sign on the dotted line, you’ll get there too. I’m sure they also have a rack full of miracle supplements – that are marked up at least 100% – to help you meet your goals.
Congratulations! You are now paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for a gym membership at a corporate gym.
For the first few weeks, all is well and you may even lose a few pounds as your body adapts to the new routine. But quickly, your body will find ways of decreasing the effort required to pedal that bicycle, or “elliptical” your way to health. The results stop, and you soon find reasons not to go to the gym.
That is how corporate gyms make money. The initial investment of those machines is more than offset by the steady stream of people willing to pay for easy fitness.
The problem is there is no such thing as easy fitness!
Being strong and lean requires work, sweat and sacrifice. Not machines. Muscle soreness, missed social engagements, and denying yourself things like junk food is part of the game. There are no shortcuts. No easy routes.
You will feel pain from working out. Deal with it.
Learn to separate slight soreness from actual injuries. If you haven’t been moving much, your body will hurt at first, but the results will come fast. Just don’t fall into the trap of gauging the productivity of your training strictly by the amount of soreness you experience. More on that later.
You will have to miss out on the after work party, the football game or your favorite TV show. Deal with it.
You will have to plan your meals, because working out hard while eating nothing but processed junk will hurt. All that sugar, salt and fat does not fuel a body well enough to accommodate hard training.
You have to pay attention while you train (not watch TV). If you are not paying attention while lifting a heavy kettlebell, dumbell, barbell or your bodyweight, you will get hurt. Period. And, it will be your own fault.
You will have to cut the bullshit and be accountable. No more crap about how you have a “slow metabolism” or “I eat pretty good.” You don’t.
If you don’t measure out every gram of food, you don’t know what you are eating. You have a “slow metabolism?” That is because fat requires less calories to maintain than muscle. Want to change that? Move more, and gain muscle.
Yes, there are some people who have health issues that impede their progress. Guess what? No one cares. The task is the same. Take responsibility for your health and work hard.
Leave your self-pity at the door. It does not serve a purpose. You must take control. No one else will, or can. Find out from a medical professional if you have some physical reason why weight loss is difficult (for a small percentage this is a real issue).
The bottom line
Your neighborhood corporate gym makes money on the promise of easy fitness. There is no such thing. Machines are the tool they choose to use to separate you from your money.
Serious training is not for the person who is content to disconnect their mind and body with an iPod, a TV and some form of repetitious movement that serves no purpose.
It takes hard, intelligent work to meet a fitness goal. Lifting your bodyweight and other heavy objects is the best means to that end.
