Simplicity

Simplicity is hard.

yesterday at the local Unitarian Universalist Church, where one of my housemates does snackfood for the children (and where I take my kiddos on Sundays) there was a bit of a bobble in the food showing up.

There's a lot of trouble with the snacks for the kids as, even though the church as a whole is focused loudly on eating a 'low carbon diet' with a focus on natural, sustainable, local foods- the children's snacks have traditionally been donuts, "go-gurt", "froot by the foot" and other such ....delicacies.

My housemate has been very instrumental in helping that change- to the point where you can almost guarantee the presence of whole fruit in the snacks.

Well, Simplicity is the problem. The kids are happy eating apple slices, or grapes, or carrot sticks. Parents who volunteer to supply food cannot handle this, though. There's a constant creeping need to add things- cheese slices, hummus dip, 7 kinds of fruit in quantities too small to share out well to the classes. Dips. Always something has to be added because just eating fruit can't be done!

This weekend when the parent who volunteered to go get food asked, it was a 5 minute circular conversation where everytime my housemate said "apples are in season, a 5 pound bag of apples is fine"- the response was "with what?" "can I get cheese?" "how about peanut butter?"

Simplicity.

As a knifemaker, I try and focus on simplicity in design and ergonomics. It's surprisingly hard. I practice, and regularly simplify a design I'm working on through 2 or 3 iterations.


In exercise- simplicity.

One of the things I like best about the Convict Conditioning program is that it is dead simple. You have 6 moves, each with 10 progressive steps. You just do them. it's helpful to have a pullup bar around, but it's very simple on equipment. Just do the reps. Slowly.

Kettlebells are currently going through a major period of complexification. There's really not but a few core movements- swings, snatches, getups, presses. Maybe deadlifts and hot potatoes, too.

You can do nothing but swings and getups forever and be in fantastic shape.

But lately it's like there's a new program variation, exercise, or 'system' every couple of hours.

I like the simple approaches:

100 morning swings.
lots of snatches twice a week.
20 minutes of 'messing around' twice a week.

or the brutal minimalist workout (TGUs, swings, and hindu squats)

The program minimum, of course.

One of the most attractive things about a kettlebell is simplicity. It's a gym in a cannonball. Why complexify it?

Strength Training

Lately, on one of the forums I frequent, there's been a lot of talk in a thread about getting in shape.

Apparently, and this is a shock to me, because I can't always see it in the mirror- I'm a bit of an inspiration to some guys. I love it because it means I have to keep going! It bugs me a bit because I'm...just a guy, yknow? Nothing special here at all.

There's been a bit of debate recently. One of the participants is nearing completion of a degree in exercise science (I'm not recalling the exact name, but it's a general exercise and not a physical therapy specific degree). He's come down pretty hard on the kettlebell, thinking it's a horribly dangerous thing.

Now, all my reading suggests that the rate of injury among gireviks is far lower than in many lifting programs. If you ave the basics of good form and focus on that, it's safe and has done wonders for my joints. I couldn't point you to a study that supports swings as a cure for carpal, but mine is gone.

All the old issues with my heels and knees in the mornings are similarly gone, but that could be following Pavel's advice and wearing combat boot as much as anything I get directly out of swings.

Swings- this is the big thing that is causing the whole misunderstanding. The guy is thinking of a swing as... a swing. It's not. It's a "dynamic ballistic deadlift." A nice phrase I made up. Oh, there's definitely a rotational force, but it's not like a chain and ball toss at the scottish games.

All my swing force is generated from my center. Aside from grip tension (yes, there's some shoulder in this, Anastasia (my kettlebell) is floating like a 35 pound butterfly until I bring it home at the top. and that's not a shoulder joint motion- it's my upper back and shoulder muscles popping everything to completion before I pull her down again.

One thing you see often is people flipping kettlebells at the top of the swing. If you had 200 odd pounds of rotational force pulling on a tangent out at that point, you couldn't DO a flip of the KB, right?

And I've found precisely seven reports of injuries involving Turkish getups with a kettlebell. Every one of them involves dropping a KB on your chest, and they all resulted in bruising. I won't stop doing TGUs because of that, though I might take care not to try and do a getup with a KB I can't do 15 or 20 presses with!

The TGU is one of those exercises where I fail to see how you can get an injury. You can overtrain anything, but I simply cannot do a getup with a weight that's too heavy for my joints. Remember that a TGU is a static press, and doing a getup with 16 or 24 kilograms just can't be considered extreme. Very few people would tell you that a 35 pound dumbell is inherently unsafe to lift.


Now, on to strength training. A lot of my fellow travellers are in a heavy fat burning phase. I'm stepping back into one for a couple weeks to burn through part of this next 5%.

One of the common cautions, based on nothing I can find that's factual, is that if you try to lose weight fast you are going to drop muscle mass. Well, thanks to rusty over at fitnessblackbook, I've got the answer.

Resistance (or strength) training. This is where bodyweight is probably king of kings. Drop those calories and do a full bodyweight resistance program and you are golden. And hey, those bodyweight exercises are going to get a lot easier with each kilo you drop!

Greasing the Groove

Monday is Progression Testing day for my system, I do one or two light sets early and then spend the day spacing out progression test cycles.

Today I've done:

09:00 light warmup

10:30 I progress tested the frog leg lifts. 3 sets of 30. Didn't have any difficulty making the standard, did surprise myself a bit as the first set I'd done last Monday evening was a little rough. Purely subjective, but I'm feeling like the GTG approach is working.

11:15 I progress tested on the straight bridges- Didn't make the progression standard, but did 3 sets of 30 (standard is 3 sets of 40). This is good, as I have an area to track progress in for a longer period.

13:00 I progress tested the half pushups. Hard, but doable. 2 sets of 25. Remember, the slow pace is a big part of this- I can pop out that many sloppy military fitness test pushups in a minute. the sets of 25 were closer to two minutes of work each.

I could hang back and work this level a bit more, but I'm going to go ahead and move to full pushups and milk that phase for a while. My arms are a bit stubby and the half pushups I'm doing, using a smaller ball, are closer to the full pushups prescribed in the next phase.


I'm going to update later, I need to get several hours of recovery time in before I do the jacknife pull ups. I'll go ahead and do squats at some point after, though I'm not expecting much difficulty with them, and am not worried about being a bit blown when I do the standard.


On a purely subjective basis - I have noticed a definite increase over the past 3 weeks in my 'comfort strength'- to the point where I'm having to be significantly more cautious than previously in some tasks. This isn't a "get off the couch" program for me, I've been working out since July, so I'm a bit surprised by the dramatic level of the general, overall strength increase.

I've been at this GTG style adaptation for over 3 weeks now, and I'm told that it's going to be too much to maintain, but thus far I'm not feeling like that is the case. I may be going slower at developing pull up strength than I otherwise would if I had a dedicated Naked Warrior style program for pull ups exclusively. It is simply my weakest area and I can't really tell if that's the case.

There's a built in balance, I think, in the CC program. In Naked Warrior, the focus is designed to be purely on max strength, though there will be some endurance gain from the frequency of the workouts. With Convict Conditioning it appears that beginning a new step in any one of the big 6 will promote a phase of rapid strength gain, with a following cycle of endurance gains. (Not that it's a 100% shift, there will obviously be a ratio that changes, never hitting 0 in either area.)

Truth is that in many of the areas I'm not putting much stress on the body or muscles just yet- and as that grows the reps go down, so I'm going to continue with this program for now and if I need to back off to 1 set done 3 times a day versus 2 sets done three times a day at some point, I will.

A new decade!

I started my new year/new decade shift in physical culture training a bit early, sure.

But it's the first day of the decade, the year, and the first official day of my 2010 goals.

Breaking down the simplest ones fast:

max set of 12 pullups
12 minute 1.5 run time
handstand pushups
one arm pushups
pistols
hanging leg raises

I'm on my way!



Today was an good example of a rought training day- not ebcause I trained extra hard but because I logged about 1/3 of what I did and did maybe 75% of what I do on a Friday. Maybe being in a hot tub at 03:00 had something to do with it!

But the lesson is there- record SOMETHING, do SOMETHING, even if you know that for one reason or another you just aren't physically going to manage a full day.

It has been 2 weeks and one day since I started the Convict Conditioning GTG program I've developed. Generally, if you are already working out and switching to a beginner level regimen you wouldn't expect a lot of change in that period of time.

Yet- in 15 days I've gained a noticeable amount on arms and chest, and somehow managed to drop some body fat - this was my real concern going in to such a light sounding beginner program. I'm still needing to focus on fat loss hard for another 20 to 30 pounds.

One thing I've found is that the program isn't as easy as it looks- it's dead simple, easy to motivate yourself, and not terribly time consuming. But it's not easy in the muscluar sense. The key to this is the speed and tension of the repetitions.

We all want speed, but paradoxically, up to a point, the way to gain speed is to move more slowly. That's because, as explained in Naked Warrior, up to a fairly advanced point, the explosive strength is going to go up hand in hand with maximum, or power, strength. (there's also endurance strength, which is another approach from the initial goals I have in CC)

So, go slow. Go slower. Go slower still. I am probably going to hang and milk the simple pushups steps of my progression (half and full pushups) for a bit longer than necessary because I can't go as slow as I can with squats. A set of ten 'half' pushups (really close to what most people think of as a full pushup) is 35-40 seconds depending on how fast I am with my stopwatch buttons. So I may milk these progressions for an extra few weeks until I can use a gymboss timer and do full 5 second repetitions in 2 sets of 25

So here you are, laughing at wall pushups, then, you really start taking 5 seconds for each one....150 times for the progression standard (in 3 sets). It's a bit of work, now!

The kneeling pushups in step 3, same thing. One of my friends was laughing at me doing "girl pushups", but she can't keep up with my gtg set of 15 done for my slightly speedy 3.5 second time.

On squats I'm not timing with a watch, but with my breath. very slowly down, a shorter pause since full squats aren't under a lot of tension at the bottom, and very slowly up. A set of ten runs me 55 seconds according to a friend. That's about right.

Leg lifts are running 39 seconds for 10 reps, nice and slow for the movement range. The next level is the last level before it moves to hanging work, and I'd like to let my pullup work catch up before I switch to that so I may work the straight leg rasises to 60 or even 80 second sets of ten. (Ten is purely arbitrary in all cases, being at this level a decent in-between the beginner minimum standard and the intermediate standard as a working set for multiple daily grinds)

With bridging, I go up at a fairly quick rate, controlled but not lingering. It's the clench at the top, holding that for a 2 count, that I'm looking for. It's crucial in all bridging work to control the motion coming back down, as well. The range of motion at my current level isn't tremendous, either. I'll likely start milking the meditative speeds at the half or full bridge level.

Pullup work is my weak point. To some extent, all upper body work is weaker on me, I have far better development in my abdomen and legs. I'm moving a bit too quickly on my jacknife pullups, though I'm still controlled and not ragdolling, and I have a clenched pause at the top. I've been considering getting some bands to use with the bar and modifying the step progression so I'm doing 50 pound bands instead of jacknifes, and then 25 pound bands instead of halfs. My only concern there is that standing on bands can have an impact on the tensing of the abs.

Slowing down the pullups is the hardest part, and the only realistic thing to make it easier is to rapidly drop another 20 pounds of body fat off. Even if I gain 5 or 10 in muscle, the strength gains will offset the 'lack' of weight loss.

I'm working at one quarter, possibly one fifth, the pace I have worked out with pushups and crunches and bodyweight squats in martial arts classes and military PT. I'm developing a desire to slow down my repetition pace at certain levels.

Sample day

I'm not intending to log all my workouts on the blog here, but I'm going to post today since it gives me some meat for explanations of my system using the Convict Conditioning book.

Workout 1 - 09:30
Half pushups, 2 sets 10
Squats, 2 sets of 10
Straight bridges, 2 sets 10

Workout 2, 11:00
jacknife pulls, 2 sets 5
frog leg raises, 2 sets 10
Headstand- up once for 20 seconds.

Workout 3 - 12:15
Half pushups, 2 sets 10
Squats, 2 sets of 10
Straight bridges, 2 sets 10

Workout 4, 15:00
jacknife pulls, 2 sets 5
frog leg raises, 2 sets 10
Headstand- up twice for 20 seconds.

Workout 5 - 17:30
Half pushups, 2 sets 10
Squats, 2 sets of 10
Straight bridges, 2 sets 10

Workout 6, 18:00
jacknife pulls, 2 sets 5
frog leg raises, 2 sets 10
Headstand- up for 20 seconds.

As I posted previously, I have 2 basic workout, which I'm doing 3 times per day each.

When done with proper tensioning techniques as Described in Naked Warrior,these exercises are non isolating and very much full body, though each one targets a given area of the musculature harder.

Tensioning involves irradiating muscle groups by tensing the groups around them, and generating power throughout your whole body. So while doing 10 half pushups may nt seem like much, doing them slowly and with full body tension makes for a harder workout- but with more power (so the individual reps seem easier in one sense)

In Naked Warrior, Pavel describes Greasing the Groove - it boils down to doing a limited set of exercises, often, with limited repetitions so you never approach failure points. The rep counts in my workout are currently higher than he recommends, but will go down as the intensity of the steps progress.

I'm currently, this week, working on not increasing repetitions, but increasing the length of time per rep, tension, and improving form.

The one exercise here that has no repetitions is the headstand- it's static. Generally speaking the inverted work, working towards the one armed handstand pushup, isn't something you need to start until you are around step 6 on every other technique. For purposes of acclimatizing myself to inverted work, and training my balance and comfort, I'm taking this really slow and just getting up and holding a headstand a few times a day. I'm purposefully not pushing this one, though I intend to get to some form of partial handstand pushup before March.

I often squeeze my last two workouts of the day into a shorter timespan, often with a walk or jog in between. I do almost all of my eating in the evening, as per the Warrior Diet regimen, and find that I feel better after if I go to the table with a bit of muscle burn.

2 weeks in review.

I started this blog late, since I wasn't sure if I wanted to track myself this publicly. So we're still playing catchup over here.

I started the Convict Conditioning program on the 16th of December, and yes, I've noticed gains over the past couple of weeks.

My start was with a few rounds of trying out each of the step one moves, then progression testing anything I was comfortable with. for example, the step 1 in pushups is wall pushups, for 3 sets of 50.

The step 1 progression tests are all similarly easy, and hard. One of the focal points of the program is doing each rep dead slow, smooth, and with a high tension pause at the "bottom" of the movement.

As I posted on a forum:

"CC has a progression, a plan. It's mentally dead simple. Do this exercise. Do it slower. Do it again. When you can do enough of them, slow enough, move on."

From there I needed to design a daily workout program. The programs in the CC book are all good for people who are either adding on a bit of bodyweight strength training to an existing program, or looking for a classic "work hard, rest for a day or three" workout plan.

For example, the New Blood and Good Behavior routines would work in well with Pavel's Program Minimum from the excellent book Enter The Kettlebell. Doing a twice weekly 15:15 cycle from Viking Warrior Conditioning would match up perfectly with the Good Behavior plan, as well.

I'm doing neither, and I have a few reasons. First, I need a daily system or I'll fall off the wagon. Second, I want to focus on the early progressions and get my body used to doing the particular types of work involved before I (possibly) scale back the workout days at more advanced levels where I'm going to hang out for a while. Third, some of my goals are very specific in bodyweight areas and I want to focus n those for a while before I add back in a VWC snatch protocol.

I've devised a plan where I grease the groove- do several light sets each day- of all exercises.

What I'm doing is

workout 1:
2 working sets of pushups
2 working sets of squats
2 working sets of bridges

workout 2:
2 working sets of pullups
2 working sets of leg raises
2 practices of inversion.

Each workout 3 times per day.

The inversion is at a level where I think for the next several months I'll be doing static head, crow, and handstands without doing any reps of pressing. I'm building a balance and awareness in this area.


The number of reps in any set is somewhere between the beginner standard and the intermediate standard.

For example, using half pushups (my current level on the one arm pushup progression) the beginner standard is a set of 8, the intermediate standard is 2 sets of 12. This week I'm doing sets of 10, 6 times per day.

As I progress, the reps get fewer on the standard, and I'll get closer to the true Pavel style repetition counts. By the time I'm doing the half one armed pushup, I'll be aiming for working sets of 5-10, and might possibly lower than to 3-5.


Monday I do an extra light pair of workouts and then the rest of the day is dedicated to progression tests.

this past Monday I progression tested pushups, squats, and leg lifts. I did a max test of pullups, but knew I wasn't ready to progress. This is done for tracking. I decided against testing the bridging section because I know I need to milk the current level a bit longer, and I'm not progression testing inverted work for another few weeks.