Building monster fitness

There are four core elements to fitness; Strength, Stamina, Endurance, and Power & Speed. To be a monster, you need to be competent in all four aspects, along with flexibility, joint mobility, and core stability.

Strength is the ability to do hard, heavy work.

Strength is the foundation of fitness and is typically represented and trained through the slow lifts; Squat, deadliest, press, bench press, and the squat clean and clean and press. Strength is measured relative to bodyweight.

Stamina is overcoming resistance repetitively with efficiency over time.

Stamina or work capacity is carrying heavy stuff farther or doing more work in less time. It is typically represented and trained through circuit (Crossfit style) workouts or through repeating an exercise for a set amount of time, particularly bodyweight exercises such as a military PT test.

Endurance is the ability to go long and slow over distance.

Endurance or long slow distance is aerobic exercise such as running, cycling, rowing, and swimming, across the water, air, and land.

Power & speed is the ability to overcome resistance explosively.

Power is typically represented and trained through short bursts of anaerobic exercise, including Olympic lifting and sprints. Power is the outcome of being competent in the other three core elements of fitness. Increasing your speed is to minimise the cycle of repetition.

Grease The Groove

I am currently following the Rite of Passage programme from Pavel Tsatsouline, working towards pressing a 40kg kettlebell overhead with one arm. As part of the programme, Pavel suggests that you can do ‘Grease The Groove’ (GTG) single-leg squats to supplement the main workouts.

‘Grease The Groove’ describes performing regular reps of a movement throughout the day to build the skill of strength while avoiding fatigue. Pavel suggests in ‘People to the people!’ that strength is a skill; to get stronger, you must practice strength consistently. He states that the strongest people in the world only go to max effort infrequently and for a reason such as competition. The rest of the time, strong athletes push their limits with weight and tension, rather than going to exhaustion with excessive reps sticking to 5 reps or less and always able to do at least one more each set.

There are two main ways to get strong:

Train heavy: If 100% intensity is the maximum you can lift, focus on reps at 85-95% of this.
Train often: around 50% of your max weight/reps, and training as often as possible while staying fresh.

The ‘train often’ strategy is based on stimulating a neural pathway, described by the Hebbian rule. The more you repeatedly stimulate the pathway by repeating a strength movement, the stronger and more efficient that movement becomes. You will develop the ability to lift more with the same effort in that specific movement. For example, if you can do ten pull-ups with good form, you would perform sets of five pull-ups (50% of your max) throughout each day. After a few weeks, you would retest your max number, and you will now be able to do more than ten. GTG is specific to the skill, and so focusing on form is essential, and the volume of reps will reinforce the technique you use.

If you are training to failure, you are training to fail.
Dr Terry Todd,

You should make the five sets part of your day, spacing them out with a minimum of 15 minutes rest in between. A common technique is setting a timer at the top of each hour during work hours. You could do a set each time you sit down or stand up from the desk. Another alternative is to do a set when you pass a place in your house or even each time you open the fridge.

Grease the groove

Pick an exercise in which you want to become stronger, and you can do between 5 and six reps.
Perform the exercise several times a day with two to three reps with at least 15 minutes break between each set.
Blast the groove with the final rep of the last set.
If you feel it the next day, take a day off and reduce the number of sets or reps the following day.

For my Single leg squat, I can only do one rep on each leg currently, so I need to find a regression that I can perform five to six reps with to use for my daily sets. I will use cossack squats for the next two-four weeks and then retest the number of single-leg squats I can do after all the practice.

Strength Standards and Assessments

I am currently reading Dan John’s excellent book Interventions. Dan John is one of the worlds top strength and conditioning coaches and presents his ideas in easy to understand and entertaining ways (think Yoda with dad jokes). The book lays out Dan’s approach when first working with a client, by first identifying a goal, then assessing where they are now, finally finding the shortest route between them.

A foundation for strength and conditioning, ideally developed at school and before 18 years old should contain the following:

The kettlebell foundation: Swing, Goblet Squat, Getup—
The Barbel foundation: Military Press, Front Squat, Power Clean, Bench Press
General Movement and mobility: Hurdle Walkovers, Farmer Walks, Cartwheels, Forward Rolls, Tumbling, Shoulder Rolls
Final stage: Deadlift, Back Squat, Sled Work, Prowlers and Car Pushes

Dan also recommends that everyone should learn to swim, ride a bike and tumble and play as many sports, games, and movements as possible. These are skills that you learn once should stay with you for life. If you cannot do anything listed so far, that is what you need to work on before moving on.

For most people, those who are not professional athletes or special forces soldiers, their focus needs to move to keep the body as young as possible for as long as possible. Building and maintaining lean body mass (less fat and more muscle) and joint mobility should be the focus. The challenge is to do what you need to do in the gym rather than what you want to do. You can use two tools to keep you focused on what you need to do; a coach and constant assessment. You should assess mobility via the Functional Movement Screen (FSM) or alternative once every six weeks and assess strength every two months.

Absolute strength is the glass. Everything else is the liquid inside the glass. The bigger the glass, the more of everything else you can do.
Brett Jones

Dan provides some strength standards for enough strength so that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical pursuit. The standards are relative to bodyweight and so are extremely relevant to endurance athletes like runners, cyclists, and triathletes. It is tough to get big and lean if endurance athletes eat intelligently and programming strength and conditioning on building strength rather than size, they will find that they end up leaner and faster than those that skip weights in fear of putting on size.

The book Interventions list the six fundamental human movements, push, pull, hinge, squat, loaded carry, and the sixth movement (everything else). A good strength and conditioning programme should include all six of these movements and target achieving the expected standards in each of the exercises first, and then working towards the gamechanger standards.

Dan John’s strength standards for men

Push
1. Expected = Bodyweight bench press
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight bench press for 15 reps
Pull
1. Expected = 8–10 pullups
2. Game-changer = 15 pullups
Squat
1. Expected = Bodyweight squat
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight squat for 15 reps
Hinge
1. Expected = Bodyweight to 150% bodyweight deadlift
2. Game-changer = Double-bodyweight deadlift
Loaded Carry
1. Expected = Farmer walk with total bodyweight (half per hand)
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight per hand
Getup: One left and right, done with a half-filled cup of water

For those of us who like to challenge ourselves with endurance events, the overwhelming message from top coaches including Dan John, Charles Poliquin, Percy Cerutty, and Pavel Tsatsouline, is a solid base of strength is essential to performance, health, and injury prevention. Start working towards the ‘expected’ standards for strength at a minimum and have a long term plan to reach the game-changer standards and you will find that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical activity you do.

Dan John has a weekly newsletter, a weekly youtube Q&A, many excellent books (I would start with 40 years with a whistle) and articles, and a workout generator website that allows you to enter the equipment you have available and the days per week you want to train, and it will provide you with a strength programme.

You can find the extended standards with regressions for additional milestones and the woman’s benchmarks on Dan’s website.

How not to get fat

The great thing about physical training is that if you show up consistently and do the work, you get stronger. Today was the first test day for my deadlift in years. I was successful with my target of 142.5kgs, the total amount of weight I currently have in my gym. This is not the heaviest I have ever lifted, but probably one of the most satisfying. I am older, lighter by at least 12kgs, and running higher mileage than ever but still able to move a ‘reasonable’ amount of weight. I am stronger in the bench and pull-ups than ever before too. More importantly, my body feels good.

At the start of the year, I set myself a challenge to take my training seriously. I do not have kids or other heavy commitments outside of work other than being a responsible adult and husband. I have taken advantage of working from home and no commute to train two times per day for much of the year, adding rest where needed. I have used this time to work on ticking off some strength standards as well as running faster. These include 100kg bench press, 13 strict pull-ups, I can perform solid reps of dips, press double 24kg kettlebells overhead for ten reps, and many others.

Despite two good training sessions per day, usually a 6+ mile run, in the morning or since the weather turned, at lunch, and a strength and mobility session in the evening, I have looked fit and healthy but not great. Part of this is my insanely sweet tooth, lack of discipline in my eating, and ready access to my kitchen at all times. Still, part of it is something most people working from home since march will be familiar with, I spend the rest of the day sitting down. About six weeks ago, I wanted to make some changes to what I do outside of this 60-90 minutes per day of exercise to try and look as good as I feel.

James A Levine defines Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) as ‘the energy expended for everything we do that is not sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise.’ NEAT is your general level of activity; the walking from your car to the office, taking stairs over the lift, and walking to someone’s desk instead of sending an email. If you are a knowledge worker and have been working from home for the last nine months, your NEAT has probably taken a swan dive, and your body has suffered for it.

I have been artificially adding back into my life this general activity. I started with an idea from Percy Cerutty; set of 10 sit-ups or more when I first wake up and then 5 minutes of activity to get my heart rate up after sleep. This 5 minute has been anything from some push-ups and squats to light kettlebell work, some stretches, or my latest choice of a few upper body movements with an exercise band.

Next, I started hanging from a pull-up bar for 30 seconds three times during the day. Once these were habit, I took an idea from the Gymfit newsletter and started to add short 4-minute movement breaks between meetings or after a couple of hours of intense work. The movements might be a few stretches, some bodyweight movements like 20 press-ups, some planks, or even a little sing and dance to Hey Jude by the Beatles. GymFit suggests setting a timer every 45 minutes and adding one of these breaks, but I have started to put my meetings to 50 minutes instead of an hour and use the few minutes between to do some movement.

Tomorrow, wake up and do a set of 10 sit-ups. Repeat every day for 200 days. After the first few days add one 30-60 second plank after your shower and before you work. Commit to adding movement breaks randomly and without planning. Your body will thank you.

Let me know how it goes on Twitter.