Sorry I’ve been a blogging bum the past few weeks, or truthfully, the past few months.
Things have been super busy at the gym, which is a great thing in one sense, but it means that this blog slows down a bit.
I’ve also been traveling the past few weekends, so that’s why I haven’t shared any Good Reads posts, although I’m hoping to have a monster list this Saturday—don’t hold me to that, but it’s the goal.
Really quickly though, I wanted to let you know about a great new learning resource that Eric Cressey and Mike Reinold released this week called Functional Stability Training: Lower Body.
If you read this blog regularly then you’ll notice that I often like to highlight Eric and Mike’s work because I think they’re both really smart dudes. So it’s not surprising that I really like this collaborative project from the two of them.
Mike deals more with the assessment and rehab side of lower body training, while Eric handles the training stuff. The resource (I hate referring to learning resources as ‘products’ because to me that makes it sound like a hair care product or something) is split into nine different modules, with Mike sharing five and Eric sharing four. The modules are a mix of webinar-style presentations, as well as actual presentations filmed at Eric’s gym.
You all know that I freakin’ love me some lower body training and pick training legs over upper body ten times out of ten, so I was excited to check it out.
In fact, during the summer I wake up at 4am during the week, but last night—against my better judgment—I ended up watching several of the modules from 10pm until past midnight. Woops! It was worth it though.
I haven’t made it through the whole thing because there’s a lot of info, but so far I’ve watched Mike do presentations about assessing lower body alignment (which starred by friend Dave Rak shirtless….score!) and training the foot and ankle, and I watched Eric do a presentation about training the adductors for health and performance and another all about the deadlift, which you know I liked.
In the past I’ve heard some people complain about resources that didn’t have the highest quality cinema-style filming. Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the cinematography when I’m watching something training-related with the intent to learn, but just FYI, but if you’re the type that needs all sorts of glitz and special effects, this doesn’t have it. It’s perfect quality no viewing isn’t as issue, but they don’t jazz it up; all steak, very little sizzle, which is what I like.
Being super smart dudes, Eric and Mike talk at a pretty high level, so I probably wouldn’t recommend this to the general fitness person unless you already have a strong background in training. I think it’s a very valuable resource for trainers, strength coaches, and physical therapists though, and I’d recommend it highly. It’s a great price for what you get, so it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s on a big sale this week, so check it out while the gettin’s good.
You can read more about it and see all the different modules HERE.
Speaking of lower body training, here’s a video from a leg finisher that I did the other day: a 45 second (maybe a little more) skater squat iso hold. Burn baby burn!
It’s been well over a year since my last Random Thoughts posts, but I wanted to check in about a few things.
1. I’ve written a free PDF called 21 Practical Ways to Improve Your Training Today that you can get when you enter your name and e-mail address and sign up for my newsletter. I’ve been bad about updating my newsletter, but I’m going to try to be better and make it a good resource to share training tips and let you know what I’m up to.
The title is pretty self-explanatory so I bet you can guess what it’s about, but I think/hope you’ll find it helpful.
For those of you that already subscribe to my newsletter, I’ll just attach the PDF to the next newsletter I send out so you can read it if you want.
If you like the PDF, I’d appreciate if you’d let your friends though and help spread the word.
2. I made a few small changes to my website to help make it better, including:
-an Online Coaching tab. I’ve never really advertised my online coaching program, so not surprisingly, a lot of people don’t know I do online coaching. You’d think I would’ve rectified that by now, but apparently I’m a little bit of an idiot
In any case, better late than never. I do offer online coaching, so if you’re interested, let me know!
- a Testimonials tab. I must say it was quite humbling to receive such great testimonials from some of the people I respect most in the industry and people that have been great mentors and friends to me.
- the About tab is still blank because I think the idea of writing about myself is so lame, but I hope to fill this out at some point…maybe. No promises though, because like I said, I think it’s lame.
3. I’ve had two new articles go up on T-Nation in the last two weeks that I think you’ll dig.
Using the landmine has changed the way I feel about single leg RDLs. I’ve never quite liked how they feel with the barbell, but the landmine feels really good to me and it allows you to load it up a lot heavier than you could using a single dumbbell, and I’ve also experienced some really good success using it with clients that struggle to do single leg RDLs in general because the landmine seems to help with balance a little bit. I also just like the benefits you get from offset loading.
The only issue—and it’s a good problem to have—is that when you get better at it, it becomes tough to hold the weight. Using straps helps for sure, but only to some degree, and even if you hold the heavy weight, I’ve found that going super heavy with offset contralateral feels a little sketchy on the lower back.
So to circumvent those issues, I’ve done a few things to make it harder so that less weight is required.
One method is to start from the bottom up and do each rep from a dead stop. I feel these a lot more in my hamstrings too, which is nice.
Like this:
The other method is to slow down the eccentric. These really challenge stability.
If you’re fairly proficient with single leg RDLs but aren’t quite down with the barbell version, these might be something to try. I think they could potentially also be a good option for those with smaller hands and/or weaker grips that struggle to load any considerable weight on the landmine.
I personally like the first one a little better than the second, but both are good. You can also do both versions with the “cross body” setup I showed last year, but I personally don’t like that as much. Different strokes for different though, so try it both ways and see what you like better.
I’ve been uploading a bunch of new videos from my own training, as well as some awesome clips from my athletes, so be sure to subscribe to my You Tube page for more videos.
About a month ago I shared a video of my awesome 45 year-old supermom client Julie crushing 25 feet-elevated pushups with good form. That’s not a typo, so check out that post HERE if you haven’t watched it already.
Julie is going to be taking a break from personal training for the summer, so today was her last session with me for a couple months.
She’s been working really hard on stability ball leg curls, so today we decided that for the last set we’d rep out and see how many she could get (she’d already two sets prior to this).
She ended up getting 35 reps with good form.
Again, that’s not a typo. 35 reps.
Here it is.
I knew she was strong, but holy moly that’s a strong posterior chain.
The key on this exercise is to keep your hips elevated the whole time to ensure that the glutes are engaged. As a rule of thumb, you want a straight line from your knees to your neck.
When you do it correctly, it’s quite tough, a lot tougher than Julie makes it look here. As a point of reference, I have a lot of high and college boys that can’t do this.
