Formosa Fitness

This is Lorna Kleidman and she's probably the highest ranked kettlebell lifter in the States. This is her warmup. Killer, isn't it? For most people that would be a full workout. Great work ethic and that's what we're looking to build with this style of training. Great job.

 Wow, what a week. Glad it's over. I capped off the week with this killer circuit:

double snatch

double squat

double clean and press

double swing

I attempted to do each one for 1:00 and rest :30 in between each. I did four passes back to back through this circuit. I attempted to use double 16kg but wow was that hard. I didn't even make it through the first minute of the snatches. I tried to do double 16kg through the first pass of the circuit but it was a killer. On the second pass, I switched to double 12kg and did the best I could. Even then it was difficult to make the full 1:00 on each and I only suceeded on the squats and the swings in some of the circuits.

Total workout time besides warmup and some stretching was 24:00 and I was wasted. I'm thinking of doing this every other day for the next month.

Try it out.

I'm looking to expand my product line and I'd like to hear some suggestions. What would you like us to carry here in Taipei? What would make your at-home workouts better?

Programs like P90X and Insanity get ripped apart on trainer forums, probably out of professional jealousy. These programs have been used by tens of thousands of people who positively RAVE about them, and that makes trainers green with envy. When that many people say a fitness program is good, I consider it my job to get a hold of them and try them out. I want to know WHY people consider them that good. It's just good market research. IMO other trainers ignore that at their peril.

Another reason for me to try this stuff out is that I want to try something new occasionally. Imagine you're a chef and you cook something pretty well. You cook it all day long and people say they enjoy it a lot. Great. But when you go home at night, do you want to cook that exact same thing for yourself every day? Probably not. You want to eat something made by someone else because you're tired and want some variety. Training is the same way. I eat my own "cooking" all the time. Sometimes I want to eat what someone else cooks. So I pop one of these DVDs in and turn myself over to them for a while.

Beachbody Insanity gives a great, hardcore workout. It's not a beginner or IMO even an intermediate workout. It's in the advanced category. The pace is way up there. LOTS of jumping and fast tempo work. No equipment needed. I like the no equipment format, although I did get the version that has a weight workout in it.

The exercises are a bit more atheltic/plyometric and a bit less aerobics-class type as compared to P90X. Tony Horton is too much an aerobics teacher for me with all that "look at the hands" stuff. The Insanity guy is a bit less goofy and I can see myself not getting so tired of him.

I haven't done even half the discs yet. There are a LOT of them. This program might get a bit redundant doing it six days a week as the program calls for. But if you did it, I can see people dropping a ton of fat along the way.

The nutrition guide is surprisingly good and mostly in alignment with the Precision Nutrition guidelines that I follow. The recipes are very simple and use mostly common ingredients. Combined with the program, I can see folks making a lot of progress with it.

If you're looking for an at-home workout that pushes the limits, Insanity is for you.

I created this workout for women beginners. Many of them have trouble pressing the 8kg kettlebell so the 4kg is usually what they want to buy. But 4kg is way too light for anything other than one arm pressing. That little weight won't engage anyone's hamstrings, making swings, etc. practically useless.

The solution is for the ladies to buy two 4kg kettlebells and do the workout as above. Doing double kettlebells will challenge them even when light weights are used because the body is under constant tension. This goes against the concept of single sided weighting that is so useful in kettlebell training, but who cares? You have to know when to break the rules. And double kettlebell work is pretty hard.

The sequence and set/rep scheme was deliberately kept as simple as possible. This is for beginners. I usually recommend this be done as a circuit and then repeated as needed. Rest can be taken between exercises but should be kept to a minimum. A break between circuits is highly advisable, especially at the start of training.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

So I posted something eariler today and after reading it again, I decided it was filled with self-serving drivel. LOL. Getting a little douchbaggy. So I deleted it. Next I'll be talking about "forging elite fitness" and "working in broad modal domains" while taking discrete swigs from a gin bottle. (Let's see who gets that reference, haha)

So before I become an even bigger in pain the butt, I'm going to take a break from posting for a week or so.

Here's some music to enjoy in the meantime:

I remember in my IMA days hearing that this kind of training was bad for you for one reason or another and that you couldn't do it into old age. I've seen more than enough examples to put that tired argument to rest and this clip is a good example. The guys is 63 years old and still going strong. And there's apprently not much that he can't do. Enjoy.

So here's the challenge: do 100 squats with your butt touching a basketball or medicine ball. Can you do it?

Many people have trouble squatting properly because they don't move from the hips. Sitting BACK into the hips takes the pressure off of the knee and allows for a deeper squat, giving better fitness results.

A thigh parallel squat is something that people talk about sometimes but usually don't do. It's too easy to fool yourself and that's where the ball comes in. Placing a ball (usually a basketball or medicine ball is used) under your butt and touching it on each rep insures that you are actually hitting parallel for most people. Those of you who are taller will naturally need to adjust the width of the feet in the squat to have the butt touch.

Many people claim that squats hurt their knees but not going low enough actually contributes to that problem. If you don't squat with the hip BELOW the knee (an actual parallel squat) the hamstrings don't fire, meaning the squat will only work the quads. You end up with a muscle imbalance from doing the exercise improperly. But actually, most everyone has deficient hamstring strength already due to sitting all day, then going to spinning class at the gym where they sit and think they're getting good exercise, and then going home to sit in front of the computer or the TV. All this sitting makes the hamstrings weak and tight. A full-range squat is a good way to start fixing that deficiency.

A simple program to get up to 100 might look something like this:
1. Work the squats 3 times a week, every other day
2. start with sets of ten, 20, etc., whatever pushes you a little but doesn't kill you. You want that last rep of each set to be hard but doable. stand in place over the ball as you rest for 10-20 seconds and then do the next set. Try to do 100 in as few sets as possible as you progress. In other words, you're trying to make 5 sets of 20 into four sets of 25, then three sets of 33, then two sets of 50, etc. That will get you to 100 in a fairly straight manner.
3. Place this exercise at the end of the workout for that day if this is new to you.
4. Use whatever ball or stool you have. You don't need a medicine ball to do it.

The fitness benefits of doing this three times a week is enormous if this is new to you. Properly done, this one exercise has the potential to solve a lot of problems that people have while burning fat and building muscle.

I don't usually like to do things over 100 reps, with a few possible exceptions. When I can do 100, I start looking for ways to make it harder.

Thoughts on how to progress the exercise:
1. Squeeze the quads or hamstrings while squatting. This gets you in touch with the muscle in a big way. For example, as you stand up really try to squeeze the quads. Squeezing the hams as you go down tends to be a lot harder for people to do but you can try it out.

2. Come up 3/4 of the way instead of standing up to full extension. This keeps the tension on the muscles constant. Very hard. A real quad builder.

3. Speed squats: try to do all 100 as fast as possible.

4. Vary the tempo. Do 10 really slow followed by a fast 20 then go back to 10, etc. This is a real leg killer.

5. Add light weights. This was the obvious one so I saved it for last. Even light weights can make this very hard.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them.

So there's the challenge. Can you do it?

Just ordered this so I'm showing off my new toy. This is the Casio HS-80tw stopwatch, and YES it does intervals. Tabata here we come baby! I was looking for an interval timer but the Seikos were very expensive. The GymBoss timers are okay looking but I wanted a stopwatch so I could look like a real coach.

I posted this on a discussion board and thought some here might appreciate the info. The topic was how to get started with a qigong or meditation pracitce.

One very important point to bring up IMO is that different parts of the spectrum work for different people. Eight brocades, standing, yoga, taichi, etc. all work the body and the mind. This is their strength and weakness. As a dual mind/body practice, they bridge the gap between the two but never quite reach the heights of either side. For example, no one I know would tell you that one of those is better than seated meditation for pure mind practice. Involving the body just creates too much interference.

Involving the body also means greatly lengthening and complicating the learning process. Learning to move correctly in qigong, taichi, etc. is much more difficult than learning how to sit in meditation properly. If you don't have access to a teacher, then a mind/body practice is much more difficult.

The advice to just pick one is spot on, but there are different learning curves for each so keep that in mind. If you're wanting more of a pure mind path, pick a seated meditation and get started. If mind/body is what you want and you have access to a good teacher, then pick that route.