5 Things I Like: Brandon's Picks

Rogue R-4 Power Rack
I put this beast in my garage so I can get seriously strong without leaving Disruptive HQ. It has Westside hole spacing for the bench press range, comes with some band pegs, and will still be kicking when my grandchildren are gone.

The AeroPress Coffee Maker
This thing is magic. In fact, I gave up my french press coffee when I got the AeroPress. Home brewed Americanos for about 30 bones. That's hard to beat.

Inov-8 f-lite 192
These are my go to athletic shoes. Super comfortable, zero drop, fiery styles. What else could you ask for?

OlyCustoms Weightlifting Shoes CHECK OUT THIS LINK!!!
What's better than training in a solid pair of weightlifting shoes? Training in a solid pair of Iron Man weightlifting shoes. A buddy of mine is customizing your shoes, to your theme, and does a quality job. Check his work out on instagram @olycustoms.

Captains of Crush Grip Trainers
These things are the top of the line crush grip trainers. If you can close the #3, you are probably strong enough to pick up Mjolnir. Sorry Thor.

3 Ways to Stop Missing Lifts in the Gym

I wake up pretty early to get to work. I usually try to get ready in the dark to avoid disturbing my wife. This morning as I was leaving my bedroom to get the morning coffee going, in the dark, I missed the door and walked right into the door frame. It's not quite like hitting a brick wall, but it hurt, and it momentarily stopped my progress.

Some of you guys and gals are doing the same thing in the gym. No, you're probably not running into door frames (if you are, I bet it's embarrassing), but you probably are missing too many reps in your training. When it happens, sometimes it hurts your body, it always hurts your confidence, and it definitely hurts your progress.

Body

Failed lifts always seem to be more taxing to my body than made lifts. On top of that, you tend to be out of position when you miss. I rarely see someone miss simply because the weight was too heavy. It is almost always the combination of a heavy weight and bad form on that particular lift. Putting your body in compromising positions with heavy loads is a recipe for disaster in the gym. Even when you save bad lifts, it's inefficient and therefore puts a higher stress on your body which is harder to recover from.

A good example of this in my training is muscle ups. I'm not as consistent as I'd like to be (give me some credit though, I've done muscle ups over 250lbs body weight) and when I miss, it hurts my shoulders. Miss enough and I end up with some pretty achy shoulders for a few days which impacts the rest of my training.

Mind

As a competitor, missing lifts in the gym can get into your head before a competition. I had a few rough days before my last meet that resulted in some shaky expectations going into the bench press. For a lot of the people, a missed lift can lead to fear of that weight or that exercise in general.

Sometimes we talk about a lift or a weight "getting in your head." That essentially means you're afraid of it and instead of you working with the barbell to get stronger, it becomes your adversary. When the bar is your enemy, it always wins. It can always be heavier, it never gets tired, it doesn't need to recover, and you can't psyche it out.

Progress

You don't get stronger from the reps you don't complete. If you are doing a simple 5x5 program to build strength and you aren't getting all of your reps, you might not be getting sufficient stress to drive adaptation and progress. Even worse, if you're injured by missing a lift, you have time away from training where you not only don't progress, you actually regress.

Progress is one of the biggest motivators for people to keep training. When you hit a plateau, if you don't know what to do to get moving again, it can be a slippery slope back to the couch. No one likes banging their head against the wall trying the same lifts with the same weights over and over again only to fail over and over again.

So what do I do?

Here are three things you need to do if you consistently miss lifts. 

First, you must address your weaknesses. Are you missing lifts because your lower back is too weak? Lower back weakness is a huge culprit in missing the big lifts like squats, cleans, and deadlifts. If you can't keep your back extended under a load and tend to round or fold forwards, there's your sign. If that's you, it's time to start doing some weighted back extensions, banded good mornings, or other low back exercises to build up that link in the chain.

As a general rule, your weak links will be hamstrings, low back, abs, and triceps. I know that because, as Clint Darden says, everyone has weak hamstrings, low backs, abs, and triceps. Start chipping away at your weaknesses to stop missing lifts in the gym!

Second, back off the weight a little bit. This is almost too easy to give as advice, but it's something frustrated lifters need to hear sometimes. Don't let your eyes be bigger than your biceps. It's okay to back off the weight a little bit. You're not a failure, you don't suck at lifting, and constantly banging your head against the wall missing heavy weights isn't going to help anyway.

By resetting the load, your body will have some time to recover and allow you to come back to the heavier weights refreshed and ready to work. This is a common tactic, especially with newer lifters to keep adding weight to the bar over a longer period of time. As a rule, it's hard to get unstuck at a plateau than it is to keep moving intelligently forward by taking planned periods of reduced work to let you recover. It's better to take 3 steps forward and 1 step back for a long time than to take 10 steps forward and fall over dead.

Third, you need to improve your technique. This is the key to being more efficient and improving your lifts while staying healthy and safe. If you're experiencing pain in your training, 10 times out of 10 your technique needs work. Being more efficient in the lifts, or doing them as technically perfect as you can, lets you express all of your strength on a particular lift. It also lets you lift in the safest positions. As machines, we are designed so that the strongest positions we can put ourselves in are also the safest ones.

Really making strides in improving technique usually requires some coaching. I am a coach, and when my squat wasn't feeling right, I hired a coach to take a look at it and help me fix it. You can do a lot by filming your own training and coaching yourself like a client. On the other hand, I tend to second guess my coaching for myself, I can't be as objective as another coach can be looking at me, and I just flat don't always make time to look at my own training. By paying someone else to look at it, they have a pretty good incentive to spend the necessary time.

Conclusion

If you're regularly missing your lifts in the gym, you aren't going to make progress in your training. It's probably been very frustrating and can drive you to distraction. In order to stop missing all the time, address your weaknesses, back off the weight, and get some coaching to improve your technique. This path has worked for countless lifters, and I promise it will work for you too. By taking ego out of the equation and putting in the work now, your training will not only start moving again, but it will keep moving because now you know what to do when things are getting rough in the gym.

Goals: Are you too busy...

Go ask 5 people how they're doing. They'll probably all say, "Good." If you ask them one more time chances are they'll say, "I'm really busy." I bet you've told several people that you're really busy in the last week. And, I get it, you probably are really busy.

We have the mentality that if something is sitting empty that it needs to be filled. Don't believe me? Look at all the closets in your house. Are they full? Yep. Can you remember the last time you used something stored in them? Nope. Are all the flat surfaces in your house covered in stuff? Probably. Do you go by them thinking, "I really need to clean that stuff up?" I know I do. Why don't you go ahead and do it? Probably because you feel like you're too busy and there are too many other pressing concerns.

You probably do the same thing with your free time. I tend to look for things to do if I have some down time. I can tackle this project for work or do that big task around the house. Someone invites me out for lunch or we have people over for dinner to entertain for the evening. Somehow all of my time gets taken up before I realize I even had some free time. The result is that rather than doing the things that I think are really important, it all gets crowded out by being busy, busy, busy.

Are you doing the same thing with your body? I've heard this countless times as a coach. I'll tell someone that I train people for a living and they tell me all about how they used to go to the gym when they had more time. I usually don't press the argument with strangers, but when I have time to dig a little bit with friends I tend to find a common theme.

The simple truth is that people do exactly what they want to do. If they want to stay up late watching their shows, they will, and then tell me how they are too tired to get to the gym in the morning. If they don't want to cook food at home, they won't, and then they'll tell me how they just can't lose weight eating on the run.

Unfortunately, I've found that rather than being too busy, we're just too lazy to do what's important. Instead of spending the necessary time preparing meals ahead of time so they're ready during your busy week, I would really rather just sit and do nothing on Sunday afternoon. Instead of going to the gym in the morning and supercharging my day, I'd rather hit the snooze button a few more times. (Sorry if that stings a little, I didn't brand this  disruptive fitness for nothing.)

So what's the answer? A little bit of toughness and a little bit of planning. Set yourself up for success by preparing what you need beforehand. Make tomorrow's decisions today. That way all you have to do is walk the path.

Leaving the decision to wake up early to get to the gym is very difficult at 6am in your warm bed. Deciding what you will eat when you're hungry and have no food at lunch time leaves you open to all kinds of bad choices. Deciding what you will eat when you cook your food in advance lets you eat food you like that will actually fuel performance without having to leave it to will power.

Keep an eye out for more on budgeting decision making and tracking daily performance in a very simple way soon.  You can hang out with us at our facebook group and throw out questions there, follow me on instagram @disruptivefit, or drop a line in the comments.

You want me to do what!?

Have you ever been to the doctor for an injury? Maybe you jammed a finger playing pick up basketball or sprained an ankle on the curb at the grocery store spilling groceries all over the landscape. (No one ever gets hurt doing anything cool.) What did they tell you to do? I bet they said RICE it and take some over the counter pain medication. But what does it mean to RICE an injury? You savvy readers already know that it stands for Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate the affected body part. Are there more effective ways to deal with the injury? What is the best way to apply RICE to an injury? This is the difference between teaching and telling. The doctor will usually tell you what to do. It will be the best advice that they know how to give, because doctors do really want you to get better. This is where you really want to enlist the services of a teacher.

Here's a story to illustrate the point. I have a super awesome client who was having some serious shoulder issues several years ago. She went to the doctor who made a diagnosis that there was some damage to the shoulder that needed to be surgically repaired. She went under the knife only to discover that the diagnosed damage wasn't there and put her in pain for over a year while she recovered. She was told to rest and ice the shoulder, but never taught how and when to do it. She was told to stretch and improve mobility, but never taught how to do it. She knew she needed to strengthen the shoulder, since she couldn't even hold her morning coffee with the injured arm, but no one taught her how to train. Then she found a yoga teacher who took the time to teach how to stretch and stabilize her shoulder. A good physical therapist who taught her how to apply RICE in a regimented and productive manner. And I like to think she has a pretty good coach now who is working on building strength and work capacity so she can continue to enjoy a healthy active life now. (It's me.)

So why do I tell you the story? Because when you're looking for experts to help you take care of your body, you don't want someone who is going to just tell you what to do unless you're already pretty well educated. Instead, you want someone who can teach you what to do and WHY you're doing it. They can show you technique and explain it in a way that makes sense to YOU the client and student. The difference is huge! After learning some self care strategies like intelligent stretching routines, strength training, and injury prevention (I like to call that prehab) the client above is able to stay on top of what was once a life stopping problem.

If you are tired of being told what to do and never taught how to do it by experts who are not teachers, stick around. You can hang out with us at our facebook group and throw out questions there, follow me on instagram @disruptivefit, or drop a line in the comments.

Supertraining: 3 types of maximal strength

Being strong is more popular today than it has been since bodybuilding dropped the lifting component in the 70s. Guys are tired of being small and wearing skinny jeans, girls are tired of guys being small and wearing skinny jeans, and everyone appreciates the difference. Athletes in every sport from Tiger Woods to Walter Payton to Rich Froning, Jr. know the value of being stronger than the competition. So what are we talking about when we talk about strength? It seems like a pretty simple thing to define, and in some ways it is. Starting out simply, strength can be defined as the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to produce force in certain circumstances. This is intuitively how you would define strength. Let's nuance this just a little bit by splitting the idea of strength into 3 categories: absolute strength, maximal strength, and the training maximum.

Absolute Strength

Researchers talk about absolute strength which is represented by maximal involuntary muscle contraction. You would reach that state if we hooked some electrodes up to your muscles and turned it up to 11. Your body won't let you contract with absolute maximum force because you would literally break bones and tear muscles apart. For our purposes as athletes interested in getting stronger, absolute strength does not have much bearing on what we do in the gym or in sport.

Maximal Strength

In real life, we usually measure strength in the amount of weight you can move in different planes or exercises. Competitors in the strength sports measure strength in squats, deadlifts, clean and jerks, odd object lifting, and a variety of other tests. This is typically represented as maximal strength or the maximum amount of weight you can move with a voluntary muscle contraction. Voluntary muscle contraction means you are willing yourself to move, for example, flexing the muscles in your arms to do a pull-up. Maximal strength is also represented as a competitive max, since it is usually tested only in competition.

Expressing maximal strength through the competitive lifts takes a huge toll on the body and can take days or even weeks to fully recover from. For this reason it is normal for more experienced strength athletes to take time off immediately following a contest to allow for their body to return to normal after the high physical and emotional stress of a meet. In many cases returning immediately to training after setting new competitive maxes can lead to injury as the lifter is over stressed and does not have time to recover for the new training cycle. Trying to set new competitive maxes day after day would very quickly lead to overtraining and quickly going backwards in your training.

Training Maximum

Unlike the competitive max, the training max is the most weight that a trainee can move on any given day without significant psychological excitement. The training max will change daily based on a number of factors including fatigue, sleep, nutrition, and emotional state at the time of the training session. Training in this state is usually preferable. By calmly approaching your bar each lift, you can continue to train at a high level for the rest of your life. Getting psyched, screaming, and being slapped in the face might work for a competitive max, but it will generally lead to burn out or become a crutch for training in the gym.

Using a training max is very useful for newer trainees especially. Programs like Beyond 5/3/1: Simple Training for Extraordinary Results* by Jim Wendler and Brandon Lilly's The Cube Method* both encourage lifters to work with 90% of their competitive max as the basis for training percentages. This allows you to make progress while using submaximal loads which are less stressful to your body, especially your joints and connective tissue. It is also less emotionally and mentally taxing than knowing you have to go to the gym every day looking for a training 1 rep max. If you have ever trained in a system that requires that kind of performance, you know how it can take over your life. I recommend it only for the most dedicated competitors who will give the required effort to recovery and have time to train at that level on an ongoing basis.

Moving Forward...

Here it goes... we'll have a handful of other articles on the nerdy stuff and then start moving into topics like periodization, methods of training, Prilepin's table, and other Russian strength training secrets! If you have questions on this article, post to the comments or ask in our facebook group.

*If you choose to purchase either of these strength training books, I will receive a small portion of your purchase through an affiliate program. That being said, I have and recommend both of them to people looking to strength train intelligently. I will never recommend anything that I have not used and seen results from in the past.

I'm just not that into you

You know that guy right? The one that no matter what you want to talk about, somehow it's always going to be about him. That guy is your favorite... right? He can turn any story about any topic in life into a story about how he did it bigger or better or first. That's bad enough all by itself, but what if you were paying him your hard earned cash to talk about something else? What if you hired *that* guy to talk to you about your mental health? Imagine sitting down with a counselor and all he wants to talk about is his day, his interactions with his spouse, his friendships... you get the picture. It would be ludicrous! You're paying this guy to help you think through your own life, and he won't even let you talk about it. He should be paying you!

If that picture is so crazy, why do so many people do the exact same thing when it comes to hiring a coach? (Pay attention to this if you're a coach!) If you've ever hired a personal trainer to coach you, chances are good that this is exactly what you paid for. You had some very cursory meeting where you got to talk about your goals, and then they were soundly ignored in exchange for the only program that the trainer knows how to implement.  Or even worse, the trainer just superimposes his goals onto you. If he's training for endurance sports, then that's the only way for you to lose fat. If he's a bodybuilder, you better start liking long heavy sets of weights. Everything you said you wanted went out the window after your first 10 minute consultation before he grabbed the clipboard template and got to work remaking you in his image, because let's face it... he's just not that into you.

That is so frustrating, right? I got frustrated typing it out! So what should a good coaching relationship look like? A real coach is a listener first and an expert second. All the expertise in the world won't do you any good if it doesn't apply to the problem at hand. A good trainer will actually listen to you when you tell them what you are hoping to accomplish by hiring them. When you tell them, "I'm not looking to compete in powerlifting, I just want to get a little stronger and be able to keep up with my kids." They actually listen and design a program that will let you slowly build strength and work capacity while staying safe. On the other hand if it's building serious strength and sport performance, they will get you on track.

A great coach will even tell you if you're talking to the wrong guy! If you came to me and asked for an ultra distance running program, I would find someone who knew what they were talking about and connect you with them. It's your coach's job to get you to the goals that are important to you. It's their job to help you refine and articulate your goals. It's your job to make sure you find a good coach.

I like to think that I'm a pretty good coach. If you're looking for someone to help you refine and reach your fitness and training goals, keep an eye out. We'll be releasing an introductory program at a limited time monthly low price for training just as soon as the details are ironed out. In the program you will receive daily training tips and programming, personal access to me through google hangouts to talk training and goals, and nutrition tips to help you build the body you want. The group will be limited in size to maximize the amount of attention you can receive from a coach. If you are going to the gym, but have no idea what to do, or you've hit a plateau and need a few tweaks to start making gains again, keep us in mind. In the meantime, head over to facebook and join our group and start following me on instagram @disruptivefit.

Crush Your Monday!

I woke up this morning well before the alarm was set to go off.  I'm usually up at 4am to get to work on Mondays.  I looked over and the clock said 2:20am.  I couldn't go back to sleep so I got up, made some coffee, and sat down at the computer.  While I was sitting there, sipping coffee, I thought to myself, "Self... why would you waste this opportunity on hulu and facebook? Let's go train!"  And that's what I did...

Started with some squats up to 480...

Then a little less fun on the bench...

Overall, I got in a pretty productive training session before 5am today.  How are you going to go out and CRUSH your Monday!?  You can follow me on instagram @disruptivefit and check out our facebook group.  Get busy!