The goal here is to build speed, agility, strength, and the stamina to go all day long. While these goals all make sense and should be priorities, they cannot all be trained simultaneously.

Train for Sport Over Toughness

Mental and physical toughness is a valuable goal, but it can be developed without sacrificing development of speed and agility. Athletes who train in an aerobic fashion with infrequent to non-existent breaks are not getting faster or more agile. They’re not even being conditioned in a way that translates to football, basketball, baseball, or any primarily anaerobic (fast glycolysis) or phosphate system driven sport. Training in this way would only help them in a sport where they were expected to move at 60-70 percent effort for a long time with no breaks. This is not characteristic of most sports.

For example, the average football play is 4-7 seconds, with 35 seconds between plays. Baseball players are routinely asked to give a quick burst of energy, followed by a long complete recovery. This training approach completely misunderstands the way in which programs develop speed, agility, and sport-specific conditioning.

Form and Function Will Beat Fatigue

In order to improve speed and agility, athletes must perform drills with good form, and each action should be done at 100 percent effort. Therefore, each repetition should be done from a non-fatigued, fully recovered state. Sure, we demand that athletes give 110 percent in each drill, but as anyone who has ever worked out to exhaustion knows, you aren’t as fast or strong in a fatigued state. This is why coaches make the decision to give an athlete rest in a basketball game or why the star running-back usually does not play defense for the whole game.

For an athlete to be better conditioned to withstand fatigue, their conditioning must replicate the physiological demands of their sport. For most sports (cross-country being an obvious exception), running for miles will do little to nothing to improve an athlete’s ability to thrive or resist fatigue late in competition.

Many of you might be thinking, “In a game, the athlete will be tired and have to put together these movements at top speed.” This is true. However, the athlete will rely on improvements in speed or agility that were created in a non-fatigued state. Once these movement mechanics – increased neuro-muscular recruitment, rate of motor units firing, reduced stretch reflex time, and so on – have been programmed, then the improvements will be more available on the playing surface, even in a fatigued state.

The following factors will allow your athletes to use these improvements to greatest benefit:

1. The amount of repetitions and practice they’ve put into the speed and agility drills while in a non-fatigued state
2. How well conditioned they are to handle the physiological demands of their sport

Plan to Win by Planning Smart

So what about making your athletes tougher and better conditioned for the sport? This is an essential element of any off-season program, but it requires a little more creativity. The idea that, “If it is hard, then it is good for them” is the recipe for a tough team that is weak and slow. We are smarter than that.

The first step to designing a conditioning plan is to plan. The plan should follow a periodization scheme, just like the resistance training plan. It should also match the physiological demands of the resistance plan.

Here are some pointers:

• Pair interval conditioning with high-rep hypertrophy phases and pair your low-rep max strength phases with short sprint, agility, and speed work.
• As you approach the season, make sure the conditioning builds on past phases while spending a bulk of the time replicating the metabolic demands of the competitive season.

Too many people just throw exercises and gadgets at their athletes. A good plan is organized and builds on itself while matching consistent training goals. It also builds to a comprehensive end point. Without these essential elements, the plan will underachieve, regardless of how good the exercise selection or equipment may be.

3 Must-Dos for Game-Ready Athletes

Here is a quick summary of the elements coaches must understand to get their athletes faster, more agile, and in playing shape:

1. Separate Out Training Variables

Speed, agility, and conditioning should not be trained simultaneously until close to competition. Agility work and speed work are not the same thing as conditioning. They require adequate recovery.

Use the principles of general adaptation syndrome (GAP) to guide your programming and recovery:

• Shock, Alarm, Resistance: This is how the body reacts to appropriate training. With proper recovery, the body enters the resistance phase and becomes stronger and better adapted.
• Shock, Alarm, Exhaustion: When not properly recovered, the body breaks down. Training has an effect like a sunburn. If the skin is burned and you don’t allow it to heal before subjecting it to another long bout in the sun, it will break down even more. Allow it to heal and it adapts with more melanin so that it is more resistant to future sunlight exposures. The body reacts similarly to resistance training and conditioning. ¹

2. Use Progressive Overload

Start slowly and with perfect form. Hardwire this. Then increase volume or load. Do not attempt a program just because a successful athlete does it. High-level athletes can handle a lot more volume and technical skill-dependent exercises. The number one reason for not realizing big results in the weight room is poor form. Start with mastering the fundamental movements.

3. Remember: Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands

The body will only adapt to specific challenges that it faces repeatedly. In short, train for the specific improvement you want to see. Don’t make a shortstop run a few miles every week. This is also why ground-based training is far superior to a lot of the latest trends, such as stability balls and wobble boards.

World-renowned trainer Joe DeFranco elaborates on the training implications of this approach:

“In all of sports it is the athlete that moves while the playing surface remains still. Because of this, true ‘functional’ training should consist of applying resistance to an athlete while his/her feet are in contact with the ground. The athlete must then adapt to those forces.”²

So… stop running miles!

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• Everything You Need to Know About Speed Training
• The 4 Most Important Exercises You’re Probably Not Doing 
• Conditioning for Strength Sports: Optimizing Both Strength and Conditioning
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. Brad Schoenfeld, The M.A.X. Muscle Plan. New York: Human Kinetics, 2013.

2. Joe DeFranco, Joe D. Talks Strength. Industrial Strength Podcast episode #15.

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock

Photo 2 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photogrpahy

The post Plan to Win: Speed, Stamina, and Agility for Sport appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When do you work out? Anyone who exercises consistently has an answer to this question. The people who build sustainable health and fitness aren’t the ones bebopping into exercise classes on random evenings, and convenient long weekends. These people have a plan. Ask them when they work out and they’ll tell you:

• “First thing in the morning before the family is up.”
• “On my way to work. I shower and get ready for work at the gym.”
• “On my lunch break.”
• “Right after work, before I get home.”

Those who struggle to consistently exercise usually will cite being too busy as the reason. It stands to reason. Even if you are doing a very efficient 30 minute or less HIIT routine, the time getting ready to go to the gym, driving to the gym, locking up your valuables, and making small talk will usually accumulate to well over an hour. But you can fit in exercise so much more efficiently if you ditch the gym and split your workouts into a few short blocks throughout your day. We are humans after all. Like all animals, we’re made to move more than just once a day.

I’ve advocated this approach in my five-alarm and four-alarm workout articles, but these plans both assume that exercises must be equipment-free if you are going to fluidly fit them into the openings of your day. Bodyweight exercise is great, but options become even more fun and diverse if you master the kettlebell. This simple tool offers unparalleled effectiveness. If you keep a kettlebell by your desk, you could make tremendous strides towards any fitness goals. In fact, spreading exercise out over a few quick kettlebell-centered blocks may be an even more effective way to train than the standard all-at-once approach

As I argued in Learn the Kettlebell to Unlock Freedom, the kettlebell is the most effective, efficient, and portable tool in fitness. It tones, stokes endurance, enhances mobility, and builds functional strength and power. Its unique design brings a powerful training effect and allows for the fun of continuous skill improvement. Of course, it is still a great tool for those simple, easy meat and potatoes exercises.

Making Your Plan

Once you master the kettlebell (I recommend my Complete Kettlebell Program), the only things left to figure out are:

What three or four times of day work best?

• First thing in the morning, prior to lunch, before heading home
• Just find a fourth time or settle at three times
• Set phone alarms or some other predictable cues to trigger the exercise. Consistent action is based on habit and the science of growing willpower. For more help with this, see my free ebook, The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery.

How do you plan on storing your kettlebell at work?

• Under your desk?
• In the car?

What work clothes are easiest to exercise in?

• Look up work clothes you can exercise in for your gender. There are tons of women’s options. Men, it is getting better, too. Thank goodness for stretchy golf pants.

How can you reduce the self-consciousness associated with being the weirdo who works out?

• You can close the blinds if you have an office. You could step outside or identify a rarely utilized space. Or, you could just not care. You are awesome, after all.

What kettlebell workouts can you do and how will you structure your plan?

• There are tons of options. Once you’ve mastered the basics, try mixing and matching the following six to ten-minute blocks.

Kettlebell Exercise Block 1 Options

Each block should begin with this very quick kettlebell warm-up:

• 5 per side Kettlebell Halos
• Kettlebell Squat Pry Series
• 3 per side 1-leg Kettlebell RDL
• 5 Push-Ups

This block is, ideally, done first thing in the morning. Because this is prior to getting dressed for work, you have the opportunity to get a little dirtier. I recommend taking this opportunity to do Turkish get-ups (TGU), the king of all exercises.

Options include:

• Set a timer for six to eight minutes and continuously alternate between right and left hand TGU
• 3 rounds of 1 right-hand and 1-left hand TGU with 10 per side kettlebell rows

Kettlebell Exercise Block 2, 3, and 4 Options

Option 1

3 rounds of:

• 5 per side Kettlebell 1-leg RDL Rows
• 3 per side Kettlebell Snatch or Kettlebell Strict Press

Option 2

• Six to eight minutes of two hand kettlebell swing intervals. Start at 30 seconds of work and 30 seconds of rest and work towards less rest.

​

Option 3

• Six to ten minutes of constant suitcase carries.

It is well documented that outdoor breaks boost energy and work productivity. Head outside and do this single-arm farmer’s walk variation. Just pack your shoulder down and back and grip the bell tightly. Walk. When your grip loosens switch hands. Continue in this manner until you are out of time.

Option 4

• Six to ten minutes of single-arm kettlebell swings — 10 left, rest, 10 right, rest, repeat until time elapses.

Option 5: The Gauntlet

• 15 per side 1-arm Kettlebell Clean, Reverse Lunge, Press (alternate hands after one rep of all three exercises.)
• 20-30 Two-Hand Bent-Over Rows

Option 6

Five to ten minute AMRAP:

• 10 Kettlebell Goblet Squats
• 5 Push-Ups

Option 7

Two-Exercise Tabata:

• Choose any two kettlebell exercises to alternate between and do eight rounds of 20 seconds work/10 seconds rest.

Kettlebell Fitness Is Good for You

There are many other options, but these exercise blocks should be more than enough to get started. Any day that included three or four of these options would be an extremely active, healthy day. That is the benefit of learning the kettlebell — the most portable, powerful tool in fitness. It is a skill that unlocks a lifetime of fun fitness.

Featured Image: Srdjan Randjelovic/Shutterstock

The post Keep a Kettlebell At Your Desk: The Four Alarm Kettlebell Program appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

According to Dan John, there are five fundamental movements:

If you are into strength training, you’ve heard about the fundamental movement patterns—the natural human movements that most trainers believe all humans would, ideally, be able to demonstrate and load.

According to Dan John, there are five fundamental movements:

• Squat
• Hip Hinge
• Push (press)
• Pull (row)
• Loaded Carry

Dr. John Rusin adds a sixth: the lunge.

And senior SFG Delaine Ross takes Dan John’s original five, excludes Rusin’s addition of the lunge, and adds two others—rotation and counter-rotation.

Depending on how much you want to split hairs, there are probably fifteen or more fundamental movement patterns for which you could make an argument.

Furthermore, you could create subcategories, splitting presses and pulls into vertical and horizontal, and single-leg exercises into linear, lateral, and vertical movements.

Such categorization schemes are helpful for understanding training principles and building balanced, well-organized training programs.

But these schemes also run the risk of confining us to a needlessly limited exercise set.

There are many apparent exercises that nearly every human would engage in in a natural environment, but which do not extend from a superficial commitment to any fundamental movement pattern models.

What Most Strength Programs Feature

Most programs exclude the loaded carry and add general core work in its place, such as:

• Squat variations
• Deadlift variations
• Press variations
• Pull variations

The decision to sub out loaded carries speaks to the problem. This choice is usually substituted because core work accomplishes many essential effects the same as the loaded carries. And, like the rest of these typical exercises, you can do them in a confined place. But that’s the problem.

The reason fundamental movement patterns are basic is that they contribute to accomplishing a once-essential human job.

Exercise should serve a purpose, and it’s what makes training interesting and relevant. Think about the sort of strength and power-related jobs in which humans would naturally engage.

They probably wouldn’t do three rounds of picking up heavy things (deadlift) or squatting them five to ten times. But they would pick up heavy items, walk them to a different location, and set them down, just as we do whenever we have to move houses, unpack groceries, or participate in a construction project.

Likewise, as any parent who has taken young ones to the park without a stroller knows, humans have spent an enormous amount of time and energy carrying young children.

And, most humans throughout time probably wouldn’t hang from a branch and pull their chest to it repeatedly—a pull-up.

But, they would frequently climb trees, pull themselves over obstacles, and pull against other people. For most of history, whenever humans applied strength and power, they would combine it with some form of locomotion.

They wanted to move their body or an object.

Spice Up Your Training With a Few Simple Substitutions

Thus, adding locomotion and a job is a great way to enhance your training and apply it to your life.

I suggest a few simple substitutes. You’ll note that these movements are typically excluded from workouts that focus on the fundamental movement patterns, yet they are all fundamental movements by any logical definition.

• Instead of squatting: Try sprinting, jumping, sled pushing, or sled pulling. Do you not have a sled? Load up a wheelbarrow, and be careful not to spill.
• Instead of typical deadlifts and anti-rotational core work: Try picking heavy items up and moving them. You can use dumbbells, kettlebells, loaded barbells, sandbags, bags of bricks, paint buckets, garbage cans full of odd items, or try carrying other people—a once vital skill. Carry things upstairs, across parks, or wherever.
• Instead of presses: Try throwing med-balls and other objects, adding crawl variations, or moving heavy objects by pushing them. If you’ve ever tried to move a power rack or remove a stubborn tree, you’ll know how exhausting this last one can be. We can simulate this exercise by loading the hell out of a sled.
• Instead of rows and pull-ups: Try climbing ropes, trees, and odd objects, connecting a rope to something heavy and pulling it towards yourself hand over hand, swinging between bars, and pulling yourself on top of and over obstacles.
• Instead of rotational core work: Try hanging from a bar or tree branch and pulling your feet to either side to hook a leg over the bar. MovNat’s hanging side foot lift is a great place to start. Try throwing med-balls and heavy items rotationally.

Most of us begin lifting as athletes seeking a targeted manner of adding strength and power for our sports.

In that context, the sport provides real-world chaos, and we want the best plan possible for adding strength that we will learn to apply in practice. But once sports stop, our workouts need to fill in that gap.

We can make our workouts more fun and beneficial by including elements that apply strength in natural human situations.

None of this is novel. The man who gave us those five fundamental patterns, Dan John, now talks about a sixth movement, which he calls Integrity With the Environment. John recommends splitting this sixth movement into two categories:

1. Get on the ground: Engage in the horizontal Environment

• Rolling
• Crawling
• Get-up variations

2. Brachiating: Engage in the Vertical Environment

• Monkey bars
• Rope climbing
• Any climbing variations

The point of all of this is to prompt you to expand the bounds of your typical lifting plan, even if just one day a week at first. I have a few work-outs that are an excellent place to start:

• The Locomotion Workout
• Three Summer Challenges
• Fit for the Holidays Challenge Week 3 (Outside the box training challenges and a Turkish get-up tutorial)

These may make you sore and tired in new exciting ways.

But, more importantly, they’ll stoke your creativity and reconnect you to your environment. Strength training will have a purpose again. This purpose tends to breed creativity, fun, and motivation.

The post Go Beyond the 5 Fundamental Movement Patterns appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

We praise what matters. In a famous study, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck found that students were far more likely to persevere through challenging problems and bring those problems home to work on more when they received praise for working hard rather than being smart.

Praising effort produced a hard-working identity that fueled people to persist through difficult challenges.

By contrast, praising fixed traits like intelligence produced a fragile identity where students avoided challenges because they worried that they would no longer look smart if they struggled.

Similarly, a London Business School study found that those receiving praise for their decision-making skills were 40% more likely to stick with bad hires.

Even more, those receiving praise for their creativity were more likely not to escalate their commitment to bad hires.

Praising creativity made workers more open and adaptive, while praising decision-making skills made people rationalize why their decisions must be right.

These examples show that certain identities tend to cage people and limit their options, while others are the springboard to adaptability and success.

I’ve found toughness to be the latter.

Toughness Creates Motivation and Willpower

Toughness was among the most important values instilled in my youth.

My father told stories of tough people, glorified tough movie characters, and praised any behavior he deemed tough. Thus, I wanted to be tough.

As I got older, I developed a correlation between toughness and discipline and between toughness and exercise. Missing a planned workout or even failing to study enough became a form of wimping out.

There are many pitfalls to rigid, overly tough machismo, but the toughness identity is the most powerful when well defined and balanced by other values.

• Toughness creates motivation and willpower.
• When you value toughness, health goals are just a trade.
• Tough people will trade a few minutes of discomfort to be stronger, healthier, more empowered people.
• You can interpret almost any desired behavior in terms of toughness.
• You know that that cold shower has benefits and will leave you feeling better all day. So don’t wimp out.
• You know that 10-minute morning movement habit primes you for a better, more active day.
• Tough people do the work, even when they don’t feel like it.
• You know that an occasional intermittent fast can help you develop a better relationship with hunger.

Then what is stopping you other than your unwillingness to withstand short-term discomfort for a more significant cause? Just convert your goals into the currency of toughness, and then following through becomes the only behavior that makes sense.

Perhaps this is why every culture, until very recently, placed a lot of value on toughness.

There was no other option. The work that society depended upon required a population willing to persist through discomfort on behalf of a greater cause. But advanced modern cultures seem to be wholly oriented around the effort to make life as comfortable as possible.

We’ve removed any expectation of toughness only to find that people avoid the actions and experiences essential to living well without it. Without a capacity to intentionally endure discomforts, life becomes superficial and minor pains are amplified in proportion to our growing sensitivity.

Whether you buy into the power of toughness or not, it shows how you can use your values to stoke motivation.

All you have to do is convert your desired behavior into the language of what you value. Then not following through is a threat to an identity that you cherish.

For example:

1. If you highly value being a creative person, then any health or fitness goal is just an opportunity for you to figure out how to manipulate your situation to succeed.
2. If you value being a good parent, the best way to commit to your health and fitness goals is to remember that your kids aren’t likely to be healthy unless you are first.

Strong parents make strong kids.

The Power of Heuristics to Motivate Behavior

Heuristics, like this one, are another powerful tool that can help groups and individuals cultivate more empowering identities and clarify the behaviors you want to associate with those identities.

As Daniel Coyle explains in his book, The Culture Code, successful groups “focus on creating priorities, naming keystone behaviors, and flooding the environment with heuristics that link the two.”

His book is full of these. Here are some of my favorites.

Heuristics of the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team:

• “If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere.”
• “Leaving the jersey in a better place.”
• “Pressure is a privilege.”
• “It’s an honor, not a job.”

Heuristics of KIPP charter schools:

• “Read, baby, read.”
• “Everything is earned.”
• “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching.”
• “No shortcuts”

To create behavioral change, I recommend borrowing a couple of popular heuristics or starting your own.

For example, I still frequently think of my high-school football coach’s saying: 99% is a wimp.

It keeps me from making concessions whenever I’m not in the mood to stay disciplined.

Other effective toughness-related heuristics include:

• Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.
• When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
• What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
• “Discipline equals freedom.” – Jocko Willink.

Heuristics have a way of being overly-generalized, overly-romanticized, and incredibly corny.

They are the sort of thing you see on a ten-year-old child’s shirt.

But the cultures and people who lean into them and integrate them into their daily lives tend to be far better at following through on the behaviors that matter to them. So who cares if you look cheesy being an adult who latches onto tough sayings.

Your actions will speak far louder than these words.

The post How to Form Tough Identities That Propel Behavioral Change appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Dear stressed-out life hackers, I’m with you. Have you ever stressed yourself out by trying to incorporate too many stress management tactics? Have you lost sleep trying to fit more into your sleep routine?

Have you spent a meditation practice thinking about what you can do to find more time to meditate? Or, perhaps, you have grown resentful about how hard it is to fit in a gratitude practice? If any of this rings true, take heart. You are not alone.

Like so many in the fitness world, I love personal development and human optimization.

In the aggregate, this passion has been very positive for me. But, on occasion, I stress myself out with all the hobbies, habits, and life hacks that I want to adopt.

I find myself scrambling to fit it all in and, in the process, diminishing the effectiveness of each practice.

Similarly, to squeeze more time out of the day, I’ve found myself sacrificing some less-celebrated yet vital habits, like sharing an evening routine with my wife or being present with my kids when I get home from work.

It’s important to remember that every decision has an opportunity cost.

Habits like family dinners are not traditionally categorized as personal-development practices, but they significantly impact my well-being. Too often, we neglect the benefit of these seemingly mundane habits when we are setting new goals.

But by doing so, you risk eliminating something essential, and you make it far less likely that you’ll stay consistent with any new practice.

The failure to account for opportunity costs may be the most common reason people fail to maintain their personal development goals.

Take Stock of Your Behavior and Goals

These patterns have played out repeatedly in my life over the past few years. But, recently, I did something different. After another round of self-induced overload, I decided to engage in another self-development staple—a personal inventory where I took stock of my behaviors and goals.

Within this process, it occurred to me that I should create a list of everything I would want to do on a daily or near-daily basis if time was infinite.

My list included:

• Exercise
• Mobility
• Meditation
• Wim Hof breathing
• Cold shower
• Sauna
• Write for a few hours each morning
• Naikan gratitude/reflection practice
• Family dinner
• Spend the last hour of each day with my wife and go to bed at the same time
• Sleep eight hours
• Study timeless wisdom
• Read educational non-fiction
• Read fiction or easy non-fiction at night
• Listen to my favorite podcasts
• Call a family member
• Take a 20-minute nap
• Go biking
• Go on a walk or hike
• Spend time in nature (grounding)
• Learn to play the piano or guitar
• Play chess, solve riddles (cognitive development)
• Do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, play tennis, or play some other active game with/against other people

You might assume that seeing everything laid out all at once would create more stress. But, surprisingly, it took off a lot of the pressure. Something about writing everything down gave me a sense of control over it.

The Benefits of Putting It in Writing

1. It helped me notice how many positive habits I accomplish each day, even when I missed more formalized practices. Seeing what I had accomplished took off a lot of the pressure. If you already exercise, eat well, sleep well, and have good relationships, then relax. Sure, you can add more when life allows it, but it will get much better than that. Once you have those essential habits, you might be better off giving yourself a bit more freedom.
2. It helped me to let some things go until a time when they fit better. You can’t do it all right now, but over a few decades, you probably can. Perhaps I’ll take on Brazillian jiu-jitsu and acoustic guitar when my kids are old enough to start with me. Maybe I’ll have more time for a Naikan journal when I’m not writing four hours a day and working a full-time job.
3. It helped me to identify habits that overlapped, thus, offering the best bang for the buck. For example, daily walks get me out in nature, provide mild exercise, and have a similar effect to meditation. Biking to work allows me to exercise while catching up on podcasts and listening to audiobooks. Double-dipping!
4. And, most importantly, it helped me identify what habits are essential and, thus, must be prioritized. I found that four habits—exercise, writing, time in nature, and time with family—offer more benefits than all the others combined.

It’s worth reflecting upon this final point. In the era of biohacking, it is easy to get bogged down by everything you can be doing to optimize your life. But, essential practices have not changed.

In particular, physical exercise, quality nutrition, sleep, and social connection have more benefits than everything else combined. I’ve long evangelized the benefits of meditation, but in a pinch, it isn’t even close to getting an excellent lifting partner or playing racquetball with your best friend.

For anyone who has more goals than time, I highly recommend taking the time to list out everything you want to do.

Get it all down in a journal or on a computer document so that you can add to it when new ideas come to you. This process will give you a sense of perspective when times are overwhelming, and you lack motivation, or when life seems stagnant.

It is an ideal reflection for anyone who wants to live better.

The post A Guide to Optimize Self-Development Habits appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

A new school year is around the corner. All over, there will be in-season coaches trying to condition their athletes to be ready for game time and out-of-season coaches trying to get their athletes faster, stronger, and tougher before the season begins.

Lots of effective exercises, cone-drills, and conditioning schemes will be assimilated. But if the right things aren’t done in the right way, with the proper rest, timing, and compatible exercises, the program will be working against itself.

What few coaches consider is whether the improvements their athletes make come despite their efforts.

This improvement is a phenomenon that author, Nassim Taleb, calls “teaching birds to fly.”

The wonderful thing about training adolescent athletes is that they have a lot of biological momentum, which pulls them towards being stronger and more athletic. It’s hard to mess that up.

Additionally, they are exceptionally resilient.

Even the most ridiculous training programs will tend to make high-school and college-age athletes stronger and better conditioned. But could the program get them more bang for their buck? Could they see more of the desired adaptations? Almost certainly.

In over a decade working with sports coaches, I’ve noticed that it is startlingly rare for coaches to make any distinction between different power training:

• Speed
• Plyometric
• Agility work
• Conditioning

Coaches are often confused about the purpose behind their drills. The majority want tired athletes. “If it is hard, it is good.” I’ve heard more than once. You can’t blame the coaches, though.

This motto is the tradition that is passing down in almost every sport.

But this needn’t be the case. You can get athletes optimally faster, better conditioned, and even tougher in the same program if you understand a few simple principles.

It all boils down to understanding the basics of energy systems—concepts so simple and essential that every coach should know them.

Energy Systems Made Simple

The body is an adaptation machine. It tends to respond predictably based on the type of stress that it is experiencing.

When the body is called upon to do an activity, it utilizes three energy systems:

1. The Power System* (ATP/CP)
2. The Burn System* (Glycolytic)
3. The Aerobic System

While every action initiates all three systems, one system is often doing the bulk of the work.

Understanding how to train each system best is crucial for determining how you should prepare.

*Note: No one else calls the ATP/CP system the power system or the glycolytic system the burn system, but this will be easier to remember.

1. The Power System

Think of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) and CP as dynamite. It is very explosive energy:

• In the Power System, ATP and CP are utilized to create a level of power that is impossible without them.
• ATP and CP make max speed, max vertical jumping, max agility, and max strength possible.
• These are the elements that are the most destructive and essential in almost every sport.

But you cannot effectively train these harmful elements without ATP and CP.

Here is the rub. ATP and CP are like an 18th-century musket. When you decide to use it, boom, it’s gone.

ATP and CP only last about 6-7 seconds.

Then you’re losing power. Even Olympic 100-meter sprinters at the top of their training game will be decelerating before the end of a 100-meter sprint. They’ll hit top speed and then start to go slower because ATP and CP are gone.

And ATP and CP take a while to re-load.

Specifically, there is anywhere from a 1:12 to a 1:20 work to rest ratio required to make an all-out effort and then do another. For better power training results, err towards 1:20 or more.

That means if your speed training has you running max-effort 20-yard sprints that take you three seconds, then you would ideally rest for 60 seconds in between each. If you only rest 30 seconds, guess what. You aren’t getting faster. You’re getting tired.

2. The Burn System

When strenuous efforts extend beyond six seconds or are repeated with little rest, the burn system tends to take over.

• The burning system begins to drive the machine for medium-range efforts from six seconds to two or three minutes.
• To train this system specifically requires a 1:3 to 1:5 work to rest ratio.
• Depending on your sport, you can train this system with everything from repeated 40-yard dashes at only 30-40 seconds rest (too little rest for speed training) to Fartleks and conditioning ladders.

Coaches love the burn system because it burns, it’s hard, and an all-out effort.

But this is not an effective way to train speed, agility, power, and strength, those elements that are most destructive in almost every sport.

When your speed training becomes burn training, it is no longer speed training. When you do box jumps to train explosive power and repeatedly do them with little rest, you aren’t getting more explosive.

You aren’t training power.

Furthermore, this sort of training also tends to beat the hell out of the central nervous system and the muscular system required for the practical training of any power system goals.

For this reason, I recommend avoiding burn-specific training (other than while playing sports) until within a few months of the season and limiting this training while in-season.

3. The Aerobic System

• The aerobic system is predominant throughout most mild daily activities such as walking and any exercise lasting over two or three minutes.
• Despite being the opposite end of the spectrum from power work, it is crucial to almost all athletes.
• A more developed aerobic system will help athletes recover more quickly and make them far more capable of developing the burn system.

These generalizations do not tell the whole story, but they are the basics that everyone should know.

For a more in-depth look at all three systems and how they work in your training, this article in The Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism does a great job clarifying sport-specific conditioning demands.

Practical Implications

The myth of more is better pervades sports. Many coaches would look at the distinctions between energy systems and conclude that their sport requires the development of all three systems and try to find time to train everything, all of the time.

It is important to remember that you can get a fixed amount of training adaptation out of the body:

• Three hours of vigorous exercise isn’t better than one. It is almost certainly worse.
• Over time, athletes can develop greater work capacity so that they can compete for longer durations.
• Work capacity will look different in each sport.
• It could mean anything from dozens of near-max bouts in a football game or tennis match to oscillating between many different intensities and moving almost constantly throughout a soccer game.
• Regardless of what your sport requires, work capacity should build slowly and methodically.

As I’ve stated, the burn system has a way of counteracting speed, agility, plyometric, and all power system training—the qualities that are most destructive in sports.

Training should be done with sufficient rest for optimal power system training results, without too many reps, and before more fatiguing work.

It would be better to avoid any traditional conditioning on days that focus on training the power system. But, of course, you will eventually want to introduce other variables as well.

Many different training goals have to be balanced and coordinated over a training year:

• Speed, agility, plyometric power, strength
• Metabolic conditioning
• Aerobic conditioning
• Mobility
• Toughness

Some goals go together better than others; each has its benefits and costs and will depend on the sport and the training phase.

I’d recommend focusing on quality movement and gradually building the power system early on, with a bit of gradual mobility and aerobic development for most sports. Over time, you can build up to greater intensities and duration of work.

This focus alone will develop a lot of capacity in the burn system without explicitly targeting it. As always, training needs to include appropriate recovery. A couple of months before competitions begin, start to integrate a bit more sport-specific interval work gradually. But his approach runs contrary to what is typical.

Most coaches want to begin their off-season with hard conditioning gauntlets and as many exhausting gut checks as possible.

While I understand the value of establishing standards of work ethic and developing mental toughness, it is important to recognize the costs of this work. I like to approach building mental toughness in a manner that aligns better with my other training considerations.

Train Mental Toughness

Rather than starting off-season with a few weeks of puke-bucket-workouts and then easing into a more effective training philosophy, I recommend starting with a fanatical emphasis on executing exercises with proper technique.

At the same time, clarify all your disciplinary expectations:

• Focus on high-quality movement, but consistently punish disciplinary infractions like lack of eye contact, urgency, or tardiness with burpees or wind-sprints.
• I prefer full team punishments as these incentivize leaders to emerge.
• Explain to your athletes that such punishments work against their training goals and that you’d prefer not to have to resort to dumb training.
• In addition, make sure to bring a bit of competition into your weekly routine.
• With consistency, this approach produces athletes with a rare level of discipline, attention to detail, and mature mental toughness.

This will become apparent in the months before the season when you begin integrating more metabolic conditioning.

The best way to maximize all the attributes your athletes need is to have a system for determining what is trained and when. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Simple, smart, and focused beats flashy every time.

The post What Every Coach Should Know About Speed and Conditioning appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

My dad began waking up my older brother and me a few days a week to practice karate and lift weights in the basement in elementary school. While I wouldn’t recommend starting eight-year-olds on weights, these experiences had a lasting impact on me.

I’ll never forget my father bragging to other adults about how much I could lift. This bragging became a point of pride that stoked my confidence and gave me an identity that I wanted to keep.

The early development of this strong dude identity has been a tremendous influence throughout my life.

In junior high, I began playing football—a sport where strength matters. I was among the stronger kids on the team, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I committed to a consistent training regimen that I’ve maintained to this day.

Each Identity Breeds the Next

Eventually, my identity was not just that of the strong guy, but also the guy who works out hard.

In high school, I became serious about trying to break lifting records to get better at football. When I got to college and was no longer Shane, the football player, I doubled down on the big and strong part of my identity.

It became essential to me that I was the strongest-looking guy in every room. This desire led me to research workout programs and buy fitness magazines.

As I read and talked to more people at the gym, I was turned on to other types of training and eating that highlighted virtues outside of the meathead realm.

When I began coaching, I realized that I knew a lot more about strength and conditioning principles than most other coaches, and I developed an identity as the guy who knew how to train better.

This led me to pursue my CSCS and various other certifications, which led me to Breaking Muscle and many other contacts, books, and experiences that helped cultivate the commitment to fitness and healthy living that I have today.

That outline is simplified. There have been many other influences and parts of my identity that steered me throughout my life.

But, more than anything, my commitment to nearly twenty straight years of consistent training is the consequence of developing an identity as a strong dude.

• First, I was strong.
• Then, I was an exerciser.
• Then, I was big.
• Then, I was fit.
• Then, I was knowledgeable.
• Then, I was healthy.

Each identity bred the next, and at each point along the way, I was determined to maintain whatever behaviors facilitated that crucial part of myself.

Tapping into the power of identity is the key to creating consistent behavior in any realm of life.

To work out consistently, I didn’t have to worry about creating a why or writing down my goals. These behaviors became a part of what made me, me.

Identity May Also Impede Your Goals

There are also times where your identity can stand in the way of your goals.

For example, at the end of college, I embraced the idea that I would be the kind of guy who drank alcohol every night after work.

That was typical among most of my friends and many other adult influences at the time. But three IPAs a night is not a good formula for health or performance.

Finally, the drinker identity came into conflict with my value for health, and I was ultimately determined to change who I would be.

Most people approach fitness and behavior change as robots who need to follow a different script. We want to be the same person but to be stronger or thinner. So we decide we need to start exercising, eating better, or doing some other behavior that will bring us to our goal.

This approach is not necessarily wrong, but we make failure more likely when we only look at processes and outcomes without regard for who we are and what we need to maintain a particular behavior.

Success is far more likely when you approach your goals as attempts to become an enhanced type of person—to bring something else into your identity.

How to Reframe Your Identity

Author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, notes this identity distinction in people who quit smoking. Those who say, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.”—rarely do. Those who say, “No thanks. I don’t smoke.”—are more likely to succeed.

But it isn’t so simple (or hokey) as just speaking things into existence.

We have to believe changes are possible by slowly believing that we are a different kind of person. You can’t fake belief.

So how do we shift our beliefs about ourselves and our identity? You focus on imitating the sort of people who do your desired behaviors.

As James Clear writes:

“Your identity emerges out of your habits. You are not born with preset beliefs. Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience. More precisely, your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.”

We all have experienced what Clear is talking about in his book.

• In high school, I defined myself as an athlete.
• When I got a 4.0 in my first semester of college, I began to define myself as smart and began working to embody that ideal.
• When I was 25 and wanted to overcome my anxiety to be better for my wife-to-be, I began meditating every morning.
• I became a meditator.

This last example is the most instructive.

I had done many on-off meditation sessions in the past. I had learned enough to be convinced that meditation could help me. But I wasn’t ready to change my lifestyle. I’d try it and move on. When I finally made the no-excuses commitment to meditate every day, I gradually began appreciating its benefits.

To create a lasting behavioral change, ask yourself, “What kind of person acts this way?”

Find a Like-Minded Community

This question is why a great place to start is to embrace a community where your desired actions are already typical. You get to see the belief patterns and habits of people who have already adopted your desired behaviors.

These people’s examples highlight an array of better paths.

And the more time you spend around these people, the more their habits rub off. Such is the power of CrossFit. Their community rapidly creates CrossFitters who know their Fran time, favor a Paleo-Esque diet, and do mobility WODs between WODs.

There are plenty of good cultures to join outside of CrossFit, though. Justin Lind and my IHD Seekers Membership mean to create the exact positive behavior change on a global level.

Every action, according to Clear, is a vote for the kind of person you want to be.

To be healthy doesn’t mean every vote (action) in your life needs to facilitate that goal, just that gradually more do. So rather than asking yourself what outcome or behavior you want to adopt, it is probably best to start by asking, “What kind of person would behave the way I want to?”

That doesn’t necessarily mean a group identity like CrossFitters. You can note successful identities and decide to take them on like toughness, reliability, or tenacity.

The author Michael Lewis explained this best on an episode of Tim Ferriss’s podcast:

“As I’ve gotten older… I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people… you’ll find patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There’s the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there. There are many versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, ‘I am going to adopt… as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.’ And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

This narrative often comes down to a reframe.

You already have an identity about which you care.

1. How do your goals align with that identity?
2. In other words, how can you make failing to follow through threaten your identity?

Say, for example, you value your identity as a good father or mother; reframing this value is among the most important things you can give your kids as your healthy model.

Your children are more likely to live active, healthy lives if you do.

From this perspective, the chaos of parenting is no longer an excuse for sacrificing your health. Committing to eating better and regularly exercising is the only way you can be the parent you want to be.

That’s the real motivation.

The post Tapping Into the Power of Identity Is the Secret to Sustainable Fitness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

In 1914, World War 1 began. The glorious war that was to be over by Christmas turned into the bloodiest four years the world had ever seen (up until then, anyway).

“Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

In 1914, World War 1 began. The glorious war that was to be over by Christmas turned into the bloodiest four years the world had ever seen (up until then, anyway).

In 1918, the Spanish Flu hit, killing about 50 million people. A testament to nature’s capacity for cruelty, this disease proved most deadly to children under five and young adults between 20 and 40.

The 1920s brought a brief reprieve for many people, but life soon turned upside down again when the largest global depression in history hit.

The Great Depression crashed economies across the globe.

In the United States, unemployment exceeded 24%, and half the population lived under the poverty line.

To make matters worse, two years into the depression, America’s Great Plains region fell under a decade-long drought, the Dust Bowl, which forced farmers to abandon their land in search of better opportunities.

In 1939, World War II began. About 75 million people died, and citizens across the United States were forced to ration everything from gas to meat to ensure an ample supply for the war effort.

I could go on about the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and mandatory military conscription, but you get the point.

These were some trying decades. The year 2020 was certainly rough, but compared to the 30-year suckfest that our ancestors were entering a century ago, this past year has been almost mild, generally speaking. Not to diminish anyone’s trials, but it is humbling to compare our challenges to those of our ancestors.

Living through the early and mid-twentieth century required a degree of toughness, contribution, and fortitude uncommon today.

Is Abundance Insulating Us From Happiness?

Still, I don’t know that we are entirely better off. Obviously, not having loved ones die is preferable to the alternative, and we don’t want to reinstate a military draft just for the hell of it.

In many respects, it is a wonderful thing that we can afford to raise children:

• Who can’t run a mile in under 10-minutes
• Who meltdown when asked to mow the lawn on a hot day
• Who think Instagram posts count as civic engagement
• Who are traumatized by microaggressions

We’ve never had that option before.

But given the high level of angst that characterizes modernity, it’s worth considering whether our comfortable abundance is insulating us from something essential to our happiness.

When the sociologist, Glen Elder, looked at longitudinal data on people who went through the chaos of the early 20th Century, he came to a startling conclusion.

People who faced their first significant adversity in their teens and twenties grew stronger.

Whether fighting in World War II or leaving their dust-choked farm searching for a new life, these great challenges were a formative experience that empowered them throughout their lives.

However, when people faced their first significant adversities after age 30, they were more likely to break down as a consequence.

They were less resilient and less capable of growing.

People Are More Resilient Than You Think

The implication seems to be that if we want people to thrive, we must begin gradually building their capacity for withstanding hardship from a young age. In a time when sensitivity training abounds, perhaps we should be more focused on training toughness.

“My dear child, I do not worry about the bleakness of life. I worry about the bleakness of having no challenges in life.”

– Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Letter to my Unborn Daughter.

In my upcoming book, Setting the Bar: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Era of Distraction, Dependency, and Entitlement, I argue that the modern cultural and youth development paradigm has fallen deeply out of balance.

There is a sense today among parents, educators, and most adults that their role is to provide and protect infinitely.

Adults are always there—chauffeuring, mediating, and patrolling the environment to ensure that it is as safe as possible. Parents are riddled with guilt about the potential traumas they may have invited upon their children and anxious to solve all of Junior’s problems so he doesn’t have to deal with unfairness or hurt feelings.

But this ethos is based upon a faulty presumption of human frailty.

As the psychologist Dan Gilbert explains in his book, Stumbling on Happiness:

“For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them…. But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists has made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.”

The Self-Esteem Movement Led to More Fragility

After decades of researching the self-esteem movement, psychologist Roy Baumeister and his team found that our culture’s emphasis on showing children unconditional positive regard was more likely to create a sense of individual superiority and entitlement than a golden age of mental wellness.

As Baumeister and his team state:¹

“Sadly, over time, unconditional positive regard has taken the form of suggesting that parents and teachers should never criticize children and indeed should praise children even for mediocre or trivial accomplishments, or just for being themselves. Always praising and never criticizing may feel good to everyone concerned, but the data we have reviewed do not show that such an approach will produce desirable outcomes.”¹

The self-esteem movement helped eliminate many of the standards and social pressure that help societies compel more fulfilling behavior. For example, rope climbing and physical standards were pushed out of P.E.

Such expectations might have propelled more students towards a genuine sense of confidence and capability and empowered them to pursue more physical pursuits as adults.

Over and over, the well-meaning desire to protect kids from ever feeling bad about themselves left them less capable and more fragile.

Even more, by leading youth to believe that adults should be protecting their feelings and taking responsibility for their safety, we establish impossible expectations that set kids up for future angst.

Expectations Determine Our Response to Adversity

• When people expect to avoid hardships, each pain is magnified.
• When they expect to live without ever having to exert themselves, exercise seems brutal.
• When they expect others to solve their problems for them, there is never a reason to take responsibility and always someone to blame when pains inevitably come.

But, when overcoming adversity is an expectation established early in life, people thrive even through hardships.

As Elder explains, “Events do not have meaning in themselves. Those meanings are derived from the interactions between people, groups, and the experience itself. Kids who went through challenging experiences usually came out rather well.”

We need stress to grow.

Stress improves us and makes us more capable of overcoming similar or greater future adversities. This makes us what author Nassim Taleb has called Antifragile—not just resilient like a bulletproof vest, but made stronger by resistance and harmed by its persistent absence.

This is more the case for humans than most species. Humans have acclimated to an infinite number of environments because we are born far less developed than other mammals. Stressors tell us how to grow to thrive.

The effort to eliminate stressors renders humans incapable.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be wary of too much resistance. There is nothing beneficial about car wrecks, child abuse, or chronic stress. A subset of crotchety older men and sports-crazed parents have made a mockery of toughness and helped fuel our current societal over-correction.

The best path always lies in the nuance. As with all training, there should be a progression, variety, and rest.

Taleb explains this best:

For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety… long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully, heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes—things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization. In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health.

The fact that adolescents will still typically get stronger despite trainers who insist on archaic more is better training is a testament to the power of puberty and the fantastic resilience of our youth.

We can withstand a lot, and we may have to at some point.

But optimally, we would balance genuine care for people with an understanding that thriving requires toughness. It is great to enjoy the luxuries of modern living as long as we also have the wisdom to make hardship a consistent feature of life.

Toughness Training

In 1940, 130 Harvard sophomores were subjected to the Harvard Treadmill Test as part of a battery that sought to determine what qualities helped people live better lives.

Subjects were put on a steep treadmill at an uncomfortably fast pace and told to stay on for five minutes. The majority lasted four minutes or less.

The researchers meant to assess the “…extent to which a subject is willing to push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”

They hypothesized that those who stayed on longer would live more successful and fulfilling lives.

After tracking the participants over the coming decades, researchers found that the amount of time a 20-year-old would spend on a treadmill was an excellent predictor of their future life success.

Those who lasted longer tended to have better jobs, better marriages, better relationships, less substance abuse, and, of course, better health.

The capacity to withstand physical discomfort translated to a higher quality of life:

Winston Churchill famously said that “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

Courage may come first, but toughness is a close second.

Like courage, toughness is a prerequisite to the most admirable behavior. It underlies the self-denial that precedes most fulfilling endeavors.

There are many different forms of toughness, but the best place to start is through physical training. The physical world is a microcosm of life, which can teach impossible lessons through words.

A few ideas to begin training toughness today:

• Work out: If you are already a consistent exerciser, add a gut check workout once every week or every other week. If you already do, try getting outside of your comfort zone by trying something hard and different. If you don’t exercise consistently, you’ll want to make it easy to start but commit fully. Exercise is the place to start building toughness. As the Harvard Treadmill Test demonstrated, an ability to endure physical discomfort is a prerequisite of health and happiness.
• Meditate: Despite its reputation, there is nothing tougher than sitting in place without succumbing to distraction. And meditation has immense benefits ranging from better focus to lower blood pressure and better mental health. I credit meditation with helping me overcome a form of OCD called Pure O.
• Cold Shower: Plenty of health benefits, but, most importantly, it builds a mental edge. When you can start every day by willingly entering the harsh cold, then you can will yourself into whatever else you need doing.
• Intermittent Fasting: Hunger was once an inevitable part of daily living. It is a luxury always to have food around. Pick a day each week where you extend the time between last night’s dinner and today’s first meal. Shoot for 17 hours. This would have once seemed impossible to me, but now I routinely work out in a fasted state, and most days, I only eat two meals—lunch and dinner.

Justin Lind and I have begun holding bi-annual 48-hour fasts for our IHD Membership group. The IHD Membership is a group for people interested in self-development and committed to creating a structured pursuit of better living practices.

We will be kicking it off with another 48 hour fast this July.

And for more specific recommendations for training and assessing the different toughness components, I’ve put together a battery of tests.

Regardless of whether you jump into these challenges or you take a more moderate approach, the point is to remember that we need a little discomfort to thrive. It is time we all remember that toughness is a virtue.

By committing to cultivating it, we can enhance our lives and our communities.

Reference:

1. Baumeister, Roy F., Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger, and Kathleen D. Vohs. “Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4, no. 1 (May 2003): 1–44.

The post Train Toughness Before It’s Too Late appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Quit being such a buzzkill, Shane.

But a quick survey of history shows just how often following herd norms can lead the masses towards insane behaviors.

Herd Norms Can Lead to Insane Behaviors

In the early 1800s, Americans were known to drink whiskey from sun-up to sun-down. As Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, corn whiskey became dirt cheap due to an overabundant corn supply—a problem we still pay for in other ways.

By 1820, Pollan writes, “The typical American was putting away half a pint of the stuff every day. That comes to more than five gallons of spirits a year for every man, woman, and child in America. The figure today is less than one.”

According to Dan Carlin’s book, The End is Always Near, well into the 20th century, American schools routinely beat students for misbehaving. They used implements like the disciplines (whips made of small chains) and flappers (a rod with a pear-shaped end that had a hole designed to raise blisters).

And, of course, if you look outside of America, you’ll find even more insane norms like traditional Chinese foot binding. Well into the 20th century, it was normal for young Chinese girls of status to have their feet broken, folded over, and tightly bound, so they were deformed for life. Yikes!

Comparable to these rituals, our modern insanities don’t sound so crazy. But it is still worth noting pernicious trends so that you can resolve to live better. Among the most bizarre and overlooked of these is our popular footwear patterns and what they are doing to us.

What Popular Footwear May Do to Your Feet

As a high-school strength and conditioning coordinator, I’m constantly witnessing the downstream effects of inadequate footwear.

After a lifetime plodding around in modern shoes, nearly every incoming freshman already deals with:

• Injuries
• Flat feet
• Immobility
• Foot weakness
• Movement pattern compensations

All of which stem from footwear choices.

It is a fascinating oversight given the extreme lengths and exorbitant funds many of these athletes’ parents invest in giving them an athletic edge.

Cheap and Available Alternatives

What most people overlook is that the best athletic advantages are cheap and available to us all:

1. Good nutrition
2. Good sleep habits
3. Frequent play
4. Exposure to many different sports
5. Footwear that allows your feet to move the way they are meant to while playing

Our feet are our predominant contact point with the world—our primary movement to an environment feedback mechanism.

Avoid Backless Footwear

Most forms of footwear place our bodies in abnormal walking and moving conditions for prolonged periods.

• When we distort the feedback and force the foot to move unnaturally, the entire body compensates. It eventually adopts new, less desirable postures and movement patterns, and the burden works its way up the chain.
• Many young athletes walk around school all day in their slides—the popular slide-in flip flop where the band goes around the foot, rather than in-between the toes so that you can wear socks with them.
• Despite my insistence that athletes arrive at workouts prepared, many athletes still show up in these slides and then change. It has become common to keep athletic shoes in a separate bag and only break them out when exercising.
• The effects of prolonged flip-flop wearing are evident with one glance at an athlete’s feet—flat arches, feet turned out to the sides, and highly immobile toes and ankles.
• One of my favorite weekly power exercises is the landmine kneeling hip extension to press. Athletes begin in a kneeling position with their butt on their heels and toes curled. I’m amazed how often my athletes cannot get their toes to flex at all. Their toes remain rigidly fixed in a neutral position so that the top of the toe is hammered into the ground rather than flexing back and creating a powerful coiled position. Extrapolate that effect to the playing field, and you can see how this would reduce ground-reactive power and increase injury risk.

According to mobility expert Dr. Kelly Starrett, it is best to avoid wearing flip-flops or slide-on shoes that don’t fit around the back of the heel.

Backless shoes require the big toe to clench down on every step, so the flip-flop doesn’t slide off.

This clenching shortens the big toe, which shortens the plantar fascia at the bottom of the foot, which causes the calf muscles to contract, thus causing dysfunction up the chain.

Issues also stem from walking around on an elevated heel for prolonged periods.

Our bodies tend to operate best when we respect the expectations cultivated through millions of years of human history.

Until very recently, humans walked without arch support or an elevated heel. But today, most shoes have a rigid bottom and a heel raised higher than the forefoot, which, according to Starrett, “systematically shortens the heel cords.”

Choose Your Feet Over Fashion

It is easy to dismiss concerns about wearing poor footwear.

The adverse effects are less understood than poor nutrition, the consequences aren’t immediately noticeable, and shoe fashion is essential to many kids and parents alike.

However, when we wreck the natural walking and running pattern, we open the door to a lifetime of pain, injury, and other obstacles to enjoying movement.

We’ve come to accept it as usual that active adults will spend their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s constantly battling back pain, knee pain, plantar fasciitis, and a million other maladies. That doesn’t have to be the case.

Parents, in particular, can do a lot to help their children grow up moving well.

Parenting Directives

• While inside, keep the shoes off.
• Let children play outside barefoot, especially in wilderness environments. Until very recently, every human in history spent the majority of their life barefoot in nature.
• Avoid buying your children flip-flops, slides, or any shoes that don’t strap to the back of their heel.
• Avoid high-top shoes that limit movement and remove the need for the ankle to be stable, strong, and self-supportive. In my experience, basketball athletes almost always have the most mobility issues. It could be a correlation error, but I guess that the basketball shoes are part of the problem.
• Avoid shoes with elevated heels. Save the cowboy boots for special occasions.
• Shoot for minimalist shoes with flat soles. Starrett recommends getting the lightest, most flexible, and flattest shoes possible. Old-school Converse and Vans are often great, but several good minimalists or barefoot shoe companies are available online.

It is harder to initiate footwear changes later in life when fashion becomes a bigger deal to people.

Coaches can help by making it a point of pride among athletes and not wearing flip-flops or shoes without backs. This is tougher in southern climates and among people who care more about fashion norms.

As with learning to eat healthily, I recommend not focusing on what is being given up but seeking to find as many good options that you like as possible.

You’ll probably have the most success if you begin without too much rigidity and try to make it a mission to find good footwear options that you like.

Focus on finding options you like, and the process becomes much more fun.

The post A Guide to Proper Footwear Selection for Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So, I made a rule: No looking at my phone while in the bathroom.

Recently, I noticed I had a bad habit of pulling out my phone every time I used the bathroom. It was automatic. I’d head to the urinal, aim, and scroll. After nearly dropping my phone into the bowl one day, I decided that this habit was a problem.

So, I made a rule: No looking at my phone while in the bathroom.

It’s easier said than done. Whenever I take a break, I’m magnetically drawn to the phone, but I use this as a cue to take deep diaphragmatic breaths instead. It is self-denial that always hurts for a split second.

In my impulsive, almost ravenous state, this new rule seems arbitrary and meaningless. My emotions beg for the phone. But, being the stubborn cuss that I am, I do the breathing and gradually feel sanity being restored.

Suddenly, the part of myself that wanted to scroll so badly seems like another person.

Our Culture Compels Us to Indulge

The modern environment is full of strong temptations and movement-reducing comforts.

These always feel good in the moment, but the collective effect of building society around comfort and convenience has made it more difficult than ever to be mentally or physically healthy. Both our impulses and our culture compel us to indulge.

But, what feels good now leaves us achy, tired, and riddled by malaise later.

This is why there has been a strong counter-movement based on setting intentional limits and designing your environment to promote better actions.

• Jocko Willink tells us that discipline equals freedom.
• James Clear teaches us to hack our habits.
• Tristan Harris argues that we need to change our phone settings.
• Jordan Peterson has reminded us that we need rules to govern our lives.

None of this is new. Nearly every culture has had some system to teach people these lessons.

In chapter four of his phenomenal book, The Paleo Manifesto, John Durant argues that the Law of Moses helped Jewish people thrive and survive in a time when mysterious diseases routinely ravaged other cultures.

In addition to The 10 Commandments, the Jewish tradition established 248 do’s and 365 don’ts, which governed their community norms. Many of these focused on health and hygiene.

As Durant writes:

“Taken as a whole, the knowledge of hygiene contained in the Mosaic Law is nothing short of stunning. It correctly identifies the main sources of infection as vermin, insects, corpses, bodily fluids, food (especially meat), sexual behaviors, sick people, and other contaminated people or things. It implies that the underlying source of infection is usually invisible and can spread by the slightest physical contact while considering the different physical properties of solids, liquids, and gases, the passage of time; open and closed spaces; and different material types. And it provides effective methods of disinfection, such as hand washing, bathing, sterilization by fire, boiling, soap, quarantine, hair removal, and even nail care.”

While many Jewish traditions may be antiquated health precautions in light of our current technology and knowledge, these laws were revolutionary in their own time.

Rules to Optimize Your Health

We now live in a very different world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need our own set of laws. On the contrary, now more than ever, we need rules if we want to thrive. So, I’ve come up with a list of my own.

Feel free to take what seems most necessary and ignore what doesn’t.

Rules number one and two may not be for you if you already have an exercise ritual that you love, but rules three through twelve are likely to be useful for everyone. They are practical, and we’d all be a lot better off if they became cultural norms.

And now, without further ado, here are the twelve rules to optimize your health in the 21^st Century.

1. Wake to Movement

You’ve been lying down for hours. Shift the trajectory of your day by always waking to some gentle movement—just a few minutes will do the trick.

Some options:

• 10-minute Morning Routines
• Wake Up and Move Plan
• Recovery Mobilization
• Bruce Lee’s 3-Minute Morning Workout

At IHD, Justin Lind and I created the 30 x 30 Thirty-day habit program, which starts with 5-10 minutes of exercise each day.

2. Do a Mini-Cindy Five Times Per Day

Plan five specific points throughout the day to do a Mini-Cindy, which consists of:

You’ll need a pullup bar available. For example, you can hang one over your office door. Or, you can substitute five Y, T, W’s for the pullups. This is based on the same concept that I’ve advocated with my 5-Alarm Workout Plan. I recommend looking at your workday and figuring out five specific times.

For example:

• 8:30 am—Right before leaving for your workday
• 10:30 am
• 12:00 pm
• 1:30 pm
• 3:00 pm

Each round will only take a minute or so, and it will improve your focus and productivity.

But don’t expect to do it on your own. Instead, set the alarm so there is a consistent cue. You could also make it a rule that you have to do a Cindy round every time you go to the bathroom.

Other bathroom break options include:

Easier Option:

Advanced Option:

Super Advanced Option:

Creative Option:

• Keep kettlebells on hand and make a weekly plan so you are hitting different exercises each day. You may find that this allows you to get rid of your structured workout time.
• Just add some time for cardio once or twice a week and gut checks every other weekend, and you’ll be a fitness dynamo.

3. The Eat and Walk

Take a short walk after every meal. Walking aids digestion, and most of us do not get enough fresh air and sunshine.

Rule three is an easy solution. It also doubles as a great mental reset when you throw on an audible book or podcast.

4. The Last Spot

Always park in the farthest available spot. Exceptions are permissible when you are traveling with others. My wife would not be happy if I did this with her.

Prioritize marital harmony.

5. Five Flights or Less

Are there stairs? Are you going five flights or less? If yes, then take the stairs.

6. The DIY

If you have a task that you know how to do but requires muscle, like moving or mowing the lawn, you must do it. You can undoubtedly enlist friends and family on moves, but you were made for this. Rise to the occasion.

7. If It Didn’t Exist in the Time of Moses, It’s a Treat

The majority of foods consumed today are chemistry projects engineered to manipulate our taste buds in a way that would be impossible with whole foods.

People love to nit-pick terms like whole foods or processed foods.

The best designation might be John Durant’s: “Industrial foods.”

Industrial foods are foods that have come about since the industrial revolution. They are, generally, less nutritious, more likely to induce over-eating, and more calorie-dense.

As best as possible, move towards making it a rule to eliminate industrial foods from your typical day and try to limit them to a couple of pre-planned treats or meals per week.

8. Embrace the Benefits of Fasting

Until very recently, all humans would have gone through moderately frequent periods of hunger and food scarcity.

Our biology is built on this expectation. Post-agricultural religions found value in these periods and regimented them with a calendar of fasts and feasts. Some fasts only restricted certain foods, like meat, while others, like Ramadan, restricted eating altogether for a specified duration.

These fasts have been familiar to almost every religion, even Protestant sects, until very recently. For example, the 1928 version of The Anglican/Episcopal Book of Common Prayer called on fasting during Lent Fridays and before feasts, just like the traditional Catholic fast.

Likewise, the Mormon tradition dictated that adherents fasted for a full day on the first Sunday of every month.

More recently, the health world has begun to embrace the benefits of fasting again.

• Some argue that it is only helpful because it limits lifetime calories.
• Others maintain that fasting can help purge cancerous cells and promote greater longevity.
• At the very least, it provides a necessary mindset shift for a world of over-consumption.
• The willpower training element alone makes it worthwhile.

I recommend an intermittent fast of 16-20 hours at least one day per week, a monthly 24 hour fast, and (if you’re up to it), a yearly 48-72 hour fast, like the bi-annual fast Justin Lind and I do with our IHD members.

9. A Pre-meal Prayer

I’ve had a gratitude practice off and on for years. It works. But I often stop because I’m busy, and I prioritize other self-development practices. Then it occurred to me that most religions have brilliantly embedded gratitude into their adherents’ daily lives with the expectation of a pre-meal prayer.

You don’t have to be religious to see the benefit. Stop before each meal and take a moment to note some events from the day for which you are grateful.

Bonus points if you add three long, slow breaths.

This stimulates the vagus nerve, which helps shift you from a sympathetic (stressed) to a parasympathetic (relaxed) state where you will eat slower, eat less, and break down nutrients better.

10. Be Less Accessible

Countless times now, I’ve had athletes walk up to me after a workout and unconsciously grab their phones. Dozens of message alerts pop up. Most people today are pulled and prodded by a constant succession of message dings. Work emails interrupt dinner, and friendly texts and social media alerts interrupt our workflow all day.

Each comes with the illusion of urgency, but with few exceptions, this is not the case.

You can train people to expect whatever messaging norms you set for yourself. I recommend:

• Not checking work emails in the evening after work (if possible, take work email off your phone)
• Putting your phone on airplane mode and in a drawer while working—If you want to be accessible to certain people, let them know that you do.
• But, of course, they can still call you on your work phone or through FaceTime (with or without video).

11. Preserve the Bedroom

Don’t charge your phone in your bedroom or look at screens (TV or phone) while in bed.

The blue light from screens throws off your circadian rhythms. Ideally, you’d never look at the phone in bed so that your mind associates your bed with sleep.

Not having a phone in the bedroom is also a great way to prevent yourself from looking at your phone upon waking. The best way to own the day is to acknowledge the morning. Random phone checks have a way of co-opting our time and emotions.

12. No Phone Zones

In addition to bedtime, commit to no phone use:

• At dinner
• While driving
• At social gatherings (except as necessary for coordinating events)
• Oh, and don’t pee and scroll

I’m cutting myself off here, but I could easily add 100 do’s and don’ts for thriving in the 21^st Century.

Now more than ever, we need rules for ourselves. Some may seem excessive, but it’s relative to what is considered normal today. We’d all be better off if these became everyday practices.

For example, in the 1800s, it was customary to drink alcohol from sun-up to sun-down. Today we know better.

If you’re interested in joining a group committed to exploring personal development practices, check out Justin Lind and my IHD Membership group.

We’ve planned our bi-annual fast and personal inventory this July.

The post 12 Rules to Optimize Your Health for a 21st Century Mindset appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Whether you meant to train:

The training session is over, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you got any better.

Whether you meant to train:

• Speed
• Agility
• Power
• Strength
• Hypertrophy
• Endurance

What you do after the workout will largely determine how much benefit you get.

Athletes and parents sometimes tell me how they are going to another trainer plus, the work they are doing with me. The thinking seems to be that if they do twice as many workouts, they’ll see twice the results. It is that pervasive myth that more is better.

Unfortunately, coaches often fall victim to it as well.

They’ll condition their kids into the ground practice after practice and then wonder why they are dragging on gameday. Of course, you have to work hard, but there is an optimal way to do it. Just because someone got sore and tired doesn’t necessarily mean they got better.

It comes down to some elementary principles that all coaches and parents of athletes need to know.

Allow me to explain:

The post A Guide to Recovery and Training for Coaches and Parents appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Summer is near, and you’ve felt caged for far too long. No, I’m not talking about the quarantine. I mean locked in your life—the 9-5 job, the commute, the nightly TV, and a disciplined workout routine. It is all so typical and, yet, so inhuman.

Throughout most of human history, there has been no need to work out. Life did that for you. Between hunting, foraging, building, climbing, and playing, burning calories was never a concern.

Humans’ Bio-evolutionary Program Works Against Us

We are programmed to conserve energy whenever possible and to gorge food whenever it’s available.

This propensity is one of our many evolutionarily ingrained quirks that work against us in this bizarre modern habitat. Today food is everywhere, and a million new inventions have removed the need to move. Thus, we make it an obligation to work out.

But understanding our bio-evolutionary programming can give us insight into how to make our exercising a bit more fun and interesting.

We have many competing needs that work as a thermostat to keep us balanced and focused on the right thing at the right time.

Even a well-fed hunter-gather wouldn’t conserve energy forever. Boredom would spur our ancestors to use their time more efficiently.

How Boredom Motivates Humans Today

Today, boredom usually prompts us to click a different app or pick a new show, but it does initiate action.

As Michael Easter, author of the new book The Comfort Crisis, explains,

“As humans evolved, we’d become bored anytime we were doing something that had a low return on our time invested.”

Boredom spurred humans to try more effective fishing techniques, build better structures, create better tools, kill more animals, and play with their comrades.

The traditional way that humans cured boredom was by either taking on some new physical project or leaning into more social connection, or both. We can make our fitness a little more inspiring this summer by doing the same.

Some suggestions:

• Workout partners: Fun training is almost always social training. Create a good group, and you’ll look forward to seeing them at every workout.
• Take on a new sport or physical skill: Racquetball is social and fun. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will ignite your competitive fire and motivate you to practice new skills. Embrace sport again.
• Build something: Whether it’s a garden, a deck, or a set of cornhole boards, building taps into something primal and gets you moving in a natural, low-and-slow kind of way.
• Take on a grand challenge.

Easter’s book details his month-long caribou hunt in backcountry Alaska. Isolated from civilization, he spent weeks lugging supplies as he pursued more food. This example is another one of those profoundly human experiences.

Hunter-gatherers frequently move, carrying all their possessions and young children along with them.

We, humans, are slower, weaker, and more physically exposed than most similarly sized mammals.

But, despite being known as a physically inferior species, humans are elite endurance athletes compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.

Society’s Standards and Rites of Passage

As Sebastian Junger explains in his new book Freedom:

“Other primates can’t come close to matching human performance on the ground, and even horses, dogs, and wolves have trouble outrunning humans in steep terrain or hot weather.

The Western States 100, in which western runners and horse-back riders race 100 miles over the Sierra Nevada, sees humans and horses running roughly similar times. (Runners and riders compete separately but on almost identical courses).

The record for runners, fourteen hours and nine minutes, was set by ultra-marathon runner Jim Walmsley in 2019. Walmsley covered the distance almost two hours faster than the fastest horse and rider entrant that year and would have beaten all but one of the horse and rider entrants over the previous twenty years.

Many animals sprint faster than humans, but few can compare across such a range of distances—especially in the heat.”

I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to get out and conquer some treacherous terrain. This desire is natural for humans; it is one of the staples of every society’s standards and rites of passage.

Nearly every Native American tribe required their warriors to be capable of running all day.

Likewise, Christopher McDougall writes in Natural Born Heroes that in the ancient Cretan culture, youth was known as apodromos, meaning not quite a runner, and the ritual ceremony for entering adulthood was called the festival of Dromaia, meaning the running.

The 50-Mile Challenge

American society has a tradition of distance excellence as well. Disturbed by the low physical standards of older military officers of his time, Theodore Roosevelt issued a directive requiring officers of all branches to prove themselves capable of marching 50 miles in 20 consecutive hours.

When John F. Kennedy became president, he put this challenge back to the marines. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy, jumped in before the marines had a chance, and he finished in under 18 hours. The marines followed suit.

The media covered these events, spurring organizations all over the U.S. to begin taking on the 50-Mile Challenge.

Around this time, World War II veteran Stanley LeProtti created the legendary La Sierra High-School P.E. program. He also included distance standards, notably a distance Man Lift and Carry (also known as the Fireman’s Carry).

His lowest group was required to carry a similarly weighted classmate 800 meters, and the most elite group required students to carry a like-weighted classmate five total miles.

Well, reader, the gauntlet has been laid down.

I guess there is nothing left to do but decide which of these challenges you want to take on and then lace up your shoes and get moving. It’s time we became a little more human.

The post I Challenge You to Train Like a Human appeared first on Breaking Muscle.