What’s So Great About Hardstyle…

Over the years I’ve had so many clients question me about why working out has to be so hard. Furthermore, when they’ve witnessed the torture I put my self through, like 1000 swing days, or what my friend called the death march, they often question why I want to do that to my body… Or why put myself through so much just to tear a phone book, or just for fun?  I’ve never really taken the time to answer that question, but what I do say is it’s about experiencing movement in all it’s different variations. However to say I do 1000 swings coupled with 1000 lateral jumps, coupled with 100 one armed pushups merely to experience all these movements is asinine, because I don’t. Furthermore if you’ve been keeping up with my blogs, a few weeks ago I wrote a whole article on the benefits  of fatigue- the lessons you learn about range of motion while totally exhausted, but the fact is it’s more than that. Hardstyle fitness is about the performance coin, thus everything you do needs to focus on improving that performance in whatever ROM you’re doing at that point in time. That means that your 1000 rep workouts or your 25 rep workouts are a journey to that progression. This article is about that journey, and why you ought to be on it.

Ok, So your doctor has told you to exercise, and/or perhaps you’re looking to get in shape for the summer… lose a few pounds or whatever; there’s something you have to understand Fitness is a larger concept. A friend text me the other day asking me what he’d get out of my new Hardstyle Yoga Camp, and my answer was well, “what are you looking for?” He told me he wanted a six pack of shredded abs for the summer, so I answered him with “sure you can get that from the Camp, but you gotta make sure you’re eating clean as well.” He immediately complained and told me but if I eat clean I could get that out of any well balanced workout. He further asked me if I do hardstyle yoga and my answer to that is, “of course.” However when he asked my objective results that I want to achieve from it, I said it’s fitness!

He further said what’s that… How do you measure it? I said, “when the world ends, I’ll be able to survive the longest before I die of suffocation in space.” Latter my friend and I spoke, and he said reading my goal made him laughed. People laugh at that response, but that is what fitness is: the ability to survive in an environment, and to reproduce. Although fitness might be inclusive of, it’s neither a six pack, nor buns of steel; it’s the ability to out last, out hunt, out run, and out live anything and in any environment. It’s about that one more step when you need it, that inside strength when something needs to get done, the pain tolerance to hold on till help arrives, the ability to get whatever done with no rest all by yourself… It’s about being better than you are now “just incase,” but mostly it’s about Living anywhere at anytime, no matter what.

I do sound crazy now don’t I, lol. But there are all sorts of common sense sayings around this idea: luck favors the prepared mind, and survival of the fittest come to mind. Fitness being survival is something which has common sense value. There’s lots of people like me who enjoy setting fitness goals, and pursuing them with vigor, ask them why they want that… or why aren’t they happy with what they look like- [because they’re already ripped]? I bet whatever answer they give will point to this idea of survival. Survival is a human need, just ask any dying person if they’d like one more day. Fitness is about the one more day!

The next topic to cover here is well if we all agree that fitness is about that one more day can’t it just be easy routines? I mean most research says all you need is about 20- 60 min of light aerobic activity a day to get all the heart benefits you might need to stay- in one sense of the word- healthy. Surely you can add 30 min of whole body weights to that, and you got yourself a fairly complete fitness package. In other words what’s up with the 300’s, and the 1000’s… what’s up with the craziness?

So for anyone who doesn’t know what hardstyle refers to, it’s not the kind of fitness routine that makes you throw up- (at least not every workout, hahahaha). No… Hardstyle refers to a type of balance between the “two sides of the performance coin,” according to the RKC manual: 1. Looseness and 2. Tension. A program well versed in such a style can definitely elicit stomach cramps and vomiting, but other times (like today when I grooved my Turkish Get Up) it’s about freeing up your movement- “taking the breaks off.” In fact a Hardstyle fitness routine is always about this idea of mobilizing and patterning movements so that you can perform in an athletic and proper way. Whether you fatigue or not is a by product of merely working; it’s not the goal of the workout, better movement is. How does this relate to surviving?

Well, throughout your life you are called upon to move, and most movements take certain motor skills. Just look at the primitive movement milestones that everyone needs to accomplish to be able to go from an infant to a walking/moving being.  Even though the future of everyone’s movement is different, rolling, crawling, scooting, squating, and the like are everyone’s baby fitness program. Thus I don’t think it’s too much to believe that no matter what your movement environment involves, there still exists a few basic movements that must be worked over and over again by everyone. In essence whether you’re a baseball pitcher, a soccer player, or an 80 year old grandmother squating is important, and making that squat a better freer movement is important.

So now picture this: your car runs out of gas on the freeway and you have to walk back 5 miles to the nearest gas station, but because your next business meeting is in 2 hours you have to move quickly. With this scenario in mind what should you have focused on in the gym?  If you said speed and cardio you’d only be partially right. The answer is good movement under stress- whatever that stress may be; in the gym stress is normally a resistance, speed or a state of fatigue. That way you can survive the emergency and not break anything doing so. Would it have been a good idea to test a 5 mile walk?

Sure, but what if you don’t do a lot of walking cause your workouts have to be 30 min. How could you have been prepared?

I can literally think of dozens of ways to prepare for this situation without walking as a test- even though it’s the best test, because its the most specific. You could snatch, swing, push up, squat, lunge, combo any group of the above exercises, yoga, etc… and you’d be prepared for this; you’d be fit to survive. But a 5 mile brisk walk/jog if you’re doing a 10 min mile is going to take you practically an hour. Can you imagine how many reps you’d have to do of a circuit of any three of the above exercises to accomplish an hour of work without stopping? It’s a lot, at least 100, probably more like 300. My death march takes me 45 min to an hour dependant upon which one I’m doing; it’s a lot of sets of 5 and 20 reps.

In 30 min you could do 700 or so of almost any exercise in a reasonable amount of sets, even with some rest.  So just because a workout is 1000 reps doesn’t mean anything terrible, just that in some time frame 1000 repetitions of a movement was done. BTW doing 1000 of any of the above mentioned exercises would have prepared you for the 5 mile walk, and probably more. Furthermore would you have built an incredible body over time with such a routine? With a sensible diet- sure!

This is what’s great about Hardstyle fitness, you work a few exercises, and you’re prepared for almost anything! So stop doing 3 sets of 10 of 20 different exercises. Pick one exercise, perhaps two, and work at them until you’ve performed them in an athletic proper way. If you want help choosing here’s my advice: Turkish Get Ups, and Swings. Pattern them, balance your tension and relaxation, take the breaks off of them with mobility drills, and don’t worry about how many reps you end up doing of them in the time frame you committed to working out. Do 1 get up at a time, and try 10 or 20 random swings at a time. As you get better at them start taking less and less rest until you’re doing an entire workout in a flowing way without breaks from one movement to the next. If you’re anything like most of my clients and me, some days you’ll end up focusing on drills doing a few sets, and other days you’ll end up doing mostly swings and get ups doing 80- 100.    

Why are bootcamps good [for me], and why have I started one?

 

So I took some time off of writing after the last Cardio Series installment to work on starting this Yoga/Kettlebells bootcamp, and now I’m back hahahah! However, I’m not back to talk about Cardio even though I have the full intention of continue where I left off eventually. However today I have planned to answer a few questions that have been brought up to me over the past few weeks. One of the major questions I’ve been asked is Why are bootcamps good, and why did- [me] a guy who’s into strength training where there’s lots of rest- start one?

So this is a little different to answer since most of my articles stress hard work just as much as they stress the idea of staying away from fatigue. Bootcamps, and mine is not all that different in intensity, are designed to make you fatigue- to take your conditioning and mentality to another level. They are not teaching orientated, instead they are activity orientated. Thus they are useful to some, and not so useful for others; even better they are probably useful to everyone at different times, and not all at the same time.

I’ve actually had some people call into me asking about my Hardstyle Yoga Camp, and I’ve told them it’s probably not going to be best for you participate in it. One of them was a football player from a local High School looking to prepare himself for summer conditioning. I told him straight out, “it’s probably a good time to build a foundation of strength, not conditioning.” So whether or not you should do a bootcamp depends on what phase in your conditioning cycle you’re at, and for that football player he shouldn’t overlook the importance of spending some time on heavy strength and power training, with lots of recovery time. Perhaps you should do the same?

However if it’s the right time for you a conditioning routine might be something you need, and bootcamps normally fit the bill; (specifically if you’re looking for fat loss- one camp session could easily burn up to 700 calories plus give you a huge boost in metabolism after). Pick anyone and go for it. Why pick mine then?

Well, most bootcamps are not flow orientated, and I think there’s something to be said about the mental as well as the physical parts of accenting flow- moving from one movement to the next with intentional grace and fluidity; the weird and unscientific words capture the term flow best; it’s feeling energy move within you through your body into the ground all the way through the crown of your head and finger tips. If using the idea of chi or energy has turned some of you off, hold on a second it’s not that unscientific.

In one way or another if you’ve worked with a reputable strength coach, you’ve worked on your flow. Normally in my one on one sessions I focus on flow within an exercise rather than on transitional flow. For the squat I use words like “root yourself,” or “ be the wedge between you and the weight.” I sometimes even use the phrase “be a tree and spread yourself into the ground through the floor as deep as you can.” If you’re doing a push up you’ll hear me say don’t push yourself up from the floor, move the earth from you. All this visualization and language leads to one idea and that is a stiff, strong, and stable movement. In other words feeling your “energy” directed into pushing the earth doesn’t somehow make you one with a tree spreading it’s roots, it just makes you stable, and enables you to understand the concept of moving as one unit- keeping you as strong and safe as possible.

Yet transitional flow is just as important, if not more so, than flow during an exercise. Few know this, but if you go to physical therapy everything is an exercise, and there is a factor of independence involved. Where independence comes into play is merely getting on and off the machines. Think about it… your physical therapist planned everything for you, but getting in and out of a lying or sitting position; he/she barely helped with that. Yet ironically the reason you were probably in physical therapy was not to get massaged, or have e-stim, but to get better at daily living activities. In other words your physical therapist could, although he/she might have been using those things as assessments, have helped you more if he/she would have spent some time actually instructing your transitional flow making it more graceful and fluid. In other words Hardstyle Yoga Camp is about moving everywhere, in everyway with fluidity and grace, strength and poise, even though you might feel like collapsing from fatigue.

Now why put the fatigue in there? Well if you take the advice of dance instructors you don’t worry about fatigue, and you just practice till you get it. However, I think for the practice of fitness you have to go with the advice of Yogies. What do I mean by that?

Well if you want to learn a Jive, then you have do something pretty much daily, and in learning movements fatigue is your enemy; you’re trying to learn a motor skill. In fact even yogi’s talk about coming to your mat daily, sometimes for an hour and sometimes for merely 10 minutes to learn the flow. Yet most of you don’t care about perfecting the Sun A flow; it’s something you’re doing to get strong, flexible, in better shape, etc... . In this case fatigue is your friend sometimes.

Fatigue is obviously part of a workout to lose weight because it’s the result of work which of course is what you need to do to burn calories. But ironically fatigue can also produce quality movements sometimes.

So the best- defined by the deepest and most properly aligned- downward dog that you can do right now takes a lot of exercise to warm you, as well as the right movement that allows the muscles that need to be lengthening to do so, and a completely exhausted body that will just give in to the stretch. We notice similar effects when we use kettlebells. For instance when you swing you seem to gain better form when fatigue sets in and you stop using the muscles you shouldn’t, because they’re to tired to do the work. In essence the workout gets safer and more productive as it goes on; this is completely the opposite of strength work where you want your first rep to be your best. Therefore we’ve picked the best exercises and the best tools to perform under the state of extreme fatigue to provide you with the best results, and we’ve put the exercises that we want to build strength first in the workout so you don’t do them when you’re fatigued.