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.
No comments:
Post a Comment