Thoughts.

My Situation

I’m presently doing rotations in San Francisco for a couple months (working at California-Pacific Medical Center‘s Pacific Campus); as such, I am a long ways away from Dartmouth’s free-for-student gym access and the resources it offers. Unfortunately, my current finances and location are such that I have no close, cheap gym options to get my iron fix on. At this point, it’s a bona fide jonesing to lift heavy; there is something deeply satisfying to me about a heavy pull or nailing that last squat in a set  that is hard to recreate elsewhere, but necessity is the mother of invention, and here I am needing to gear up for another season without my old, comfortable training allies.

So, what’s the alternative? There are a range of options for the aspiring trainee without a power rack:

• Acquiring a decently-weighted kettlebell enables a lot of strength and power work without a lot of expense or equipment
• Likewise, a TRX setup allows for several motions (I’m thinking of inverted rows and other pulling movements, but also unstable pushups, ab “rollouts” and bulgarian squats with an unstable rear foot) that broaden the palate of strength training options.
• Finally, the best implement to master is the one that you carry with you every day – your own bodyweight. Many challenging movements exist that push not only your strength, but your balance and aid in the development of athleticism.

In the interest of not paying excessive baggage fees, I opted against bringing my kettlebells out here – I have put together a homemade TRX setup for under $30 that I highly recommend (though they just came out with some elastically-rigged “Rip Trainer” that I’m dying to emulate as well). I’ve been using it mostly for inverted rows but there are many, many options to incorporate this into one’s training.

General Concepts in Strength Training

But enough about that – the meat of this post is about bodyweight strength training. A general review of the notions of how to improve strength includes a few options:

1. Moving a heavy load. This engages the nervous and (depending on how heavy and how long) muscular system to both improve the capability to express the strength you have, as well as stimulate muscle growth with enough volume.
2. Moving a less-heavy load, at high speed. This method focuses more on engaging the nervous system – with an intent to move at full speed, you recruit more muscle units and therefore train more of your muscle mass on a movement. This is generally the case when doing olympic lifts or dynamic effort work on the basic lifts.
3. Moving a less-heavy or light load to the point of fatigue or failure. This method, often used by bodybuilders, is intended both to maximize time under tension for a given muscle group (believed to be a prime variable for stimulating muscle growth); additionally it’s thought that the last few reps of each set occur at a point where the smaller, weaker muscle units are so fatigued that you cannot help but recruit the larger, more powerful units, allowing you to stimulate a large percentage of the muscle to adapt, grow and improve overall strength capacity.

My personal bias has always been more for methods 1 and 2 – with method 3 you lose some of the nervous system training component (typically one ends up “training slow” doing bodybuilding work and not developing athletic qualities such as speed and explosiveness; there’s also the notion that this encourages adding less-functional muscle mass.  If you’re training for speed, every pound of excess weight, be it fat or muscle, that isn’t making you faster is slowing you down; I’m also not fond of training to failure on a regular basis, as it tends to promote more lasting fatigue and injury risk). With bodyweight work one ends up necessarily trending more toward the low-load, high-rep end of the spectrum, but there are ways to keep efforts challenging enough to develop real strength.

Increasing the Degree of Difficulty

This is something I plan to focus on – if our sweet spot is somewhere less than 15 reps/set to maintain at least some strength development, it’s important to progress in the type of movement being done to keep it challenging. Examples of this are progressing from a split squat to a Bulgarian (rear foot-elevated) split squat, or adding range to reverse lunges by doing them off of a step, or elevating one’s feet while doing pushups. One does not need weight to make such progressions.

Another way to go about this is to regularly change the exercises done. If after a few weeks pushups are feeling too easy or taking too long to get the effect you want, experiment with handstand pushups against a wall. Return to pushups again later, try a different progression, and see if allowing your body to “forget” the movement doesn’t allow it to become useful again.

High-speed Work

An additional way to go about this is to add a high-velocity component to the exercise. Again, time under tension and doing slower movements can be good for stimulating growth, but it fails to develop explosive athleticism; rather than (or ideally, in addition to) doing slow, controlled reps of your split squats, try an explosive variant like split squat jumps or scissor kicks (or work the absorptive rather than generative side of explosivity with some jumps to lunge position landings). One could even combine methods and start with an explosive variant and transition to a more controlled version once fatigue makes the explosive version too hard to sustain.

Diminishing Rest Intervals

Finally, if there’s anything I’ve learned from Crossfit it’s the magic of incorporating a time element. Sure, you might be able to do 50 pushups at one go, but how long does it take? What if every 10 pushups you alternate with some lunges or air squats? What if these pushups are at the bottom position of a burpee? If you’ll pardon this coming from a scientist, there’s something magical about what happens when you take routine exercises and integrate them into a larger circuit, when you track time and incentivize doing more work with less rest – this probably also relates to the time under tension concept, where it’s not only the overall volume, but the density, that stimulates the hormonal responses that encourage growth.

More to Come

Those are the general considerations. I’ve decided to follow more of a set program for my bodyweight training rather than wing it entirely (based off of the Vertical Jump Development Bible‘s bodyweight strength program – incidentally, the whole thing is a great read for some grounding in basic concepts of athletic training), but I’m hoping to actually lay it out more specifically along with the rest of my training plan in a future post.

This site has been silent for too long, and for that I apologize. Some updates for you:

• Personally, I’ve had a full year. Finished the study grind (well, one of them) wrapping up year two of medical school and passing Step 1 of my Boards (there are 3 steps total) in July; since then I’ve been busy in the hospital and clinic getting hands-on training and exposure to patients trying to translate my knowledge of how health and disease works into the more functional side of how do we recognize and treat illness in real people. After two years of struggle I finally feel like I’m starting to thrive and get some certainty on my future career path – life is very good.
• Ultimate-wise, I wound up playing mixed with Ballometrics again this year; we wound up losing at the end of Saturday at Regionals in what is always a tough Northeast region. This year I’m looking to take more of a leadership role still playing coed and am excited and energized by the prospect of helping lead a team to something great.
• Writing-wise, I’m hoping to do better with updating this blog – short-term plan is to do some reflection on my training this year (with my schedule and travel I’ve had to forsake the weights, which has made for more interesting decisions). I’m also planning to re-work some of my older material on strategy and skills and deliver it to Skyd for republishing, with perhaps the occasional new feature there as well. I haven’t quite figured where I’ll draw the line on what goes where yet, but I’ll certainly link from here to anything that goes up there.

I wish I could say I’ve written enough here to do a retrospective “best of” but that’s simply not the case – but stay tuned for more to come!

Lifting is only one component of my training these days – I’ve been ramping up the explosive work to gear up for more speed training/on-field play as well.

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Continuing to increase strength and adding muscle remain goals for me over the next couple months, along with getting ready to play this season. What am I doing to these ends?

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With some broad background explanation given in the past three posts, these next posts will really drill in on specifics I’ll be using for my training. First up: mobility work.

Gray Cook, noted rehab expert (check out Athletic Body in Balance, or his newest book on the functional movement screen), inspires a lot of my thinking here, with a strong tip of the hat to Eric Cressey‘s methods for incorporating mobility work into the warm-up and workout.

My Imbalances – What I Need to Work On

Here’s a list of various imbalances or mobility issues I’ve noticed over the past several months – I’ve already begun working on some of them, but I’d like to formally prioritize them going forward.
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Before I can start arranging all the pieces of the plan, it helps to have an idea of what I want my training week to look like. (I find organizing with a weekly cycle to be the most convenient for me, but you may find a shorter 2 to 4-day cycle makes more sense, especially for beginners when less variety is needed).
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In part 1 of this series, I touched upon my general goals; choosing a site to build, or framing the canvas, if you will. Step 2 from that is to assemble the appropriate tools to construct something befitting the site; after that, I’ll begin putting the pieces together into something coherent and useful.

From each general goal I’ll lay out some specifics in how I’ll go about applying that to my training:
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