Achieving Balance and Heavy & Light Training

Howdy friends. Love to use that Southern speak. Well last week found us very busy. In fact we didn't get a newsletter put out so we're going to make up for it by putting out three this week. My wife just shot me a look about that. You see for all the whacko skills that I've acquired in my life, typing and computer work is not among them. So she types all of the content. however typos have somehow remained in my responsibility, funny how marriage works, ain't it?

Also, we're going to start sending out seminar and product announcements, etc., on their own. Because in putting this newsletter together we put in so much content, they're longer than they should be and by doing that we just can't devote the detail to all of the subjects we want to tell you about. So to simplify things for everybody we're still going to put the newsletter out in its format, but we're going to send you separate info on updated products and events.

You know every time I go to write something for the mental and spiritual strength side of this newsletter, I almost always end up touching on the subject of balance. The more I explore building well-rounded mental, spiritual and physical strength, the more I come back to the subject of balance. You know. Yin and Yang. oh sorry, that was a flash back from an old Kung Fu episode. Seriously. for the greatest success with the least downfall in your life, every part of it requires balance. To be a complete man you must balance the spiritual, mental and physical. To be intellectually complete you must balance technical knowledge with common sense. To be spiritually complete you must balance spiritual understanding with spiritual application. To be physically complete or complete as an athlete you must balance health, strength, endurance, effort and recovery. even solid nutrition requires balance.

Finding true balance in yourself requires self knowledge. It requires the ability to honestly evaluate your needs and apply your resources to fixing them. It's kind of a complicated sounding way of saying that you need common sense. If you don't have one of the things that it takes to be balanced, then get it. If you have lots of book knowledge, get out and do some real hands on work. If you have lots of practical experience without the intellectual back up, then study. If you're strong, but you get gassed from walking across the parking lot, do some endurance work. If you can run for miles like a gazelle but can't carry the groceries in the house without collapsing, do some strength work. The real trick here is honest evaluation. Looking at yourself honestly and acknowledging the need to improve in an area and believing that you can overcome whatever the obstacle is that's keeping you from completeness.

We all tend to move in our natural comfort. Big strong guys tend to strength train and ignore the rest. Endurance guys tend to work endurance and skip strength. Book smart people tend to read more books and ignore the hands-on. Lots of hands-on guys wouldn't be caught dead with a book. It applies to the spiritual as well. You can know everything there is to know about God and still live as if you've never heard of Him. And. you can know only His name and live a spiritually strong day-to-day life. But there is no reason not to have it all.

Whatever it is that you're blessed with that is your natural strength will become greater when you add to it by building up your opposing weakness. It may not be easy, some of it may be downright unpleasant. But it is the job of a man to be the best he can be. This includes well roundedness in every area of his life. We're only here for a short time. There's no point in wasting it on mediocrity.

Here are some points for honest self evaluation you may want to think about.

1. Ultimate Priorities. Since the physical is only a veil for the spiritual it must follow that ultimately the spiritual must take top priority. If you don't know God, regardless of how good you are at the rest of it, it's pointless.

2. Where The Rubber Meets The Road. Ask yourself what area of these things do I have to improve in? Be honest. Be specific. Realize that this is just scratching the surface of this subject and that each of these areas will be completely specific to you.

3. Develop A Plan. We spend lots of time planning training cycles, but do we really plan for complete development of all of your total man? The next time you spend time writing out your training, write in a plan not only for what you will do physically, but for what you will do spiritually and mentally. Remember to balance it for effort and recovery, strength and endurance and technical knowledge and real life application.

4. Specializing. Specializing short-term to bring up a weakness is an effective way to quickly build up your balance. Your ultimate plan must contain balance work for all the areas of your development, but if you see a glaring weakness and want to improve on that, then you must work it. Once you have a base built of all of your areas it is much easier to maintain ability than it is to build it in the first place. This applies across physical, spiritual and mental lines.

5. Use the discipline that you built through physical training to push you to greatness in every other area. It wasn't easy for me to get strong. It's not necessarily easy for you to get anything else, be it smarter, kinder, whatever it may be. But once you get in the groove of doing the workouts, they get much easier. The same applies in building mental and spiritual strength.

6. Fear Keeps us Out of Balance. Fear of failure. Fear of effort. Fear of pain. Fear of giving up something you've come to rely on. Most everybody reading this has conquered at least to some extent the fear of building strength. Use that to build the belief in yourself then you can become a truly spiritual and intellectual person.


TRAINING TIP

HEAVY AND LIGHT TRAINING
This is a popular theorem that's been around forever, but I'd like to approach it in a different way. Maybe in a way that can help you be more practical in your training. I'm all for and all about achieving great levels of strength and endurance in all possible areas and as much as is possible all at the same time. But you must still be intelligent in the muscular, mental and structural recovery of your body. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Squats and Deadlifts:

Pretty much everyone will structurally favor one of these lifts. I.e., your physical leverages and build give you greater aptitude at one or the other. For most people working these lifts in conjunction will help them get stronger at both. However, working both heavily at the same time may prove difficult to recover from. Also for certain people, extremely heavy work in the lift that does not favor them structurally tends to cause them injury. This may be from genetics, but it is also accentuated by the stress placed on the body of working these exercises intensely together. It may not always however by necessary and may be at times, more productive, to work one exercise heavy and the other one light. By concentrating on one exercise heavy you get the real strength and power benefits of very intense work. But by doing the other exercise light you can maintain the development that you get from that exercise as well as the nerve efficiency of continuous practice and the benefit of combining the two exercises without the potential of injury, the excess strain and recovery and risk of over training.

Overhead Presses and Bench Presses:

Again these exercises are generally favored one or the other by your body structure and follow the squats and deadlifts in that they can be beneficial to each other by training them together yet difficult to balance for recovery. Some of the problems of recovery can be solved by moderating your intensity and volume, but at some point, hard work regardless of its volume takes enough of a toll that it requires significant recovery. By mixing these exercises one heavy and one light, you can gain from the combination of strength with less potential for overwork and injury. They may even have a restorative effect (and this applies with the squats and deadlifts as well), by pumping blood into the similar muscle structures without the straining effort of extremely heavy weight.

Grip Work:

There are many areas of the grip that can be trained. Supporting strength (holding a bar as in a deadlift), crushing strength (grippers), thick bars, pinching strength of varying widths, bending and wrist strength, etc. All these areas are at the same time specific to themselves and flow to one and other. They however can present the same problems as the rest of the body. You may structurally favor one or just want to work on one to bring it up, etc. They also are difficult to balance and working all of them heavy at the same time. If you are not conditioned to a tremendous amount of volume or are inexperienced by doing them all heavy simultaneously you invite overtraining or injury. I personally have found it difficult to work heavy bending and heavy grippers together for a long period of time without beginning to get pain in my hands. I have also however found that by concentrating on bending (heavy work), and intermittently or less intensively working other areas of grip (light work), that not only has my bending gotten better, and I have less pain, but I also recently PR-ed on my max knuckles-front partial deadlift (supportive strength).

Summing This Up:

In my books I always advocate working all your barbell exercises heavy as in with heavy singles all of the time. But this is not a rule written in stone, you have to think for yourself. I am finding that by doing heavy squats and light deadlifts my squat goes up, my back doesn't hurt nearly as much and I still maintain a descent deadlift. By working heavy overhead presses and light bench presses, my overhead press goes up, my shoulders feel good and even though it's not very important to me, I can still stay in touch with the bench press, not aggravate an old partial pec tear and keep my chest in shape to use for other strength areas such as bending and stone lifting. (This is also similar to the idea of doing heavy overhead presses and bodyweight push ups.) By concentrating on bending, but still working light on the other areas of grip my hands don't hurt but my grip stays strong in lots of areas. I didn't list it in the headers above, but the same idea may apply to deadlifts (straight arm pulls), and rows (bent arm pulls), you may find it difficult to work both together at the same time and can mix them heavy and light for good results. The same can apply for static pulls (deadlifts), and explosive pulls (cleans and snatches), etc.. It can also apply in short-term specialization for an entire area of training. For instance; easing off on, but still doing conditioning for a short while when you wish to demonstrate max power or vice versa.

Does this negate what I said before about working heavy on everything all of the time? Nope, it just means you have to listen to your body. I still work things heavy in conjunction with each other (that means individual exercises as well as areas of training), I just don't always do it all of the time, but they are both always included in my total program. I think you have to mix both styles to get the greatest training benefit.