Spiritual Training & Rotate Conditioning

May God bless you all and may this letter find you experiencing unprecedented success.


CONTINUED PRAYER

Last week I wrote to you all about a prayer request for Dennis Rogers’ youth group. I told you how in four weeks time they had four teenagers either killed or injured in shootings or car accidents. Since the newsletter they had another teenager injured in another car accident. Although that is apparently by the grace of God not life threatening. They’ve also had the funeral for one of the teens who was shot. And some of the others are still in the hospital and still dealing with the repercussions of what put them there. Let’s continue to remember them all in their time of need. May God continue to bless and work in all those lives in Jesus name.

Let’s also remember our Iron Brothers who are dealing with serious situations in life. I’ve seen requests for prayer for several brothers lately who are dealing with serious life circumstances, cancer, etc. Notably I understand that powerlifting great Pat Casey is dealing with a second bout of cancer. Let us remember him and his wife. Another powerlifting great Tony Conyers has been dealing with some injury issues. While nothing nearly as serious as the others, let’s still continue to remember him.


CONGRATULATIONS

A little bit belated, but I understand that my friend Rob Lawrence, Kettlebell Instructor and All Around wiry-skinny-strong-nice guy and his wife have a new baby! God bless them all and congratulations.

Also belated is from what I understand Chad Coy and his wife Kim also have a new baby! God bless them all. Chad, if you see this, give the baby a little time before you starting making him/her (I’m not aware if you had a boy or a girl), sit in the sled for extra weight.

Also blessings and love to my wife who just celebrated her birthday and who has put up with me for nine years of marriage. A tremendous accomplishment. Possibly far outweighing the many heavy lifts done in the last year as a demonstration of strength.


NOW FOR THE REQUIRED STRONGERMAN SPIRITUAL INTERJECTION

As you can see from the above paragraphs life continues to move all the time in ways we would consider both positive and negative. Light and dark comes to every man “rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

My wife and I were just talking about this. How it is sobering to think that on the same day we were celebrating, friends in other parts of the country were at funerals mourning the loss of children. I think it’s a waste of time to reason why bad things happen to good people. They are simply part of the structure of life and they are necessary even though we can’t fathom why. Especially when in the midst of one of those situation. Everything has a counter balance. Without sorrow there would be no joy. We still continue to pray for those people and those situations because prayer does change things. BUT worrying about circumstances out of your control or thinking that prayer will absolutely stop every tragedy from happening is missing the point. There are hills and valleys in every life that everyone must deal with. Worrying about whether they happen or not is wasting your time. Dealing with them when they do and having the faith to withstand them is our useful direction.

Everything that happens in life is an opportunity for the demonstration of strength. Not physical strength, not your own emotional strength, because they are not right for every situation and eventually they’ll fail you. It’s a demonstration of the strength of your faith and the closeness with which you align with God. When someone cuts you off on the road or in the grocery store it is an opportunity for you to grow spiritually. An opportunity to put feet to your belief, to step back and realize that the physical is preparation for the eternal and that wasting your time and energy in anger over minor issues is a waste of life and weakening to your faith. It is an opportunity for you to act not only like a grown up, but someone who practices true belief. Everybody sometimes loses it over stupid little things. It’s part of humanity. But as you grow in physical strength, you can also grow in the spiritual and emotional strength to be able to practice a discipline of peace. To not have your first reaction be volatile, but to carry through with the discipline that you built in training to a peaceful reaction. To choose to display that spiritual strength but literally being above that idiotic circumstances of life. Doing this practices and builds strength for handling those circumstances that truly require an advanced level of it.

Just like training every day makes you physically stronger and more disciplined eating a solid diet makes you more disciplined in that respect, training your mind makes you tougher and smarter mentally, training your spirit falls along the same lines. Life can take on a whole different place for you if you begin to see every day’s minor challenges as training to build your inner peace and your relationship with God. When you can get to this place there is a much more fun and sweeter aroma to your life. And when you do need maximum spiritual strength you help to build a condition to display it and to get through those times that sometimes crush people. You need to know God through Jesus Christ and practice that belief. Talk to God regularly, treat people like you know they need to be treated, ask for and actually use peace from God. We all struggle with this every day and just because I write this doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to me as well. If we can help, please let us know.


TRAINING TIP

In the past we’ve mentioned Heavy and Light Training. Now let’s talk about rotating training for constant improvement.

You know I don’t believe in traditional cycling. I believe the body will tell you when and how to cycle. By cycle I mean build up in weight toward a goal or consistently add intensity toward a goal. I believe you must learn your own body through experimentation. I and other authors can give you our opinion and everything we say is not written in stone. You must logically apply what we say with consideration to your own particular needs and characteristics. At some point you will come to a place where pretty much regardless of what style of training you apply, that you train a particular lift hard enough, heavy enough and long enough that it begins to burn you out. This doesn’t necessarily apply to just pure heavy lifting, but it can apply to conditioning as well.

Here’s where rotating you focus can help. What this idea really means is that once you hit the place where you make a major goal, or have hit that burn out stage you then put that particular area of training into a maintenance mode and shift your focus so that you maintain the gains that you have, but stay mentally and physically fresh by concentrating on something else. There are two ways to do this. The first is to concentrate on something similar to the goal that you’ve already achieved. This will allow you to continue building a similar type of strength while regenerating your reserves on your main goal. Then hopefully when you switch back to the focus on your main goal you will have built extra strength that you can then apply to your main goal.

The second way is to use maintenance training again on your main goal but then to radically shift your focus to something completely different. The advantage of this is that the regeneration time to a state of freshness for again picking up your main goal is probably shorter. The disadvantage is that while training builds on each other you may or may not get much strength carry over to your main goal. Other than simply refreshing your mental and physical ability to pursue it.

I’ll give you a couple of examples of what I mean. Say you’ve been squatting heavily using a particular program for six months to a year. You finally achieve the goal you set for that lift, but you begin to feel mentally and physically burned out. Here are a couple of options that you can do.

Reduce your training percentage to a comfortable weight. A weight that is moderately challenging but that doesn’t create an mental psyching or create an excessive amount of wear and tear. A lot of people like 70% as a number. I tend to go by more feel, I don’t particularly pay attention to percentages. From there, pick an exercise that has similar effect on you as squats and focus on it with greater intensity. There are several ways to go here. You might pick a partial squat. You might use a type of progressive distance training (although many styles of this have a built in intensity cycling and to me this type of training allows you to train heavy for longer periods of time with less burn out an damage). You may pick an alternative type of full squat (I always use parallel bottom positions as my major squat exercise, but from there I could do regular power style or Olympic style or Zercher, etc as an alternate), or you may pick a completely different movement that allows for the same type of strength or fixes a particular weakness.

Example here might be focusing on Good Mornings for back and torso strength, one leg deadlifts for hamstring strength, regular or stiff-legged deadlifts for pure back strength. These would all help to fix weaknesses and still add to general strength. Still another way or two to go would be to focus on massive whole body strength that can be applied to squats. For instance I have recently been experimenting a great deal with the back lift and heavy torso training and even thought my squat frequency has not been quite as much, I’m still making some PRs. Heavy poundage lifts like hip lifts or harness lifts would also apply here as well as heavy strongman movements such as yoke walking and sled dragging.

Examples of the second way to go would be the same situation (focused on max squat, hit a goal reaching burn out, moving to maintenance phase). From there you may decide to focus on a completely different strength goal for instance an upper body strength goal or move to a high level-conditioning phase. Now generally I espouse working o all of these things at the same time. High strength for every area of the body and conditioning at the same time. Even in this training template this will still apply from time to time. Because different areas of the body may reach goals at different times and while the whole body functions systemically you may still progress in one area while being slightly over-trained in another. Specific example here might be to focus on dumbbell training or one arm shoulder presses while letting your squats hold in the maintenance pattern. Doing so may allow for PRs in your shoulder strength by lessening the total stress put on them from heavy squats while at the same time allowing your strength to stabilize in your squats and your freshness to build back up. It would be a great time emphasize a flow conditioning or achieve a particular conditioning goal for instance 1,000 reps of mixed bodyweight training in a certain time period. Or 100 kettlebell swings in a certain time, etc. You may also use both of these in conjunction, i.e., maintenance on the squats with an upper body strength goal and a conditioning goal.

Don’t be afraid to go by feeling in your training. Beginners need the absolute discipline of a written cycle, but you still have to learn for yourself. By using this technique you are always still working o a goal, you’re always maintaining good intensity in training and your being smart about the needs of your body for recovery and stabilization.


NEW ARTICLE

There’s a new article up on our site entitled, “Bodyweight Efficiency for the Big Man.” Talks a little bit about pound for pound strength, about maintaining or building efficiency even as you get monstrously huge and gives you some basic ways to train it and test it within the idea of being good at everything even if you are bigger than the average Grizzly.

Hope you enjoy it.

http://strongerman.com/bodyweight_efficiency.html


DON’T FORGET

Check out our site for our new article and for new links to LifeLine Equipment. If you don’t have the cables, the power jumper, the power wheel, the power push up and the TNT set, you’re missing out on a whole area of strength and development that you could be gaining.

Check these out at:
http://strongerman.com/alternative_cond.html