_ If you can’t do a chin-up, a lot of people like to recommend jumping or climbing up to the bar, and lowering yourself down with control. If you can’t do the positive part of the movement, at least you can try training the negative aspect. Now, lowering yourself slowly from the bar can help you to get stronger, it can certainly make you sore the next day (a feeling that’s often mistaken for ‘getting stronger’, but isn’t necessarily so), but all the controlled lowering in the world isn’t going to give you the skill of pulling up. If you have some strength for slow, controlled negatives from the bar (let’s say you can do five or so in a row, taking three to five seconds to lower yourself fully), something you can try is partial-chins: lower yourself until the bar is the same height as your eyes – your upper arms should be almost horizontal – then pull yourself back up to the top, and then do a full controlled lower all the way to the bottom. This will give you an experience of actually pulling-up, but through one of the easier portions of the movement. All that being said, I’m not really a fan of the controlled negative – I don’t find it helpful, and I don’t find it enjoyable. It feels like going to do chin-up training without doing any chin-ups, which is not particularly satisfying.
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_It’s a big question, and what needs to be addressed first is the assumption that hard work is necessary or important. We take it as given that it is, and it’s certainly glorified, but this desire for excellence and the iron will to achieve often comes from destructive or negative places, such as the need to compensate for perceived inadequacies, or the desire to dominate and control oneself or others. In short, indulging in destructive behaviours might not serve you in the long term. Masochism, ideas of purification and bargaining, self-loathing and then the obvious need for personal betterment – these themes come up again and again when you spend enough time at a gym. Why can you picture nothing worse than being just like everyone else? What is it you despise about your own humanity? And does it simply come down to – as it seems to for me, time and time again – a naive attempt to deny one’s own mortality? We are weak, and vulnerable, and flawed, and no amount of training will change that. So – why the hell not just spend your time doing something you enjoy? Seriously? _ If I’m to be perfectly honest, my concentration span is short. Like everyone else’s. I can’t maintain great focus for longer than eight reps, and that’s pushing it. Five or six reps, and I start to wander. I need to pull my focus back in, and this is one of the reasons I lift heavy: short concentration span. I check in with my body – a few cues: feet, knees, hips, spine, chin up, tension – and lift. Reset, repeat. Honestly, who can do a set of ten reps, without their mind wandering – even if just a little? It’s hard work, maintaining focus. Who can maintain true single-pointed focus for so long? What are you focusing on? Leverage? The feeling in the muscles? Alignment? With so much stimulus, what do you pay attention to? That guy wearing the lemon singlet, making a scene? Damn, focus gone! Someone calls out your name? Don’t look, don’t turn your head – they can wait. It’s not rude of you, they’re the one who’s interrupting. Training is about development. It’s not about simulating the experience of competition, it’s not about testing, it’s not about being the best around, nothin’s ever gonna keep you down – nor is it about rehab, consistency, or even the acquisition of skills. It may include many of these things, but it is limited to none of them. To take a broad view, if you’re not progressing, your training is not serving you. Of course, if you read my last post, and you really are simply into having fun, improving your health, and training intuitively, what follows may be kind of irrelevant. But if you are looking to progress athletically, read on, dear reader... It’s a funny thing – when we think of training in terms of education or occupationally specific knowledge and skills, we think of an end result where we have learned something – where we possess more skills and knowledge, and the ability to apply these in a practical context. _ I love to lift heavy things. But I don’t do random sets of biceps curls or leg extensions because it bores the crap out of me, it’s uncomfortable, and I don’t find it helpful. You don’t have to go through every body part in a session to get a good, well balanced and satisfying strength workout. You really don’t. In fact, in my experience – to do so achieves very little except mediocrity and boredom. Two or three lifts are enough. A workout like that, you can sink your teeth into. Disclaimer: what this post is about is doing what you find helpful, in a way that feels good, in amounts that satisfy you. Not in a way that makes you feel bad. It’s my usual agenda - nothing new there. I’m just talking about how I like to train, about what I feel is rewarding. And not in some vague future sense of the term, but in a very immediate sense – if your training itself is rewarding, you don’t need to reward yourself for training. That’s key to my approach to all things exercisey. A different kind of coach First things first: age is irrelevant. In a certain context, anyway: I have never trained someone who was too old to be able to improve their condition. Never. I had an 84 year old client a while ago now, who played lawn bowls. He could play quite comfortably, but the green is sunken – there’s a fair step that borders it, and stepping on and off the edge was challenging for him. So we started practicing step-ups, to a variety of different heights, with extra support where needed – we started focusing on gluteal and hamstring activation, increasing stable range of motion, etc. and within a couple of months, the step was no longer a problem. An 84 year old man successfully increased strength and range of motion in a couple of months. When we don’t consciously work or train with a variety of people, we have a way of thinking that what works for us, now, is what will work for everyone else, whether this is training or diet, irrespective of goals or stages of development. Even the term ‘stages of development’ implies that people will progress through the same steps in the same way. We seem to lack the capacity to understand other people’s work capacity – all the time you hear the judgments: he should be lifting heavier, or she should not be training so hard – but really? Why? Because it would be too much or too little for us, ourselves. _ I don’t train because I enjoy being abused or emasculated. In fact, I don’t enjoy being abused or ridiculed at all, not even ‘in the name of progress’. Maybe this is why I generally train by myself these days. It’s a strange and sad state, when our normal expectation of the personal training experience is to berate or be berated. Any moron can tell someone to do it harder, and just because you’re Drillseargent McYellface doesn’t make you good at progression or athletic advancement. In fact, it probably makes you worse. If you’re actually in the army, and you need to be combat-ready – there are different processes they take you through. You need to learn about managing stress in a whole different way. Bootcamps aren’t about getting you fit – it’s the army – they assume you’re already fit. Bootcamps are about team building, learning to trust and rely on the other people who will keep you alive when death is on the cards. The modern civilian bootcamp is an abomination. _ People think that when you do chin-ups, it’s all about getting the chin over the bar, but it doesn’t have to be. I find it’s much more practical to think about getting the elbows down, pulling them towards your buttocks. You aren’t pulling down to the front – if your intention is to bring your elbows behind you, it’ll open the chest, arch the back naturally (which is what you want) and really engage all your mid- and upper-back muscles, which are the ones we want chin-ups to develop. There are two ways (a billion really, but today I’ll talk about two) you can look at the strength exercises you do: either you’re training body parts, or you’re training movements. I used to train with a body-parts mentality, but I don’t think it’s as effective when it comes to developing your athleticism. If you think of working the muscle hard, fatiguing it, you’re focusing on expending energy for its own sake – to burn calories, or stimulate a growth response, or whatever. But if you focus on movements, you start to see your training in terms of efficiency, leverage, and understanding momentum and the application of force to achieve something specific, rather than simply chasing fatigue. I think everything about strength training ideally comes down to promoting good (harmonious, efficient, etc.) movement patterns within your body. If you are capable of efficient, natural, harmonious movement, then you build up your strength, you’ll ultimately be able to do a lot of really cool stuff, not the least of which includes getting around the world with mobility and freedom. Then when you develop your strength, and you put power behind efficiency, clearly this leads to good results. _ It’s mostly social. And there’s a lot of misinformation. Or people are doing it for the wrong reasons – they think it’s going to make something happen that might never happen – or maybe they’re compensating for something (I raise my hand here – hello!). How does calling someone soft help them to get strong? By exploiting them, rather than encouraging them. By shaming and manipulating them, rather than inspiring them. Is that method of motivation still going to be working for you after three years of lifting? I hope not. I hope you’d be better at standing up for yourself by then. If a guy posts a video on youtube of his max effort deadlift, someone’s going to call him a pussy or a fag. Maybe because he isn’t lifting enough. Or maybe he’s lifting too much, and the critic feels threatened. Or his technique’s all wrong, and the bullying is excused with a phrase like just sayin’, as if nothing untoward has happened and being an asshole is okay because of free speech and blah-de-blah. We know that walking for as little as ten minutes is good for your health, yet any personal trainer will tell you it isn’t enough. For what? Weight-loss. What is enough? And how much pressure is supposed to be helpful, anyway? If we can let go of our own hypocrisy, that will enable us to do things that are good for us, even though they won’t make us thin. Anyone who says they have a fool-proof, guaranteed system is lying to you. If such a system actually existed, would anyone be fat? Hell no. If it’s a secret method, that means it’s statistically insignificant. So is that ‘one weird tip’ good for anything other than lightening your wallet? |