(This article originally appeared on Original Strength)

By now it’s no surprise that Original Strength is the perfect answer to dissolving your aches, discomforts, tightness, and movement issues. But did you also know that it’s your sword and shield for use in epically crushing weakness?

Yeah, not just getting stronger, but straight up punching weakness right in its stupid face.

The secret?

There are two. And really, they’re not secrets. Just practices that you may not know about yet. Sorry if you were expecting some dark arts sort of stuff.

1) Utilizing resets between sets of any given exercise
2) Experimenting to find the right reset for the right exercise for YOU
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The first is important because many relegate the resets to a warm-up or cool-down only and miss out on the benefits of doing them WITHIN their training, which can help you and your body figure out how the resets connect to various strength and athletic movements. Call that reset inception if you will, but it works like crazy.

The second is important because one size NEVER fits all if it’s something worth wearing. Don’t fall into that trap. In fact, you might find that what would seem to be the most obvious reset might not be the one that helps you the most.

Using the principles of Original Strength (crossing the midline and stimulating the vestibular system specifically) in tandem with the training principles found in StrongFirst leads to awesomely quick gains in strength and improvement in technique, regardless of the movement.

I recently spent the last few months training hard for my SFG II certification in Italy, and for those who know anything about it, they know that one of the biggest hurdles that candidates face – in addition to the various technique tests and that one must pass – is the half-bodyweight one-arm military press.

The approach many people take to it is to press and press and press some more – a good approach to improve pressing power, but one that overlooks the fact that in order to pass the cert, you must still pass your level one skills and the other level two skills, 9 of which are overhead (single snatch, double snatch, the snatch test, double military press, Turkish Get Up, windmill, bent press, push press, clean and jerk). That’s a lot of overhead work and it can lead to plenty of issues *IF* you’re adding more and more work on less and less of a rock-solid foundation. As Master SFG Dave Whitley recently said to me “I’m all about making hard stuff easier”, which is exactly what this article is about. It will be hard. You will have to train. But you can make it easier.

Here’s a short case study based on the most recent training of yours truly. I’ll spare you all the details of my training program and focus specifically on the military press and how I found the right reset FOR ME to improve it.

Here was my uber-scientific approach.

You ready?

I tried a reset and shortly thereafter would press my 32 kg bell (36 kg was the test weight). If the press got shakier/weaker, I knew it wasn’t for me. If the press got stronger, faster, and floated overhead with less struggle, I knew I was on the right track.

BOOM. Science.

When you were born, you were pure.  Your mobility and flexibility were as good as they would ever be, and your software (your brain) only had a matter of time before it developed into a powerhouse to launch your hardware (your body) into a fully-functioning, strong and supple Soft Machine.  You would start this path by laying on your back and stomach, gazing at the world above and below you and using each of your five senses to make sense of the endlessly stimulating environment that surrounded you.  Eventually, you were meant to explore your surroundings by rocking, rolling, crawling, touching, and feeling everything you could.

The World, however, didn’t wait.

The World, in its impatience, put you in a stroller and a walker, robbing you of your movement birthrights – rolling from back to belly, rocking back and forth, and cross-body movements like crawling.  These things made you strong and resilient, not immature and lesser developed.  They made you human.

When you were young, you were playful.  You learned to run, jump, wrestle, throw, climb, and enjoy life and movement.  Your play spanned neighborhoods, creeks, fields, dreams.  It followed you wherever you went – at home, at school, on vacation, and any place else you could think of.  It included games with your friends, both the standards and the ones you made up.  It included all kinds of sports and activities, and your imagination knew no bounds.  Your surroundings were your playground, and no place was off limits for physical exploration and movement.

The World, however, didn’t wait.

The World, in its insistence to sell something, developed video games and lured children everywhere into playing them – so that they learn to run, jump, wrestle, throw, climb, and enjoy life through their fingertips and a glowing screen rather than through their limbs and minds.  Outdoor play and movement took a backseat to computer programming that made the world only as real as what the start button said it was.

When you were in adolescence, you were an open book.  Sports, competitions, games, and activities became a vehicle for self-expression, and just as you don’t use just one sentence to express yourself, you didn’t want to commandeer just one of these vehicles – you liked playing many of them.  You enjoyed the complex game of human chess that was football, baseball, basketball, dodgeball, tennis, martial arts, and the myriad of other games and movements that comprised the art of expressing the miracle of the Soft Machine.  You wanted to remain a part of all of them.

The World, however, didn’t wait.

The World, in its impatience, demanded that you pick just one, and excel at it by all means necessary.  When the weather permitted, you were at practice, doing repetitive movements and cementing them into your muscles and mind.  When weather didn’t permit, you were given alternative arrangements and made those work instead.  When the season was over, rather than participating in new sports or activities, you were funneled into sport clinics and camps and made to repeat the same movements in the same way again and again.  Your baggage of movements that you would carry with you through life became more and more economical – and unbeknownst to you and The World, this would do you more harm than good.

When you were in college, the World was your oyster.  You were on your own, allowed once again to explore your surroundings.  Only this time, no one could tell you what to do.  You could major in anything, be involved in any club, activity, and program you liked.  The classroom was your window to the world, and you could look as far and deep as you wanted to.  If you felt like it, you could skip class, play catch or Frisbee with your friends, laugh, and enjoy life.  Deep down, something told you and your body to return to what you knew you should do, and now was your time to do it.

The World, however, didn’t wait.  

The World, in its ambition, nudged, poked, and prodded you into ignoring the primal scream within your body and mind, as you spent more and more time in class and in the library, while comforting your decision to now rob yourself of the joy of movement.  You were told you had too much to get done, and playing around would have to wait until you were finished.  If you did find time to activate your Soft Machine, it was in the same sport you played in (and possibly even got hurt doing) as a kid.  Your training for this sport involved your Soft Machine sitting in a hard machine – doing exercises involving pulleys, well-oiled and perfectly calibrated moving parts to “safely” guide you into movements you no longer had the strength and knowledge to do.  Having spent most of your life seated, the open arms of the exercise machines comforted you into having a seat to do all of your movement.  This seemed like a great idea. 

When you were a grown up, you were funneled into “real jobs” where you sat all day, hunched over a computer and relegated to more repetitive tasks – tasks that involved minimal and redundant movement, given importance that comforted you once again into not moving outside of what was required of you, because deadlines beckoned and promotions called from afar.  In your mind, in your imagination, you couldn’t miss any of these things.

Then one day you woke up.  You looked around and, like the child you once were, you realized how big the world is around you, and how much your body and your health have to offer you as a conscious entity.  As important as everything in your life is, none of it is as important as you are, and there is nothing you have ignored as much as yourself.  Your life is a shell of impressive accomplishments and its interior is filled with ghosts of memories of what you could once do effortlessly.  Running to catch a cab becomes an exercise in wheezing and coughing.  Trying to climb a tree to get your family’s cat out of it becomes an embarrassing realization that not only can you no longer climb due to the mobility restrictions that “more important” sedentary tasks have left you with, but even if you had the mobility, you no longer have the strength and coordination that once came to you as easily as breathing.

Primal Move isn’t just a system about movement; it IS a movement.  A movement to return you to your primal nature and your God-given birthright.  We were not born to sit all day.  We were not born to restrict ourselves.  We were not born to be drones.  We were born to play, to move effortlessly, to be both strong AND supple.  Only the World’s deafening insistence that we silence our primal desire to be so abundantly active convinced us otherwise. 

Resilience and unrestricted movement and muscle joy in all sorts of activities is what awaits you, regardless of your vocation, history, or personal background.   You are not meant to merely exist.  You are meant to LIVE.  The living are separated from the dead through movement.  The less we move, the more our bodies start to resemble the dead.  More and more, we are dead on our feet; we die years before we are declared so because we forget how to move.  If we have to be taught how to move again, so be it, so long as we do it. 

For too long, that primal scream has been echoing within your shell of accomplishments, bouncing off the walls of everything you’ve done for decades and decades.  It will not go away; it will only echo louder.  The time has come to answer the call.  The time has come to reclaim your movement birthright!  Unlearn what you have learned and re-learn what you used to know; play, have fun, and enjoy the way you were meant to move!  Whoever you are, wherever you are, and whatever you do, come back to what you were made to do.  Your movement destiny awaits, and isn’t going anywhere as long as you make the return you need to.  Throw off the shackles and joint the movement.

The World can wait.

Oh yeah, it can be done.

Can you burn fat AND build muscle with *just* the Original Strength resets?

In a word: Hell yes!

Okay, that was two words. Sue me.

The fact remains the same – for as gentle as the OS resets are, time and time again my students (most of whom start off using ***only*** the OS resets before moving on to any tougher exercises) report back to me that a steady diet of OS and OS alone has helped them lose fat and build muscle.

Just the other day a student brought up – almost sheepishly – this topic during our lesson.

“I’ve noticed that I’ve lost weight lately. Is it even possible that what we’ve been doing could be responsible? I mean, it all seems so gentle…it just doesn’t make sense!”

This is hardly the first time I’ve heard this. Last year, someone who went through my 30 day crawling challenge (crawl a total of 10 minutes daily for 30 days) told me she actually LOST weight while eating like crazy during the myriad Christmas festivities she took part in!

“Yeah, but building muscle? Everyone thinks they’ve built muscle once they start doing anything and the fat starts to fall off.”

^^^ True. But when a student comes back from having her body composition tested professionally (more than once, mind you) and is told that she’s lost fat AND built muscle, well, that’s something!

Moreover, my good friend and former powerlifter Corey Howard of Sioux Falls, SD has experienced the same thing by loading up his crawls and training them seriously. (Check out his article “Crawling Is Better Than Deadlifting” for the details). Dude’s an experienced lifter whose results go beyond mere “beginner’s gains”.

So why might this be? How can deep breathing, head control, rolling, rocking, crawling, and marching POSSIBLY do anything more than feel good?

Here are a couple of reasons why that you can be damn sure of:

* “It doesn’t matter how much work you can do – it matters how much work you can recover from.” OS helps your recovery ability even with the most basic reset of deep breathing. The better you can relax and recover (be it from your day-to-day life to your hard training), the less physically stressed you are. Not only that, but it balances stress hormones with anabolic hormones, making for better fat loss.

* OS builds real, usable strength in every nook and cranny of your body. Traditional strength training – as great as it is – usually has you standing in place. Real life happens in motion. Strengthening your most important movement patterns and all the muscles that support them and you’ll be shocked at how much lighter everything will feel – including YOU! Case in point: I spent two months away from squatting and crawled in its place. I took my double 24 kg kettlebell front squat from 10 reps to 20 reps!

* OS builds work capacity. Crawling and marching – particularly when done in tandem – are tremendous ways to ramp up your work capacity like nothing you’ve ever seen. Greater work capacity = greater energy (i.e. bodyfat) consumption. Best of all, for those of you HIIT junkies in need of some sort of sucker punch to your heart, lungs, and muscles alike, these two moves are where it’s at, yet are gentle enough to be done daily as they doesn’t tax your central nervous system the way many other forms of training do.

* Done consistently, it lifts movement restrictions from your body, allowing you to move more efficiently, more gracefully, and more powerfully, meaning you can express your body the way it was meant to be expressed and you can do so more often. Consistency in any endeavor leads to success.

The list goes on (and on, and on…) but I digress. The proof is in the practice. If you haven’t spent some serious time with these moves under your belt, there’s no time like the present to add them to your daily routine.
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Your health (and waist line) will thank you.

There is nothing new under the sun –
 but there are some secrets you don’t yet know.

When you work out, work out like it’s your job.

That doesn’t mean work out all day every day. It means do it as though your livelihood depends on it.

How would you do that?

By making sure that you *practice*, NOT “work yourself out” – so that you could do the same thing again the next day if you needed to (not unlike professional performers have to do).

Why would you want to do that?

For the simple reason that it will sustain you far better – and far longer – than all the borderline crippling workouts that seem so popular today.
How do I know? Because people who DO/HAVE trained for a living don’t push their limits any more often than every once in a very great while, and they seek to leave their sessions better and stronger, not merely sweatier and more tired.

Case in point: I read a very interesting article recently about two brothers who have been Cirque Du Soleil performers for over 10 years with a mind-boggling ***4,500*** performances under their belt in that time. Guess what they don’t do? If you guessed “random workouts with random exercises in a random order to be completed as fast as possible”, then you hit the nail on the head.

They do what all great performers and professional strongmen from today and bygone eras did:

1) They have a daily restorative routine.
2) They take their recovery as seriously as they take their training
3) They train with purpose and focus
4) They listen to their bodies and surge forth when they can and step back when they have to
5) They train hard enough to challenge themselves, but easy enough to be able to recover and improve themselves.

A cursory look at any old-time circus strongman or professional performer with a physically demanding job will show you that they have this and other things in common.

If all you want to do is do Insanity or P90X until your heart explodes, be my guest. But keep in mind that these are 60-90 day programs, and there are 365 days in a year – not to mention tens of thousands more ahead of you for the rest of your life. If you’re looking for a program to get you in shape for life (and not merely to make you sweaty for a few minutes and sore for a few days) start by infusing the above principles in your training and fill in the gaps from there.

The progress will be slow and steady, but it will always be forthcoming, and it will transform you not for 3 months, but for life.
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Pictured is Pyotr Kryloff – a Russian circus performer who often performed between 12 and 15 times a DAY, and performed late into his 70s lifting preposterous amounts of weight, snapping chains in half, and breaking rocks with his bare hands (not to mention juggling kettlebells)

Well, maybe.

It’s time to abandon your unrequited obsession with “the basics”.

Before you tar and feather me, hear me out.

The basics are absolutely essential, and you HAVE to get good at them. In fact, probably one of the best quotes of all time on the importance of getting good at the basics comes from M. Sgt. Duane Stanton of the USAF Pararescue:

“The only thing that separates the elite from all the rest is the fact that the elite are better at the basics than everyone else.”

Hard to argue with that.

But while you should always find room for the basics in some way in your training, at some point the best way to keep going forth and unrepentantly crushing weakness is going to come from stepping up to the plate and taking on some more advanced exercises.

Let’s take the kettlebell, for instance. If all you ever do is swings, get ups, and goblet squats, you can still be good – great, even.

But once you’ve dialed in those basics and the above-and-beyond flexibility and mobility required to perform them, AND can comfortably do them all with a bell at or above, say, 1/3 to 1/2 of your bodyweight (depending on your age, gender, mileage, etc.) with great technique and to the point where you can practically do it all with your eyes closed (please don’t try), why not put those basics to the test and test your mettle with some more advanced stuff?

In the kettlebell world, my vote would go to working up toward heavy repetition double kettlebell long cycle clean and jerks. Not only will they will leave you even more out of breath than that last sentence, they are the ultimate in kettlebell lifting – 1/2 push, 1/2 pull, 1/2 squat, and all muscle-building, strength-imbuing, weakness shattering (also, yes, I realize that one thing cannot be three halves of something, and no, I don’t give a shit).
Same goes for the calisthenics world. Nose-bleed high-rep sets of dips, pullups, and bodyweight squats should eventually give way to pistols and pullups (preferably weighted) and extended ROM handstand pushups – or better yet, front lever and planche work.
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By all means, honor the basics. But do them the greatest honor by putting the foundation they built to the test and building a magnificent temple of accomplishments upon them. When the time comes to clear all distractions and hone your skills in just the basics again – and that time will come – you will be better prepared not only to understand what you must do, but to appreciate it as well.