It’s more straight-forward than you might think.

There are a few simple rules that will help you succeed with a personal trainer and exceed your goals.  They are: 

1) Hire value, NOT bargain.
– A value is something that enriches your life. A bargain is something that keeps money in your pocket. While the two aren’t *necessarily* mutually exclusive, more often than not they really are. This is important to keep in mind because you are trusting this individual with your *health*. At best, the training you get may be ineffective – meaning that while you kept money in your pocket relative to hiring a more qualified, more expensive trainer, you wasted money AND time and have little to show for either. At worst, you could get very seriously injured, in which case all that money you saved (and probably more) will end up helping your doctor/surgeon/chiropractor/physical therapist to update their car to next year’s model Mercedes.

As the saying goes “if you think it’s expensive hiring a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.”

2) Treat your training as a joy, not a chore.
– Raise your hand if you, your spouse, your children, or anyone else you’ve ever met has ever enjoyed doing chores? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Imagine how much enthusiasm you’ll have for your training if that’s how you approach it.

Training will not always be a mile-a-minute thrill ride, but it has to be something you look forward to, not dread, for it to be something you stick with. And the only program in the world that works is the one you stick with.

3) Listen to your trainer.
– This one seems to be the most obvious to me, but is so often overlooked. If you trust that your trainer’s knowledge and expertise is good enough to transform you, why waste your time and money avoiding doing what they ask – even if you don’t completely understand it? I can tell you that – without exception – every one of my students who has followed my directions to a T has always gotten exactly what they’re looking for. And I don’t ask them to do anything outrageous, anything they can’t recover from, or anything to put them at risk of injury. Consistency and focus in one direction will work miracles, but you have to be willing to hear the message and then *do the work*!

The list could go on, but you get the message. Your success at every step of the way relies on *YOUR* decisions. A good trainer will just help you sort them out and lay out the path for you to walk down.

(This article originally appeared on practicalhungkyun.com)

For the martial artist looking to improve his craft, there are a few bare essentials you need – apart from your actual martial arts practice – that will help propel you toward and beyond your goals.  A healthy level of strength and a good program for all-over conditioning.

The more time you spend doing other exercises, the less time you get to practice your art.  And each strength and conditioning movement you practice should ideally have a strong carryover into your striking, kicking, grappling, etc.

There are a few movements that many of you already practice a great deal that have a massive carryover into your power over your opponents: deadlifting, kettlebell swinging, heavy pressing, pullups, ab work, and loaded carries.  But there’s one movement you’ve probably neglected that will have a major carryover into all you do – a movement you were born to do and haven’t done since you were a toddler.

I’m speaking of none other than crawling.

WAIT!  Before you write the rest of this off as nonsense, hear me out.  Crawling as taught by Original Strength strengthens and makes more efficient many of the natural movements that a true martial artist must do (in fact, crawling has a long history in martial arts training and was a popular exercise among Chinese martial artists).  For example:

• Crawling is cross-lateral, just like a strong right cross or roundhouse kick.
• Crawling correctly requires that your eyes lead your head and that your head leads your body, much like what one must do when dodging a punch or executing a throw such as a suplex (have you ever tried to perform a throw without looking in the direction of where you’ll be throwing your opponent?  I’m guessing not.)
• Crawling is a coordinated full-body effort that builds eye-hand coordination, in-between strength that fortifies all the corners of your body that many standard strength drills can’t do, and incredible conditioning.
• Crawling teaches you to relax under pressure.  The longer you crawl, the harder it gets, but in order to crawl correctly, you must stay relaxed, no matter how hard you’re breathing or how much your muscles are burning.
• Your body is one large X, extending from the tip of your fingers to the tip of your toes.  Your right wrist  is connected to your left ankle, and vice versa.  Your left shoulder is connected to your right hip.  Your right serratus anterior is connected to your left oblique, and so on.  Making this connection stronger teaches your body how to communicate with all of its parts better and connects you from top to bottom, tying your body into one strong, resilient piece.  The better tied together you are, the easier it is for you to fight without falling apart; to get hit without getting injured.  To train for your art without falling apart.

This last point is especially important, because martial artists take quite a beating in training, whether they’re strikers or grapplers.  Your body is one piece, strung together by a myriad of moving parts (specifically your joints, bones, and various muscles and connective tissues).  The stronger and better these are held together, the better you can express your power, speed, agility, and strength.

There is a right way to crawl and a wrong way to crawl.  The following only scratches the surface of crawling, but it’s a quick overview of a few of the many things we cover in Original Strength as a way of utilizing crawling first and foremost as a way to improve your movement, as well as to improve your brute strength, conditioning, eye-hand coordination, recovery time, and a variety of other things for any sport or athletic activity.

Incorrect (left photo): Looking down, staying too tense – a great way to get worn out, but not to get stronger/better conditioned.  C’mon – you’re better than that!

Correct (right photo): head up, eyes forward, butt below the shoulders, and the crawling is cross-lateral.  A win all around.

For some intermediate steps, check out this video tutorial below:

To get the full, unadulterated information on how to use crawling to improve your athleticism, be sure to attend an Original Strength Workshop (there’s one coming up August 30-31st in Prague).  For now, get started on working your way through the progressions and watch as your strength, conditioning, and athleticism improve in spades.

There’s a lot more to learn, but this is a great place to start.

Try it out and make note of the change in the feel and performance of some of your favorite exercises. And if you make some fast progress or hit a PR, I wanna hear about it! Drop me a line on Facebook (Aleks “The Hebrew Hammer” Salkin).

Have fun, and enjoy putting the hurt on your opponents!

Aleks Salkin is a Level 2 StrongFirst-certified kettlebell instructor (SFG II), StrongFirst-certified bodyweight Instructor (SFB), and an Original Strength Certified Coach. He grew up scrawny, unathletic, weak, and goofy until he was exposed to kettlebells and the teachings and methodology of Pavel in his early 20s. He is currently based out of Jerusalem, Israel and spends his time teaching clients both in person and online as well as spreading the word of StrongFirst and calisthenics.  He regularly writes about strength and health both on his website and as a guest author on other websites. Find him online at https://alekssalkin.com and on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/alekssalkintraining 

(This post originally appeared on originalstrength.net)


 “I wanna rock!  ROCK!”

“I want! To! Rock!  ROCK!”

Twisted Sister, “I wanna rock”

In keeping with my tradition of starting my articles on Original Strength resets with a lyric from some of my favorite hard rock songs from decades past (and with resets with names like rocking and rolling, how can you not?), I thought I’d throw in that gem from 80’s hair metal band Twisted Sister.  Yeah, they obviously had something different in mind with the rocking they wanted to do, but the rocking I want to do is very much in the interest of resetting my Soft Machine and rejuvenating and strengthening its ability to reflexively stabilize itself under any circumstance.  And YOU should want that, too.  Rocking often gets short shrift among the quintet of resets.  How do I know this?

Because I was a guilty party in this for a long time.

Rolling I could see being important.  I mean, it can be done all sorts of different ways, can help you gently stretch your spine and re-introduce rotational patterns to your movement (crucial for spinal health), and is also a life skill: if you’ve ever slipped and fallen, you know that rolling will get you back on your feet whereas “splatting” will keep you flat on your back, possibly with a brand-new injury to add to your collection.

Crawling is obviously important.  It teaches your top and bottom halves how to synch up with each other, builds real brute strength that directly applies to other strength and athletic moves, helps you move better almost immediately, bestows upon you just the right amounts of flexibility and mobility for most any task you could ask for, builds abs of steel and a heart and set of lungs like a racehorse…I could go on and on about crawling.  Who DOESN’T love it by now?

Breathing is an obvious one – if you don’t do it non-stop for your entire life, it’s curtains for you, buddy.  Neck nods were also pretty obvious – your neck is your body’s fuse box.  If you don’t wanna blow a fuse, you’d better not let your fuse box get rusty and dusty.

But rocking?  I’ll just turn my music up and get my rocking in that way.  How does that sound?

Well, turn your music down and listen to this, whippersnappers.  Rocking – as I’ve discovered – serves a lot more purposes than I originally thought, and has had such a big impact on my body – and my strength practice in particular – that I feel compelled to tell you why I like it so much and why you all should like it just as much.

A few years ago I got injured doing a hold-my-beer-and-watch-this type stunt.  Only I was the only one around, so I pretty much had to hold my own beer and watch as I got jacked up.  The long and short of it was that my upper back got knotted up like a rope in a Boy Scout camp merit badge competition and threw a lot of stuff in my shoulder girdle way out of whack.  Even after getting it fixed up so that I could hoist iron again, I hadn’t really fully recovered – I had to do stretches and a variety of warm ups in the morning to get my tight muscles to play ball.  While I never trained in pain, I definitely dealt with a lot of discomfort every morning.  After moving to Israel, I met with a Neuro-Kinetic Therapy specialist, Dara Cowen Saker, and among other things she pointed out that my pecs and lats weren’t working together as they should, which explained why my shoulder girdle had been so jacked up.  She gave me a few drills to work on, and let me tell you, they were gold.  Solid gold.  But I also knew that they weren’t going to be enough, and that if I ever really wanted to regain some function, I was going to have to re-teach my pecs and lats to be friends, hold hands, and help me get strong safely once again.

Enter rocking.

As Tim and Geoff point out in the book, rocking has multiple big payoff benefits, including:

• Improved posture
• Reflexive stability
• Mobility
• Engagement of pelvic floor muscles
• Engages the abs inside and out

Believe me, I’ve done a lot of rocking since realizing the error of my ways, and all of the above are true.  But one thing that really stood out in stark relief from the known benefits that I had never noticed before was that when I rocked correctly, I could feel my pecs and lats working together!  A bonus worthy of an entire article!

For the record, having your pecs and lats working in harmony is important for more than just eliminating discomfort in your shoulder girdle.  If you ever want to do some impressive feats of upper body strength, these two big muscle groups HAVE to join forces against the armies of darkness known as Weakness and Gravity.  Ice climber and one-arm chin up artist Ian Holmes astutely pointed out once that beyond a certain range of motion, your lats aren’t the only things working hard in a heavy pullup attempt – your chest has to get in on the action if you’re going to get your chin over that bar.  Likewise with dips – if you don’t feel your lats during the movement, prepare to feel like your neck and chest muscles are choking you once all is said and done (ask me how I know this).  And by now I probably don’t need to tell you that the world’s best benchers fire their lats as hard as they can to help their heavy barbells defeat gravity.

The ability to gently remind your body to fire these two major muscles as if they were one big muscle group is pure money when it comes to training.  If strength training is a skill (and it is) there are always aspects of it that can be practiced over and over again, day in and day out, to scaffold the really hard work you’re going to have to do to smash your old personal records.  Stack this one aspect on top of all of the other benefits mentioned that rocking confers upon you and you’d be leaving a lot of training money on the table by not using this move regularly.

In addition to my daily resets every morning, quite possibly the biggest and best tip I picked up from Original Strength was that of inserting resets BETWEEN sets of your exercises.  In my opinion, this is where the power of the resets really shines.  The stress built up from set to set and exercise to exercise can be shaken off and allow you to start from a much fresher point each time you get ready to practice again.  Geoff Neupert has pointed out elsewhere that it’s not how much work you can do, but how much work you can recover from.  If you can use resets not only to recover from exercises, but to recover between exercises and also to improve exercises by teaching your body how to link itself up to better perform them, you MIGHT just have a secret power tool in your back pocket, and I MIGHT just have to implore you to start immediately.

The recommendations on which resets to use for which task are pretty loose.  Regarding rocking, Tim has said that he likes rocking after fast movements, like kettlebell swings.  Geoff likes rocking after squats or kettlebell ballistics.  Me, I like rocking between sets of dips and pullups for the reason I mentioned above – getting my lats and pecs to talk to each other, which has a big transfer into both movements.  Listen to what your body says and respond accordingly, but start now.

Here’s an example of how I did it.

A1) Weighted pullups
– 5-10 rocks
A2) Weighted dips
– 5-10 rocks
B1) Double kettlebell front squats – 3-5 reps
– 5-10 rocks
B2) Double kettlebell swings -5-10 reps
– 5-10 rocks

Simple, super straight forward, and if you’re not doing it already then start now – believe me, it feels like you’ve been given an almost clean slate at the beginning of each new set.  You will get a ton of rocking in and you’ll be amazed at how the benefits not only of reflexive stability, recruitment of sleepy muscles, and improved mobility help your training, but also how the vastly improved recovery abilities and ability to relax after each set make a huge impact on the amount

Sammy Hagar once sang “There’s only one way to rock.”  I’ve been there, done that, and I disagree.  Don’t limit yourself to rocking only in one way!  I rarely do the same type of rocking between sets, and it both breaks up the monotony AND develops your body more fully.  I switch up between a wider than normal hand placement, a narrower than shoulder width placement, just outside shoulder width, different foot placement, legs far apart, legs close together, lift up a foot upon rocking forward, rock facing downward on a hill, etc.  The idea is to elicit the benefits of rocking, and as long as you’re moving forward and backward on your hands and knees/feet while maintaining good posture and your eyes straight forward, guess what: you’re rocking!

One of the biggest concepts of Original Strength is to regain the body we’re meant to have the same way we attained it in the first place: by playing, exploring, and enjoying ourselves.  Don’t treat your resets as a chore – have fun with them, and mix them up however you can!  And if you invent or discover a new way to do a reset that really rocks your world (no pun intended – okay, maybe a little bit intended) then by all means, send it my way!  I wanna try it too.  In the meantime, go forth, hit the deck, and ROCK!

The back bridge: the ultimate  in flexible strength and youthful movement

I love bridges.

And not Bridges-of-Madison-County bridges, but actual back bridges. It’s a great exercise, and if you don’t like it you’re wrong.

Why are bridges so badass? Well, there’s roughly a metric shit ton of reasons, so I’ll just list a few.

1) Flexible strength at its best. 
– Quite often our strength training – and especially bodyweight strength training – nets us a lot of hunched over-ness. Not awesome, especially if you want to remain healthy (and I’m assuming that if you’re reading this it’s a consideration). Back bridges completely reverse it and stretch the hell out of everything from your quads, your hip flexors, your abs, your chest, your shoulders, your forearm flexors while simultaneously strengthening your spinal erectors (the pythons you’ve got running up each side of your spinal column), the various muscles of your upper back, and lots of other stuff I’m sure I’m forgetting.

2) Breathe happy
– Back bridges – whether done as holds or as pushups – help you breathe better by opening up your midsection and rib cage without investing a boat load of time. A few reps or a minute or two will do you just fine.

3) Back bridges help to protect your spinal cord.

– Your spinal cord is a complex thing that helps the brain send messages all throughout the body. Building up the flexible and dense armor that surrounds it – your erector spinae (or spinal erectors) – adds some additional protection to something that you literally can’t do anything without.

4) Unlock your full-body power
– Sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. In Convict Conditioning, author Paul Wade likens the spine to the universal joint in a car. Movements from the legs, waist, limbs, and torso are better able to be expressed with the back is strong and limber.

5) Bridges are just cool! And they’re a great litmus test of how well you control your body overall. If you can do a boatload of cool party tricks but can’t bridge to save your life, work on that and you’ll be amazed at the things that will open up for you: not just your shoulder girdle, abs, and hips, but your athleticism as well.

While you’re getting ready to bridge like a madman/woman, here’s a video you can enjoy of how to work your way into a full back bridge 
​
Enjoy both my hilarious hair and the shrieking, banshee-like song of the cicadas in the background.
– Aleks

Wanna have more wind? More get-up-and-go? Yeah, you definitely do!

No matter what your physical goals may be, you would do well to increase your work capacity.

Increased work capacity means the ability to handle more work (DUH!) as well as your ability to recover from said work. Increased work capacity means you can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ – and improving whatever skill or quality you may be working on, from strength to endurance and everything in between. More work + more recovery = more results.

There are a million and one ways to boost your work capacity (I’m estimating) but one of my favorite ways is a simple one-two punch that will leave your muscles pumping, your heart pounding, and your lungs heaving, all without draining your energy – allowing you to go hard even very regularly without over-taxing your recovery abilities. Win-win.

A solid combo of crawling and marching gets my vote for a quick, (relatively) painless way to crank up the dial on your training while still staying on track to your goals. They are simple movements – ingrained within everyone’s brain to do as you grow and develop – and will also improve your coordination and strength while making you stronger and more resilient.

My friend Pat Flynn helps me explain their benefits in this video below.

Try this out in your next workout. You can thank us after you catch your breath.

Sample workout #1:
2 minutes: alternate crawling and marching
1 minute: off
Repeat x4

Sample workout #2: 
1 minute: alternate crawling and marching
1 minute: rest
2 minutes: alternate crawling and marching
1 minute: rest
3 minutes: alternate crawling and marching
1 minute: rest
Repeat up to 5 minutes​