Happy Birthday, COL (P) Gaston!! You make 29 look good. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of training with Brock, you’re missing out. Brock has been volunteering for the better part of a year teaching self-defense moves to anyone willing to put themselves through the ringer. He’s also a resident kettlebell expert and is competing in the Tactical Strength Challenge. We are lucky to have Brock training at MVMNT and we can’t wait to head to Dobbins in a few weeks to play with black hawks, HMMWVs (that’s High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) and barbells!!
Bar Muscle-up. Nicole makes it look easy.
Trivia Night is tomorrow at 6:00 pm! Looking forward to a great turnout and, hopefully, very few burpees. Feel free to bring drinks and snacks for sharing (or for keeping to yourself). We have limited chairs available but lots of boxes…so, if you want to be more comfortable…
Level 1/2 Test – Monday, September 12th at 7pm. Please get signed up.
Dunk Truck – Monday, Sept 19th. Slots are available from 4:30-6:15. Sign up here.
Read – Soreness by Mark Rippetoe. Tough pill to swallow for some. But, if we’ve done our jobs correctly, your mindset should be such that you understand that constantly being sore is straight up wrong. Trainers that leave their clients in pain day after day are uneducated, inexperienced and probably only got that one weekend certification. It’s 100% okay (not to mention smart) to not “feel” like you got the hardest workout of your life in…much like today. Lift some weight and practice the skill work. You should walk out the door today with plenty left in the tank. It’s called minimum effective dosage. And it’s what world class athletes understand. Ripp is unforgiving but on point. It’s all too good not to post in its entirety.
Soreness does not make you stronger. Soreness does not make you bigger. You should not LiveSore, because not only is it counterproductive to your strength progress and your health, it feeds the wrong psychology – penance is Religion, not training.
Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is currently understood as an inflammatory response to the eccentric component of an exercise. The actin-myosin crossbridges are damaged by the separation under tension as the sarcomere elongates during the eccentric phase of the muscle contraction, and the damage is repaired during the inflammatory cascade (for more information about the microanatomy involved start here)
When you are sore, you have done muscular work with an eccentric component to which you are not adapted. For example, cycling has no eccentric component, and although cyclists new to barbell training may be fairly strong, they get incredibly sore the first time they squat due to the eccentric component of the movement. And pushing the prowler doesn’t make you sore, no matter how hard you work, because pushing a sled lacks an eccentric component.
Since productive barbell exercises include an eccentric phase in their movement patterns, some soreness is always the result of productive training. But the soreness itself is not the aspect of the training that makes you stronger – the programmed increase in the load over time does that. The soreness is merely an unfortunate but necessary side-effect of having done barbell exercise.
Training specifically for soreness is foolish, since it indicates nothing more than unadapted-to eccentric work. The best illustration of this is 100 bodyweight (“air”) squats done as a single set. Anyone who is actually capable of doing this will get both excruciatingly sore and absolutely no stronger as a result. The soreness will be the product of the negative phase of 100 continuous reps, despite the fact that the load is only your bodyweight. And because the load is only your bodyweight – and because you’re already strong enough to do it 100 times – you cannot increase your force production capacity by doing 100 bodyweight squats. You can only get sore.
And being sore all the time is also foolish, because broadly-distributed DOMS is system-wide inflammation. Just like having the flu. Neither the flu nor 100 air squats makes you stronger, and in fact the catabolic effects of massive inflammation actually detrains strength. And doing this to yourself voluntarily – over and over again, week after week, month after month, for years at a time – takes its toll on your health.
People who do this habitually have either learned the wrong facts about exercise and its benefits, or they are trying to pay off a debt they think they owe, usually to themselves. This type of OCD is outside my experience, so I’ll leave it to the psychologists.
Productive training entails some soreness, and everybody that trains gets used to the idea that getting stronger over time is accompanied by soreness – not the debilitating, crippling kind that makes normal movement difficult, but the mild soreness that accompanies a PR squat. To the extent that PRs are enjoyable, this soreness is welcome. It is possible to train for months and double your squat without being terribly sore at any point in the process.
But doing stupid workouts that cannot make you stronger and have not made you anything but sore indicates that you either don’t know what you’re doing, or that your priorities are other than getting stronger. If I were you, I’d reevaluate my priorities.
*This article speaks to strength training for the purpose of getting stronger. For new people, you will get sore a lot in the beginning because you don’t know your capabilities yet and you may push too hard.
Warmup
Speed Ladder
Lift
Levels 1-4
3 – 3 – 3+(AMRAP)
75 – 80 – 85%
Deadlift
Level 0
5 x 5
Double Kettlebell Deadlift
Skill
Level 4
5 x AFAP
4 Bar Muscle Ups
12 Ring Push-ups
25 sec Hollow Rock
10 Plyo Step-ups R/L
ALL OTHER LEVELS NOT AFAP
Break up reps into manageable sets
Level 3
25 Single Rep Max Effort Kips*
50 Ring Push-ups
120 Sec Hollow Rocks
50 Plyo Step-ups R/L
*The idea is to kip so hard your belly comes to the bar–the sternum should be well above it. You should drop down and release the bar after every rep.
Level 2
25 Chin-ups
40 Ring Push-ups
120 Sec Hollow Hold
120 Lunges (alternating)
Levels 0/1
50 Ring Rows
30 Ring Push-ups
120 Sec Hollow back practice
100 Lunges (alternating)