Training For Dad Strength

In my previous post, I showed off my abstract thinking skills and presented "Coach Stevo's Real World Model for Strength." It was such a huge hit that I had literally a person ask me, "hey Coach! How do I train for that?" Well good news, everyone: here's the follow up! Coach Stevo's Rules for Training Dad Strength.

Lift Heavy

This is the simplest rule and therefore the one most people will ignore. If you want to be strong, you need to pick up, move, carry, and throw heavy things. How heavy? Heavy enough that you notice it on the first rep, but no so heavy you can't do two. I am a big fan of autoregulation for people that can handle being consistently in tune with their bodies, but for those with other, more interesting hobbies, just stick to 10 total reps between all your sets.

Consistently but Infrequently

Training Dad Strength means moving your body every day, but rarely with enough force to produce grunting. How rarely? 3(ish) days a week. You should be going heavy on those "on" days, but listen to your body and lift as heavy as you feel you can. The "off" days? You should still work up a little sweat pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging, thrusting, pressing, or hell, just get-upping. I like doing 3-5 Turkish Get Ups and a set or two of bodyweight exercises. That combined with a long walk with a pretty girl should be good enough for any man looking to train for Dad Strength.

Complex but Simple

The movements you pick to train matter. They should should involve your whole body, the floor, your hands, and something heavy. In "the biz" we call those "complex exercises" because they involve multiple joints, but I personally think they are the simplest exercises. At least to remember anyway. It's hard to forget a squat. You go down; you come up. It's when you break that exercise down into the single-plane, single-joint variations that people have grown accustomed to (knee extension, hip adduction, ankle dorsiflexion, bla bla bla) that things get really complex and Dad Strength deteriorates. The reason is that our brains work this way. Our prefrontal cortex tells our reptile brain, "I wanna squat." It's up to the reptile brain to do all that multi-planer math that turns the sack of meat we call a body into a tool. So leave the math up to it. Just squat.

Grab It and Stabilize It

I am convinced the single most important factor in Dad Strength is stabilizing weirdly shaped weight and holding it there while the body moves around it. That means two things: 1) you're gonna have to use your hands and 2) you're gonna have to prevent it from moving you. Someone told me once that, "there are no strong people without strong hands." Until I started swinging kettlebells, I didn't know what that meant. But look around and you'll see that nearly every human endeavor that involves strength involves grabbing hold of something and applying force to it. So train with stuff in your hands. But it's moving that stuff in your hands when you're gonna notice that bowl of jello between your pelvis and your shoulders. Stabilizing weight means holding it there and preventing it from crushing you or folding you in half. A decade ago, trainers called that "core strength," but now we are getting smart enough realize that it's really just strength. And Dad Strength is using your whole body as a single tool.

The Dad Strength Pantheon of Movements

Firstly, I should say that all you need to train for Dad Strength is a Squat, a Hinge, a Push, a Pull, and a Loaded Carry that you like. But here are the ones I like, organized by tool.

Kettlebells

• The Swing: Duh.

• The Split Squat: This exercise requires stabilizing your hips, shoulders and spine with an asymmetrical load through most of your range of motion. Nice.

• The One-Arm Press: Stay rooted to the ground and press weirdly shaped weight in one hand over your head? Dad Strength, ho!

• The Push Me-Pull You: Do a push up with one hand on a bell, then pull it up to your armpit while still in the push up position. Now tell me that doesn't require strength in just about every way.

• The Rack Carry: Heavy weights that make you want to tip over every which way while you hold onto them for dear life. Isn't that just what your Dad felt like carrying you?

Barbell

• The Overhead Squat: The granddaddy of all strength movements and the inspiration for the term "Dad Strength." Yeah, it'll take you a few weeks to build up the shoulder and hip mobility to do it right. But the moment you can, you should. If you have access to a barbell, some rubber plates, and train on the ground floor that is.

• The Deadlift: Picking heavy stuff off the floor with your hands? Yeah, you've figured this out by now.

• The Clean & Jerk: Explosively throwing weight off the floor, catching it with your body, stabilizing it, then split-squating it and stabilizing it over your head? Damn. If Dad had done these, maybe he wouldn't have needed your help every time he went to the dump.

Why Am I Doing This Again?

A lot of my clients don't care about being strong... at first. Most of my clients come to me wanting to be hotter, but try to hide their vanity by telling me they want "to be more toned and have more core strength." But no matter what your goal, even if it's fat loss, getting stronger is the name of the game. When you are stronger, your posture is better, your body is harder, your booty is shaplier, and you can recruit more muscle into every movement which means that you burn more calories doing stuff that isn't working. That extra buffer means you can eat a pie every now and then and not freak out. It means more hotness with less work! So go pick up some heavy stuff and throw it around.

Real World Model for Strength

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be "strong." There are as many kinds of strength as there are kinds of exercises; it really all depends on how you think about things and categorize them. A very popular model that a lot of people smarter than me will tell you about is the "speed-strength continuum." This is a pretty cool way to think about a lot of kinds of strength and goes a long way to explaining why powerlifting and sprinting seem so different. Crossfit guys will tell you that there are "10 fitness domains: cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, agility, balance, coordination, and accuracy." This is a handy model too, and you'll see some overlap with mobility and conditioning in there as well which is helpful in explaining why a strong strongman is different than being a strong olympic weightlifter or a strong gymnast. But like the speed-strength continuum, this model seems incomplete and based on a particular worldview (the founder of Crossfit was a gymnast). So based on my thinking, I'd like to throw another conceptual model of strength into the fray. This model is the same as other models in that it is completely arbitrary, but superior in every other way because it's mine. I therefore call it: Coach Stevo's Real World Model for Strength

• Picking Up Heavy Stuff: Heavy stuff is lazy and gravity is a bitch. Heavy stuff isn't gonna get up and walk over to where you want it to be. You're gonna have to hinge over, grab hold of it and pull it off the damn ground. You might even have to put it over your head if you want to get it into your truck or over your fence. Sometimes heavy stuff is really low and you have to squat down to pick it up. And sometimes you can only get one hand on it. You never know where or in what condition you'll find heavy stuff, but heavy stuff is always gonna need to be somewhere else and it's you that's gonna have to get it there.

• Moving Heavy Stuff: Sometimes stuff is too heavy to pick up but you still need it to be somewhere else. But heavy stuff, that bitch gravity, her sister interia, and her sister's no-good-boyfriend friction are gonna conspire to keep that heavy stuff firmly planted in place. You're gonna have to push it, drag it, pull it, rock it, twist it, yank it, and heave it in order to break it loose from the Newton family affair of physics that's keeping it in place. You may even need a running head start. 

• Carrying Heavy Stuff: After you've picked it up, heavy stuff is cumbersome to hold and always puts up a fight. But you're gonna have to fight back against it, gravity, inertia and fatigue if you want that heavy stuff to be where it belongs. You're gonna have to hold it longer, carry it further, and keep it higher off the ground than you'd like. Your hands are gonna hurt and it's gonna be hard to breathe. But staying upright with heavy stuff is the only way it's gonna move.

• Throwing Heavy Stuff: Sometimes picking up, moving or carrying heavy stuff is too good for it. You're sick of friction, your hands are tired, you just wanna be done with inertia and you'll deal with gravity later. Besides, heavy stuff is usually hard and you're pissed off at it now anyway. So you muster all you've got left in the tank, plant a foot, twist your hips and let that mother fly. Throwing is everyone's favorite thing to do with heavy stuff because dammit, it had it coming.

What Have We Learned?

In the real world, we come across heavy stuff sitting around where we don't want it all the time. Part of life is getting it to be where we want it to be. I don't care if you can bench press three giggling Victoria's Secret models, if you can't help me move my couch or get my car out of a ditch, I don't think you're strong (jerk). "Training" implies that you're trying to do something better, and I'd like to hope that something is going to take place in the real world (where I have couches that need moving). As people who use our bodies as tools, we need to consider the applications of our strength training in the real world and make sure that the movements we select to progressively overload carry over. We need to think in a way that rewards not just bigger kettlebells or more weight on the bar, but improves on what Dan John ingeniously refers to as "Dad Strength." Because for almost everyone reading this, the Real World Model for Strength is our Dad. And even though we may never have seen him do a 3x bodyweight bench, he always seemed to be able to get heavy stuff where it needed to be.

Update on Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 12:19AM by Stevo

I posted a follow-up called "Training for Dad Strength." You should read it. It's kind of useful.