What I Learned Today

So I'm on vacation in NYC and staying with my sister-in-law, who has a very nice gym in her apartment building. It has more cardio machines and floor space than my gym in SF. It also has more people that do not know what they are doing. I watched a trainer put a 95lb man through 6 different tricep exercises. And incorrectly coached walking lunges. Luckily I found this olympic bar abandoned in the corner and the little guy saw me knocking out overhead squats. Hopefully he'll ask his trainer to step up and awesomeness will find a way.

NYC needs Coach Stevo.

Ask Coach Stevo!

"Hey Coach Stevo, can women get too bulky lifting big weights?"

Can they? Yes. Will they? Very unlikely. Quite frankly, I spend most of my day trying to convince women to either eat a little more or significantly less and that is not a recipe for muscle gain, no matter how many heavy things you pick up off the floor. That's because like everything else in fitness, muscle gain is 80% what you eat and 20% how you train. Ask any man who's ever tried to bulk up and he'll tell you: it's freaking hard to eat enough to gain lean mass. And men produce many more times the testosterone that women do! You will never get bulky in a caloric deficit. You will never get bulky eating 2000 calories a day. Relax and lift heavy!

What I Learned from Doing 10,000 Swings in 23 Days

So, I did it. 10,000 swings in 23 days. What's that look like? I averaged 435 swings per day, but that's not an insightful statistic. On some days I did none, and on my last two days I swung the bell 2,500 times. The fact is, swings are simple. And once you learn a few tricks, it's pretty easy to chain them together into insanely high volumes. On my last day I swung a 16kg bell 1,250 times in a row for 30 straight minutes. And like Pavel says, the key is "the same, but different." Here are some quick insights:

• My form sucked. It took me 21 days to learn that I was hyperextending my lower back at the bottom of my swing. Neutral spine is the key, and if you're stubborn like me, you just have to do the reps to know you're doing it wrong.
• If you're swinging correctly and filing your calluses regularly, your hands will be fine.
• That being said, I went through 4 rolls of athletic tape.
• In the beginning I did sets of 20 with the 24kg. This is a killer for grip strength and proved to be valuable for the later High Volume Days.
• Every bell size has something to offer. I tried sets of 25 with the 12kg and my heart rate was through the roof!
• The larger the bell, the more "dampening" of the transition between up-stroke and down-stroke. When you use a tiny bell, you have to go way faster and the cycles will murder you.
• TracyStyle Roundabouts are the key to high volume sets of swings. I swung continuously for 30 straight minutes with a 16kg and that would not be possible without the insights of Tracy Reifkin.
• High Volume burns calories, but it feels a lot more like cardio. Once you're doing swings for more than a minute, the results feel more like low-intensity cardio that the sets of 25 with rest.
• High Volume has its place, but it's different than Hard Style. Obviously I was burning calories the whole time I was swinging, but I doubt it was 1/2 calorie per swing, which is the number thrown about for Hard Style Swings.
• Transitions are like mini-breaks because you don't have to snap as hard on the up-stroke and the down-stroke is gravity.
• Snatches break up the monotony, but sap you quick.
• Pick a bell and do everything you can with it. Having lots of bells available for a workout just means having lots of reasons to not swing ("Oh! Whatever bell shall I use?").
• Every time I told myself I could swing more, I could swing more. 

Turkey Day Tips

My wife pointed out to me today that every women's magazine in the world has Thanksgiving diet tips this week. Since I like to think of myself as well versed in the zeitgeist of fitness (everyone's swinging bells now, right?), I thought I would cut through the fat and give you some real Turkey Day Tips!

• Live a little. It's a holiday! If you are worried about fat loss, one day is not going to ruin you unless you let it. Eat some pie!
• Don't punish your body with food. Eat slowly and listen to your tummy. 
• Go for a walk. Ok, go for a walk after your nap. And football.
• Live a little. Did I say that already? Wow, I must have meant it!

1,000 Days. 1,000 Swings.

Today I woke up and decided to do 1,000 hard-style kettlebell swings in an hour. 1,000 days ago, on February 14th, 2008, I woke up and decided to run a mile. What a difference 1,000 days makes.

There are many reasons that we can decide to change something in our lives. We can make ourselves do something, or circumstances can force our hand. In the world of psychology these are called "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivations, respectively. For true change to happen I will argue that both must be in place as well as positive and negative reinforcement (the carrot and the stick). But I only know this after studying it in psychology text books and working through it with my clients on a daily basis. A question I get from them is, "why did you do it? Why did you go from sedentary jack-ass to fitness nerd?" And I can honestly tell you, I don't know. There was no clear message in my head. I just woke up on Valentine's Day and decided to run.

I didn't make it a block. Seriously, I started at 5th Street and had to stop before 4th. What's scary is that I wasn't even at my worst. Walking around San Francisco for a year had at least resulted in a 20lb drop from my peak at 205. But in 8 years I had gone from 3 mile warmups (in under 20:00) followed by 20,000-40,000 meters of rowing, to unable to maintain a 10:00/mile pace for even 400 yards. I was so embarrassed I couldn't tell my wife. But I was also so embarrassed that I woke up on the 15th and decided to try it again.

Looking back, I probably did it for her. It couldn't have been an accident that it was Valentine's Day. Being sedentary has side effects no one talks about at the time. I was depressed. I had been seriously depressed for over a year and was throughly unpleasant to live with. My job was absolutely terrible. I had very few friends because the only people I knew also worked for the same shitty company that made them unpleasant to be with as well. So every night I would be there when she got home, sitting on the couch, eating a pizza, and wasting whatever potential I had to be a better husband on malaise and excuses. And I think on that Valentine's Day, I just wanted to be better. I just wanted to push past the malaise and get 1 mile closer to the person I told myself I could be. I settled for 400 yards because it was at least in the right direction.

Steve Grubbs destroys the competition!I couldn't do it by myself though. I broke down and asked a coworker for the number of his personal trainer, Steve Grubbs. On March 15th, I met Steve for the first time and he told me to warm up with an easy mile on the treadmill. At that point I had yet to even finish a mile, but I obliged and when he returned to get started I was glowing from having completed my first goal from over a month ago, but too scared to tell him because I didn't want him to know how bad I was. He figured it out when I vomited a few minutes later. But he gave me a few orange slices and we finished the session. I saw him twice a week and I still train with him so he can make me do all the things I can't make myself do.

But today I woke up and decided to do 1,000 swings. I had put this date on my calender a while ago and knew that I wanted to do something to commemorate it, but I didn't want to make it a goal that I'd have to train for months in advance. I just wanted to do something spontaneous, like running that first block on Valentine's Day. Swings should have been obvious. I've never done more than 25 in a row before, but I've been fortunate enough to learn from some pretty amazing people in the past 1,000 days. One of those people is Mark Reifkind, Master RKC. Rif was kind enough to tell me everything I was doing wrong 3 months before the RKC in February and offer me some encouraging words and an actual kettlebell program (on the back of a napkin, I think). Three months later he saw me at the RKC and was genuinely surprised I had passed (I did what you told me to do every day, Rif, of course I passed!) It was through Rif's blog that I learned about his wife Tracy's amazing work in high-volume swings, in particular "the Roundabout." I'll save you the details, but it's an ingenious way to chain together an insane number of reps while delaying the onset of grip fatigue. So this morning I decided to try it. 100 continuous swings every five minutes, for 50 minutes.

I used a 1:1 rest:work ratio and started with the 16kg, moving up in weight every 200 swings. My last 200 were with a 32kg bell that I call, "The Bitch." I finished at 50:00 on the dot.

That's the difference 1,000 days make. Yes, I've lost 60lbs of body fat and put on 20lbs of muscle. I've run marathons and aced the USMC PFT and CFT. I passed my RKC. But those all took months of work and preparation. They are incredibly fulfilling, but quite frankly, expected. Today was not about success, it was about spontaneous success.

1,000 days ago when I pushed myself, I failed. Today, I didn't.