The Swing Revisited

I learned the kettlebell swing about two years ago from a guy named Antonio who is carved from marble and has a butt you could rest a beer on. Rightly thinking the swing might have had something to do with that, I have swung a bell almost every day since. Without exaggeration, I have performed the movement hundreds of thousands of times. For one month, all I did for exercise was swing the bell 10,000 times. I have also taught over a hundred people the hard-style kettlebell swing. After two years of swinging, teaching, and swinging some more, I thought it was about time to revisit this king of ballistic hinge movements.

The Bottom, aka The Hinge

Before one can launch a rocket, one must know where to aim it. The swing is a hip hinging motion very similar to the deadlift. Don’t know how to hinge? Walk over to a wall and face away from it. Place two fingers of each hand on each of your hip bones on the front of your hip. With a perfectly flat back, push your fingers into your hips and shove your butt back towards the wall. Bend your knees a little, but only to get your butt back even further. If your butt taps the wall, come back up by squeezing your glutes and bringing your hips all the way forward. Now take a half-step away from the wall and repeat until your butt cannot touch the wall before you fall over. This is a hip hinge, and the position where your butt is as far back as it possibly can be before you fall over backward is the bottom of the kettlebell swing. Notice your butt was going forward and backward, not up and down. That’s because the swing is about horizontal force production, not vertical. Remember, a swing is not a squat, it’s a hinge!

The Top, aka The Push-Up Plank

Get into the top of a push-up. Now imagine someone is about to sit on your back. Squeeze every muscle holding you up as hard as you can. Think about pulling your shoulders into their sockets, bracing your abs until they are rock hard, and squeezing your glutes so tight that your pelvis actually tucks a little (don’t worry this is probably only bringing it into neutral) and engaging your quads hard enough to pull up your kneecaps. Now get up, stick your arms out and mimic that position while standing. This is the top of the swing. Everything is tight, hard, and locked down. And as you hold it for a few seconds, you can imagine how it might burn a calorie or two.

Putting Them Together

The swing alternates between these two positions: loaded and ready to explode on bottom; hard as a rock at the top. How do you get from one to the other? You explode! Start by placing the bell a few feet in front of you. Hinge down with a perfectly flat back and grab it. Now hike it back like a long snap. As soon as you feel the loaded hamstrings of the bottom position… explode your hips forward! The bell will fly forward, then start to arc upward. Don’t lift it with your arms, your hips are doing all the work here. Think of your arms like ropes with hooks on them. As soon as the bell gets to about chest level, put on the brakes with your lats, abs and butt. This is that top position, like a push-up plank. Your hips should be all the way thru, your shoulders should be down and back, and your body should be hard enough to repel bullets. Once you are in this position and holding it hard, the bell will stop (before it crosses the plane of your shoulders) and your job is now to throw it back at your crotch with all the force you can. Don’t worry, unless you’re an idiot, you’ll get out the way. Right before the bell slams into your zipper, drive your hips back again and keep the bell close to your body. It should never drop below your knees. As soon as it’s back to the bottom position, explode your hips forward again. Shoot for sets of 20, then relax.

Why Am I Doing This Again?

The swing is special. Not like the way your mom told you that you were special, but actually special. The swing is an exercise that targets everything that modern people suck at. We sit too much which means we have flat, useless butts, chronically tight hips, hunched upper backs, and deliver less power than a Yugo with an exhaust leak. The swing is the anti-sitting. When done right, it forces glute and lat recruitment, opens up the hips, teaches proper hinging technique, boosts the endurance of the lower back, and trains full body power. Oh, and did I mention it will crank your heart rate higher than a phone call from your credit card company?

How Do I Program Them?

So we know the swing is bang-for-your buck full body training. For most people, and I am not kidding here, swings, Turkish Get Ups and some jogging are all that is needed to look better, feel better, and generally kick ass at life. In Enter the Kettlebell, Pavel writes the “Program Minimum” which is:

• Day 1: Swings and light jogging for 12 minutes
• Day 2: 5 minutes of Turkish Get Up singles (Do a rep. Rest. Repeat.)
• Day 3: Nothing
• Day 4: Repeat Day 1
• Etc.

 If you do the Program Minimum and nothing else you will see results. But what if you are already training with a program you like and you want to incorporate the swing? Then I suggest “Coach Stevo’s Daily Swing Program” which is:

• On days when you lift heavy things, add 20 swings to the end of your warm up. Increase this by 20 every week until you are doing 5 sets of 20 over the course of your warm up.
• On the days you do not lift heavy things, do 100 swings how ever you’d like. If you’re taking it easy, put a bell in your living room or office and do 10 sets of 10 throughout the day. If you want to train your conditioning, do 100 swings in as little time as possible. And if you want to get on some sort of cardio hamster-wheel, try doing 5 sets of 20 with 1 minute breaks in between sets instead.

Try either of these programs out for six weeks and keep what you like; discard what you don’t like. But try it! The swing is a simple movement with huge hotness potential.

Dan John Teaches the Swing

Neghar Fonooni Swings 48kg

Why You’re Not As Hot As You Could Be

Part 1: Tight Chest

In this series, we are going to look at the factors that are holding you back. The little fixable things that are making you look less hot than you could be, or in today’s case, less hot that you already are. These are the weak points that most sedentary people have which I seek to improve on my personal clients. Today’s weak point is very common with people who work desk jobs, boys who love to bench press, and women who were a taller than the boys in middle school (which is most women in middle school). These populations seem to universally have tight muscles in their chest. The Pectoralis minor, Pectoralis major, subscapularis, serratus anterior, and the intercostals are chronically shortened through poor posture (hunching) and/or relative overuse (i.e. bench press every day but can’t do a single pull up). Luckily, stretching these badboys out and finally sitting up straight is serious bang-for-your-buck hotness. Here’s how:

Unglue It

Get a Lacrosse ball. Here. They cost two dollars (you’re welcome). Go to a frame and place that hard little ball of awesome between your chest and the wall. Stick your head through the door frame and roll the ball around your chest. Now keep it up as you move your arm around through it’s range of motion. All that grinding awfulness? That’s part of the reason you’re so tight. It’s little balls of knotted up muscle and fascia that can only be released manually. Keep doing that until you feel looser. I go until I see actual improvement in my range of motion.

Stretch The Big Stuff

Walk up to the door frame again and pretend like you’re going to give it a high-five. Place your whole forearm on the door frame and squeeze your shoulder blades together. Now start to turn away from the door frame, pressing your arm behind you. It’s important to keep squeezing your shoulder blades together, otherwise you’ll just start pulling your shoulder out of it’s capsule instead of stretching your chest. So if your arm looks like (and feels like) it’s gonna pop out the front of your shoulder, you’re doing it wrong. Lighten up the pressure and ease into it with a packed shoulder. Repeat this stretch with your elbow below, at the same level, and above the level of your shoulder. Do both sides and shoot for a total of 2 minutes per side in the stretch.

Stretch The Little Stuff

Go back to the door frame and stick your elbow as high into the air as you can. Place it gently on the door frame and begin to slowly put pressure on it, trying to force your arm behind your ear. When you feel like you can’t get you arm any further back, flex the muscles you’re stretching slightly for 2-3 seconds, and relax them as you exhale. Hold there for a minute and repeat until you can’t get your arm further back at all. Do both sides and shoot for a total of 2 minutes per side in the stretch.

Now Use It

Take a slight step away from the wall and put your butt, shoulders, and head against the wall. Put your elbows on the wall and the back of your hands on the wall at 90 degree angles. Like your giving two people high fives. Flex your abs, squeeze your shoulder blades together, and slide your arms up and down the wall as much as you can without letting your hands come off or without unflexing your stomach. Repeat for 10-12 reps trying to go higher and lower each time.

The Sixth Human Movement

As a coach, I think a lot about movement. I write a lot about it, too. A couple of months ago, Dan John clued me in to a model of movement that I love called “The Five Human Movements.” I loved it so much that he named a workout after me that used all five. But in hanging out with Dan and the other fitness nerds at the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club (like Rob Umfress who actually texted me the inspiration for this article), I came to realize there is a sixth human movement.

You know that old expression, “I trust that person about as far as I can throw him?” I think Dan John would trust that person a lot because he can throw heavy things very, very far. But I have a confession to make. I can probably front squat, power clean, bench, and carry that person, but I can’t throw much of anything to save my life. This is a problem, because like the squat, hinge, push, pull and carry, throwing (the ballistic application of rotational force) is the sixth human movement.

The Movement

Throwing is ballistic rotation. Everything that leaves your hand leaves on a ballistic trajectory. It starts from the ground, transmits through your body, and is directed into whatever you want to get rid of through the rotational force of your coordinated muscles around your center of mass. And that includes throwing a punch. Hooks, uppercuts, even jabs involve rotation. But rotational force is hidden in a lot of other athletic movement. You generate (and resist) rotational forces when you 

• Run
• Jump
• Change direction
• Swing anything
• Serve
• Volley
• Kick
• Tackle
• Slam
• Dodge
• Turn
• Pound someone’s face
• Have sex
• Or do anything with one hand or on one leg.

As you can see, pretty much every athletic movement involves the application or resistance of rotational forces. So how does one, especially someone like me who never played ball sports as a kid, train this human movement?

The Progression

In his brilliant DVD Intervention (with a brilliant cameo by Coach Stevo) Dan John talks about a teaching progression that I call “Pattern, Grind, Ballistic.” The idea is you need to learn the pattern before you add weight and you need to get strong and stable before you start adding speed. For a hinge movement a good progression is goatbag, deadlift, swing. For throwing, the progression is as follows.

Roll: 

Because we aren’t born standing up, everything starts on the ground. The movement pattern for applying rotational force begins as basic rolling. That’s right, rolling around on the ground as a newborn is how we learn to throw. The ground provides more stability and allows us to break down the movement into little parts that we can learn as kids. Rolling around with our arms. Rolling around with our legs. All without the risk of falling over and getting hurt. It also allows us to work against gravity instead of across it, which is a lot more complicated. As adults there are lots of great ways to mimic this progression that also safely increase stability and range of motion along the spine. Here are a few examples from the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club PDF:

• Lie on your back and roll onto your stomach using only your legs
• Lie on your back and roll onto your stomach using only your arms
• Get Up Planks
• Cuddle bells
• Rolling 45s
• Rolling 45s to the T
• Half-Get Ups
• Turkish Get Ups (the ultimate rolling exercise)

Twist:

Once we are on our feet, we start twisting our body in space. This looks a lot like just moving around to adults and we barely think about it. We pick up stuff slightly to one side or the other. We put on backpacks. We move typewriters from one side of a table to another. These are grinding applications of rotational force. We also resist rotational forces when we try and remain upright in a car or on a bike, hold an uneven load, or do anything unilateral like hold ourselves up in a push up position which people do a lot more than they think. Some of these motions are very common causes of injury so a lot of the exercises to train for them come out of the rehab world. Here is a short list:

• Any of the rolling movements with heavier weight
• Half-kneeling Paloff Presses
• Paloff Presses
• Half-kneeling Chops
• Half-kneeling Lifts
• Rotational Rows
• One Arm Bench Press
• One Arm Push Ups
• One Arm Rows
• One Arm Presses
• One Arm Front Squat
• Long Presses
• Cross-plane SLDL with a row (I call them HATwings)
• Landmines
• Gulbis Glute Twists

Throw:

As soon as we are strong enough and stable enough as kids, we start throwing things. Like bowls of cereal across the room or keys into the toilet. As adults, once we are strong and stable enough from training rolls and twists, it's time to start chucking things around. Medicine balls are a popular tool for this type of training, but you can throw anything that won’t complain about it too loudly. The goal of ballistic training is total force, which is the product of mass and acceleration. In non-high-school-physics terms, this means you want to throw lighter things harder than heavier things more slowly. It’s fine to throw a kettlebell (if your hella strong and your downstairs neighbor isn’t home), but throwing something smaller like a medicine ball or even a six pack of coke will probably be more beneficial. Here are a few ballistic throwing exercises, some of which don’t even involve letting go of the object:

• Overhand throws
• Underhand throws
• Throws with a Step
• Standing Side Twists
• The Grappler
• Dumbbell Snatches
• One Arm Kettlebell Swings
• One Arm Kettlebell Snatches

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to train the throwing movement pattern. I suggest starting on the ground and just rolling around. Seriously, it feels so good you’ll get hooked. Which is a good thing because like the other five human movements, throwing (rolling and twisting) is something that you should practice Every. Damn. Day.

Coach Stevo's Razor

Coach Stevo Fun Fact: I majored in the Philosophy of the scientific method at the Univerisity of Chicago, a school that in 1945, pulled out of the Big 10 Conference because football was too much of a distraction. What did I learn from this eduacation?

Science is fun. Ok, football is probably more fun, but science is arguably more useful. Unless you’re interested in making money, making friends, or having sex. Then it is far less useful. But it is definitely better than football for understanding how the world works! For example, one of the most important devices in the philosophy of science is called a “razor.” It’s a logical device that shaves away unlikely explanations for a phenomenon until you are left with the correct answer.  Kinda like how Dr. House comes up with the correct diagnosis but not before being fully convinced that it’s lupus (Hint: it’s never lupus). The most famous razor is Occam’s Razor which is translated as, “all things beings equal, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one.” Fancy, huh? Well today we are going to learn about Coach Stevo’s Razor. It’s a lot like Occam’s Razor except no one has ever heard of it and it was inspired by instructions on the back of an antacid bottle. 

Stating the Obvious

The other day my sister-in-law posted this picture on Facebook. It’s the back of an antacid bottle with “Tips for Managing Heartburn.” The penultimate suggestion is nothing but pure genius: 

“If overweight, lose weight.”

Seriously people, that sentence is so full of truth I think I need an antacid just reading it. In the short time I’m been making people sweat professionally, I’ve had dozens of clients. That means I’ve asked dozens of people what their fitness goal was. I’ve only ever had one client not tell me, “fat loss” and she was lying. Most people are fatter than they want to be but the thing that stops people from losing literal weight is most often figurative weight. Too many choices, too many distractions, too many pressures, too many bad days and too many bad influences lead to too many donuts. Everyone knows how to lose literal weight. Eat less; move more. People hire me to help them cut the figurative weight. Coach Stevo’s Razor is how I help them.

Coach Stevo’s Razor

That which is done is superior to that which is not.

Let’s look at two identical twins, Sherri and Terri, who both need to lose 10 lbs. Sherri frets and researches the best way to do lose the weight. She talks to everyone she knows about exercise, reads 4-5 diet books, and spends hours at work on internet message boards learning everything she can about losing 10 lbs as quickly as possible. Terri, on the other hand, cuts down on some sweets and starts doing some exercise. Nothing special, she just goes to the gym every now and then and tries out a bunch of different stuff. Let’s look at the results a year later:

Sherri: Gains another 3 pounds.

Terri: Loses 1 pound.

I know what you’re going to say: “A pound of fat loss in a year?! That’s nothing!” And you’re almost right. Terri’s program was haphazard and inconsistent. She could have certainly lost all 10 pounds in a fraction of that year if she stuck to Coach Stevo’s Ticket to Hotness. But look again. Terri might have lost only a pound of fat, but she held off the other 3 pounds that Sherri gained. In a year, that’s a net of 4 pounds of fat that she lost. And here is an example of Coach Stevo’s Razor: any change was much better than no change.

If you look at fitness magazines or on fitness websites, you’ll see the words “optimal” and “most effective” thrown around a lot. But in the real world, the control group is doing nothing and doing anything that moves you towards your goal is worth your time. Can I write you a program that will result in you reaching your ultimate hotness potential? Sure. I can write it. But the program that gets you there is the program that you actually do. It might be haphazard, it might be inconsistent, and it might have some dead ends (like Zumba). But if it keeps you moving and keeps you motivated, then you aren’t doing anything wrong. Doing something is always better than doing nothing. 

Fear is Dead Weight

After years of accumulating bad habits and shame, taking control of their lives and their bodies can be a daunting task for most people. But learning that there is almost no way that you can screw up frees you of a lot of figurative dead weight. With my clients, proper form is not optional and I go out of my way to help them learn the most objectively successful ways of training towards a particular goal. But in reality, training isn’t objective. I don’t judge someone who wants really wants to do cardio every day or really likes that this type of training or that type of training. In the end it’s all subjective because it’s your body. If your form is good and you know why you’re doing what it is that you’re doing, you’ll be fine. Just lighten up do something!

Move More

"Bobby, can you do me a favor and stand up? I just wanna make sure you still can."I’ve written about a lot of healthy habits in the past. Most of them were probably pretty obvious, some of them maybe not so much. Today I want to talk about what might be the most obvious healthy habit of all. You need to move more.

“But Coach Stevo, I work out!” 

I said, “move more,” not, “train more.” Training is what you are doing when you are wearing gym shorts, sweating, and holding iron in your hands. Training is intense and goal-oriented. This isn’t about training. When I say “move more,” I mean just that: you need to pry yourself off your couch or desk chair and just move your body as much as you can, every damn day.

Life is Moving

Humans are built to move. Our upright posture and bi-pedal movement makes us unique amongst the Great Apes. Based on our other unique human traits, especially lack of body hair and resulting awesome thermoregulation, some scientists have theorized that the first hunting method humans used was just running down our prey until they overheated and died. Evolution aside, the preponderance of scientific evidence points to movement, especially walking, being pretty much the most awesome thing we can do with our day. Walking reduces the probability of cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, anxiety and depression. Walking also increases bone health, especially strengthening the hip bone (the one you’ll break when you fall in the tub), lowers LDL cholesterol, and raises HDL cholesterol. Studies have found that walking can also prevent dementia and Alzheimer's. To top it off, some of these studies controlled for BMI and exercise. The positive correlation of movement to health was seen in skinny people and obese people. Gym rats and muscle-phobes. The more we move, the longer and better we live. 

Death is When You Stop

On the flip side, not moving also has an independent pathology. Men who spend more than 6 hours a day sitting have a death rate 20% higher than those that sit less than three hours a day.  Women fared even worse with a 40% higher death rate. And once again, that’s after controlling for exercise and BMI.  The evidence shows pretty clearly that it doesn’t matter how much you train, if you spend all the other hours of you week on your ass you will probably die sooner than if you got up and moved around more. But not-moving is also co-morbid. The less you move, the less calories you burn and, assuming you eat the same amount, the fatter you get. But it’s even worse than that because we aren’t eating the same amounts. Women consume 335 more calories and men eat 168 calories more per day than they did in 1971. And in 2009, the average American only spent 2.4 hours per day bearing his or her own weight. The fix is in and the only thing saving us is $15 billion in statins. 

NEAT Tricks to Move More.

Scare tactics aside, we all know we feel better when we move around more. You take a walk to clear you head. You trek to the beach on the weekend. Maybe you stand up from your desk and stretch every now and then. Put it all together and this stuff really adds up. Dr. James Levine has popularized the research into Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or NEAT. This is all the calories you use to move you throughout your day. Basically, everything that isn’t keeping your breathing, conscious, and it doesn’t include exercising. For active people NEAT is anywhere from 1,500 -2,400 kcal per day. That’s huge! That’s the energy equivalent of 3-5lbs of fat per week and way more than you’ll burn with exercise. But how can you maximize your NEAT? 

• Get a pedometer: they cost $6, come in every color of the rainbow, and will blow our mind. Every day try and make the number go up. You’re shooting for 10,000 steps.
• Set an alarm: Set an alarm to beep every hour of your work day. When it goes off, stand up and walk around a little. Maybe stretch your pecs and hip flexors a little, too.
• Drink more water: Constant trips to the bathroom have a funny way of replacing that annoying alarm and providing you with an excuse to walk around and do stuff,
• Grease the Groove: There are a handful of exercises that I try to improve on every day using the GTG method. This means that 10 times a day or so, I bang out 1/2 my max in a handful of exercises. Because it’s super low intensity I don’t break a sweat, can do them all in street clothes, and get better at them without messing with my recovery and all while contributing to my NEAT. So pick something easy like push ups or pull ups, and do a handful every time you have to use the bathroom from all that water you’re drinking.
• Dump your default: When I got a roomate, he brought a sofa that replaced my favorite sitting area. His sofa made my butt sweat, so I couln't sit for more than a few minutes without getting very uncofortable. Having a favorite chair or spot on the sofa means that you spend a lot more time there. I still sit down, but I try to move to a new place or position every few minutes. That way, I am at least adding to the movement that I do between sitting.