For several months now I have been in contact with Andrew Read, RKCII and head of Dragon Door Australia about doing an HKC certification in Sydney.

Well, it is finally live on the website and ready for folks to sign up HERE.  The date is November 13th, the week after Hardstyle Ventura.

I’ll be there for several days and we are doing another non-certifying workshop on Sunday Nov. 14th and if anyone wants a private session with me, I’ll have some availability as well.  Contact Andrew for the details on that stuff.

So now this is stuck in my head:

An athlete who performs well is very often  not functional, but is very good at compensating. Function and Performance are NOT the same thing.

Here are a a couple of quotes from Gray Cooks book Movement :

“Specialized activities will always lead toward a degree of fundamental compromise.”

“When basic momvement is limited or compromised, it  follows the natural laws of energy  conservation, compensation and avoidance of pain (testing) avoidance of the unfamiliar and the essential rendencies of survival.”

What happens whe we engage in movement and physical activity?

Response- Something that changes almost immediately, like heart rate, range of motion, fatigue, sweating, etc. or  later like muscle soreness.  Many people associate the immediate response with progress, but that ain’t always the case.

 Adaptation- This is the one most of us are after, and takes longer. Bigger, stronger, leaner, faster….add up enough responses over time and you get meaningful adaptation. This is the body in survival mode, seeking efficiency. You get stronger so that the next time that stimulus comes around you won’t need to work as hard. You get leaner because your body is using up the energy it had the good sense to store up when you were putting away all that Mexican food. All so it can survive. This is good.  If you have good baseline movement, this is where you wind up. If you do not, the you get……

 Compensation- This is where survival meets adaptation. You keep doing things that reinforce a faulty movement pattern for a few hundred thousand reps and you wind up with a very efficient faulty movement that is assymetrical and leds to injury. Asymmetrical movement patterns occur in the body, that is fact.  This happens as a response to stimulus and is a natural adaptation. Bleeding occurs naturally in response to the stimulus of a knife blade as well, that doean’t mean it is healthy or desirable. 

“Specific activities (like swinging a golf club or baseball bat) can serve to undo a basic functional level, forcing the body to work only in certain patterns, and this is okay if we take countermeasures”-Cook

What are those countermeasures?  How do we know if we are moving well or if we are compounding a problem? 

The Functional Movement Screen is where I begin and end everything. It is the best way to understand what is going on in regards to movement patterns. Get screened. From there of course it depends on the specific of the screen, but here are some principles (also from Movement) to help guide you into balanced movement patterns.

Separate painful movement patterns from dysfunctional movement patterns to create clarity and perspective. Do not exercise around pain hoping it will mysteriously get better.  The other side of this is just because it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t mean that it is functioning pattern.  Unless you measure, you don’t know.

The starting point for movement is a reproducible baseline. What is ”reproducible”? Measure like against like. If you are constantly changing your standard of measurement you’ll get a different reading of the same result. $100 + $50= $150 is a 50% increase.  $150-$50=$100 is a .33333% decrease. The measuement is different, but it’s still $50.

Do not put fitness on top of dysfunction.  Fitness is not the fundamental baseline for movement, because it is performance-based.  Nor is movement is not the fundamental baseline for fitness. It is very possible for fit people to move poorly and for unfit people to move very well.

 Jeff O’Connor started with “Lifelong Strong”, tying together the necessity of developing mobility, stablity and strength evenly. From bodyweight drills thru the Sots press, it was Jeff at is finest.

Do you want to learn  how to use the old-time strongmen’s methods to take your own training to levels you hadn’t imagined? This DVD is a combination strongman show, history lesson and philosophical discourse on the principles of getting stronger. Click HERE to get your copy.

Included in this volume:

- What is strength?
~Some of the record lifts that remain unbroken decades later
~How these men trained to get so strong
~And why we should pay attention
~Modern performing strongmen training methods

Demonstrations of nail, spike and horseshoe bending, grip feats, the public debut of the signature feat the Hammer Getup,  and powerful demonstrations of singular focus.

Want to make your Getup better?

In the RKC, we use the kettlebell as a tool to teach movement.  The getup is the foundation for ALL grinding kettlebell lifts. In this volume, I break it down into essential elements. Apply what is on this DVD and I promise your Getup will improve dramatically . Plus there are tips for other overhead work such as Military and Bent Pressing. Click HERE to get your copy  if you are ready to deepen you skill at the getup.

~ A step-by-step breakdown of the bent press
~ Bent press partner drills
~ Kneeling press drills
~ Bridging
~ The armbar and the crooked armbar
~ A thorough analysis of the getup
~ How the getup is fundamental to all pressing  and overhead movements

Discussion of  mobility and stability needs of the getup, how to assess these, and how to gain more of both. You’ll learn how the lats and glutes work together, and how the getup resembles gait — and how to fix it when it doesn’t.

Click the links above to get either of them….or go HERE and grab BOTH. 

And don’t worry, there are plenty of copies to go around!

TONS of paradigm shifting information, flowing from a very simple premise: “Screen movement patterns before you train them. Training poor movement patterns reinforces poor qualityand creates greater risk of injury. If you identify poor movement patterns, you can correct them with simple exercises, later rechecking against the baseline.”

Now this may seem like a “Duh”, but how many people involved in fitness actually do this? A reliable, objective method of screening and assessing movement to make sure we aren’t doing more harm than good with our programming.  To get the most out of any movement training, whether it be corrective or simply “correct” (learning and practicing a movement for improved capacity) we need an experienced eyes to evaluate and guide us. One of my favorite parts of my recent travels was having MRKC Jeff O’Connor watch and critique my swing, my getup, my bent press and my Indian Club technique. He spotted several things that I could be doing better because he has a differnt eye than me, even though we both look for the same things. The differnce is objectivity.

It is critical not to let the personal pride componant interfere with the truth about our own movement. We cannot screen ourselves as effectively as someone else can for the same reasons that a psychiatrist should not treat his own mental issues. The objective eye, the standard measurement offered by the Functional Movement Systems has begun to set a new standard in how movement is viewed.