A few weeks ago I got a call from Grandmaster Strongman and my mentor Dennis Rogers. He asked if I would be interested in performing some feats of strength on the big stage at the Arnold Classic along side him and mike the Machine Bruce. I immediately agreed to this huge honor.

I drove up to Somerset KY, home ofthe Machine for the first leg. Mike has a private training client at the Machine Shop Gym who owns a small plane and offered to fly us to Columbus.

Once we got to the hotel, we headed down to the restaurant. There were several of the strongman competitors there among them Jedd Johnson, who I hadn’t seen for a while. After dinner we went back to our room and spent some time with Dennis Rogers. I always learn something new when I am around Dennis. Here he is in the hotel room, doing what he does better than anyone else in the world.

 

If you have seen the trailer for Kraftakt, you may remember that my original inspiration for ever becoming involved in strength was Lou Ferrigno. From the time I was about 8 years old, I have been a fan and felt a kinship with him. As a kid he was bullied and picked on because he was deaf and developed a desire to become big and strong, eventually leading to Mr. Universe victories and his most well-known role as the Hulk on TV. I had a terrible stutter as a kid and found comfort in the iron as well.

Well, Lou was there and I got to meet him, had him autograph my book “The Incredible Lou Ferrigno” and get a picture with him. We spent a few minutes talking and I bent a 60d spike for him. The 8 year-old boy inside me was giddy.

We went on between the strongman competition and the Mighty Mitts contest. We only had a few minutes, but this performance was in front of the largest crowd ever for me, by far, and sharing the stage with Dennis and the Machine is truly an honor. Mike and I each did a couple of feats and Dennis did several. Here is Mike’s signature neck feat which I get to help him perform.

I also got to meet several legends in the strength world and even got a “Good Morning” form Arnold himself.

I had an amazing time and hope to get to do something similar in the future.

 

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Twenty years ago today the mighty Pantera released  their second album Vulgar Display of Power.

I stood in line at the record store to buy it.

It has been a part of the soundtack of my life ever since.  It is one of those albums ( we all have them) that is such a part of my life that every track is associated with multiple memories  for me, some decades old, some much more recent.

I still listen to it almost daily, especially when it is time to move something heavy or bend a perfectly good piece of metal into twisted shapes that are only useful for decoration.

This Explicit Lyric Live clip from 1992 shows them on the upward swing, toward the height of their power and total domination the Metal World. Enjoy.

 

Rest in Peace Brother Dimebag.

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One Move to Rule Them All

The swing is the jumping off point for many other physical abilities

Okay the Lord of The Ring reference was a bit much in the title, but hey – it actually carries a pretty big point. The swing is one of the major movements of the human body. The hinging or hip extension movement is in almost every athletic sport, almost every major strength move, almost every major life movement that the human body makes. This is true whether it’s walking, running or bending, working in and around the low back, abdominals, hips, hamstrings and quadriceps. The major prime mover muscles of the swing and the other supporter muscles inclusive of calves, shoulders, arms and grip and upper back that the swing pulls into play.

If you’re going to do just one thing or a very small number of things to prepare you for the widest range of physical activities and to give you the most incredible bang for your buck well certainly the swing would be in my top number if not the actual top exercise. Here’s why – the swing is one of the simplest exercises you can possibly learn. It’s simple in the same way that martial arts or any art from is and don’t confuse what I’m saying – strength is an art from – the swing is simple in the way that most things are – You can learn it quickly and the individual techniques are actually simple, but you can spend a lifetime actually mastering it either from a technical perspective or a performance perspective.

Whatever it is you want to do if you get good at swinging you will get better at the other. You’ll begin to get much more flexible and pain free. I believe you build sequencing in how you teach the muscles to function by doing the swing correctly. Let me explain that – I was an athlete pretty much all my life and a football player up through college. When I got out of college I decided to specialize in strength and spent many years chasing high level lifts in powerlifting and strongman and may other veins of strength. Along the way I didn’t really run, because it didn’t pay me for what I wanted to accomplish. Later on I began to change my philosophy on that and began to think that for true well-rounded fitness everyone should be able to run. That doesn’t mean that everyone should be running distances, but it should be something you can call upon if you need to without physically falling apart.

I found that I developed a problem – I had gained massively in strength and was still flexible and in theory I should have been able to run, but every time I did such as running sprints I would pull a hamstring. I was doing massive stiff legged deadlifts – I’d done everything else necessary to logically correct that, but it still wouldn’t go away. Once I started really cranking out the volume on the swing I tested myself running again and voila I was running with no pain and no had no further problems with pulled hamstrings.

What does that mean? I believe the explosive movement in the swing which is actually a stretching and shortening cycle of the muscle is so akin to the explosion of sprinting that you immediately prepare the muscle for sequencing in the right way and contracting in the correct order as well as strengthening under a stretched load that it literally eliminates hamstring problems.

For many people the swing takes away the back problems that they experience in life. Why? Because it actually works the muscles that you need to keep strong to keep your posture correct and to keep yourself from falling apart when you bend over to pick something up. That stretching effect carries over in that you can bend over to pick something up off the floor without having a problem. The contract/relax feature of a high rep swing builds an auto-tightening of the body.

What does that mean? Most people hurt themselves in lifting things carelessly, but if you do enough swings you automatically go immediately into that movement to pick something up off the floor and you’re far less likely to throw your back out picking up groceries if you automatically pick up in safe manner. Since you’ve done a thousand repetitions of that motion you literally downloaded that movement into your cells and your muscle structure auto-defaults to the movement without issue. You’re far less likely to injure yourself when you’re hardwiring the muscles.

The swing can be adjusted for whatever performance vector you wish to build. In other words:

You want to get stronger? Swing heavy and explosively.

You want to get incredibly enduring? Swing for long periods of time.

I personally lost 120lbs of fat with the swing. I know that Dave Whitley – my man, super guy and super strongman who I’m proud to have had a hand in helping with strongman has also recently radically lost a massive amount of body fat. Many others have done the same. More than fat loss you build an incredible jumping off point for every other kettlebell exercise as well as every other type of exercise. For me personally my heart rate dropped over 30 beats a minute and my cardiovascular fitness went to an incredible level. I stopped getting sore doing bodyweight exercises or any of the other hundreds of ways I like to test myself for strength and strength endurance.

Everyone knows me for the high rep swing, but I also do many reps of other implements including maces, sledgehammers, Indian clubs, heavy bag work, sprawls, sled dragging, tire flipping – incredible world class strength endurance feats and I rarely ever get muscularly out of sorts from it because my whole body is now prepared for it because of that base of swings. In fact with that base built it allowed me to set personal records in many other areas, because in building the swing I believe you build a primal movement.

You’re building the raw capacities of the muscles and that raw capacity transfers over to more contrived and complicated movements in a very simple way. You’re not just building the specific movement you’re building the pure raw, horsepower of the body from a strength and endurance perspective and you can apply that endurance in any other way. I’ve set PRs in both the kettlebell snatch and one arm push press which are my two other favorite kettlebell movements that would seem difficult for most people to manage all because of the base of the swing.

It is literally the jumping off point for the kettlebell world, but I believe it’s the jumping off point for every other strength and athletic capacity you might want. Why not use the smartest thing you can do to create the most gains at the same time when you’re going to have to do the work anyway. If you’re session is taking you nine hours a day to lose fat, you’re missing the point. You could be doing it in 20 or 30 minutes if you just put the work in with the swing. You can build in a couple of hours per week and a few months the ability to swing non-stop for 20 to 30 minutes or almost non-stop and build the ability to have the endurance like no one’s business and strength and muscle that you keep and build along the way. That’s why I went crazy with the swing and you should too.

When you’re building yourself why not get every ounce of your capacity that you could. Truthfully everybody wants to look good and that’s why most people workout, but to refuse to build physical capacity along the way is for most people a set up for failure. Iin other words if you won’t actually get good at what you physically do you probably won’t actually look better. You’re going to have to build some real physical capacity, but more than that it’s like saying, “I want to invest in the stock market, but I don’t want you to give me back every penny I earned and interest I only want a quarter of it.”

If you’re not building into your physical capacity you’re not building into your health as well as your performance and daily life – you’re not adding to your life savings account, adding to your years, adding to your enjoyment of life, to living pain free, to living vitally and with incredible energy and your ability to build into those things. If you really want to take it to the next level – begin to think consciously of using the subtle energy of your body and breathing while you’re training the swing. Then you’re training muscular strength, incredible cardiovascular capacity, fat loss and endurance. You’re also training the rhythm, muscular and electromagnetic pulse of the body to work together. You’re doing what the old style Kung Fu master wanted to do in their training. You’re doing a living, breathing, moving Qi Gong by focusing energy, strength, muscle, endurance and breathing all in the same direction.

The swing also because of its simplicity and non-stop movement allows you to concentrate on those things very quickly without a million other technical details to focus on at the same time. You build a tremendous mental focus, physical focus, physical power, and you rip body fat off like nothing else. You can turn your hormones around and in fact your whole life around if you just train the swing hard enough. You can build the ability to train any other thing you want by building a base first. The people who are the best in the world at what they do are so because they are the best at the basics. The swing is a basic primal movement – it’s the basic of kettlebell movement. Get really good at that and you can be really great at the other stuff too. Just do the work. Dave does the work, I do the work – Everyone who wants to get really great at what they do puts in the work. Why not be world class? You can be if you just do the work.

Bud Jeffries is the owner of Strongerman.com where you can read much more about in combining super strength and super endurance together, with partial training, kettlebell swings, and much more.

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I just happened to run across this clip on youtube. Awesome does not begin to describe it.

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In the RKC we use the term “Packing the shoulder” quite a bit, but what does it mean?

From the RKC manual: “Packing the shoulder” refers to scapular retraction (back) and depression (down). The ability to “suck the shoulder into its socket” is very important for health and performance.

We do this by engaging the lats and other muscles surrounding the shoulder joint. “Packing the shoulder” is just an easier way to remember it and explain it to our students who may not have a background in anatomy. A simple explanation is usually the most effective.

Now, if you look at top-level presses, either overhead or bench, they naturally pack their shoulders under a heavy load (or they were coached to do so). The unskilled person will tend to shrug the shoulder up and winds up going nowhere when the load gets heavy. Most of us had to learn this skill.

Mark Toomey, SrRKC did some experimenting with a fluoroscopy, which according to Wikipedia is “ an imaging technique commonly used by physicians to obtain real-time moving images of the internal structures of a patient through the use of a fluoroscope”.

I have included a couple of videos for comparison below, and you can see in real time that the clavicle, humerus and scapular move in different ways. With the packed shoulder, the bones glide right thru the range of motion. Without it, they visibly jam into each other.

From Mark:
“This was shot using a piece of PVC pipe filled with expanding foam insulation sprayed inside. I took a barbell to the OR with two wheels, but the metal bar created interference with the flouro machine. Went to Home Depot, got the pipe and the foam, then taped the two 45lb plates to the bar. I wanted to really load the shoulders, but the total weight was only about 95 pounds using the pipe instead of the bar.

I was standing with the bar/pipe held at the base of my skull, behind the neck, shoulders down and scaps retracted as hard as I could. Hips were neutral.

We show this when docs say, “You should never press behind the neck.”

I agree, you never should UNTIL you’ve been taught to press properly.

Here is an overhead press with OUT scapular retraction

Here is an overhead press, but with the packed shoulder:

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