Everyday Occurrence

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Prehab

Keg Drill
Lat Activations
Groiners

Warmup

Row 500 Meters or Run 400 Meters then
2 Rounds of:
10 Wall Squats
15 Grasshoppers
20 Situps

Strength

3×5-10 Strict Pullups (See Below)
3x20sec Ring Support – Demo
3×5 Strict Muscle-up Drills – Toe Point and Full Spot Demo

Notes:  We will be using spotters for each of these drills and work through all rounds of one movement before moving onto the next.  For the pullups, if 10 strict reps is easy, try to perform strict Chest to bar.  Videos will be posted and instruction will be provided on proper spotting.

Conditioning

For Quality:
50m Bear Crawl
20 Pistols
20 Straight-legged Toes to bar
50m Bear Crawl
15 Pistols
15 Straight-legged Toes to bar
50m Bear Crawl
10 Pistols
10 Straight-legged Toes to bar

-15 min Time cap-

 Notes:  If you are close to a pistol, but lack the strength for mulitple reps or control through the entire range of motion, use a post or box as a spotter.  The other sub option will be a deck squat.  If you cannot perform the T2B with straight legs just do your best and focus on staying engaged through your lats.

Cool Down

2 Rounds of:
10 Wall Extensions
Couch Stretch – 30 Sec each
Cobra Stretch – 1 Minute

Sleep: Usually the first thing in our training that is sacrificed but one of the most important foundations for time well spent in the gym. Although I would like to drink coffee and slam bars all day ala Jon North, most of us can’t afford to put that sort of time in at the gym and caffeine can only get you so far.

So it’s imperative that we spend our time wisely and the first step towards that begins the night prior with a good nights sleep!!!!!

I completely understand how life can sometimes get in the way of a consistent sleep pattern. Events happen at night that we just don’t want to (and sometimes truly can’t) miss and then we have to get up and go to work the next day exhausted and so begins the vicious cycle of sacrificing one of the most important pieces of our training. If you asked me a couple years ago why I wasn’t getting my rest it would go something like this. “Well, after I cut a rug at the club, we heard about an after party in the hills where Josh Brolin was bartending. You had to buy a piece of his napkin art to get in. Needless to say I didn’t get home until 3am.” Or maybe my response would have been, “I probably could have PR’d today but last night got wild. We met some agent guy at the Troubadour who drove us to a mansion in Bel Air. Prince played an acoustic set in the master bathroom with no lights on. You weren’t allowed to clap either, just snap. I didn’t get home until yesterday afternoon.” You catch my drift.

Fast-forward to life as I know it these days and I wasn’t getting sleep a couple of months ago but for drastically different reasons. My tiny terrorist, aka my 6-month-old daughter, pretty much tells me when to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. She is like the cutest little Abu Nazir you’ve ever met. At her age there is a ton of cognitive brain development happening, which disrupts her sleep every now and again.  The best way to deal with these unforeseeable disruptions is to create a ritual you repeat with her every night. Bath time, bottle, read a book, all starting at 6:15. She now sleeps 11 hours straight through the night.

When we started this, I began experimenting with my own nighttime ritual.

I try to get to sleep not too long after putting her down and I can feel my body shutting down for the day at the same time every night. I wake up feeling much more refreshed and my training has begun to improve again.

My daughter had to be trained to go to sleep and it took months! An infant has to be trained? That begs the question, how many adults should be retrained to sleep well? If you want to improve your fitness, sleep improvement is a great place to begin.

Some suggestions on how to improve: Only sex and or sleep in the bedroom – No technology (TV, phones, etc) and no caffeinated drinks in the afternoon. Go to sleep and wake up at close to the same time everyday and sleep in a dark and cool room. Life is constantly changing and evolving and sleep is something we have to work at but it’s actually doable, something I can check off my seemingly never-ending ‘to-do’ list.