Thursday, July 2, 2009

Done Backed Off

After taking my own advice from the previous entry I took 10 days completely away from the gym, and spent it all with family enjoying great food and lots of time outdoors in Wisconsin.

I hope everyone has a great 4th, and get out and enjoy the warm weather. Long summer days are perfect for getting outside and doing some training in the fresh air. Grab some of your favorite tools, find an open space and get to work. Lately I've been enjoying the simplicity of climbing ropes, sandbags, and bodyweight gymnastic-type exercises on rings and ground-based.

You'd be hard pressed to find anyone stronger in relation to bodyweight than gymnasts. And the funny thing is alot of gymnastic movements tend to work the important stuff such as anterior and posterior core, and pulling movements - all of which do much to keep us healthy, as opposed to bodybuilding style training which often does the opposite, in my opinion.

Here is a short video taken a while back of me climbing a rope on Santa Monica beach. Do a bunch of these and you'll know you've done some work.

Simple, but not easy.

2 comments:

Alphadominance said...

I agree with you that gymnasts seem exceptionally well conditioned. For me, functional and proportional strength counts for far more than sheer weight on some certain lift. Doesn't the point of fitness lie in what you can do with it?

I've seen various clips on free-running, which strikes me as the application of gymnastic and perhaps climbing and running altogether to perform some really spectacular feats. I have a hard time imagining better all around resilience than free-runners. Plus bonus points for style, coolio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeqHj3Nj2c for example, though many other good ones are out there.

Chris B said...

yeah free running is cool and it does depends on what kind of fitness you need. Surfing demands different qualities than biking than martial arts and so on.