Strength is a skill" -Pavel Tsatsouline
"Don't take this practice too seriously but train like your life depends on it." -Pattabhi Jois
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/yogadude1234/videos?flow=grid&view=0

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Attacking the weak spots

Ever since my shoulder was dislocated in my early 20's I have been avoiding presses of all types.  I could go years without doing a pushup and I am pretty sure it was more than a decade in between overhead pressing any serious weight.  I am getting semi-competent at the ballistic kettlebell movements, mainly the swing, clean and snatch, but have been avoiding the overhead presses.   I am going to start doing 1 day a week of a certain kind of  old-school strength work.  I dont really know what it is called but it is similiar to what bodybuilders do in the gym - they tend to lift as heavy as they can for 1-10 reps and then rest for as long as they want, sometimes exceeding 2-3 minute rest periods.  It is a method of training where there is no rush because you  want to stay as fresh as possible for your next set.  In this approach of training you also avoid training to failure.  I have a feeling that I held myself back for years as far as gaining strength through weight training because I was a huge advocate of training to failure every time I worked out.  Studying kettlebell technique and the way kettlebellers, particularly the Russian type,  has really opened my eyes and I can feel myself growing stronger by the week! 

I decided that my own old-school approach would be the very simple 5x5 set/rep scheme.  I'm doing 5 sets of 5 reps with a weight that makes the last rep in the last set very difficult but not impossible.    Even though you can do this routine and rest for a very long time in between sets I had to draw the line somewhere.  I did one 5x5 round on the 2nd minute which was way too much resting.  The 5x5 on the 1.5 minute worked much better.  Here is a clip of one round of 5 with the 16 and 18 kg bell.  I am using different size bells because I dont have a 2nd 18 kg bell!  My right arm is also still a little stronger than my left so I feel the asymetrical training can only be good for me.

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