There is no doubt life can be hectic. Deployment schedules, night shifts, taking care of family, any of it can throw a wrench into maintaining your physical fitness and readiness. But, you owe it to yourself and those around you to never be a liability and be physically capable. given these interruptions to our perfectly planned training routine how do we continue moving forward? The key is week to week maintaining the volume of training you need to be hitting. There is evidence suggesting as long as the overall volume and intensity of training are equated the frequency of these sessions is not indicative of progress in both maximal strength and running applications. Colquhoun et al., (2018) DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000002414 Yamaguchi...
Whether you are throwing a 90-pound ruck on your back, carrying those tools around the job site, or refilling the water cooler at the office having a strong back is essential to life. We don't believe in having a glass back we believe in having a capable back. You will flex, extend, and have to move in all sorts of odd positions (try helping your buddy move furniture without being in all sorts of fun positions) therefore we need to train our back under load in various positions. If you are still of mind we should never "flex our spines in training" I'd highly suggest looking at current information regarding lifting techniques such as the following as just a start...
Grip strength is one of the most daily applicable forms of strength yet many choose to not train it in any form of isolation. Grip strength is going to help you process that animal you just hunted, run that machine gun up to your support by fire, and most importantly help your mom carry in the groceries. Additionally, grip strength is often correlated with being a marker for overall health in several studies (granted this is usually due to individuals with higher grip strength being overall more fit both aerobically and anaerobically). So here are some practical exercises to throw in to build that grip. Plate Holds - Simply holding a plate for a set amount of time and repeating...
Knowing when to hit the gas or pump the breaks during training can be the difference between continual growth and improvement or re-injury/burnout. This is even more prevalent when returning to training and ramping up volume and intensity is a fine balance. When returning to training a general recommendation is to build that volume before ramping up intensity. In application, this means a little more zone 2 cardio and a little more RPE 5-6 for the first few weeks as we increase sets, reps, mileage, rounds, etc. But the question arises how do we determine when we are pushing too fast too quickly or under recovering? The simplest metric for many of us is often soreness. Having excessive delayed onset...
Forget your old PRs. Your training cannot be focused on reliving the "glory days" trying to throw 405 back on the bar for squats for reps, you are now forging a brand new and better foundation. Whether it is a return to aerobic training, strength training, or a combination a new baseline has to be built. Just after 2-4 weeks off from aerobic training, there is a drop off in VO2, and after 3 weeks or more strength decreases are noticeable. What this means in a practical sense when returning to training you cannot go off of old PRs as a reference point. We have to all set our egos aside and be willing to go a little lighter, slower,...
