BEYOND STRONG: Shaf's Corner

Quick and Dirty Reviews

A few quick reviews that are overdue.  Sorry these aren't more in-depth

1.  2008 Indy Seminar Series

In this information packed seminar/DVD series, Bill Hartman and Mike Robertson give you up-to-the-minute information on how and why they train their clients in the ways that they do.  Every major area of the body is covered (upper extremity, lower extremity, and core), along with individual presentations on topics such as program design, flexibility training, and assessment.

This DVD series includes:

DVD #1 – Introduction and 21^st Century Core Training

DVD #2 – Creating a More Effective Assessment

DVD #3 - Optimizing Upper Extremity Biomechanics

DVD #4 - Bulletproof Knees

DVD #5 - Selecting the Optimal Method for Effective Flexibility Training

DVD #6 - Program Design and Conclusion

This took me some time to get through, since I've had it for several months now.  It's a lot of material, and I wanted to watch all of it at least one time before commenting.  This was worthwhile for me to sit through, since both Mike and Bill have a lot of good things to say, and are committed to being on top of the latest research and trends.  You hear about a lot of this material in various places, but it's gone into a bit more in-depth here.  I got a lot out of the "Bulletproof Knees" section, and the core training progressions were new to me and logical (and based on the current meme of stabilization and anti-rotation).  I lost my notes in some home improvements, but I had jotted down some good points in each disk.  I tend to divide informational products like this into either exercise demos or theoretical/practical advice.  This falls thoroughly on the latter category.

My recommendation:  If you are a trainer, especially if you aren't a 'cutting edge' kind of guy, this is the beginnings of the sort of education you need to take your skills to the next level.  I say "beginnings" because this really only scratches the surface of that new interface between therapist and trainer.  I plan on revisiting this sometime now that rugby season has finished.

***As an addition to this, I rewatched the flexibility segment today and I'd forgotten how good that particular segment was.  Hartmann goes into the concepts of stiffness, shortening, and deficits in movement and how to address these with clients and with yourself. 

While these sorts of DVDs can be a bit dry, they can also be pretty information dense.  This one is.

2.  Collision Course:  Kettlebell Training and Beyond

Main Presenters:

John Brookfield: The Battling Ropes System for incredible strength, cardio, and muscular endurance. Looking for a new challenge to ramp up cardio and endurance? Look no further as it does not get better than John’s rope training system.

Jon Hinds: How to maximize your alignment and posture and why you must do so for mobility and well-being. At a training plateau? You will blast through it when you master Jon’s section.

Mike Mahler: Advanced kettlebell training and nutrition strategies for effective fat loss, vitality, and well-being. Want to work up to pressing 88lb kettlebells for reps? What about 97s? How about a great way to do double swings that is much more comfortable and effective than what you have been taught before? Want to snatch a 125lb kettlebell? Apply the two-step snatch technique.

Mark Philippi: How you can benefit from strongman training and how to incorporate it safely and effectively into your training program. You do not need strongman equipment to benefit tremendously from what Mark covered. Once you learn the concepts you can apply it to whatever you want to do and push forward big time.

Guest Presenters:

Tom Furman: How you can have pain free mobility and durability.  In addition, what mobility exercises you should be doing before and after every workout.

Dylan Thomas: Effective kettlebell training and conditioning for the martial artist that works just as well for everyday people like you.

Mike Mahler invited me out for this, but I wasn't able to make it, much to my regret.  Mike did send me this set as a consolation.  Thanks Mike.

This set has a lot of information on it.  Despite me being a more 'kettlebell sport' oriented guy, there was a lot of things I hadn't seen or thought of before.  Each presenter (even Dlyna!) had good points to make and techniques to share.  In particular, I enjoyed Jon Hinds presentation.  Jon's progressions for the mastery of your own bodyweight in assorted exercises and jumps are fantastic, as I've seen the Monkey Bar Gym DVDs on the same topic before and was very impressed.  Tom Furman's segment was very good as well, his applied ideas on mobility and durability training continue to be refined and expanded.

Nice job on this one.  This set definitely has an audience in general fitness and training enthusiasts.  A nice blend of both exercise demonstrations and progressions and practical advice on effective training.

Both of these packages are worthwhile purchases, given that your own goals line up with the topics discussed within.  Their prices reflect the density of information available on them.  My friend Lyle McDonald have a similar metric when it comes to fitness products:  If you learn one new thing from a purchase, than it can be considered a worthwhile investment.  Both these packages have a lot of educational value, even for someone as well-informed on the current state of the S&C industry as myself.

Circuits

In the backyard and sunshine with my training partner.

Sled pull backwards over grass:  90#, ~45 yards
20# sledge to the tire, 10x each side
Sled pull frontwards, ~45 yars
Kb work a) C&P/10 reps (first 2 circuits), b) HTH swings, 30 reps (Last 2 circuits)

Notes:  The kb C&P was brutal after the sled dragging.  I was using 24s and getting very sloppy.
-my knees feel good after the run 2 days ago

YRG Old and New

I have a lot of reviews to catch up on.  Mike Mahler's Collision Course reveiw and the i-FAST seminar disks are two I need to finish.  Both have a lot of material on them, and I've gone through most of it.

What I'd like to do is touch base on YRG.

YRG stands for Yoga for Regular Guys.

This was mentioned on IGx a long, long time ago after Diamond Dallas Page and Craig Aaron published the YRG book and it's available on Amazon pretty cheap.

Yoga For Regular Guys

I made some printouts of the sequences and had at it.  It turned out to be very good.  Both my wife and I liked it.  Most importantly, it stretched what needed to be stretched and also helped strengthen weak areas.  It's an imminently practical book, and this is the first yoga based book that I looked at where I could follow along with the diagrams easily.  It complemented the heavy lifting I did very nicely, and it gave a nice cardio workout too (as related to bringing the heart rate up and maintaining it)

I'd consider that YRG 0.8

The next step was grabbing the 3 YRG workouts on DVD that DDP and Craig Aaron.  This made things incredibly easy.  You pop in the DVD you want and you follow along. 

I have the 20 minute workout, the Fat Burner and the Fat Burner + workouts.  The FB+ is still very challenging, and the FB hasn't become easy.  The YRG20 was a nice morning routine to work the kinks out or a nice cool down sequence after another workout.

I guess I'll call these YRG1.0.  I have no idea if these are still available for sale. 

It was more during this time that DDP began to emphasize "owning your life", which is a self-help strategy.  In my opinion, more people fail on diets and exercise programs because they lack a coherent strategy to keep them going, and to keep them focused on the long term benefits.  DDP is an exceptional motivator and a poster child for positive thinking.

DDP finally got the bug to make these workouts more accessible to the public, and now has a YRGFitness infomercial playing.  I picked up these disks because I (and my wife) liked the previous material so much.

YRGFitness

I was a bit put off by the ad copy and infomercialness of this, but since I watched Arthur Boorman's transformation occur in real time, I knew it wasn't just bullshit.  Instead of starting from scratch, an IGxer with the handle of "Freki" broke down the new products excellently here:

IGx YRGFitness Reviews

Keeping in mind I've been taking a class w/ Arthur Boorman for the last 6 months but I'm going to try and review from the perspective of only having seen the book and original DVDs.

Filming/presentation: Bright and very open, not kind of cramped like the originals. For most of the DVDs, it's DDP in front w/ 2 people behind him. For a few of them there's 4 people behind him. First person to the right is always the modification person to follow. When there's 4 people, especially on the Core tape, the two guys in the back are kicking it up a bit. In the lower right hand corner is a count down clock to let you know how long is left. I liked that personally. There are also messages across the bottom, think CNN/FoxNews text, that shows the move names and has reminders pop up to modify if you need to and to check a heart rate when you might need to.

Yoga Doc and Angela, the ripped black chick w/ the tig ol' bitties are the only ones from the originals and are only in a couple DVDs each. DDP makes a point of saying in almost all of the DVDs that these are not fitness models, they're real people.

Which gives us the opportunity for new Yoga Babes: Little chick w/ a great rack, she's the first transformation on the yrgfitness.com site. She's in two DVDs, i thought she was just eye candy but she cranks out fingertip pushups on one.   A brunette w/ in one video looks damn good, but in another looks very house frau-ish. A dirty blonde w/ a big rack is in a couple as well and is pleasing to the eye.

I got the basic 5 plus an additional three on an impulse, I've watched or fast forwarded through all of them and done the Fat Burner, here are my initial impressions and I'll add as I actually do the others if that impression changes. What I have not done is thought about comparing say the Fat Burner to Below The Belt to Strength Builder to Stand Up as they're all about same length 25-35 min. Probably 80-85% of the moves are the same as the original dvds but the sequencing/pacing is often very different.

Diamond Dozen/Energy
Intro level DVD, comparable to the old 20 min workouts. I have not gone through all of the Diamond Dozen as it looked to be more instructional in nature. The 13 moves that make up the Diamond Dozen will mostly be very familiar to owners of the old DVDs, but 4 of them will be "new", they're really twists/additions, we do them in class weekly. Energy is the workout. Art's in it. Very much the equal to the 20 min workouts, if you're new to YRG, you'll use this a lot, if you've been using the others for a while, you probably won't use this DVD much or could use the dozen as your practice if you don't want to pop in a dvd or are travelling. you get a poster of them w/ the package.

Fat Burner
25 min long. I found the guy in the background to be a bit of a tool, distracting and he was struggling. This is the one w/ the brunette where I think she looks good. As is stated in the ad copy, the Diamond Dozen is the foundation for all of these but w/ new twists, sequencing and combinations to keep it interesting. Some new stuff in there that I've never seen. I didn't find it that hard but will probably become one of my go to's as a warm up on KB days.

Core
12 min. Yoga Doc's in this one. So's the little sprite w/ the great rack, another lady and big, ripped black dude. Mostly leg raisers, variations on those, some stuff from yoga doc's dvd and new stuff i've never seen. Going home on all these is pretty much the standard from the original dvds. This is the one where I really noted that the guys in the back ground are really doing different stuff than DDP and the ladies, what they do is usually up a notch from DDP, while the ladies typically do a notch below him. From the pamphlet that comes w/ it, it looks like this is intended to be paired w/ some of the others, which I was planning on doing anyway.

Below the Belt
about 30 min. Different focus than the others as it's more about the legs, new twist, literally, on thunderbolt. Sonnon's 4CBD becomes a hood ornament. New table sequence too.

Diamond Cutter
50 min. Yoga doc and a new set of real people. Equivalent to the old far burner plus. For all of these, the moves are for the most part the same, but the pacing differs quite a bit, as does the sequencing from the old DVDs. Several new moves or variations in here. As well as new YRG-ized versions of regular yoga moves.

the Extras
Strength Builder
35 min, old standard kicked up a notch. New version of awkward airplane that i've never seen. Just as an example of how things are the same, but different, Wrap and Burn isn't in the Diamond Cutter (but was in the old Fat Burner +), but is in this DVD.

Stand Up
30 min, a lot of balancing, one legged stuff. I think it's going to be harder than it looks. This would be a good time to mention that in all of these, you can see sweat running off people and they're falling a lot in this one, which is kind of cool.

Double Black Diamond
70 min, this is supposed to be the big one. Looks pretty challenging. Art's back!! Again, most of it is the standard stuff, just paced differently. A couple new to YRG moves, but are known in yoga. Just looking at it, I don't think it'll be much beyond a typical class, but is probably a good bit beyond the old fat burner+, IMO.

Overall: Mostly the same moves, w/ some new ones and new twists. It's good for me to see new combinations, some new stuff and have the 25-35 min canned stuff will come in handy. Toss in the mat I got w/ the extras and the heart rate monitor, and it was very worth it for me, but I'm kind of in the can for YRG. DO NOT BUY THIS ON MY RECO ALONE, READ OTHERS TOO. If you have the original DVDs and think the fat burner or fat burner+ are hard, several these will be good twists and/or challenging. If you think those are easy, these will probably be more fun for the twists and new ideas, but the Diamond Cutter is probably a notch above the old Fat Burner+, even though it's 10 min shorter.

One thing that got on my nerves is DDP does this growl-chuckle that was annoying me by the end but might just be me and I'd watched like 3 hours straight of YRG DVD's by that point.

It's funny, there's things in here that we don't do in class and there's things in class that aren't on here. One thing I do like that DDP does on several of the DVDs, is out of the blue, he'll pop into a pose that's a step beyond what they're doing and he'll look at the camera and say "Always somewhere else to go w/ this."

I hope all ya'll find this useful.

One thing of note is that in the original YRG DVDs and book, there was a lot of talk about T&A and the patter was occasionally borderline raunchy.  DDP and his crew dropped that sort of presentation, and it's a very cheerful, motivating and supportive patter that's going on now.  There were some other changes that were obviously designed to be less offensive to more people...for example, when doing the diamond cutter move, you used to make the "sign of the cross", and now you make "the sign of the T".  This is all related to making the product more palatable to more people, and is only noticable if you had the original DVDs. 

I have not had great luck with the heart rate monitor in the package.  It works, but it takes some time to start being consistent, even with wetting down the electrodes initially.

I really like YRG.  I like it because it makes me feel loose and good after doing it, and if I really get after it, it's an excellent workout.  It's low impact so it doesn't bug the aging joints.  I don't use it as a stand-alone fitness program, but it would be very good for that purpose, too.

DL4: Deload

6-May

DL:  225x10, 10, 10

Kbell long cycle with the 16s for 6 minutes.

5-May

YRG 2.0 Fat Burner

55 minute, 4 mile run through City Forest.  Got lost.  Twisted ankle.  Scratched hand.  Ponderous pace.

Ate like shit.

4-May

YRG2.0 Energy + Red Hot Core

Bench

Short.

Bench: 245x5, 265x5, 275x6
Chin/Inverted Row/Band Pull Aparts - 3 circuits
DB Bench: 65x15, 12, 10
Band kurls/band pressdowns

This workout induced a lot of soreness.   I think it's related to the DB bench, which I haven't done all year.