Sandbag Training Fitness System

How Ultimate Sandbag Training Will Change 2012 Fitness!

How Ultimate Sandbag Training Will Change 2012 Fitness! 2

I wanted to try to squeeze one more Ultimate Sandbag Training post in before the holidays. I know my last post was a little non-traditional for me, but I like taking the occasional opportunity to talk about other areas of fitness, but now back to the training!

2011 proved to be a quantum leap for Ultimate Sandbag Training as far as our ability to really meet with a ton of great coaches from all over the world. I admit, I get pretty darn excited to see the look in a coaches face when our Ultimate Sandbag Training makes sense for them. When they start to see how it can provide solutions, complexity, challenges, and fun for their clients. I know that we are making a difference in giving people strategies to get even better results for their clients and that is exciting! A question that I get a lot from coaches is now what?

2012 Ultimate Sandbag Training

Education, education, education! Just the other day a well known coach asked me if we were going to keep going down the road of Ultimate Sandbag Training? I smiled a bit, thinking about the seven years it has taken us to get to the point where more and more people are understanding there is a purpose, there is a system, there are so many layers of Ultimate Sandbag Training that in many ways I feel like we have just begun! A lot of people talk about education, but what does that really mean?

-It Really Is That Simple-During a conference this great fitness professional who had literally travelled the world learning various training methods, came up to me and had a moment of confession. He told me how he watched our videos on squatting techniques and just couldn’t believe that it would be that easy to teach someone how to squat just by using our Bear Hug Squats. “It really is that simple though” is what he said, of course as we talked about how specific cues really enhance the movement, I completely agreed with him, that it really is! His comments reminded me of the fact that sometimes we want to make things more challenging or complex than they really have to be. In fact, the more impractical training methods are some times the more coaches and trainers think they have to be valuable because they are complicated. The truth is we efficient is always best and sometimes that does mean simple. When people ask us “what is Ultimate Sandbag Training all about?” They are often surprised that I don’t speak about instability training, or being hardcore, or really any of the ideas that most would consider with sandbag training. My answer is “we provide better solutions for fitness and performance programs.” It really is that simple!

-Learning to Be Inefficient-This past year I think I learned so much being able to work with so many top professionals and get their feedback on what they felt to be important about our program. You have to know you are on to something when two great professionals on opposing coasts end up saying the same thing. Our colleagues Alwyn Cosgrove and Rick Mayo both known for getting amazing results for their clients especially in the world of fat loss, told me the same thing. “The best thing about Ultimate Sandbag Training is the amazing metabolic effects that you create from making training inefficient.” How does being “inefficient” actually make your training better?

Especially in the world of fat loss, inefficiency means your body does become acclimated to the stimulus and become too efficient which means you expend less calories and use less muscles. This is great if your sport is one of the iron sports (i.e. Powerlifting, Olympic lifting, Strongman, Kettlebell Sport), however, if you are an athlete or someone looking to get really lean, becoming inefficient is really key. Ultimate Sandbag Training accomplishes this goal in several ways which makes it really unique.

-You can use an unstable Ultimate Sandbag (which is what we love large Ultimate Sandbags for in sandbag training) so that the Ultimate Sandbag is unstable and moves which makes every repetition distinctly different.

-You can use an unstable body position, one of our core Ultimate Sandbag Training concepts is using unstable body positions to train from to increase the stabilizers of the body and to find specific weaknesses. However, it is also a great way to make the body work in really a unique manner. This comes in the form of pressing in different positions (i.e. lunge, half kneeling, suspended) or trying to produce force in different positions such as lateral lunges, staggered stances, and many others.

-You can make the Ultimate Sandbag drills work in different postures and positions. Recently I had the pleasure to speak with coach Bret Conteras who is working on his PhD in the world of Biomechanics and has a ton of practical experience lifting and training people himself. I spoke with Bret about our informal study that demonstrated that the Ultimate Sandbag Rotational Lunge created a higher heart rate and calorie expenditure than the kettlebell swing at half the weight! To my surprise Bret was not shocked at all! He went on to explain from a biomechanical perspective it made a lot of sense because in rotary training (the Rotational Lunge obviously being a form of rotary training) that some of the large muscles such as the obliques really work to create a lot of stability and perform the movement at the same time creating a lot of force. This is force not just to move the weight, but to stabilize the spine as well. So, it would make sense that we would see the body expending more energy. I don’t know, sounds pretty darn good to me!

What Will Be Different for Ultimate Sandbag Training in 2012?

Probably the most exciting thing about for Ultimate Sandbag Training in 2012 is all of you! YOU are going to make us be better in the way we teach, cue, and create effective training programs. YOU are going to help us innovate and create even BETTER solutions for people’s training goals. That may be in the form of new Ultimate Sandbag Training tools that are on the horizon or better Ultimate Sandbag workout programs, or continually be blessed to work with many of you and seeing how you are changing lives and how you are using our Ultimate Sandbag Training system to raise the standards of fitness!

Posted on: 12-22-2011
Posted in: Sandbag Training

Can Ultimate Sandbag Training Save Your Life? 0

Ultimate Sandbag Training Motivation

We are getting to the time of year when resolutions dominate magazines, news segments, and everything in between. It seems that more and more fitness professionals and workouts are trying to slide in their version of motivation and inspiration. To be perfectly honest, I kinda chuckle at it all. Why? When I think of great athletes, coaches, and teams I think about what makes them great and I think some of these foundations:

Keys to Beyond Motivation-Ultimate Sandbag Training Philosophy

-Education: This may seem odd as a concept for motivation, how does education relate? “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”-Nelson Mandela. I don’t care how excited you are to train that day, or how excited you are to take yourself or someone through a “killer” workout, if it is not based off a sound basis of understanding exercise science the immediate excitement begins to dwindle quite quickly. That doesn’t mean you have to possess a PhD, but rather a desire to always learn more and not just create more difficult workouts, but more effective workouts. The winningest college men’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, says “continual learning is the key to effective leadership..events change, circumstance change, people change…leadership is about change.” Possessing a great deal of knowledge gives us great potential to problem solve more effectively, identify potential obstacles, and understand when change is necessary.

-The REAL Goal: If I type in “goal setting” into Amazon over 52,000 book results come up! There is no shortage of people try to tell you how to set goals, the value of goal setting, yada, yada, yada. The problem is that people often make the wrong goal and aren’t really honest with themselves. When a client comes into our facility and says they want to lose 20 pounds is that a goal? Yes, but that isn’t REALLY why they are there. Ask a few important questions and you may find out that they don’t feel attractive to their husband anymore which has grown a distance in their relationship and makes home feel like a cold place. Wow seems like quite a quantum leap when someone just wanted to lose 20 pounds, but this is actually based off a true story of a client. Identifying not just the goal, but the true motivation behind it goes a long way in being able to maintain focus on the goal, the training program, and accountability.

-Be Able to Adapt: Here in Phoenix for a few years our NBA team the Suns has been known as a “run and gun” team. They won consistently during the regular season and would even get to high positions in the playoffs. However, falling short of the championship the management decided that the coach and philosophy had to change. One year a new coach was hired, the “run and gun” was out and a strong defensive mind-set was installed into the team. The players were basically the same, but heck, everyone knows in sports DEFENSE wins championships (a very common saying). Well, less than a quarter into the season the team was a wreck, losing, finger pointing, quickly got the coach fired and the “run and gun” philosophy was coming back. That year the team came within two games of going to the championship.

My point? It is much harder to do what is not popular but what you believe to be right than it is to follow the masses. Why do a lot of clients suffer from poor eating habits during the holidays? Because most of their friends and family are telling them they are “odd” and “weird”. Hard to be different especially from those that you value their opinion.

Second is the fact you have to be able to adapt to the people you work with, even if that person is yourself. I can’t tell you how many even great coaches I know that have confessed performing exercises that hurt themselves only because those are the exercises everyone “THINKS” are important. I always like to remind people of the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.” If it is not working, I don’t care what the “expert” says, you have to change to something else and you can be shocked how this spawns great results!

Does Ultimate Sandbag Training Save Your Life?

Am I going to dare try to make a parallel to Ultimate Sandbag Training now? Oh heck yea! Listen, can Ultimate Sandbag Training save your life? Probably not. Can Ultimate Sandbag Training be an inspiration to creating better habits, does fun and dynamic fitness programs sound like a good reason to start getting involved or re-energizing your fitness program? Then maybe so. I have always told clients that fitness has to be fun in some way, I don’t care if it is the BEST fitness program in the world, but if it is stale and boring adherence is going to be terrible. That doesn’t mean just perform the most random stuff in the hope that it may carry over to your fitness goals. This is exactly what I love about our Ultimate Sandbag Training system, it is not about absolutes, but rather how you can use it to solve your fitness goals. 2012 is going to be all about how you can use Ultimate Sandbag Training for the very reasons we talked about to ensure your long-term success!