Hello amazing Tribe member! Here we are at the end of our Agility Block and entering a deloading week. You’ve done a great job with all the “high-variety” training that we’ve been doing to augment your MOVEMENTSMITH ability.
It’s always fun to bid farewell to one block and to usher another one in. With the agility training we were mainly trying to enhance our abilities to use a lot of different movement patterns and exercises while being reactive, balanced, and fluid. Now that we are heading toward the strength block, it’s good to preview the initial goal. When we start up in February, we’ll be using a Push-Legs-Pull x 2 split. This means there will be three workouts – one for pushing movements and muscles, one for legs, and one for pulling – done twice (hopefully) each week.
The two unique things next month that you probably will notice are as follows:
- Exercise Simplicity: We’ll be using mainly basic, simple, compound exercises that are easy to add load to the body. This is progressive overload training and it benefits from using these exercises and doing them somewhat repetitively for the entire month (gains brah).
- Balanced versus Biased Training: We always stay true to our model within the Annual Training Plan which balances the 5 capacities of human performance or athleticism (strength, power, speed, agility, and endurance). However, we bias the strength quite heavily in this first of 3 months to create a strong stimulus. We sneak in some elements of the other capacities just enough to keep them alive. As a Lifetime Athlete, you never have to do everything, all the time. Because you spend the year touching on all the categories, you never lose your awesomeness.
Back to this week and month (January), try to spend some time double checking your body and making sure everything is feeling good. Old nagging issues have healed. You are not chronically tired. All that usual stuff but it’s good stuff. Then, see if you can make sure you have a dedicated strength training area set up, no matter how small and simple, that you can just show up in and hammer. This helps a lot with the consistency. Finally, make sure you have enough weight or load to really challenge yourself. While we don’t go super heavy, you need to be able to create the proper stimulus. All the other blocks allow us to dance around and fluff it with lighter loads, but strength and muscle are built best with more resistance.
However, this does not have to be iron, as in going out and buying a bunch of bells and plates if your desires, budget and space don’t align with that. Instead, we can always make an exercise or piece of equipment “harder” to utilize with a little thought. Please feel free to use me as a resource, particularly in the T2 Forum, where you can pose a question and our team can participate.
Here are just a couple of ideas that you may find really helpful:
- Spend $12 at Home Depot or other similar store. Buy two cinder blocks and two 5-gallon buckets. You can use the buckets with the blocks in them for carrying and you can also stand on the blocks, fill the buckets with water, sand, gravel, etc. and perform fairly heavy deadlifts.
- Invest in a set of resistance bands (not the tubing with handles but the flat bands). These can be had for $25 or so on Amazon and you can get a set of 3-4 going from light to heavy (color coded). Now you can use the band to make many of the exercises we do “heavier” by attaching them to your weight in a variety of ways that I can show you. Also, if you do any barbell training, get two matching sets of bands and you can essentially replace several hundred pounds of weight.
Week of 2023-01-23 (week 4 of month 2: Agility Block)
| WOW | PREP | PRIMARY | ACCESSORY | TIPS |
| A X1 | 2 circuits 10 reps each MB trunk twist Elastic deadlift SB push press | 2 circuits 15 reps each KB swing SB back squat Suspension row | 2 circuits 20 reps each MB slam KB Gobsquat Elastic Curl | Keep it playful! |
| B X1 | Walk 20 minutes 10 air squats | Box Jump 10 x 1 Any height Rest 15-30 sec. | Jump Rope 3-5 x 2 min. | Just enough! |
| C X2 | Free Choice Cardio 15-45 minutes Zone 1-2 easy/steady | Stretching As preferred | Heat Cold Meditation 2 rounds Any way you like | Restore yourself! |
Workout A Breakdown: This is the “Fitkitt Funfest!” Three different circuits of 3 with different reps. The exercises are fairly standard. For the suspension row just throw your strap over the pullup bar or put a broomstick across two chairs. Just keep it safe.
Workout B Breakdown: Here’s an interesting possibility with this workout. The warmup will take care of itself without any complexity. But the box jumps will be unique. That’s 10 sets of 1. Do a good jump onto your box or bench, landing like a cat. Step off and wait up to half a minute before the next one. We are not looking for fatigue here, but quality as you defy gravity. Then on the jump rope, challenge yourself a bit. If you have no rope, just use an “invisible” one. Anybody (myself included) who can do 5 sets of 2 minutes will have all the cardio and foot/ankle/calf work they can stand. I’ll probably only make the 3.
Workout C Breakdown: You deserve one of these spa-like restorative sessions. If you can’t go to Viper’s house for this, just do the best you can.
The early winter MasterClasses focused heavily on refining competency in the major movement patterns. Everyone did great. We’ll continue to touch on that but also begin to work on some advanced elements in training such as tempos, isos, supersets, etc.
| MASTERCLASS | DAY AND TIME | MEETING INFO |
| Training and Refining Movement | SATURDAY 9:00am-10:00am MST | Join the MasterClass |
I’m honored to work with you and I consider it a privilege to be a resource!