Teaching Cleans Pt. 2
I love when athletes get to be athletes.
The two videos are about 5 minutes apart from teaching the initial movement of the bar into getting the hips to be more dynamic in the pull and into the high pull.
The argument against Olympic lifting has a pretty big weight put on the idea that they're too complicated to learn enough to be useful for training. Because there has to be a certain amount of load and capability for them to be useful to create adaptation.
That's a lot of big complicated wording, basically, meaning they're hard to do, so then hard to make useful.
I find this is often not the case, most athletes will pick up a movement pretty quickly. Especially when you're not trying to be perfect, just trying to get them to understand what the purpose of the exercise is.
And again...FUN
https://bit.ly/4tQ5hLI
Thank you everyone so much for your support.
I'll be going through all of the gear preparation next week so you can see how exactly I'm going to make 13 days on my feet doable.
I look forward to sharing the journey with you, and always remember
Fuck Cancer
Soul Snatching Body Shots are easy
Hinging, not so much.
It's one of my absolute favorite things when a very successful, very high level athlete is an absolute amateur in the weight room.
Especially if they don't have great control over their body mechanics in the way that I want them to. It usually requires a lot of feedback, a lot of slow readjustments of the positioning and movement in order to get them to find the right place.
The cool part about it? most athletes have a very quick ability to learn. So once you've got them in the right position, getting them to do the right thing doesn't take much effort. But sometimes initial teaching can be pretty entertaining.
In order to stress tissues. You have to find the point at which they actually become stressed.
That's easy to do with a squat or a bench press. I'm finding it much more challenging to do with my feet and a pack on my back.
The training starts to feel all consuming.
I can only equate it to those who've trained for a marathon.
You spend every spare second trying to carve out time enough to walk.
I'm finding this preparation block to be much more challenging than the last time I did this. I'm not sure if it's the lack of fear this time around about not being able to complete it. I have a lot more confidence in myself than I did the last time. But I'm certainly finding it to be a much more arduous process to simply put in the mileage required to make sure that my body can handle what I'm going to ask it to do
Don't Try to Reinvent The Wheel
Swapping a few things when a fighter enters camp is generally enough to start making those changes from general prep to sport specific.
And that doesn't mean what most athletes think.
We don't start adding in weird shit like weighted punches or Instagram Sensational garbage.
We swap some of our volume out in favour of longer rests and more targeted outputs. Jump higher, more nervous system activation, etc.
We need fighters to get the most out of all their sport sessions, and strength and conditioning takes a much more supportive role.
Single session mileage > total weekly mileage
I'm not saying that the accumulation isn't going to help you adapt. That's not the point. The problem is that there is a level of wear and tear that happens on your body after extended lengths of time doing the same thing. Overuse is real. And the difference between walking 10,000 steps and then taking a break for a few hours and walking another 10,000 versus walking 20,000 steps straight is pretty significant.
The way that I have my progression set up is that I have a few shorter, more intense walks during the week with a heavier pack.
And then I try to have longer sessions stuck together on my less busy days or the weekends when I can push my body to adapt to those bigger stressors.
It's not your systems that will take you out of a long long Trek, it's your feet
The limiting factor is never going to be an energy system that is designed to be used forever. Particularly at the speeds that you walk when you're doing a long distance hike.
It's the small structural things that'll fail first
Your skin, plantar fascia, bone bruises, ankle stability, issues with your knees, stabilizers in your hips, lower back endurance. Those things will wreck you so much more quickly.
Some of those issues may seem like small things when you're not dealing with them for very long. But 30,0000, 40,000 or more steps in a day, those little things become absolutely monstrous.
TGO 2026 Preview
For everybody that caught my story, this is the projected route for my 2026 crossing of Scotland.
For those of you who didn't, this may, I am going to be walking across the highlands of Scotland following a route that my father did solo in 2017.
I will be attempting the same crossing in his memory, and to spend a little bit of time walking in his footsteps.
I'm going to be sharing my training for this attempt as well as some thoughts and observations while I do so.
It would be great to have you follow along with me, and as always, any charitable donations towards kidney cancer would be absolutely lovely and greatly appreciated.
Thank you all so much!.
