Transcribed from video:
– How do we build adaptability in our athletes? If you looked at the programming in a lot of places, there will be maybe 15 to 20 exercises, which in general, will be repeated week after week, month after month, year after year. So I would say that 20% of all the exercises we could do are being done 80% of the time. It’s the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle for those of you who know it. It basically says that the clothes you’re wearing now, they are probably part of the 20% of your wardrobe that you wear 80% of the time. The clothes you’re wearing now, you wear a lot. It’s the income of a population of a country, 20% of the people earn 80% of the total income. You can find this pattern all through nature, all through economics. And exactly the same thing happens here. People tend to do 20% of the exercises 80% of the time, and then these 80% of the exercises only 20% of the time, and it’s this 80% of the exercises which are neglected that I want to talk about. Let’s go back to that hip extension movement, all right. So the movement we’re trying to train, not the exercise, the movement we’re trying to train is an aggressive extension of the hip. Who can tell me an exercise that’s going to train an aggressive extension of the hip? Go for it. A deadlift, a box jump, more. Kettlebell swing, power clean, keep going. Hip thrust, more, semi-deadlift, tyre pull. Good, okay, so so far, we’ve had one exercise which was body weight, which was the box jump. Everything else was a barbell. Now we’ve got a dead ball to shoulder. Keep going. Yup, yup, any sort of jumping, high vertical leaps, broad jumps. More? Wall ball, yup, there’s a hip extension. Probably more anterior chain dominant, but still a hip extension.
– Broad jumps.
– Broad jumps. All right, we need to think wider, broader, and deeper. Anything that you put on your shoulder.
– Tyre flips?
– Tyre flips, yeah. Tyre flips, keg, atlas stein, sandbags, child, anything that you can put on your shoulder, anything that you can lift. How about single-arm dumbbell or double-arm dumbbell? Sing-arm dumbbell from ground, from hang, kettlebell, single-arm kettlebell, Russian swing, American swing, one or two arms. There are 50-plus movements that we can programme which work on aggressive hip extension. Of all those things we’ve just talked about, can you see how you’ve probably only ever done less than 20% of them, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. You’ve done less than 20% of those things. When we programme a session, if we’re programming a session and let’s say, let’s just make it simple and choose these four different areas here. So these four different areas here, we’re going to put together a programme containing these four areas, so we need something which is a press, and let’s call it a gymnastics press, all right. So you’re pressing body weight like your push-up, handstand push-up, whatever the case may be. We’re going to put in a gymnastics pull, we’re going to put in a squat-based movement, and we’re going to put in a deadlift-based movement. Someone give me a pressing-type movement. A body weight press. Handstand, cool. Someone give me a gymnastics pull-based movement. Pull-up. Someone give me a squat-based movement. Yup, back squat. Someone give me a deadlift-based movement. Deadlift. All right, boring, boring, super predictable, the answers you gave me there, yeah. What’s a deadlift-based movement? A deadlift, you put weights on a bar and you lift them. Now what that does, that is going to give you a really good effect. It’ll give you a good metabolic effect. This will have the intent of the session from a work capacity point of view. But is this going to create a well-rounded, adaptable athlete? Is this going to create an athlete who can do something that is slightly different to a deadlift? Not necessarily. It is going to give you a high competency in a very, very narrow band of movement, a very narrow band of movement, and these are the people who are not adaptable, who are good exercisers, but are not good athletes. These people are good exercisers, but not good athletes. Bless you. You can’t throw new things on them that they’re not used to and expect them to do well because you haven’t trained their ability to do well in this environment, in this situation. Gymnastic press, let’s think of something a little bit more interesting. A dip, still yeah. I mean, you’ve done those thousands of times, haven’t you? How about a clap push-up? Yeah? It’s like a push-up. It’s really like a push-up, but there’s just, there’s something in a clap push-up that you don’t get from a normal push-up. Now, is the clap push-up going to help their normal push-ups? Yes, of course it is. It’s not taking away anything. It’s only adding something. Your clap push-up is going to improve your push-up almost by just as much as your push-up will. There’s this overlap. Here’s your clap push-up, here’s your push-up. There’s a huge overlap, but there’s this crescent moon here of benefit that you only get from a clap push-up that you just can’t get anywhere else. And if we look at 1,000 different ways of doing upper body gymnastics, bodyweight pressing, and we have all these overlapping circles, there is a huge amount of common ground. They all contain upper body pushing, but every single one has this little sliver of something which is unique to that movement. Handstand push-ups, kipping, stripped, parallette, deficit, weighted vest, walking handstands, freestanding, just these slight variations on a theme, and that’s what you should be including because we’re trying to create broad, adaptable athletes. We are trying to train movements. We’re not training exercisers. But the movements that people are training are in this narrow band of the 20%. We want to expand that. And those of you that have been involved with programming that I’ve done in the past will know that you put some weird, some different stuff in there. It makes it fun, yeah. It makes it really interesting. So someone that I’ve programed for who’s in here, throw a movement at me that you’ve done in the last month that you’ve never done before that was a stimulating movement, something a bit different.
– [Student] Sandbag thrusters.
– Cool, so sandbag thrusters. Is that going to improve your ability to do thrusters? Yes. Do you think thrusters will improve your ability to do sandbag thrusters by as much? Probably not. So as we get towards the extremes, towards the margins of our competencies here, the stock, standard, boring pull-up bar, barbell, box jump stuff, it’s just not going to push our extremes. Again, you get exercisers, people who are good at what they train, not athletes who have a broad competency across broad areas. And this is easy to do. Let’s say, again, we’ll go back to our example of thrusters and pull-ups. How many different ways you reckon you can do thrusters? 100? Barbell, axle, log, sandbag, stone, keg, dead ball, single-arm, double-bell, kettlebell, dumbbell, single-leg, double-leg, wall ball, two-for-one wall ball, heavy wall ball, low wall ball, high wall ball. So many different variations, so instead of doing thrusters, put one of those variations in. Do you think it’ll be just as difficult if not more so? Yes. Is it going to dull the metabolic effect, the work capacity effect that we’re looking for?
– No.
– Not at all. Are there any negatives of putting these novelty movements in? Any positives? Heaps of them. You guys don’t need to change your programming. You don’t need to change the movements. You need to change the exercises. A movement is a thruster. An exercise is a barbell, dumbbell, single-arm, double-arm, et cetera thruster.
– Big time, big time. Skill, skill, yeah, yeah. And there is such room for improvement there, and you guys will know that. Like a new skill comes up in a competition, or a new skill comes up that you haven’t done before, and at first, it feels really uncoordinated. You can’t get it. And literally, within five minutes, it’s improved by 80%. In a very small amount of time, you’ve worked out how to get it. Then those marginal gains come along where you’re improve it by 2%, by 3%, by 4%, it starts to slow down. If you do these exercises, and choose something different, and do it just once a month or once a year, if you do something on January the 1st of 2019, and you never train that again until January 1st, 2020, you will be better in 2020, than you were in 2019 from a single about of that exercise because of the coordination that you get from that single about of exercise.
