I’ve been doing a lot of running lately. Hill sprints, flat ground sprints, sled sprints and cone/agility drills. Because I have a habit of getting overzealous and pushing too hard, too fast I added in too much volume when I knew I shouldn’t have.

We’d been getting seemingly endless streaks of rain here in NJ (somewhere my friend, Chad Waterbury is smiling) which were driving me insane and causing me to restart my search for a place to live in Southern Cali. So when the sun finally started shining and the ground dried up I couldn’t get outside often enough.

My calf started bothering me and tightening up from the excessive volume that I wasn’t ready for. I should have listened and taken another day off but since the forecast called for ANOTHER entire weekend of rain I decided to get my sprints in a day early. That was two weeks ago and I haven’t been able to run since, much to my chagrin.

It’s not a major injury, just something that we all deal with. It’s frustrating as hell, though because sprinting and jumping are two of my favorite things in the world, and I can’t do either. Ah well, hopefully I’ll get some treatment on it and be back next week sometime. If not, I’m gonna have to cut down on my eating schedule. And the prospect of doing that really doesn’t excite me.

Last week my buddy Craig Ballantyne was in town from Toronto and we had a couple great workouts together. Of course I jumped on the bad calf during one of our workouts and hit a 50+ inch box jump, which wasn’t bad. We also did a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

Our last workout wasn’t anything to write home about, however, since we were on four hours sleep  from a night out

My worst nightmare.

at the Jersey Shore the night before where we partied with Einstein (“E=MC2, motherf*ckers”) and drank fifty cent beers, while I hobbled around like a gimp.

Craig had never been to the shore before so I took him down to show him it wasn’t just a place filled with ass clowns from Long Island, like the MTV show made it out to be.

On Thursday my bother, Jonny Hinds rolled into town and we had a great session of bodyweight training, Eischens yoga, alignment work, handstands and, yes… quite a few bananas.

Last night was the first time I was able to do a barbell snatch in over two years. And today my shoulder actually feels pretty good. Due to the fact that I have broken my right wrist three times (Pop Warner football, basketball, snowboarding) and torn my right trap, labrum and rotator cuff my form will always be a bit odd/off on Olympic lifts but I do what I gotta do to protect myself while still being able to perform them.

Why do I even bother doing them and risk another injury? That’s a good question that can only be answered by someone much smarter that me. See the title of this post…

The workout consisted of military presses (worked up to 195), pull ups, med ball pushups, farmers walks, fat bar curls, neck and some barbell complexes as a finisher. Here’s the video of the complex below. I did clean grip snatches to protect the shoulder.

Again, the Olympic lifting form is not perfect, but it gets the job done.

I meant to do six reps on every exercise but I only ended up doing five on the first one.

Story of my life- always coming up a bit short when it comes to the snatch…

(Turn your speakers down if you’re at work)

Please leave your comments below.

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On top of that we also had a visit from one of my favorite guys in the entire fitness industry, none other than the owner of Monkey Bar Gym, Jon Hinds. For those that don’t know, Jon is a 46 year old white dude who can dunk a basketball, walk on his hands and perform numerous other displays of supreme physical fitness. He’s also a Pan Am games winning BJJ black belt, and one of the all around coolest, nicest guys you’ll ever meet.

While he was in town he was staying in Brooklyn and yesterday morning just decided to buy a bicycle, on a whim, and ride it from Brooklyn, through the Bronx to meet us at Yankee Stadium, while wearing flip flops, no less.

And no shirt. He just bought a Jeter shirt from a street vendor and threw it on to get in to the Stadium.

Dude is the definition of chill.

And he eats twelve bananas a day.

TWELVE BANANAS!

Back to Sean Hyson…

Ten weeks ago he decided he wanted to get really serious and do a transformation story. So I put together a 12-week training and nutrition program and we got started. So far Sean has lost 30 pounds of bodyfat, while simultaneously putting a half inch on his arms and improving all of his lifts.

This Saturday he was attempting a new PR in the squat, looking to put four plates on for the first time ever. Again, I will repeat the fact that he has lost thirty pounds over the last ten weeks and is running sprints, jumping rope and doing fasted cardio several days per week. Still, he was able to increase his strength dramatically in ten weeks, through an incredibly high level of dedication, discipline and attention to detail.

We will cover his transformation and training/nutrition program in more detail when it’s all done and we have the before and after pics in two weeks. But for now I think the video below speaks for itself:

While Sean was squatting, a bunch of us were doing pin pulls at the next rack down. I worked in with my brother, Jared, Hinds, and my good friend and Renegade Gym member, Lieutenant Paul Miller of the NJ State Police.

I’m still doing my best to stay smart and not go too heavy on anything. I need to just get healthy and stay healthy. However, the cameras were rolling and the adrenaline was pumping so I jumped up almost 200 pounds from the last time I did rack pulls a few weeks ago. None of these sets were incredibly hard, though, so I told myself it was all smart and safe. Even though a 200 pound jump is never remotely smart or safe.

Again, I am keeping the reps high on my warm up sets in order to ensure that I am totally warm and ready for my heaviest sets and also to induce fatigue (the opposite of what I recommend for most people) so that my heaviest sets aren’t as heavy as they would be had I done less warm ups. Right now it’s working quite well and I feel good.

I worked up to 545 with the following progression:
135 x 10
225 x 10
315 x 10
405 x 8
455 x 8
495 x 10- I think. Maybe I got 8 or 9. I can’t remember. This was going to be my heaviest set so I pushed it.

But then Paul did this weight for five reps:

This was a huge milestone for Paul as it was the first time he’s had five plates on the bar. At 46, he’s bigger and stronger than he’s ever been and has been making insane gains in size and strength the last few months. So congrats to the big man for that awesome new PR.

Anyway, after watching Paul do that I couldn’t NOT do another set So I threw on another quarter and did 545 for a few reps:

Without all the warm ups, and if I was really going all out I think I would have had 600 in me. Which isn’t great, but isn’t bad for where I’m at right now and I’m happy with it.

Probably the most impressive performance on the rack came out of Hinds. Until Saturday he hadn’t touched a barbell in 15 years, as he does the majority of his training with bodyweight only.

Still he worked up to 405 for 12, which I thought was awesome. I know that if I hadn’t touched a barbell in 15 years I’d probably only be doing 225 or so.

For some reason we didn’t catch it all on video, but trust me; he got 12 reps.

Finally, Jared finished up with 495 for 12:

After that we messed around on the glute ham and did some tire flips:

After that we had a challenge on the log clean and press.

I wasn’t going to train at all on Saturday since I had already trained three times that week and done a couple days of hill sprints. I also woke up at 4:44 in the morning so I didn’t have a ton of energy. But once I felt the intensity and the adrenaline I made a last minute game time decision to get in on it.

However, I really had no intentions of pressing the log, considering that I had pressed on Friday, and my injured shoulder and all…

But, of course, I continue to make testosterone influenced decisions in the heat of battle.

Paul beat everyone on the log with 20 reps so I had to jump in and see if I could beat my buddy. That would only be the right thing to do…

After that a round robin style tournament of tug of war broke out, with the finals coming down to me and Sean vs. Jared and Brian.

All in all it was a great day, tons of healthy competition and a lot of fun.

And that’s what training should be all about.

Please leave your questions and comments below.

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One of the major problems is that for most average guys a set of chins is a five rep max. Therefore it is true CNS draining Max Effort work. And they repeatedly do this time after time, workout after workout. There is no other exercise that you would continually max out on and take to near death failure like you do with chin ups. You would know better than to do that with squats and deads. But everyone is fine with doing it on chins. And I truly believe that to be one of the major reasons why more people don’t improve on their chins with any regularity.

The other problem is that there isn’t enough variety in the rep ranges and when you continually do those five rep max sets you are never doing anything to improve your endurance in that movement pattern. To get better on the 225 pound bench test you would do things like strap pushups, ascending board presses or pushups, high rep dumbbell presses, etc. on one day to build your endurance and some heavy pressing on another day to build your strength. But most people don’t take this approach with their chins; they only work on the lower end of the rep scale trying to improve strength, but do nothing to improve endurance. And obviously this doesn’t always work too well.

So the simple solution is to throw in more high rep work; which would again involve the use of the bands. The bands got you from zero chins to one and now they can help get you from your current plateau up to a new PR.

Exactly how, you ask…

Any way you want. Simply using more variety will be enough to do the trick and help you break out of a rut. Some workouts you can use the light band, some workouts you can use the mini bands, some you can use the average bands, some you can do with bodyweight, and some you can do weighted. Just mix it up each program and keep getting stronger on each variety of chins you do.

But remember not to go to failure and let your form break down. Again, most people are smart enough not to let their squat turn into a good morning, but everyone is ok with climbing up the invisible ladder, swinging, rest-pausing, severely protracting their shoulders and doing whatever else they can to make their final reps on chin ups look as ugly as possible. Don’t do this if you want to get stronger.

Below is a video from this past summer that we shot at Renegade Gym of Jen doing chin ups. She bangs out 13 picture perfect reps with no band. That’s something that most guys can’t do. In the video in the previous post about how to improve your chin ups she did 15 WITH the band. That was less than eight months earlier. The way she made such dramatic improvements was through variety and building up her endurance in that movement pattern with higher reps sets. She always did a variety of different grips and we varied her reps from 3-20. Some months she did chins twice per week (one day heavy, one day light), others only once. This is another way to boost your chins. Hit them 2-5 times per week for a month and then cut back to only once per week for the next month. The supercompensation effect from the reduced loading will often lead to improved performance in the second month.

Waving the reps up and down is more effective than just trying to make linear improvements; which only beginners can do. While a linear approach of starting with strong or average bands and working down to no bands worked well in the past, it won’t work so well now that you can do eight reps or so. You need to use a form of undulating or alternating periodization to get the best results.

But again, remember that you need to improve your strength endurance in that movement pattern. Having the arms extended overhead (as in a military press) makes it more difficult to breath. You need to get used to that. So even throwing in an exercise like the monkey bar climb, seen below, can be helpful as well.

Hopefully that gives you some good ideas about how to improve your chin ups and you’ll be setting some new PR’s real soon.

Please leave your comments below.

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What I love about this exercise is that it requires more athleticism than a regular pushup so it serves multiple purposes.

You can get your Power Wheel HERE. It’s a great piece of equipment that I can’t recommend highly enough. And nothing works your abs any harder.

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TRX Exercise #1: Bicep Curls

TRX Exercise #2: Triceps Extensions

TRX Exercise #3: Inverted Rows

TRX Exercise #4: Low Ab Pull In’s

Get your TRX Straps today and take your training to the next level.

http://www.TrxStraps.com/

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Bear crawls aka bear walks are an awesome strength and conditioning exercise but are commonly performed incorrectly. This is the proper way to do bear walks. The common mistake is to keep your butt up high in the air and allow your lower back to round. This can be problematic for people with glass backs and should be avoided. Performing them as demonstrated is a great total body exercise that really works the core musculature and the stabilizer muscles of the shoulder. This is way better than external rotations and other such isolation movements.

This exercise is way harder than it looks when done properly. Try to work up to 50-100 yard sets and increase your speed only if form is perfect.

For more great training tips visit http://www.MuscleGainingSecrets.com/

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Since the video will explain it more clearly than words ever could, watch below to learn exactly how to improve on chin ups.

For more great muscle building information please visit http://www.MuscleGainingSecrets.com/ now.

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Anyway, here is a clip of the battling ropes from tonight. And also the aftermath.

And the aftermath… Unfortunately we didn’t capture the main blast on film, but the end was still entertaining.

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