Back To The Beginnings

Using a lighter club to feel the movement

 Forging ahead in any modality of exercise is a great accomplishment. Adding weight to a squat or sprinting in a faster time for a new personal record is exciting. This fosters the initiative to keep on training. Then there are the times when the program fails and the scheduled weight, or time, or number of reps falls drastically short of what was to be expected. Now what?

 If the reason for the failure isn't injury or exhaustion, the cause for failure may be the athlete's technique. Many times, when the focus is on a determined goal, little nuances that were learned to get to that particular point fell by the wayside. Too much emphasis may be placed on the goal of heavier, faster, or more, and the attention to detail is forgotten thus creating a vacuum in the athlete's programming.

 For those who aren't familiar with my training, I use clubs exclusively (which I will detail why in another post) in my personal training program. Some of the exercises are complex movements which require not only strength but a certain degree of skill to execute properly. One of these exercises - the inside mill or just the 'mill' is the club trainer's bench press. Club fanatics always compare mill weight or reps. Since I have been experimenting with the heavier clubs I sometimes fall short of an expected P/R or training goal. My answer to that is go back to the beginning. Lighten that load up for the workout and get in some volume training with a manageable weight. For example, if I completed Monday's mill workout of 10X10 with a 35lb club and Friday's mill workout calls for 5X6 with a 40lb club but my form fails on the first set or maybe the first rep, I'll revert back to a 25lb club for a 10X10 light conditioning set but feel each part of the movement relearning small subtleties that make heavier weights possible. The next mill workout will open with that same 25lb club as a warm up for one set to coordinate the feeling throughout my body before attempting the 40lb club again. Then go on the the 40lb 5X6 workout progressing to ultimately the 10X10 workout with that weight.

 I had learned this type of 'assistance' training way back in the 70's from an old school guy who was built like a bodybuilder but moved weight like a powerlifter. This method was used by the older set of strength trainers, the guys that were before me. Here, on this page I can share some of what they left that may have been forgotten or discarded due to style or ego. Apply it to any of your training, being sure to feel the movement, perform some volume then back to your regular programming. It'll work.

Age Defiant

Adex Club Loaded at 25 lbs

Exercise is great for everyone ESPECIALLY for those of us getting older. Club training or Clubwork is an excellent way for anyone to train, but for us older folks 35+ who want to remain active for our whole lives, clubwork is the crux of fitness. Swinging it at 51. Growing Old Isn't For Sissies Repair, rehab, and keep those shoulders, elbows, and wrists moving. All clubwork exercises translate through the legs without isolation exercises. Restore or maintain your Range Of Motion - ROM in all of your joints. Add muscle to your frame to prevent age related atrophy. If you are over the age of 40 and want to regain freedom or hang on to it for life, inquire at www.adexclub.com for more information

Keeping The Shoulders MobileAdex Adjustable Exercise Club Unloaded

An easy way to begin club training is with an Adex Adjustable Exercise Club. Adex Clubs offer the versatility of owning a complete set of clubs without the high price tag and shipping costs of individual standard clubs. The biggest mistake when making initial club purchases is getting an incorrect weight, one that is too heavy or will be outgrown in a rapid time. Adex Clubs are always the right weight because they adjust quickly and safely by hand. www.adexclubs.com

5 Club Exercises For Shoulders

WRITTEN BY DON GIAFARDINO ON JUNE 25, 2015. POSTED IN FITNESS ARTICLES

Club training is synonymous with shoulder exercise. Just about every club training movement has some degree of shoulder activity involved. If you are interested in packing some muscle on to your delts or increasing your OHP (over head pressing) strength, here are some great club training shoulder exercises.

If you are new to club training, please watch the videos on my website to get the basics down and avoid possible injury.

CLUB 2-HAND OVERHEAD PRESS EXERCISE

Begin with the club held in both hands front, elbows bent 90 degrees and press the club straight up toward the ceiling. Keep it steady by imagining a cup of water balanced on top of the club.

As you press upward wring your hands outward which keeps your elbow tissue safe. Return to starting position while wringing your hands inward. This same move can be done with one hand, but instead of starting on your body’s centerline, begin with the elbow married to your side, club held upright straight in front. Don’t forget to rotate your hand and club outward as it travels upward, and reverse on the way down.

CLUB 45 DEGREE OVERHEAD PRESS EXERCISE

The next is a variation of the overhead press, but instead of pushing the club straight up, make the club travel up and away from your body at a 45 degree angle. Some trainers refer to this as the torch press or angle press. The knob of the club should end up about eye level and the arms are fully extended at an angle up and away from the body. Remember to wring the handle. This also can be done with one hand.

CLUB SHOULDER THREAD EXERCISE

Getting away from the pressing moves, let’s add some strength/mobility to the shoulder exercises. Begin by picking the club from the floor, left hand next to the knob, right hand is under, clean it up to ready position, right elbow married to your side, left arm forearm crossing the abs.

Your two arms should form a square, the club is the corner when you look down. Raise the head or muzzle of the club up and dump it over your right shoulder, ending behind your back. Your elbows should be above your head. The right elbow should be pointing fairly forward while the left is pointing toward the left. Move the club behind your back toward the left and draw it back over your left shoulder into the opposite position that you began in. Return the club to your right side by passing it in front maintaining its upright position. This is an excellent move for building a thick powerful shoulder girdle and directly develops the rotator cuff muscles Supraspinatus, Infraspinatus, Teres Minor, and the Sub-scapularus, easy to remember by SITS. Anatomy lesson – check.

INVERTED CLUB LATERAL RAISE EXERCISE

A shoulder exercise for those who want a bit more deltoid shape is lateral raises with the club held upside-down. Simply grip the knob or the handle and raise the club laterally for medial deltoids, raise to the front for front delts, or bend forward at the waist 45 degrees, drawing the elbows up and to the rear to hit the posterior delts.

CLUB MILL EXERCISE

 The last exercise is a complex and challenging movement for the club training enthusiast. The mill is a shoulder exercise designed to develop strength and coordination. It is similar to throwing a football or cracking a whip. The easiest way to teach this drill is to practice throwing a football but never letting it go. Throw the ball like you were throwing a bomb, but don’t let it go, instead let it return in a downward arc back naturally to the cocked shoulder position.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Once you have that down, practice forceful elbow adduction to the body’s centerline. This will cause momentum when using a club and give it a ‘wag’ when performing a mill to help propel it forward and over the shoulder. Once you feel confident, practice more but using a T-ball bat. These are excellent for learning club training patterns. Get in a good hundred on each arm before using a club with any weight. Form is important here, and mills done with a light weight are excellent for joint conditioning and rehab. Mills performed heavier will be a great addition to your shoulder exercises.

BONUS: PRE-WORKOUT CLUB TRAINING WITH BODYTRIBE

Club Training Side Cast

Club Training Side Swing

Sore Shoulder? Your Body May Love You For It

 Club training is the one of the best ways to rehab or prehab your shoulders. The whole reason that I got into club training and designed the Adex Club was to get rid of an achy shoulder that had me in pain for a decade. Chiropractors couldn't fix it, other doctors and specialists wanted to operate but with no guarantee.

 My condition was a 'slightly' separated A/C joint and mildly torn rotator cuff muscles. Relying on time to make it better did nothing but increase the pain. At that time, training heavy was my thing so I'd tough it out through bench presses and live with the soreness. after all this is what we do, right? Until I had gotten to the point where a push up wasn't possible because of the pain. A single push up! The search to repair my shoulder now included seeking other ways of treatment.

 While searching the internet looking for relief Google directed me to a man swinging a club. He spoke of the healing benefits of club training and demonstrated some exercises with a light weight 5lb club. I didn't have a club but I did have a loadable dumb bell that I set up with 3lbs on one end. I tried hard to copy the man's patterns and began doing this everyday. Within a month, I was able to not only do a push up but 20.

 Fast forward through the development of the Adex Club, competing at Crossfit events, back to the gym for regular training all while holding jobs that require physical strength that include the shoulder. Cell tower climber, pizza man, crane operator/mechanic, ditch digger, truck driver - all these jobs wouldn't have been possible with a nagging shoulder. Incorporating club training into my regular workouts kept me working out and out working.

 The shoulder is an easy joint to injure, and the repair and rehabilitation can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Club training may be the way to either help heal or help prevent future or further injury, plus the upside of club training is that a full body workout can be accomplished with a few different weight clubs or just one Adex Club. I now use club training as my sole training preference, to do legs, upper body, arms, to stay lean and muscular. Give club training a try for your shoulder and discover what else you can do. Your body may love you for it. Also check into some of the conventional exercises found here by Mark deGrasse.

Power Clubwork Article from MegaMad Fitness

HOW TO BUILD POWER THROUGH CLUB TRAINING

WRITTEN BY DON GIAFARDINO ON MAY 27, 2015. POSTED IN FITNESS ARTICLES

Club Training has been used for thousands of years by warriors to develop power for the battlefield. Could this simple tool do the same to help you enhance your body?

WHAT IS CLUB TRAINING?

Let’s begin with the basic of basics. Club Training has been around for thousands of years simply because it works. Most of us are familiar with the lighter weight Indian Clubs that are swung in complex patterns which develop coordination, mobility, and speed not unlike an Olympic Fencer.

Then there are the bigger clubs; the large wooden ones or the more popular metal clubs of 15 to 45 pounds, originally designed to train warriors to deliver punishing power with heavy hand armaments. Heavy Club Training will be the subject of this article.

WHAT IS POWER DEVELOPMENT?

To me, power is the strength that you have to perform a specified exercise in a specific amount of time. So, if you are doing an AMRAP of Thrusters for a 30 second time periods, you’d be able to determine if your power output has increased if you see an increase in the number of reps performed or if you used a heavier weight for the same number of reps.

For example, if you did max effort Thrusters with 95 pounds and got 12 in 30 seconds, that’s 1,140 pounds moved. If you practiced Thrusters for a few weeks and your retest your AMRAP and you get 14 in 30 seconds -congratulations! You’ve increased your power because you just moved 1,330 pounds, OR if you kept the same 12 reps BUT instead of 95 pounds you used 115 pounds, you have increased your power.

Now that you have the idea of power we’ll apply it to Club Training.

POWER CLUB TRAINING WORKOUT PLAN

WARNING! – There is no doubt about the fact that if you follow this power program you will be buying more clubs, if you don’t have access to a complete set or an adjustable one already. 
 The exercises listed below can be found on YouTube demonstrated by many different instructors plus searching for them will entice you to watch more clubwork exercises. Watch. Learn. Grow.

I usually increase only 5 pounds between the Pre-Fatigue Sets and the Work Sets. 5 pounds is a big jump in clubwork. Better to chip away smoothly than to get injured rushing progress.

The workout plan will be a 4 day split into 2 upper body days and 2 lower body days. For the upper body days the exercises will be 1-Hand Inside Mills, 1-Hand Front Swipes, and 2-Handed Gamma Casts. A set is reps done on each arm (i.e. 1 set of 10 means 10 reps right arm and 10 reps left arm). The sample below is from my current program:

Pre-Fatigue Sets: 1 minute rest between sets.

Exercise	Weight	Reps	Sets
1-Hand Inside Mills	30	10	4
Front Swipes	30	10	4
Gamma Casts	30	10	4

Work Sets: 1 minute rest between sets.

Exercise	Weight	Reps	Sets
1-Hand Inside Mills	35	30sec AMRAP	4
Front Swipes	35	30sec AMRAP	4
Gamma Casts	35	30sec AMRAP	4

This is now your Base Power Program. Good form is important to reduce the chance of injury. I practice quite often on my ‘off’ days doing up to 150 reps with a lighter weight to get the feel of an exercise. This ensures proper form when the heavier weights are used.

Once you are able to perform the above workout getting 7-8 reps for ALL 4 Work Sets, take away one Pre-Fatigue Set and add one more Work Set for the next workout. Do this until you can get a full 8 AMRAP reps for all 5 Work Sets in 30 seconds. Now reduce to 2 Pre-Fatigue Sets and go to 6 Work Sets until 8 reps is reached again, then pat yourself on the back and begin over with the Base Program. This round the Pre-Fatigue Sets will be the weight you used in the previous Work Sets but for 4 sets of 10 and the Work Sets will add 5 pounds. Look how far you’ve come!

MegaMad Fitness

Clubwork Exercises Shield Cast Demo

Gamma Cast Demo

Clubwork Exercise The Clean

Clubwork Front Swing exercise

Trainers, teach newbies to learn the kettlebell front swing quickly by having them practice Clubwork front swings. The clubs are easier for the students to swing and reduce the learning curve.

Clubwork Inside Mill To Outside Mill Transfer

A simple move to develop coordination. Easy to do, just perform an inside mill as normal and at the bottom of the swing pass the club to the opposite hand to begin performing an outside mill. Try it a few times to get the feel. You can see in the video that my first few swings are 'clunky' but by the 3rd one the smoothness comes out.

Being In The Moment of Movement

Today's training was my typical Monday workout. It's clubwork. it's always clubwork and maybe some sprinting. Today, I hearkened to some fine words while grinding out my reps. Concentrating on the feeling of moving the club, rather than just moving it. I became aware of subtleties that have plagued past workouts where I became frustrated with my lack of skill, and more often than not, blaming the poorly executed rep on too heavy a weight or being too tired. 

Using An Adex Club For Leg Training

 I do perform 'tune up' metcons on my off days. Either doing clubwork Tabatas or 100+ rep schemes that serve 3 purposes. The first is the obvious, to build endurance and burn the fat off my belly. Second reason is to do some opposite direction work from my normal clubwork training. The third and becoming the more important reason, is to practice the movements I do for heavy training days with a lighter weight. If you are a veteran of heavy clubwork, then you know the difference between doing an inside mill with a 15 pound club vs. a 35 pound club. If you aren't, you need to try this shit out! Back to my point - I use my Adex Club set to 15 pounds for my 'off' days. This way, I get the high reps and concentrate on where the club is, how it rotates, and what each part of my arm and body is doing. This changes to me controlling the club rather than letting it hurl itself around me.

 I first took notice of being in the moment of exercise when I read Scott Shetler's Abundant Health article about QiGong and being in the moment of performing a movement in a relaxed state. Concentrate on the flow of energy when doing QiGong or Tai Chi. Chip Conrad also has numerous articles that he's written about enjoying the moment of exercise. Chip says that we shouldn't look at exercise as drudgery, but to study it while actually doing it, to gauge how our body feels and where it is in space. This may sound very 'heady' and almost spiritual, but it opens up the mind's eye to better performance for the next time we attempt that movement. This practice has taught me when I up the weight on my club, I have to process the movement to be sure it's going correctly.

 The gist of the story is to practice movement, especially complex movements. Revert back on your off days to some lighter work and take the time to 'feel' what is going on. You'll surprise yourself when you hit the gym on your regular days and feel the progress in your body. It's the beginning of the difference between being good and being great. Move and enjoy it.

Building A Suit Of Armor

July 18, 2014 at 11:36am

 Science and medicine have proven beyond a doubt that regular exercise increases our longevity. Citing different excerpts and texts would border redundant. So what is your training goal for the long term? Do you know where all this blood, sweat, and tears is taking you? I re-evaluated my regiment a few years ago and here is what I am planning for the future, and I'm not talking 12 weeks to a better deadlift. Let's begin way back when I got my first weight set. All I wanted to do was be able to lift that bar with all the weights on it. Great goal for a 12 year old, but follow my trail to 38 years later.

 After a few months of training, I walked into a health food store, this was pre-GNC, and asked the hippy lady at the counter for steroids. I knew nothing of steroids and had heard that the pro wrestlers took them. She gave me an informative lecture that I shouldn't use them unless a doctor was administering them to me. Then came my first ever nutrition lecture I walked away from that store with a can of Hoffman's protein powder, a recipe for a weight gainer shake, the book Weightlifting by Bob Hoffman and a bottle of orchic. My goals as an adolescent were clear-get bigger, stronger, and more intimidating. I have to admit that the hippy lady did know her stuff, plus I had the added bonus of being in puberty. Goal accomplished.

 Now at 50, I have never been so far from my uninitiated beginnings yet just a stone's throw close at the same time. I still have goals, the goals now are a bit different. The goal now is to set up my body so that I can do the things I do now but for the next 30 years. The optimum goal for trainees over 40 should be longevity, not only in the gym, but in life. A revised weight training plan, different dietary design, movement based exercise and the top dog daddy for us "masters", restorative practices. I have to note that I need to learn to relax, but that's another story.

 Weight training, though I love it, became my nemesis. The very practice that I loved gave me injuries not severe enough for immediate surgery but well on my way to ruining a perfectly good body. Frequent low back spasms, chronic shoulder pain, poor ROM of my elbows, wrists, and shoulders, countless trips to the chiropractor and yo-yo dieting. Half the year I trained like a powerlifter, the other half like a partially insane crossfitter with no guidance. Poor form, crappy workout plans, and eat what I want attitude did not give the results for what I was after. But what was I after?

 Most people don't see the future as 30 years from now, 3 months is a more common view because it is almost tangible. I challenge you to look 30 years into your future. What do you see? A person who is actively enjoying every minute here or someone who is in a chair with the TV on or something worse? You can change that image, you can be headed toward that active super senior lifestyle. I've decided to start building my suit of armor, my own protection against degeneration and stagnation that I wish to share.

 The first factor is your body composition. Get your head out of your ass, get naked in front of a mirror and be honest with yourself-fluffy 'fake it till you make it' cliches need to take a flying leap right here! Do you need to lose that fat, rehab poorly moving joints, gain muscle? I am focusing on gaining 30 solid pounds of muscle and maintaining it before I turn 60, but that entails losing a percentage of body fat too. The added muscle going into my senior years will benefit greatly but the most important may be the cushioning effect during a fall. Three words here-avoid hip replacement-get it? Find a program that will work for you, weight training is by far the most plentiful and accessible. Bodyweight gyms are an awesome change from the norm. Clubwork and kettlebells are great for strength and movement. Choose your weapon, learn or, as in my case, re-learn proper form and practice the hell out of it! Form is now the king of your training not pounds or reps.

 Second factor is your nutrition, eat to help reach the goal. Learn to cook at home, this is a must! If you are too proud, lazy, or feel you can't buck up, it isn't rocket science-do not rely on restaurants to feed you properly. I worked in the food industry for years, restaurant suppliers can mutilate the most wholesome looking foods! Set up a good diet, avoid the bad food, because you are ultimately going for longevity here, so make sure its nutrient dense. Micro nutrition is vital for homeostasis, a healthy immune system, joint flexibility, and cognitive function (thinking) because what is the purpose of a sound body without a sound mind? Macro nutrition will be adaptable to what your final goal is. Good bye Mickey D's! If you are traveling pack your own food period. I also believe that anyone who is over 40 years old that is able to take creatine should be using it in their supplementation. If you're vegetarian or vegan please note that a bag of popcorn or chips are NOT a meal! Nor are they food. Eating right is easy, it just takes a few minutes to change your life for the better.

 The next factor is movement based exercise and restorative techniques. Yoga, a REAL daily stretching program, tai chi, qi gong, flow training, or Indian club exercises. Add something of this nature to your program. I laugh at the guys who bounce through their hamstring stretches in the gym like they think that a few motions gets them warmed up-they are warming up alright-for a cramp or worse yet a tear. Learn to stretch, take yoga etc, use Adex Clubs - they repaired my shoulder. Loss of movement and joint pain should be nearly zero if you begin and stay practicing this into your later years. And the stretching will keep muscles strong and supple even if it is the only physical activity you can do when older.

 I cannot say enough about the seriousness of exercise and nutrition and the benefits it has in the general population. A life with little or no medication is possible. A life when the time is available to go places and experience new things is waiting, a life of fulfillment and increasing chances for new adventures well into the golden years. If anyone who reads this still has the attitude that wouldn't know what to do if they retire, take a comprehension class because I just set you up to have a door open to a great journey that few follow. Growing old isn't for pussies. don't take it lying down!