Formosa Fitness (closed) :facebook:

I think you mean Turkish getups (even though the video below shows him going up then down). They’re fantastic. They’re supposedly one of those old strongman/wrestler moves. I’ve heard different stories about them, but one being that they used to just give you 1 pood (which I think is a Russian weight of about 45lbs/20kg) and when you could do a certain number of reps, then they’d teach you other exercises. Or maybe that’s a story about another exercise. Anyway, it’s a great old school story.

That’s it! Of course I don’t use a small woman and I get up much faster and do sets of 10. Fuck me freddy they are HARD when you do them correctly!

Yeah, TGU is something I sometimes do near the end of the workout when I need to slow things down. The windmill is good for that too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6651sjanpxI

That’s Jeff Martone in that clip BTW and he’s lifting his wife there I think. If you guys in the States want to get a kettlebell cert, I HIGHLY recommend him. His certs are low cost and very high in usable info. And other people talk about being tactical and all but Martone is the real deal:
tacticalathlete.com/

He’s standing on one of the hostage rescue training used by the military. And he’s an all-around good guy from everyone I’ve heard from.

[quote=“Formosa Fitness”]Yeah, TGU is something I sometimes do near the end of the workout when I need to slow things down. The windmill is good for that too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6651sjanpxI
[/quote]
Geez, that dude is built like a brick sh*thouse! Awesome physique. :thumbsup:

Jesus that guy is strong. He is seriously impressive. His core must be like a tree trunk and his shoulders – all the little stabilisers, not just the delts – must be insane. He looks strong, but he’s one hundred times stronger than that even.

That’s one advantage of the kettlebell. The off-center balance means you have to work harder to stabilize the kettlebell. The weight hangs behind the hand, not down the center of the palm so it isn’t the same as dumbbell or barbell work, especially at heavier weights. Not that barbell work is easy BTW because it isn’t. But the tools are slightly different.

You can see some of the stabilization here in the core and shoulders:

The core stability that I had to generate to press the double 32kg was the most I’ve ever done. The process taught me a lot. This kind of core stability is different from Pilates and gets you the benefits of lifting heavy weights. I covered this topic in the functional fitness seminar BTW.

That’s impressive. You make it look easy.

Lots of practice. :slight_smile:

Working on body weight press now.

FF: I’ve wondered at times if you’ve been a trainer all of your adult life, and if not, what you did before and how/why you came to be in this game. Also, I’ve wondered how you came to be doing it in Taiwan. You’ve obviously found your passion and niche, which is fantastic.

Also, do you know of anyone who is good/reputable in the KB scene who trains/certifies in Australia? Probably next summer, I will go back to Australia for at least three weeks, so maybe I could look into doing that then. It’s something I’m really interested in and I’d be checking you out if I lived anywhere near Taipei (and I’m going to work on convincing my wife that I need a KB for Christmas/birthday in February).

kettlebells.com.au/

These are the main KB guys in Australia. they should know of all that’s happening down under.

I wasn’t always a trainer. I came here to learn martial arts and studied them seriously the first eight years or so. I’ve been working out in gyms since my teens, so that background was there. The two intertwined when I started teaching martial arts. I had always wanted to run a combo MA school/fitness class but the fitness side of the business took over and the MA part failed. Gotta go with what works. :slight_smile:

My MA teaching background greatly influences my fitness coaching style.

Thanks for the info.

That’s a great story. What’s your martial arts background? How has it influenced your teaching style here?

The reason I say that is that I’ve studied various martial arts over the years, though I’m not particularly serious right now. The two main ones I’ve done have been judo (for five years as a teenager) and kendo (from university until now, with some breaks and periods of low training). Judo, in my experience, is taught in a more Western style than kendo, which (from what I’ve seen at many clubs and several countries) takes one of two approaches. The first, which was how I learnt kendo (at a university club for low grades) was extremely rigid. There were basically only a handful of drills that were done over and over and over again in a particular order. You could pretty much know what time it was down to five minute intervals simply by looking at what people were doing. I’ve heard that’s a very old school Japanese approach. The second approach, which is more common, especially amongst higher level grades is free practice (i.e. sparring). The instruction is also really different to judo, where I noticed there’s a huge amount of talking. Some people in kendo like to talk, but mostly, they demonstrate a technique a couple of times, and then you go and practise it. Much of the time, they don’t even demonstrate it as you’ve done it a ton of times before. At the extreme end of that, the aikido club I trained at for a while had a sensei who was a native English speaker, but it was highly unlikely that he’d even speak one word during training and even after training. Weeks could go by without me actually hearing his voice. It was quite unsettling at first, but it was actually really good once I got used to it. All you could hear were feet moving across mats and people hitting the floor. Anyway, it’s very different to gym culture where there seems to be an abundance of (pep-)talking, which I suspect is related to all of the equipment a lot of trainers carry around with them and get you using. I suspect it’s because everyone believes there needs to be a lot of visible activity and noise in order for things to be getting done and improvements made, plus there’s all the other stuff in gyms which I think really detracts from the efficiency of the whole thing – tons of TVs and magazine racks and about a bazillion machines. I actually really like the low/no talking approach though.

Glad to hear you did judo. I studied it some and wish I had kept up with it after university. It’s a great style.

I did most everything under the sun but my specialty was Chinese internal martial arts, which is why I was here. The emphasis on health and balancing power with softness really appealed to me.

It influences my fitness coaching in many ways. First, kettlebell and the other training I do is based on skill. It isn’t just about throwing around a weight for 30 minutes. There is skill in the techniques, leading all the way up to high level competition. Check this out:

You may have heard that if you really want to study judo, you should learn from a small woman since she can’t rely on strength but skill. The woman in the clip above is swinging a 24kg kettlebell over 130 times and she’s thin. This takes a ton of skill. So kettlebell techniques go from basic, mildly sophisticated technique to very subtle, “black belt” level stuff if that’s what you’re in to.

Getting into the sport side of things really changes the program. Instead of “working out” to get fit or lose weight, the activity becomes the focus and the benefit is secondary. This is the way to go to maintain your fitness gains long term and avoid the boredom of most fitness programs.

Second, the breathing techniques that we use are very similar to MA as are many of the body movements. In fact, kettlebell training is basically MA power training. The two are practically one and the same. The Russians figured out how to use breathing techniques to improve their sport lifting and they’ve long specialized in taking the best from both East and West and putting them together. Check it out:

As you can see from the clip, the breathing can get quite advanced if people get into it but a low level is good for most folks. But the sophistication is there if people want it.

Third is our emphasis on joint mobility and restorative work – yin to the usual yang. We open up and fix problem areas of the body as part of the fitness process. Here’s an example:

I put this together to fix some areas in a short amount of time. It’s meant to open up areas that are tight and that need prehabing before people lift. Without this kind of work, clients tend to get stiff (if they aren’t already) and find movements like squat, deadlift, etc. to be a problem. This softer restorative element really makes our fitness style vastly different from everything else out there. Few fitness styles have the complete spectrum like we do. Using this template we can go from absolute strength via Olympic lifting/weightlifting all the way down to soft joint work depending on the needs of the client.

Sorry to be so wordy but I’m obsessed with this stuff so when you asked, you gave me a rare chance to really talk about what drives me. Mixing the Chinese internal martial arts approach with fitness has really paid off for me.

That’s great. Unfortunately, I can’t look at the videos now because my work connection is painfully slow. I’ll have a look at home.

That’s a whole new perspective on what you’re doing. Wow. It really makes me wish I lived closer to you so I could go and take a few sessions with you. I seem to have been on the receiving end of several bouts of flu of late, and I haven’t been getting good sleep generally (I’m a fairly light sleeper and I don’t sleep well if I have a lot on my mind), so I haven’t been working out much of late. It’s driving me up the wall.

I was never very good at judo, to be honest. I’m actually not highly co-ordinated generally, so I struggled with it. Also, I always struggled with being too tall for my weight class and would come up against guys ten or more centimetres shorter than me, but a couple of kilos heavier. I lacked both skill and strength! You’re right about small women. There was a Singaporean girl at the aikido club I trained at and she had amazing technique. With some of the guys, you could definitely feel the strength. I would have liked to do aikido for longer, but I moved abroad and I was struggling at first to fit kendo into my schedule, plus I really wanted to concentrate on that. However, that ship has largely passed in the night because I just haven’t done enough serious training in the past few years and my contemporaries are several black belts higher than me now. :frowning:

Anyway, to be honest, I’m not particularly interested in the competition side of sports anymore. I don’t like the stress of it, but also, they tend to lead me down the path of overtraining or competing with injuries, which I should never have done before, but was young enough and silly enough to get away with then (and really, people should have stepped in and stopped me).

I had to stop judo when I was nineteen because of all of the injuries. My instructor had had injuries, all of the black belts had had serious injuries, and all three of his sons had had bad injuries. His youngest son, who was a year younger than me, had his collar bone broken. After a six month recovery, stupidly, he went back to competition after two weeks of training. The exact same opponent did the exact same technique and rebroke his collar bone. After having done judo since he was three, my friend had to give up judo at the age of seventeen or eighteen. For me, after many minor injuries, it all culminated in having someone practising a technique (actually, demonstrating it for some lower grades), getting it horribly wrong and falling on my arm, which ripped the ligaments (and part of the bone) off the bone in my right elbow. I had to wear what looked like a bionic arm for several months and learn to do everything left-handed, including taking great tomes of notes in university lectures, which is why I’m still semi-ambidextrous. To this day, I still have a pin in my elbow and can’t fully extend my right arm, despite extensive physiotherapy. Judo was really good in some ways (and it gives you ridiculous core strength and awareness of balance), but on balance, I have to say it wasn’t good simply because it’s so uncontrollable. At least with the striking martial arts, the damage can be somewhat contained, but in judo, there’s too much unpredictability in falling and twisting, especially with someone else’s bodyweight added into the mix.

The competitive side doesn’t actually have to be against others. It becomes a competition with yourself and a form of personal exploration or art. So we can avoid the excesses of the competitive world.

For example:

This guy trains by himself at home using the competition techniques. He does over 100 snatches with the 32kg. :notworthy:

He’s never competed before, probably never will, and look at the shape he’s in. Fitness is now a by product of his personal journey – not the immediate goal. He works out for personal reasons and stays in awesome shape anyway. People would kill to look like that.

Also don’t forget the joint mobility/restorative component I mentioned. We are NOT about breaking the body down through competition and harming your health. Health is foremost in this paradigm and we don’t do anything to harm it. In fact, building up robust health is what it’s all about. So people don’t have to worry about that.

Hopefully one day you can come experience it for yourself. :slight_smile:

Watching these videos and reading your ideas and thoughts on KB training, it seems to me that KB, rather than traditional weight training (at least, only traditional weight training), should really be a part of conditioning and strength training for rugby players. It seems to have all the elements: Strength, core, flexibility and explosive power.
Oddly enough, I’ve never heard of any rugby coaches, conditioning coaches etc using KB for rugby.

[quote=“bismarck”]Watching these videos and reading your ideas and thoughts on KB training, it seems to me that KB, rather than traditional weight training (at least, only traditional weight training), should really be a part of conditioning and strength training for rugby players. It seems to have all the elements: Strength, core, flexibility and explosive power.
Oddly enough, I’ve never heard of any rugby coaches, conditioning coaches etc using KB for rugby.[/quote]

Well, I wouldn’t discount regular barbell training for rugby. It’s a rough game and requires some of the “armor” in the form of muscle to protect the player. Muscular hypertrophy is almost a necessity for contact sports.

But yeah, for conditioning the kettlebell work would be perfect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br0ZRJdLfSU

Not a great clip but you get the idea.

I trained a rugby player last year and he loved it.

FF: Those are great clips and make me realise how unbelievably out of shape I am.

That girl who did 138 reps, wow! That girl is seriously fit, and yes she definitely seems to have a really good technique, even to the untrained eye. I don’t get why a lot of Taiwanese women don’t want to have “muscles”. I think she’s in awesome shape. That guy working out at home is seriously strong. That’s mad. Those Russians love the kettlebells.

You’re pretty flexible too. That’s a nice video.

The breathing video was good too (is that guy Russian too?). I’ll be thinking about that stuff the next time I work out.

I’ve watched some of your other videos from your youtube channel too and learnt all sorts of interesting things. It’s clear that you don’t paint by numbers.

I’m just standing on the backs of giants that came before me. But I do try not to paint by numbers. I use whatever tool works given the situation. In the functional fitness seminar, we used nothing but bodyweight stuff. The approach matters more than the tool IMO. :sunglasses:

Dave,

How many people do you need in order to do a class for certification??

Nick