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An quick read at the NYT discusses the US Olympic training programme’s use of hill training on “the Incline”.

“It’s not running,” the Greco-Roman wrestling gold medalist Rulon Gardner said. “It’s not walking. It’s surviving.”

This sounds like it is just going to make you hard.

“No matter how many times you do it, the ending never changes,” Petkovic said. “Every time it kicks your butt.”

Link to the Times’ article

Link to the Incline Club

Recently, we’ve been thinking lots about functional fitness and getting hard without the gym. Although we like to avoid equipment as much as possible, a medicine ball could be a useful addition to our “home gym” (which is thus far small enough to stash under the bed, bicycles aside).

Medicine balls are those big heavy black balls that are a little scary except to those few masochistic folks who like to toss them back and forth to one another. It may harken bad memories of gym class. I remember when my 3rd-grade gym teacher tossed one of these cannon balls at me and I dropped it on my toe, not prepared to catch something that weighed 8 pounds (my gym teacher was a competitive body builder who could lift a car like it was a feather, but he wore those rediculous 80s Zubaz pants so we couldn’t really take him seriously).

Trying Fitness has two great videos that demonstrate various medicine ball exercises that you can do on your own. They look like they’d make you hard really fast.

Medicine Ball Exercises You’ve Never Tried [Trying Fitness]
Zubaz Official Website
Buy a medicine ball online [Amazon]

I just stumbled across a really great series from Outdoor mag. circa 2002.

The series is called The Shape of Your Life and it presents what looks like a really sensible and long term fitness programme.

Over the months you work from building endurance to strength and on to flexibility before moving on to speed and power and then finally balance and agility.

Many of the exercises are functional in nature, the writing supporting the programme is informative, inspirationally straight-foward and sometimes funny.

The endurance programme starts with building an aerobic base through heart rate training, a topic, er…, well… close to my heart? (sorry) Speaking of which, my running is going well now that I’m back from my travels.

Take a look and see if you find some inspiration.

Link to series index
Link to series introduction
Link to month one training plan

If you stumble across something great on the web and you think the SmarterFitter community might be interested in reading about it please let us know.

One of the fitness trends I’m following is the movement towards minimalist training using functional training techniques. That’s training movements and not muscles.

Here’s the NYT on why the push-up, a classic functional exercise, is so important.

“It takes strength to do them, and it takes endurance to do a lot of them,” said Jack LaLanne, 93, the fitness pioneer who astounded television viewers in the 1950s with his fingertip push-ups. “It’s a good indication of what kind of physical condition you’re in.”

The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit.

Link

Over the past few months I’ve come across a couple of articles about functional training. Gym Jones used it to train the cartoon-like warriors in 300 and then I caught an article in Outdoors about the Monkey Bar Gymnasium, a non-traditional gym with no machines or mirrors.

What is functional training?

From Wikipedia:

Functional training involves mainly weight bearing activities targeted at core muscles of the abdomen and lower back). Most fitness facilities have a variety of weight training machines which target and isolate specific muscles. As a result the movements do not necessarily bear any relationship to the movements people make in their regular activities or sports. Functional training attempts to adapt or develop exercises which allow individuals to perform the activities of daily life more easily and without injuries.

That’s a bit dry, isn’t it?

From Monkey Bar Gymnasium:

Natural fitness uses a series of free range of motion movements and body weight training. You use your own body weight with or without resistance in order to build functional strength. Strength you can actually use for everyday activities such as shoveling snow or cleaning the house. Weight machines isolate your muscles and restrict your movement to the track of the machine. Training isolated movements restricts your body from developing stability and support muscle around your larger muscle groups. Stability muscles prevent injury! Your muscles were never meant to be isolated; they are designed to work together for overall functional strength.

Why is functional training interesting?

Well, I have felt for a while that going to the gym is a bit of a waste of money and that it is better to get out into the world and get your exercise, walking, cycling, hiking, running. I’m just more inclined to actually do those things. But, I’ve not really found a good way of matching those cardiovascular exercises with good, free, go anywhere strength exercises. I think that functional training might do the trick.

The Monkey Bar Gymnasium has its daily routines online, including a no-weight training programme.

Link