Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

Yesterday, had a drive up to Solihull, to run a Performance boxing course at a Fitness first there. They have just recently had one of there rooms fully kitted of with boxing gear.

We had 11 guys on the course ranging from a pro boxer to guys who had never boxed before. The standard on the course was high a lot of the guys have had some boxing experience. We got the introductions out of the way, and got straight into it, everyone got involved with learning the techniques, which everyone picked up well and started to implement them . After going though all the punches and padding technquies in the morning, the afternoon was full on training, fair play to the guys they put the effort in which was excellent to see. Later on I got Joe to do some demonstrations on the floor to ceiling bag and heavy bags, with good hand speed joe made the floor to ceiling bag look easy, which everyone found out isn't when they had a go. they all did the 3, 2 minute rounds after the the combinations early everyonws bodies were tired Next up conditioning circuits, with the last bit of energy people had, they completed to circuits which was excellent. The course went really well, the new boxing room will go down a treat. Thanks for everyone for taking part, pictures of the day are on our facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=52166203014&ref=mf

After the successful partnership between the Optimal Life Fitness Group and The Performance Training Institute (PTI) earlier this year we have now started running the Extreme Kettlebell Course in Australia.
PTI are a high quality educational training company and their passion for educating fitness professionals has made this partnership very easy. We're now looking forward to many years of Extreme Kettlebell Instructors coming out of Australia.
Last weekend was a proud moment for all involved as PTI held their first Extreme Kettlebell Course in Perth. Corey Bocking, MD of PTI was running the course and was really happy with the outcome. The trainers on the course loved it and now have some great new skills to utlise in their PT sessions. Corey is in Sydney this weekend for the second Extreme Kettlebell Course and with 12 people already booked on it, we know it's going to be a good one! We're very excited about the development of this course and others. There are already dates for courses across Australia. To get more information on these courses and learn more about the Performance Training Institute please click here.
If you're already an EKI and have moved to Australia, look them up and go and say hello!
To see pictures of the course, go to our facebook site

Abdominal Bracing and the Core
A lot of time is spent by fitness professionals and coaches discussing the necessity to use our core and there are a lot of terms thrown out there on the ways to train it and activate it.
Firstly I want to discuss what the core really is and this I think, needs clarification as too many people get caught up on the core and working it and then forget about the rest of the body. Yes it’s an important area and needs to be strong, but we can strengthen our core by lifting and moving the way we're designed to. The actual true core is made up of the deep musculature surrounding the spine and not the outer muscles like the obliques. When training the core it is pointless to perform hundreds of crunches all this is doing to you is strengthening your six pack muscles, tightening your hip flexors and weakening your posterior chain. All things that are completely detrimental to lifting and optimal performance. This has often been the exercise of choice when training the core and yet all it does is give us bad posture, restrict our breathing and weaken our bodies' kinetic chain. So hopefully this will change any thoughts of doing crunches or an ab session in your next workout!

So how do we really strengthen the core?
Well firstly let's get rid of the word core, it's pointless using it because we don't want to think about just training the deep musculature of the spine. What we want to think about is the TORSO and training the torso. This includes the inner and outer muscles, the longitudinal, transverse and rotational muscles, basically everything!
Our torso is needed whenever we move, when we pick something off the floor we need torso strength, when we walk or run we need torso strength. It all comes back to the phenomenon of 'stiffness' if we can create stiffness in our torso we can create a strong structure to move against. I like to use the analogy of a super car v's an old banger, I've left car brands out to avoid embarrassment to any readers, but I'm sure you can envisage what I'm thinking! Now if those two cars were ask to turn a corner at high speed, lets say 160 kph (100mph) the old banger doesn't have the chassis strength to take the forces applied to car when turning so it will buckle and crash. The super car however, has a solid chassis that can take these high levels of force and thus it will glide through the corner with no trouble.
Our body is very similar to this, think of your torso as a car chassis, if it's strong like the super car it will withstand any forces thrown at it. If it's weak like the old banger it will collapse as soon as we try to pick any significant weight off the floor.
And that's why torso strength is important!
So to create this stiffness we need to train and train hard! We can drop the old core sessions where we spend time performing minute after minute of front and side planks. Yes they will help but if we want to with stand the huge forces placed upon our body when lifting heavy kettlebells we need to prepare in that way. So we need to move and lift to train our torso. We need to put our torso under stress to allow it to adapt and develop.

To download your copy of the 'Manual for Heavy Lifting with Kettlebells' please click here

Last Friday I took a drive back up to my home town, Newcastle. I had a 2 day Extreme Kettlebell Course to run up there on the Saturday and Sunday. After an easy drive up there and passing the Angel of the North, I was full of energy and ready for a good course.
Saturday morning came round and I turned up to the gym to see everyone waiting at 8.20am! After the initial surprise of the group being there early we got the gym opened and started with the course. Although a small group I knew instantly that it was going to be a good course as the banta was flowing early doors! After getting the KBs into the studio we did a few introductions and then cracked on with the theory. We discussed a few interesting points about the posterior chain vs anterior chain, we looked at the kinetic chain and spent some time on range of movement. With all the theory done it was time for the practical. First exercise, the 2 arm swing, we spent about 2 hours on this, looking at the movement and how to improve it. I could tell from quite early on that we were going to get through a lot over the weekend, most of the group had used KBs at some point before so I was able to really push them and they picked things up very quickly.




















After Lunch we went into the snatches, cleans, squats and military press by which point the guys were just starting to slow down a bit. Not surprising really, as they were all absolutely going for it, they wouldn't stop exercising! So, time for the windmills and Turkish getups, after spending an hour working on those we rapped the day up and I went off for a BBQ!
Sunday morning and feeling fresh, drove to the gym and did a little demo for the group before they took the assessment. They all breezed through the assessment with no trouble. So we quickly moved onto the theory part of day 2 and after a bit of rambling and ranting from me, we moved onto the KB training sessions. We did 3 full workouts and then took the KBs outside to do some juggling.

And after all of that it was time to get rid of a few EKI t-shirts and say good bye!