Have you been putting off something you need to do?

Why?

If you’ve ever procrastinated on anything, you need to read this…

Today’s special guest post is by the late, great Jim Rohn.

I listen to Mr. Rohn’s CDs in the morning and while I’m driving, they act like “vitamins for the mind” and help keep me positive in an increasingly negative world.

Ending Procrastination

by Jim Rohn

Perseverance is about as important to achievement as gasoline is to driving a car. Sure, there will be times when you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, but you’ll always get out of the rut with genuine perseverance. Without it, you won’t even be able to start your engine.

The opposite of perseverance is procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit. Procrastination usually means you never get started, although the inability to finish something is also a form of procrastination.

Ask people why they procrastinate, and you’ll often hear something like this: “I’m a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right before I can get down to work. No distractions, not too much noise, no telephone calls interrupting me and, of course, I have to be feeling well physically, too. I can’t work when I have a headache.” The other end of procrastination—being unable to finish—also has a perfectionist explanation: “I’m just never satisfied. I’m my own harshest critic. If all the I’s aren’t dotted and all the T’s aren’t crossed, I just can’t consider that I’m done. That’s just the way I am, and I’ll probably never change.”

Do you see what’s going on here? A fault is being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is saying that his standards are just too high for this world. This fault-into-virtue syndrome is a common defense when people are called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but, in the end, it’s just a very pious kind of excuse-making. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with what’s really behind procrastination.

Remember, the basis of procrastination could be fear of failure. That’s what perfectionism really is, once you take a hard look at it. What’s the difference whether you’re afraid of being less than perfect or afraid of anything else? You’re still paralyzed by fear. What’s the difference whether you never start or never finish? You’re still stuck. You’re still going nowhere. You’re still overwhelmed by whatever task is before you. You’re still allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the future in which you see yourself being criticized, laughed at, punished or ridden out of town on a rail. Of course, this negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows you to do nothing. It’s a very convenient mental tool.

I’m going to tell you how to overcome procrastination. I’m going to show you how to turn procrastination into perseverance, and if you do what I suggest, the process will be virtually painless. It involves using two very powerful principles that foster productivity and perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination.

The first principle is: Break it down.

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, whether it’s writing a book, climbing a mountain or painting a house, the key to achievement is your ability to break down the task into manageable pieces and knock them off one at one time. Focus on accomplishing what’s right in front of you at this moment. Ignore what’s off in the distance someplace. Substitute real-time positive thinking for negative future visualization. That’s the first all-important technique for bringing an end to procrastination.

Suppose I were to ask you if you could write a 400-page novel. If you’re like most people, that would sound like an impossible task. But suppose I ask you a different question. Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable. We’re breaking down the 400-page book into bite-size pieces. Even so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect intimidating. Do you know why? Writing a page and a quarter may not seem so bad, but you’re being asked to look ahead one whole year. When people start to look that far ahead, many of them automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down even more.

Suppose I were to ask you: Can you fill up a page and a quarter with words, not for a year, not for a month, not even for a week, but just today? Don’t look any further ahead than that. I believe most people would confidently declare that they could accomplish that. Of course, these would be the same people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole book.

If I said the same thing to those people tomorrow—if I told them, “I don’t want you to look back, and I don’t want you to look ahead, I just want you to fill up a page and a quarter this very day”—do you think they could do it?

One day at a time. We’ve all heard that phrase. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re breaking down the time required for a major task into one-day segments, and we’re breaking down the work involved in writing a 400-page book into page-and-a-quarter increments.

Keep this up for one year, and you’ll write the book. Discipline yourself to look neither forward nor backward, and you can accomplish things you never thought you could possibly do. And it all begins with those three words: Break it down.

My second technique for defeating procrastination is also only three words long. The three words are: Write it down. We know how important writing is to goal-setting. The writing you’ll do for beating procrastination is very similar. Instead of focusing on the future, however, you’re now going to be writing about the present just as you experience it every day. Instead of describing the things you want to do or the places you want to go, you’re going to describe what you actually do with your time, and you’re going to keep a written record of the places you actually go.

In other words, you’re going to keep a diary of your activities. And you’re going to be amazed by the distractions, detours and downright wastes of time you engage in during the course of a day. All of these get in the way of achieving your goals. For many people, it’s almost like they planned it that way, and maybe at some unconscious level they did. The great thing about keeping a time diary is that it brings all this out in the open. It forces you to see what you’re actually doing—and what you’re not doing.

The time diary doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. Just buy a little spiral notebook that you can easily carry in your pocket. When you go to lunch, when you drive across town, when you go to the dry cleaners, when you spend some time shooting the breeze at the copying machine, make a quick note of the time you began the activity and the time it ends. Try to make this notation as soon as possible. If it’s inconvenient to do it immediately, you can do it later. But you should make an entry in your time diary at least once every 30 minutes, and you should keep this up for at least a week.

Break it down. Write it down. These two techniques are very straightforward. But don’t let that fool you: These are powerful and effective productivity techniques that allow you put an end to procrastination and help you get started achieving your goals.

As a world-renowned author and success expert, Jim Rohn touched millions of lives during his 46-year career as a motivational speaker and messenger of positive life change.

For more information on Jim and his popular personal achievement resources or to subscribe to the weekly Jim Rohn Newsletter, visit www.JimRohn.com.

A quick intro: John is one of the hardest-working, coolest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of training.

He wrote this last week, and this weekend a pair of 30″ waist shorts were too big for him.  So this post should be called 56+ pounds and 9 inches later!  Also, if you look at bodyfat percentage instead of just scale weight, John has lost about 80 pounds of fat!  Look at the top two pictures on this page and compare them to the two on the bottom…

Want to find out how this stud did it?  Read on!

~ Luke

I couldn’t do it. There was no way I could get up to work out at 5:00 in the morning.

I couldn’t do it. There was no way that I could give up those tasty treats I convinced myself I deserved and needed.

I told myself I was “big boned” and carried the weight pretty well but people from work were talking about this amazing trainer and these boot camps he ran in the mornings. I was kind of interested. They worked on me for months. Finally Luke got my e-mail from one of my co-workers and offered me a free trial. I’m a frugal guy by nature and thought, hey, free is free, I could do it!

And then I tried it and, seriously, I couldn’t do it. Three push ups that is. Oh, I made it through the warm up alright and a couple of other things. And then that jerk had me do push ups. In my flippant way I remember asking how he wanted them. And then I “did” three and thought he was going to have to call 911.

(Note from Luke:  To be fair, he told me he could do ten!)

I realized that night that fat and nearly forty wasn’t going to work for me. I was a 218 pound, 37 year old man (technically middle age if the life expectancy of the average American man is 77), with a 38 inch waist and high blood pressure. I have all the same excuses as everyone else, but bottom line, I ate too much and moved to little. Combined with a family history of heart disease I was a recipe for disaster and really had no idea what to do about. But Luke did.

I can guarantee that Luke thought he would never see me again after that night. (Very true – Luke) Turns out I had other plans and he was going to be the guy to help me implement them. Something in me changed that night and over that weekend. It may have been the fact that I seriously thought I was going to die after three push ups and couldn’t move my arms more than about six inches in any direction. It may have been that the other two people, the same age as me (and girls!), working out that night could do it and I couldn’t. And I realized that I desperately wanted a different life and a different body.

So that weekend I sat down and wrote out some goals. I knew I was going to need help. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew it was going to require hard work. I knew all kinds of things about my life were going to have to be different. Behaviors were going to have to change. What could I do immediately? What could I commit to?

1. Show up. Being the aforementioned frugal guy, if I was going to be paying for personal training or boot camp I could commit to showing up. That meant changing behavior and would mean being in bed by 9:30 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. in order to be up by 5:00 a.m. I could do it.

2. Eat differently. For me, that meant not skipping meals. I often used to skip breakfast. It meant drinking either a pre or post workout drink. It meant planning what I was going to eat and making sure it was ready to go if I was in a hurry. It meant more vegetables and lean protein and less processed foods and carbohydrates. And I committed to give up adding sugar to things and not eating anything with white flour. I could do it.

3. Share my goals. I decided that I was going to be happy with small changes and I would be okay if it took a while. It took a lot of years to get fat it would be okay if it took a while for it to come off. If I could get under 200 pounds and to a 34 inch waist and to the weight on my drivers license all would be good. But if Luke was going to be my “go to guy” he was going to have to know what my goals were in order to hit them. It meant my group of friends and co-workers were going to have to know what my goals were in order to be a support systems for me. I could do it.

So I started personal training. I was too fat and slow for boot camp but wouldn’t be for long. These workouts turned out to be fun and I was kind of liking them. And I lost weight right away. And then about three weeks after I started I began having some blood pressure problems while working out. But not high blood pressure, too low. It took me a week to get a Doctors appointment but it turns out that I had changed enough in a month and was working out hard enough that my Doctor suggested that if I was going to commit to this that perhaps I should go off the blood pressure medication. Really? After three weeks? I was feeling better and looking better and off blood pressure medication in three weeks? Hell yeah, I can do it!

And do it I have done for 14 months now using a combination of Luke’s personal training and Luke’s boot camp. And I’m still having fun. From 218 pounds to 162. From a 38 inch waist to a 30 inch waist. Turns out, I’m not “big boned”. You might think it would get easier but because Luke is always changing up what we do and different intensity levels it never gets easy. Luke lit a fire in me that I didn’t know was there. I have no idea if I am a “typical” example of someone who has gone through a transformation but I know I couldn’t have done it without boot camp and without him.

So if a former fat boy like me can do it so can anyone else. You just need to get the right people and decide this is what you want the rest of your life to be like. I can do it! You can do it!

One of my clients recently compared me to the speaker Tony Robbins.

It flattered the heck out of me.  (Tony is awesome!)

Just one problem – my personal motivation speeches are too short.

When someone tells me they want to lose weight but don’t want to exercise or change what they eat, here’s the speech I give them:

“You’re lazy.”

If someone comes in and says they aren’t going to follow the advice they paid for in a consulting session, seminar, or course of mine, my two word speech is a little harsh:

“You’re stupid.”

Sometimes people announce that, in spite of overwhelming evidence that aerobic exercise actually causes muscle loss and fat gain, leads to more illnesses, and beats up your joints like a bookie with a baseball bat, that they are going to keep running for a hour a day anyway.  My response?

“You’re stubborn.”

Last week a woman told me she can’t follow her diet because she doesn’t want to lose weight and make her family and friends feel bad….

“You’re crazy.”

To people who order diet pills and “magnetic weight loss earrings,” I usually say:

“You’re deluded.”

See, most people aren’t willing to face reality.

The great author Robert Ringer wrote, “Reality isn’t the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.”

Until you own up to reality you can’t start making changes.  I use my rude two word speeches to try and wake people up to what they’re doing.

Here’s my last speech for the day: “Rock on!”

This morning I was stuffing a bell pepper with bacon, eggs, and a leek when I thought about how awesome bell peppers are.  (I found the recipe for bacon, egg, and leek pepper stuffing in my copy of the Paleo Cookbook)

A cup of chopped-up red bell peppers has only 40 Calories (2g protein, 9g carbs).  For such a low-cal food, they are packed with the vitamins you need to support your journey to a fit body.

Just one red bell pepper will give you about 20% of your daily Alpha-Tocopherol Vitamin E.  This is a kick-butt antioxidant that busts up the free radicals poisoning your bloodstream.

And guess what?  Red bell peppers have more Vitamin C than oranges!  (Red peppers have about twice as much vitamin C as green ones)

Beta-Carotene from bell peppers is what your body uses to make Vitamin A.  Letting your body make its own vitamin A is a much safer and more effective course than taking a vitamin A supplement.  I always think of A as the “good looks vitamin.”  Here are some of its benefits:

• Prevents and clears skin infections
• Helps fix dandruff, dry skin, and wrinkles
• Protects against sun damage
• Keeps skin elastic
• Protects the lining of mouth, nose, throat, and lungs
• Improves eyesight
• Destroys free radicals
• Supports immune system

You can also get plenty of Lycopene from bell peppers, which is one of the best things there is for reducing cancer risk.

I go through about a dozen red bell peppers a week, with a few yellow and orange ones thrown in for good measure.

Usually I chop one up and scramble it with my eggs in the morning and then slice one to eat along with lunch.

Here are a few easy ways to get more (from the Paleo Cookbook)

Bacon and Leek Sandwich

1 small leek, finely sliced
3 slices bacon
2 omega-3 eggs
1tbs olive oil
1 bell pepper half

Place bacon and oil in a frying pan on medium heat, stir consistently for 5-6min, or until bacon has lightly
browned. Remove any excess oil and add leek, stir consistently for 8-10 min or until leek has become soft and tender. Add eggs and stir consistently to scramble into the bacon and leek.

Fill pepper half with mixture.

Grilled Peppers

Cut pepper into strips and place on barbecue over open flame until soft.  (About 5-10 minutes)

When cool, peel off charred skin and use the cooked pepper strips in a salad or as a side.

Beef And Pepper Kebabs

Cut a pound of 1-inch thick boneless top sirloin steak into 1.5 inch pieces.

Toss meat with a mix of:

• 1 tsp sweet paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 cloves minced garlic

Stab beef onto four 12inch metal skewers, alternating with slices of red bell pepper.

Grill until cooked and serve with a wild greens salad.

Final Note

If you’re serious about changing your body and you aren’t eating Paleo/Primal foods, it’s time to get on the ball.

If you want to get the results you truly want and need, remember the Wold Fitness Eating Hierarchy:

1. What You Eat
2. When You Eat
3. How Much You Eat

Eating Paleo is the key to the first and most important part of the hierarchy.  Check out the Paleo Cookbook (less than a personal training session and with a 3 month moneyback guarantee) by clicking here: Paleo Cookbook

Talk Soon,

~ Luke

PS – Deirdre Reid, one of my clients, is the person who pointed out the paleo cookbook to me.  Her picture is below.  Guess this stuff works, huh? 

(This is a quick post to show you how to improve your physical performance with proper planning.  First you should read: Warrior Sit Up Challenge: What’s Your Score?)

Lots of people make running a 5k one of their first fitness goals. That’s totally cool.

What’s UNcool is how they go out training for it.  (Even if you hate running, keep reading: There’s a big fitness lesson here)

There are 2 things people do: They go and run as far as they can every time or else they pick a route and try to run it a little faster every time.

The big problem with this is that your body will perform the way you train it to perform.  This is the SAID principle, which stands for “Specific Adaptation To Imposed Demand”

Let’s say you timed yourself on your first day of training, to get a benchmark on your 5k time, and finished the 3.1 miles in 35 minutes.  This is just over 11 minutes per mile.

If you go and run as far as you can every time you run, you keep about the same pace (maybe a little faster) and increase your distance.  The mistaken idea here is that if you can run 7 miles at your normal pace, you’ll be able to REALLY smoke running only 3 miles on race day.

Wrong.  You focused on the wrong thing.  You trained your body to run at 11 minutes per mile and guess what happens on race day?  You run at 11 minutes per mile.  Maybe a bit faster, but not much.

Scenario 2: You picked a 3 mile course around your neighborhood and tried to run it faster and faster.  This is a bit better since it is a little more specific to your goal.  But still, what kind of plan is “trying to run faster”?

I was talking to a woman who did exactly this.  She ran as fast as she could around a 3 mile course on the west side of Carson City.  In 4 months of training she cut 7 minutes off of 5k time: from 36 minutes to 29 minutes.  (She also gained 9 pounds on a whole wheat, low fat diet.  That’s another story though )

Now, cutting seven minutes off her time is nothing to sneeze at.  Her big problem is that she was hoping to run it in 18 flat.  Whoops.

Let me show you the basic outline of what she could have done to get down to that 18.  Did you read my simple plan for improving your Warrior Sit Up Score?  (Here’s the link: Warrior Challenge)

It consisted of a plan that used diminishing rest periods to up your warrior ranking.  The same idea works for any athletic endeavor that has a time or distance limit.  Biking, rowing, running, swimming, anything.

An 18 minute 5k is about 6 minutes per mile.  A basic diminishing rest plan would look something like this:

Week 1: 6 minute mile, walk 6 minutes.  Repeat 3x.

Week 2: 6 minute mile, walk 5 minutes.  Repeat 3x.

Week 3: 6 minute mile, walk 4 minutes.  Repeat 3x.

Week 4: 6 minute mile, walk 3 minutes.  Repeat 3x.

See, she is training her body to bust out 6 minute miles.  And every one of those miles is QUALITY.  No dragging, slogging, heaving, painful jogging.

Where is speed going to come from if you don’t train for it?

So to take our example of a 5k to the next level, lets look a little deeper.

To do your best at the 5k we need to increase your running speed.  For this the best method is sprint repeats.

The woman in our example above should find a flat area (like the track at Carson Middle School).  Then she should warm up and mark off an area about 50 yards.

Her sprint repeat workout would look like this:

Sprint 50 yards, jog back.  Repeat 4x.  Rest 1 minute.  This is one set.

Do 3 sets and rest for an extra minute (2 min total)

Repeat.

Total time: ~ 20 minutes

A workout like this improves your ability to totally rock a distance race by increasing your ability to go hard.

How does this work?  Well, if you can run a 5 minute mile, running a 6 minute mile is pretty darn easy.

By combining the two training methods above, anyone will be able to kick butt in any type of race.

Here’s a sample effective training week:

Monday: Sprint repeats, bodyweight circuits for metabolic training

Tuesday: Diminishing rest repeats, Sledgehammer and Sandbag for conditioning

Wednesday: 45 minute walk (active rest)

Thursday: Sprint repeats on hill, lots of foam roller work

Friday: Diminishing rest repeats, bodyweight circuits

Saturday: Hiking with friends

Compare the above fun and super-effective plan above with the plan most beginning runners follow:

Monday: Run as far as possible

Tuesday: Run as far as possible

Wednesday: Run as far as possible

Thursday: Run as far as possible

Friday: Run as far as possible

Saturday: Drag through a ten mile run.

Which is more effective?  Which will keep you healthy?  Which will have you making a great showing on race day?

The important take home message for today is that you NEED a training plan if you want to succeed at anything physical.

Want to lose weight?  You need a weight loss plan.

Want to get healthier?  You need a health plan.

Want to look better?  You need a plan.

How do you get a plan?  There are 2 choices:

a) Read stack of books and research abstracts, interview people who have done it, and test on yourself.

b) Find someone who has done all of that and will tailor a plan for you.

Your choice

If you really want to burn your stomach, try the Warrior Sit Up Challenge.

You’ll improve both core strength and endurance at a record pace.

Here’s how to do a Warrior Sit Up:

1. Lie on your back with your arms overhead and your legs out straight
2. Sit up, bring your knees to your chest, and hug around your shins
3. Stretch back out to the start position
4. Repeat

(Note: Don’t count any reps where you don’t return all of the way back to start position!)

The Warrior Sit Up Challenge is a test to see how many reps you can do in 3 minutes.

Here’s a scoring chart to rate your performance (from the MOST EXCELLENT book Ultimate Warrior Workouts: Fitness Secrets of the Martial Arts by my main man Martin Rooney)

Reps in 3 Minutes

Level 1: 50

Level 2: 65

Level 3: 80

Level 4: 95

Level 5: 110

Level 6: 120

Level 7: 130

Level 8: 140

Level 9: 150

Level 10: 160

How To Improve Your Score

If you’re unhappy with your rank, here’s a foolproof method for improving your score (and flattening your stomach!)

Do each workout twice a week, a great time for it it after an interval training session.

Week 1: Warrior Sit Ups for 1 min, rest 1 min.  Repeat 3x

Week 2: Warrior Sit Ups for 1 min, rest 45 sec. Repeat 3x

Week 3: Warrior Sit Ups for 1 min, rest 30 sec. Repeat 3x

Week 4: Warrior Sit Ups for 1 min, rest 15 sec.  Repeat 3x

Week 5: Retest and rest.

People ask me about my workout all the time.  I figured I’d share tonight’s session so that you can see what I do to keep my fitness cylinders firing on full.

Warmup:

• Hip Flexor Stretch – 30 sec
• Piriformis Stretch – 30 sec
• Single Leg Glute Bridge – 25 each leg
• Outward Hip Circles – 15 each leg
• Cat/Camel – 5 reps

Workout:

A1. Parallel Box Squats 45×5, 135×5, 245×5, 315×5, 405×3, 455×2

A2. Chinup – Bodyweight, 6×6

B1. Chain Handle, Feet on Swiss Ball Body Row – Bodyweight, 3×8

B2. Kettlebell Renegade Row – 53pounds, 3×8

C1. Cable Lunge/Row – 100×10, 110×10, 120×10 (each side)

C2. Kettlebell Snatch – 35pounds, 3×10 (each side)

D1. Hanging Leg Raise – 2×10

D2. Quadruped Pushup – 2×20

E. Handstand Hold against wall – 40 sec, 31 sec

D. One Arm Kettlebell Swings – 53 pounds, 100 reps nonstop, switching hands every 5 reps

Cooldown:

Random Stretches

The whole thing took under 45 minutes and totally kicked my butt.  Alternating sets (going back and forth between exercises) lets you do twice as much work in the same amount of time.  Pairing those exercises with an upper/lower or upper/lower/abs scheme keeps you heart pumping HARD for the whole workout.

The net sum is that your metabolism is seriously ramped up after this type of workout, with no wasted time

Imagine my surprise when I found out getting a degree in exercise science required a lot of MATH!

I thought it was all going to be gym shorts and sweat.

Instead it was cadavers, metabolic calculations, and weird tools like an “open circuit spirometer.”

Oh well, at least I got to wear the shorts

Someone asked on my facebook wall: “How many more calories will I burn walking hills?”

Awesome question.  Short answer: Lots.  Long answer: See below.

The formulas below come from the American College Of Sports Medicine’s Resource Manual for Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription.  Don’t get a copy unless you’re a super-geek like me.

Here’s the formula for figuring out how many calories you burn while you’re walking:

VO2 (ml/kgxmin) = (0.1xS) + (1.8xSxG) + 3.5ml/kgxmin

VO2 is oxygen uptake.

S is speed in meters per minute. (Conversion 1mph=26.8m/min)

G is fractional grade in decimal form.  (9%grade is 0.09)

Ok, so let’s figure out the difference in oxygen uptake for a 150 pound person walking at 2.5mph on a flat versus the same person walking up a 10% grade.

2.5miles/hour x26.8m/min = 67m/min

Flat VO2=(.1×67) + (1.8×67x0) + 3.5 = 10.2mL/kgxmin

Hill VO2=(.1×67) + (1.8×67x.1) +3.5 = 22.26mL/kgxmin

Ok, even without converting into calories burned we can see that walking up a 10%grade makes us use more than TWICE as much oxygen.  Something is going on.

Our 150 pound person weighs 68.18 kilograms.

Flat: ((10.2×68.18)/1000)x5 = 3.47 Calories per minute

Hill: ((22.26×68.18)/1000)x5 = 7.59 Calories per minute

So over a 30 minute walk choosing an incline will burn about 125 MORE Calories than walking on a flat.

If you have a treadmill, bump up the incline.  If you’re outside, get up to where there’s a view.

A lot of people are curious what we do during Wold Fitness Bootcamp workouts.

I thought it would be cool to share what we did last Friday.  Now, I know it sounds tough-and-a-half, but remember that there are variations on every exercise to make them either easier or harder – whatever you need.

And a session like this will blast your metabolism through the freakin’ roof.  You’ll keep burning calories for about 36 hours afterwards.  So if you did this on Friday morning you’d still be burning extra calories on Saturday afternoon!

So, without further ado….

Warm Up:

Wold Fitness Functional Movement Warm Up (go here to download a follow-along manual: Bootcamp Warmup)

Metabolic/Toning Sequence One:

• Feet Wide Burpees – 60 sec
• Reach Under Side Planks – 30 sec each side

Repeat 3x

Metabolic/Building/Toning Sequence Two:

(Everything 50 seconds on, 10 seconds off)

• Spin Bike, heavy resistance
• Spin Bike, super speed
• Heavy Dumbbell Squats
• Wall Sits, Feet Together
• Jumping Pullups
• Middle Pushup Position Hip-outs

Repeat Sequence 3x

Metabolic Sequence 3:

(Each was 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off)

• Step-Up/Pushup Combo
• Medicine Ball Tornado Slams
• ValSlide Bucket Push
• Side-To-Side Hop Over Cone

Repeat 2x

Toning Sequence 4:

(2 minutes each)

• Warrior Sit Ups
• Outward Hip Circles, Right Leg
• Outward Hip Circles, Left Leg

Cooldown:

• Stretching
• Massage Parade

That’s it!  Workouts change every day, but build on each other to help you keep making progress.

Do you like seeing what kind of workouts we do at the Wold Fitness Bootcamp? Leave me a comment below and tell me what you think!

Last week I teamed up with Dr. Brian Russell to do a presentation on keeping young athletes healthy and performing at the top of their game. We did four seminars for the parents at Capital City Volleyball Club (Where I’m the strength and conditioning coach)

One of the questions we received was “What do you think of crossfit for my volleyball player?”

Well, as I’ve said before, I don’t like Crossfit for ANYTHING.  (But if you’re a consenting adult, you’re welcome to make your own bad decisions

But it’s time to point out a few of the problems with Crossfit that are SPECIFIC to volleyball players.

1) Volleyball isn’t an endurance sport.

Any volleyball player who trains by running anything more than 50 or 60 meter sprints is not only wasting their time, they’re ruining their volleyball performance.

I don’t know who said it first, but it’s well known by top strength and conditioning coaches that distance running “turns jumpers into joggers.”

Volleyball is a strength and power sport, NOT an aerobic sport.  Honestly, if your daughter is in shape enough to text her friends, she’s in good enough AEROBIC condition to play volleyball.

Here’s an example of a crossfit workout that would sap a volleyball player’s strength and power:

“Jerry”
For time:
Run 1 mile
Row 2K
Run 1 mile

Not only would this be a waste of time for anyone serious about volleyball, it would destroy hard-won fast twitch muscle fibers, promote fat storage, increase carbohydrate cravings, beat up joints, take inches off your vertical jump, promote illness, mess up hormones, shorten joint range of motion, and reduce explosiveness.

2) Crossfit is more random than a Pauly Shore movie.

No matter what you think about “muscle confusion” and “being ready for anything,” volleyball is a SPECIFIC sport and needs a specific workout.

Volleyball players get sport-specific injuries and asymmetries that can only be fixed with a SPECIFIC training program.

When a player comes in to see Dr. Russell because she has a glenohumeral internal rotation deficit, scapular dysfunctions, lack of stability, kyphosis, and a severe knee valgus, the last thing she should even think about doing is something like this:

Five rounds for time of:

• 5 Muscle-ups
• 135 pound Power clean, 10 reps
• Run 220 meters

Or:

• 35 Double-unders
• 95 pound Thrusters, 25 reps
• 15 Pull-ups

One of the core principles of success in anything is the idea of SPECIFICITY.

Crossfit is a mishmash of a bunch of systems.  To quote the legendary Charles Poliquin (on Crossfit): “Looked like a bunch of cachexic fitness-model wannabes searching for their souls in the weight room.”

Or, to paraphrase my Grandpa, you can’t ride two motorcycles when you only have one butt.

To get better at volleyball, you need a volleyball training program – not an epileptic writing fit of someone who has never actually trained anyone.

3) “Fatigue makes cowards of us all”

I have a rule about doing things RIGHT before you try to do them a lot.

If a volleyball player has a crappy serve, practicing that serve will just ingrain bad habits even more leading to injury and ineffective performance.

Lots of crossfit workouts have athletes doing complicated weighted exercises for a certain number of reps and trying for their lowest time.  Two bad things with this: 1) It encourages poor form and shortcuts 2) as they get tired, injury risk goes WAYYY up.

Poor exercise technique is bad for anyone, but volleyball players are even more injury prone than other athletes.  One in five competitive female athletes will suffer an ACL-based knee injury this season, 68% of female volleyball players will have some sort of shoulder injury this season.  The injury rate goes up when you factor in everything else that will go wrong too!  Thumbs, wrists, etc.

The goal with a volleyball strength and conditioning program is to 1) keep the girls on the court 2) improve performance.  In that order.

Racing to see who can get the most power cleans done is a sure recipe for injury.  Even more when you remember that we’re dealing with tired athletes who just want their workout over so they can get back to checking their facebook pages.

4) Leaving out the important stuff.

For the moment let’s forget that crossfit is totally inappropriate in exercise selection, loading, and volume – just focus on the fact that crossfit workouts leave out important injury prevention movements for volleyball players.

Volleyball players need a lot of hip mobility, thoracic spine mobility, scapular stability, anti-rotational core stability, anti-extension core strength, and lumbar stability.

If you waste all your time screwing around with nonsensical crossfit workouts, you won’t have any time, energy, or motivation left to pay attention to this stuff.

5) Volleyball shoulders aren’t normal shoulders.

Ok, when I was in college I actually dissected shoulders and spent a lot of time learning how everything works.  So believe me when I say that I’m VERY concerned when I hear about volleyball players doing crossfit.

It’s almost a cliche that after an experienced volleyball player serves, she grabs her shoulder.  Dr. Russell realigns shoulders daily at his practice.

Heck, I know a school bus full of 16 year-old volleyball players who have already gotten cortisol shots just to be able to finish playing the season.  It shouldn’t be like that way.

Here are some of the notes we made while talking about volleyball players and shoulders:  “Most have significant shoulder and full body laxity (aquired, congenital, and monthly hormonal), diminished rotator cuff strength in serving shoulder (especially with no rest all year), abnormal labral features, supraspinatus tears, inactive serratus anterior, jacked up scapular upward rotation, retroversion, and impingements.”

Basically, it goes back to the title of this section: Volleyball shoulders are nothing like regular shoulders.

Add in an imbalanced training program, poor posture, and improper form and I’m surprised that the number of shoulder injuries isn’t higher than 68%.

When scholarships are on the line, any coach who recommended crossfit for shoulders with all of these problems should be beaten to death with a folded-up ballcart.

With all 5 of these problems with crossfit in mind, I recommend that anyone looking to improve their volleyball performance find a REAL strength and conditioning coach, not just someone who paid $1000 bucks for a weekend seminar in destroying athletes.