How to Stay Fit and Safer at Home

By Daniel Jauregui

The good thing about the world changing so drastically is that you still have plenty of time to exercise. You may find that difficult to do while you’re quarantined in your home checking the news every half hour, but there are actually a number of things that you can use this time to focus on. You will maintain a good deal of your fitness simply by continuing to move daily! Don’t use the coronavirus as an excuse to get lazy.

Equipment:
If you’ve kept up with any of the socials, then you know that we’ve begun implementing at home workouts for BHIP. Currently, these workouts revolve around bodyweight movements or exercises that can be done with odd objects (like a backpack). So at minimum, you already have the basics you need to get started. Moving forward, we will plan occasional workouts that center around fitness equipment. That’s not to say the movements can’t still be done with odd objects, but it would behoove you to look into purchasing the following implements while quarantined. We won’t officially begin using any of these until Monday 3/30.

An example of an odd object.

• Dumbbells/Kettlebell
• Resistance Loop
• Resistance Tube
• Door Strap
• Pull-up Bar
• Jump Rope

Dumbbells are the most expensive thing on this list, but everything else can be found at a relatively affordable price on amazon. You can even find a decent quality, easy to install pull-up bar for under 30 dollars. Don’t feel pressure to get everything on the list (you can always use different implements), but having any of these items around your home will only help.

Training Tips:
1) Do the BHIP at home workouts. A week’s worth will be sent out via email every Monday, and each individual workout will be posted daily. You can do them while you watch tv if you’d like. Or you can zoom and watch your friends do it at the same time. You can read a book for all I care. It doesn’t matter. Just do the workouts!

2) Do more push-ups. If you’re bad at push-ups, there has literally never been a better time to get really good at them. As a starting point, aim to complete 50 reps throughout the day a few times a week. Elevate your hands on a countertop if you need to. Once you can do it in a couple of sets, add reps or lower your hands a bit. If you’re going to take on this challenge, I recommend getting a resistance tube and doing regular banded pull aparts/rows to have some balance around the shoulder.

“Show me someone who can do 30 pull-ups, and I show you someone
who doesn’t have a problem with the way they look.” - Rus Tokman

3) Improve your pull-up. If you have the means to access a pull-up bar during this quarantine, I think it’s the single most useful piece of equipment you can get. If you’re still working on getting the first rep, you can do a few negatives throughout the day a few times a week. If you already have the first one, then set a number of reps to achieve throughout the day, as with push-ups, and try to increase that number over time.


4) Enhance your stability with some unilateral work. Since you don’t have access to heavy weights that recruit maximal muscle fibers, you can increase your motor recruitment with single leg variations. Muscle activation can be comparable to that experienced while training with heavier loads thanks to the stability demands of single leg exercises. We’ll incorporate exercises like single leg sit to stands and single leg RDL’s into your home workouts occasionally, but doing a few reps on your own a couple of times per week won’t hurt.

5) Condition. There’s no excuse to not do this. You need nothing more than your bodyweight and some effort to get you out of breath. Improving your conditioning will help increase your work capacity and make it significantly easier for you to jump back into BHIP workouts whenever we do resume. At minimum, do the programmed at home workouts with as much intensity and effort as you can muster.

6) Set goals for yourself. You will need something internal to keep you motivated during this time. Setting a goal for yourself will give you the direction and focus you need to get through these workouts without all of your friends constantly there to do it with you. Whether your goal is to get a pull-up or improve your balance when you stand on one leg, pick something and focus on it. Then you can show all your friends how fit you are when you get back.

If you have questions about how to implement any of these at home training strategies, comment on whatever platform you find most convenient, and I’ll respond. Probably. Remember to wash your hands. See you all soon.

What is Olympic Weightlifting?

By Daniel Jauregui

With our first weightlifting clinic fast approaching, we’d like to take the time to clarify what olympic weightlifting actually is. If you haven’t been involved with them before, the names of various strength activities can all be very confusing.

The Sport:
Olympic weightlifting, or simply weightlifting, specifically refers to the sport in which athletes compete in the snatch and clean and jerk. You might immediately be wondering, what is a snatch? Excellent question. We’ll dive into that in a second. But first, understand that the term weightlifting refers specifically to these three movements. This term shouldn’t be confused with powerlifting, which instead is a sport focused on pure strength movements like the squat, bench press, and deadlift. It also shouldn’t be confused with generally lifting weights. Doing a bicep curl doesn’t make you a weightlifter.

The sport of weightlifting is predicated on taking a loaded barbell and putting it over your head. In the first lift, the snatch, this is to be done in one fluid motion without the bar ever stopping to rest on any part of your body. The second lift, the clean and jerk, differs in that the bar is brought overhead in two separate movements. It is first brought up to the shoulders (the clean) and then taken overhead (the jerk). As fascinating as this must be to read, it’s much easier to understand with a visual.

The Movements:
Here is a video of prominent U.S. weightlifter Mattie Rogers snatching up to 105kg/235lbs.




The next video provides a demonstration of the clean and jerk. This is Kuo Hsing-chun, a Taiwanese weightlifter who weighs just under 130 lbs. Here we see her clean and jerking 135kg/297lbs.



You’ll notice in each of these videos that the lifters move with tremendous speed. Each of them takes the weight and throws it over her head in the blink of an eye. This is one of the defining qualities of olympic weightlifting. It isn’t only about how much force you can produce; it’s about how much force you can produce quickly. This fast expression of strength is known more simply as power. The most successful weightlifters in the world are all extremely powerful; not to mention technically proficient. These movements combine several different motor patterns into one fluid motion. For example, the clean involves a deadlift to get the bar off the floor, a front squat to stand up with it, and then the jerk takes you into an overhead movement.

This combination of multiple athletic qualities working in coordination with one another is one of the things that makes the olympic lifts difficult to master, as you may have experienced with your own cleans in BHIP. Additionally, the lifts put you in extremely demanding positions. In the clean alone, excellent mobility is required at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and that doesn’t even begin to get into the demands of going overhead or squatting. For this reason, the Olympic lifts are absolutely not for everybody. However, there are elements of the lifts that can be useful in everyone’s training.

Purpose:
The primary benefit to training these movements is power development. Rate of force production is typically the fastest diminishing quality as people age. Training power development helps preserve the ability to move quickly. If you don’t want to continually get slower and slower as you age, it would behoove you to do some sort of more explosive and dynamic training. This is the chief reason why we implement cleans regularly at BHIP. Additionally, the complexity of the movement lends itself well to the overall improvement of motor control and coordination.

Once proficiency is developed, the olympic lifts can be extremely rewarding and even fun. The problem is that it can be very difficult to become proficient with the movements, which is why we’re doing our first weightlifting clinic this weekend. Within the context of a single BHIP workout, we don’t always have time to break down every facet of the movement and reintegrate the many components together, but we will have ample time in the clinic with that as our sole focus. So if you’re someone who has struggled to grasp cleans or someone who is interested in learning more about the olympic lifts, join us on Saturday 3/7 from 10am-12pm. Hope to see you all there!