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!

Three Tips for Your Overhead Press

Some overhead pressing pointers

Improving Grip Strength

By Emil Chang

Can’t PR your deadlift because the bar is falling out of your hands? Having trouble doing pull-ups because you’re slipping off the bar? Maybe you’re stalling on your presses? It sounds like you need to improve your grip strength.

Importance

Hands connect us to most objects we interact with during the day. We need to hold, push, and pull objects all the time. Although they're probably not shaped like a barbell, they still depend on our hands and fingers working properly. If we spend most of the day on the computer and in the car, our fingers and wrists are stuck in relatively the same position. Keeping our hands strong and healthy is important not only to lift and carry heavy things, but also to maintain functionality.

In terms of exercise, grip can be a frustrating limiting factor. For example, you may have the leg and upper back strength to pull a 315lb deadlift, but if you can’t hold onto it, then what? You lose a percentage of force transfer with poor grip. Just like abdominal bracing or upper back tightness, grip is a point in your lift where you can potentially leak energy.

Programming

Improving grip strength will ultimately require an increase in frequency. While grip can fatigue quickly, it also recovers quickly. This makes it optimal for higher frequency training- something like 3-4 times a week. Grip training should be an addition to your normal workout, usually as an accessory. It’s a small and specific muscle group that is an accessory to many movements, but not neurologically or psychologically taxing enough to warrant a dedicated day of training. That being said, if you are doing heavy deadlifts, pull-ups, rows, or other grip-heavy exercises, you probably want to wait until after to do grip work as to not affect the day’s main training.

Exercises

Many of these exercises can be done for time or until failure and can easily be placed at the end of a workout. Think 20-30sec range with a moderate to heavy weight for 3-4 sets. Usually, you want it to be challenging enough to feel a decent amount of fatigue by the end of the set.

Regular Farmer Carry: With a neutral posture, grip the kettlebell with your thumb around the handle. Keeping your shoulders active, walk for a distance or simply hold the kettlebells in place. If you’re using a heavy weight, go for 10m at a time. With a lighter weight, go longer. 

Vertical Dumbbell Carry: With neutral posture, hold the dumbbell with an open palm grip. The wider spread will require you to really squeeze with your fingers to keep the dumbbell in place. Again, walk for distance or hold in place. 

Pinch Grip Carry: With neutral posture, grip a weight plate with your thumb on one side and your fingers on the other. Try to keep your fingers acting as one unit. Pinch the weight plate between your thumb and your fingers to keep it in place. Walk for distance or hold in place.

Bottoms Up Carry: There’s an added shoulder stability factor in this one and your grip strength will be crucial to keep the kettlebell in place. Make sure your wrist, elbow and shoulder are in line and try to keep your elbow at ninety degrees. 

 In both these landmine exercises, you’ll be holding onto the sleeves of the barbell (where plates are usually loaded). Since the diameter is wider than the shaft of the barbell, you will take more of an open-handed grip, which will be more taxing

Single Leg RDLs- Face your body parallel with the bar. Hold the sleeve of the barbell with your opposite hand or with both hands and perform a single leg hip hinge with the leg further away from the landmine. Keep your hips and shoulders square as you hinge.

Single Arm Bent Over Rows- Face your body parallel with the bar. Take a strong hinged position and perform a row with the arm closer to the landmine.

Hanging: Just hanging from the pull up bar can also build grip endurance. Make sure your entire hand is wrapped around the bar and you aren’t just holding on from your fingertips.

(Bonus) Grippers: There are also products like this that are built specifically for grip strength. These are small so you can use them in the office. Think of them as really hard stress balls.

In Conclusion 

These are just some examples of grip-focused exercises. Sprinkle these into the end of your workout, on recovery days, or even between sets of non-intensive grip exercises like back squats. As with anything, you have to put time in to actually make improvements. 

Isolating grip training is a rather advanced concept. It means you’re competent enough in your main lifts and movements to start worrying about little things. But, as Coach Wooden said, “Little things make big things happen.” So, if you’ve identified grip strength as a weak link, that’s great. You’re probably already pretty strong and dedicated to improving your fitness. Now, you just have to hold on.

3 Fitness Tips for the New Year

By Daniel Jauregui

I’ve never liked the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. If you wanted to commit to doing something, you probably wouldn’t wait until the first of January to get started. Nevertheless, everyone seems to be more willing to try to develop good habits at this time of year. So with that said, here are 3 tips to help make 2020 a better and healthier year for you.

1. Start training at least 3 times a week.
Several of you are already doing this, so great work! But if you’re training fewer than 3 times a week, it's likely you’re not reaping all the benefits of exercise. These include (but are not limited to) improved body composition, higher metabolism, improved hormonal profile, reduced risk of heart disease, more strength, better cardiovascular endurance, and the list goes on. If you’re only spending 1-2 days a week exercising, the lack of frequency can slow or potentially stall performance progress you’re trying to make. In 2020, work to increase your overall physical activity, and start setting aside a minimum of 3 days for training every week. If you’re already doing that, try to set aside 4 or 5.

2. Set some realistic performance goals for yourself.
Many people measure the efficacy of their workouts with things like how hard it felt or how sweaty they got or how sore they were the next day. In my experience, none of these are all that useful. The only measure of an effective workout is whether or not it actually contributed to getting you better at something. What that something is is ultimately up to you. In BHIP, we’re constantly trying to improve your capabilities across different modalities, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have your own individual focus. Whether you want to improve your number of push-ups, increase your deadlift, or run a mile faster, you can always get better. Having a goal will also help to focus your training. Rather than going through the motions and trudging along, you will have a purpose that you’re training for. The key is to make your goals performance oriented. Stop worrying about how much you’re sweating and start trying to improve what you can do. If you’re not sure how, we’re here to offer suggestions!

3. Improve the quality of your recovery.
In 2019, probably for the first time in my life, I found I wasn’t recovering enough from my training. My knees became constantly achy, body fatigued and weak, and nagging pains plagued much of the exercise I did. There were several things contributing to this, but what it boiled down to was the very low effort I put into my recovery. I wasn’t making time for stretching or foam rolling, wasn’t sleeping enough, and was pretty much eating what was convenient. I’ve seen patterns like this one repeat themselves in many BHIPers and other clients I work with. Anyone that neglects recovery, regardless of age or capability, will eventually get to a point where injuries and irritations easily develop. If you’re training regularly, then as much time as possible should be spent focusing on what you can do to continue performing well. It is during this recovery time that growth and progress actually occurs. Exercise is the stress that breaks your body down, but recovery is what allows your body create adaptations that improve your fitness. This includes stretching/foam rolling to reduce the tension and inflammation surrounding your muscles and tendons. It also includes getting the optimal amount of sleep, which most research seems to indicate is between 7-9 hours for the average person.

Doing all of these things may not always be convenient, but progress has never been easy. Comment below with any questions or other habits you’re hoping to develop in 2020.