Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Boyle Rant, And A Good One


Choice quotes from Mike Boyle:
No one has ever gotten better lifting light weights. 

Light weight is an oxymoron. A weight should be appropriate to the goal but, rarely, if ever, intentionally light.

The reality is if you are lifting a weight ten times, numbers nine and ten should be difficult. If you can lift a weight 20 times but choose to do only ten, you are wasting your time. Period.



I go crazy when someone tells me about the routine they've been doing with their eight-lb hand weights.

Strive for perfect technique in all exercises AND progressively increase the resistance.  SportBlocks, from PowerBlock, are perfect for this as are the Bowflex Dumbbells. 
 SportBlocks are a small version of the popular PowerBlock dumbbells 
that increase in three-pound increments. If you don't want to buy 
SportBlocks, get a good selection of dumbbells.

Work on basic strength in basic exercises. If your trainer has you practicing your golf swing with a dumbbell in your hands, get a new trainer.

Learn to bodyweight squat, learn to do a push-up.

The secret is, there is no secret. If you want to hit a golf ball further, you need to get stronger. You will not get strong lifting a five-pound dumbbell.


If I had not found CrossFit, I hope I at least would have found Mike Boyle, he's head and shoulders over most of the fitness industry. 

However, he's getting too cute here.  Anything is better than nothing.  If you do the same 3 sets of 10 with 10 pound dumb bells from now until you croak, you'll be stronger than many of the purists or perfectionists or the disorganized or the too bored or the plain old apathetic folks who did nothing.  First rule in my book is - do something.  Build from there.  Refine from there.  Doing something Mike Boyle thinks is silly beats the snot out of being too busy to do the perfect workout.

My vote for world's best very simple workout?  Burpee pull-ups.  Lie on your belly.  Get up as fast as you can.  Jump up and grab a bar for a kind of jumping pull-up.  Repeat until you are as distressed as you want to be for that day.  Some days do short sessions of ten reps with 30s rest before doing another ten, as fast as you can move.  Other days, do max reps in ten minutes.  Find another couple of ways to do this, or just add a day of squats and pushups.  Then do a day of sit-ups and hill sprints, or box jumps, or tire drags, or car pushes, or kid carries, or ... whatever.  The sky's the limit and the bag of tricks is cheap, varied and full when it comes to using functional human movement for strength and metabolic conditioning.  

If nothing else, do ten squats that look like this every day:

PS - neck brace and cast are optional.

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