I’VE NEVER MET A PERSON WITH A 300-POUND DEADLIFT THAT DIDN’T HAVE MORE CORE STRENGTH THAN ANY OF THESE PENCIL-NECKED FITNESS EXPERTS WHO ENDLESSLY PROCLAIM THE MYSTICAL BENEFITS OF MORE CORE.
—MARTY GALLAGHER
Functional training”, as I understand it, is supposed to teach—or rather remind—one how to move like a Paleolithic hunter. It happens to be one of the goals of the Hardstyle methodology.
What we never do at Hardstyle is divorce movement from strength. We reject the circus clown exercises as taught by personal trainers across the fruited plain. We subscribe to the FT philosophy of Gray Cook, the physical therapist of choice for the NFL and the Navy SEALs. These hard men know with their guts that “functional” cannot belong in the same sentence with “weak”.
Ironically, without strength, there is no good movement. “A heavy weight reveals the biomechanical truth behind an exercise,” quipped former Senior RKC Rob Lawrence. The “unCooked” FT folks do not “move authentically”, they are just faking it. A couple of years ago my friend Marty Gallagher wrote an article titled “Doing Fewer Things Better” which drove a stake through their hearts:
In the big fat world of fitness, things keep getting ever more crazed. The general fitness clientele, to expropriate a musical analogy, are dazed and confused. I keep seeing whacky stuff on TV as personal trainers will do anything to differentiate themselves from other personal trainers…how about sitting on the infamous Swiss Ball, one leg extended as the other fights to maintain balance while pushing a tiny-weenie dumbbell overhead. The only thing missing is circus music and perhaps a mini-car circling the exercising trainee that suddenly stops as eight clowns pile out. Meanwhile a muscle-less “fitness expert” dramatically intones that doing the overhead dumbbell press (with a weight my 90-pound daughter could rep a dozen times) while fighting for balance “builds core strength.” It seems that every crackpot exercise shown as of late builds that elusive core strength…gimme some core strength…gotta have that core strength. …of course I’ve never met a person with a 300-pound deadlift that didn’t have more core strength than any of these pencil-necked fitness experts who endlessly proclaim the mystical benefits of more core. These experts keep insisting and proscribing that their clients need more core strength; it’s become the predictable mantra of the new age fitness world. Here’s a flash bulletin: achieving a 150-pound pause squat taken below parallel for 10-reps will infuse more core strength then all the Swiss Ball sit-ups, presses and off-balanced dink-ass exercises combined. That’s a natural fact: mathematically irrefutable and demonstrable.
…Let’s get off the Swiss Balls waving tiny dumbbells too insignificant to trigger hypertrophy, let’s stop substituting sub-maximal effort and feeling good about ourselves for substantive physical progress, let’s stop pretending and start actualizing, let’s get freaking serious and that means stripping away all the toys and distractions and get back to bold basics. Let’s start mastering basic fitness themes before spinning off into all the cute little variations that net nothing.
“Heavy weight is instructive,” states Cook. Take some rotary movement like the full contact twist. Even if the student succeeds in keeping a neutral spine, locking his rib cage to his pelvis, and not moving his shoulders and he moves at a controlled cadence, as he should, he will not learn anything about transferring force from the ground up into his hands until the weight on the bar gets noticeable by the given exercise’s standards, e.g. a 45-pound plate for a 180-pound man. It takes a heavy weight to line up the vectors of force and to adequately stiffen the linkage. You will never understand this until you have been under heavy iron. “A heavy weight teaches with a big stick,” promises Gallagher.
A heavy weight is a good teacher—provided it is moved slowly. And please don’t feed me any indignant non-sense about “only fast being functional”. If you cannot do something slow, you have no right to do it fast. With some exceptions, failure to do a movement slowly indicates that you, as Gray puts it, “are hiding something”. A compensation, a weakness. Which is why our get-up master Dr. Mark Cheng, Senior RKC often has his students practice get-ups at “Tai Chi speed”. Incidentally, he has his martial arts students do the same with kicks. One gets to cram a lot of physics and skill and identify his problem areas when momentum is no longer an option. No wonder kickboxing legend Bill “Superfoot” Wallace made slow kicks an essential element of his championship practice.
As a rule of thumb, in Hardstyle exercises we move slower or faster than comfortable in order to get the most benefits. For instance, we slow down our get-ups and speed up our swings.
Another problem with the “un-Cooked” is, they fail to resolve some more fundamental mobility problems before practicing the primal patterns. For instance, in order to achieve a perfect deep squat in a way that does not gun the gas pedal against the parking brakes and set one up for a hip replacement surgery down the road, the person must have a flexible pelvic floor. Only when the sit-bones spread apart, can the hip joints move freely into the squat. A rigid pelvic floor prevents such separation and grinds the femoral heads.
Hence most squats out there are labored and “non-authentic”. Trainers have their clients do all sorts of fancy stretches for the muscles surrounding the hip joints and foam roll, yet as they do not recognize that the pelvis can and should separate, they fail. In the Hardstyle system, in contrast, we stretch the pelvic floor and teach the student to distract the hips and find freedom in his body while we are teaching him to squat. A Hardstyle squat looks natural and effortless as you learn to get out of your own way. (This is the Yin of stretching and opening space to the Yang of tension and compactness.) And we do it without big words and fancy contraptions.
Senior RKC and Black Belt columnist Dr. Mark Cheng adds: “True Hardstyle is built on a platform of fundamental elasticity and mobility. Generating extreme tension without the reactive ability to “take the brakes off” when needed is little more than developing rigid, awkward movement and fooling yourself into thinking that it’s stability. A functional athlete has developed the skill of dynamic motor control, using strength in all the right places, at all the right times, and tested its maximal weight.”
To return our “functional training” discussion to the “core”, planks are worse than worthless if one has tight hip flexors and atrophied glutes. The trainee will end up reinforcing the pattern of using his hip flexors as the core. Hardstyle sit-ups and hip flexor stretches from Hardstyle Abs rewire one to plank right. As we do at the RKC kettlebell instructor course. Physiologist Bret Contreras took EMG measurements to compare the peak activation of various midsection muscles in the traditional front plank and the RKC version and here are the results:
In the RKC plank the lower abs contracted more than three times more intensely, the internal obliques more than twice, the external obliques almost four times as intensely as in the typical plank seen in gyms everywhere. Because we pay attention to detail. For instance, we teach maximal pelvic floor activation. Just as extreme flexibility demands that the PF stretches, extreme strength demands that it contracts. We teach Hardstyle breathing and other key strength skills. When we are done with you, you are ready to plank, if this is what you want to do.
You will also be ready for various “functional” exercises that require one to move against a load in different planes while maintaining a stiff torso and a neutral spine. Prof. Stuart McGill57 took EMG measurements of several such drills. For instance, in the “cable walkout” the subjects grabbed the cable in both hands and then walked sideways. The RA showed a measly 10% peak activation and the EO did not quite make it to 25%. The IO managed to squeak past 70% MVC, but that is not surprising as any heavy exertion brings these muscles “online” in people with normal firing patterns.
The premier spine biomechanist observed that “the muscle activation levels were modest even though the tasks were quite strenuous…” He explained that “single muscles cannot be activated to 100% MVC in these whole-body standing exercises that do not isolate joints. This is because most torso muscles create movements about the 3 orthopedic axes of the spine. If a muscle were activated to a higher level, unwanted movements would occur that would have not be balanced by other muscles. This places a constraint on the activation level of any muscle in a ‘functional exercise’.” McGill concluded that, “Perhaps these constraints are one aspect of what separates “functional” exercises from muscle isolationist exercises…”
In other words, stuff like that might teach you a thing or two about movement but it will not make you strong. In my opinion, such exercises are the domain of physical therapists and corrective specialists. Half-kneeling chops are great but you need to know what you are chopping and why.
One “functional” exercise I recommend to anyone and to which I am not surprisingly partial is the kettlebell get-up. Steve Maxwell introduced it to RKC years ago and since then RKC heavyweights Gray Cook, Dr. Mark Cheng, Brett Jones, and Jeff O’Connor have dug “a mile deep” into this remarkable exercise. The GU’s benefits and applications could fill a book.
Cook comments, “The Turkish Get-Up is the perfect example of training primitive movement patterns—from rolling over, to kneeling, to standing and reaching. If I were limited to choosing only one exercise to do, it’d be the Turkish Get-Up. This is the only exercise that honors the entire Functional Movement Screen.”
“For many athletes learning to lock the ribcage on the pelvis is essential for injury prevention and performance…” stresses McGill. “[A] terrific exercise for transitioning into performance is the Turkish Getup, where the spine posture is controlled and the overhead weight is steered as the body learns more movement strategies that maintain torso stiffness while driving with other extremities.”
“The kettlebell community has praised the core-activating benefits of the Turkish Get Up for many years,” writes Bret Contreras. “It’s taken quite a while for some strength coaches to catch on but nowadays most coaches are having their athletes perform the TGU in their warm-ups. The TGU was the only exercise [out of fifty-two] in this experiment that had over 100% peak activation in all four core muscles that were tested. Good job, kettlebellers!”
The physiologist got these surprisingly high readings and it only took a fifty-pounder:
It must be noted that if you choose to use the GU as your only source of developing rock hard abs, it will take considerable volume. While the peak activation of each midsection muscle is very high, the mean activation is modest, in the 30-40% range. Neither muscle fires this hard for a long time as the athlete keeps changing the direction of loading. You will have to punch in more reps to have more time under high tension for each muscle. We do just that in the Enter the Kettlebell! Program Minimum.
