Layers Of Strength Like Super Saiyan Transformations

For years now, I've been a Dragon Ball fan of the Saga. It's really the only anime I like that didn't include Street Fighter as a kid. Similar story to Superman with a twist and has Martial Arts, powerful warriors, rivals, match-ups, foes become friends, Vegeta always wanted to be ahead of Goku but never really does and the training clips are just bad ass especially in the Gravity Chamber. It's one of the inspirations for my own training and finding some cool things to try out.

 One of the cool aspects of the Shows is the transformations guys like Goku and Vegeta go through to become more powerful than usual. The levels of Super Saiyan are just an awesome blend of animation and the fighting internally they go through to achieve their transformations and making them effortless later on. It's a way of looking at strength progressions in fitness, there are several layers and as you get stronger, there's always another layer coming your way to push through. 

Yeah it's corny and has some off the wall characters (Master Roshi anyone) along with situations that may not be suitable for even today's generation unless you watch the uncensored versions. The fact remains, with each transformations the Saiyans generate, it's a progression that at first takes a lot out of them and as they master them, they become effortless and doesn't take on a ton of energy or in their case strength. With each time you master a weight or a certain exercise, you would progress to a heavier weight or version of an exercise that's harder in order to become your strongest. 

Yeah it's a cartoon and we can't look exactly look like Goku or even withstand a Gravity Chamber that goes up to 400x the gravity of earth (if you were to calculate that, it be walking into a room and you weighing hundreds of times your bodyweight) but we can build strength and muscle using things like weighted vests to do our bodyweight exercises or do exercises with greater control and slower. Guys like Matt Schifferle & The Bioneer are awesome at teaching progressions in order for someone to build their strength on and guys like Brooks Kubik utilizing old school weight training and bodyweight exercise to build a great deal of muscle using progressions on a consistent basis. 

Although Goku & Vegeta have completely different views on life and progressive training, they still become stronger in their own way and format different purposes. That's what it's like in the real world where you can progress in your own way but still reach levels of strength beyond belief. Now what they do is obviously exaggerated and very fictional but it doesn't take away the fact that it is possible to build strength and muscle with the right tools and training programs. Many struggle especially with the consistency and discipline but it's not impossible. Like a transformation, you can also transform your level of strength and physique. The old time strongmen who were no more than on average 165-190 lbs were some of the most muscular people on the planet yet had strength that baffles by even today's standards. It's incredible what you can achieve when you give yourself the time and dedication.

Look past some of the silliness and dialogue and understand what some of these guys do in that Saga that gives them abilities that just seem to go higher and higher each time. When you thought one of the transformations made them crazy powerful, another one comes along and just becomes even more mind boggling. Even the transformations become God-like later on; you can have some crazy strength as well (without the need of steroids of course) and harness the ability to find out what the body is truly capable of. Of course I believe in safety and doing things without getting injured as much as possible but we are capable of things we didn't think were possible. In a weird way, we have a bit of Super Saiyan strength where each progression is another step to being the strongest we can be as a individual. 

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How Do I Keep My Lower Arms, Hands & Wrists Strong

 As a human being, we are responsible for what types of strength we develop whether it be physical, mental, emotional and/or spiritual. Some don't always get to even choose that responsibility because of either birth defects or other things but if you're compelled and learn to work with what's possible, there are many ways to strengthen yourself.

Strength is not always measured by a cannonball shaped bicep or having washboard abs that look good in a magazine, it really is measured what the body can handle and be able to do things that require sometimes a great deal of effort in order to provide the strength needed in life. The hands for one is probably, arguably one of the most prominent aspects of strength that we don't always understand the true meaning of it. We build things with our hands, we can clip hair like it's electric with such precision and speed, we destroy things, we test a man's grip with a simple shake, we lift and hold onto things as if our lives depended on it. Our hands are the ones that turn the knob to a world of possibilities.

When I was in my teens, I didn't have thick forearms or crazy strong hands and wrists even though I threw the shot put and the discus along with some mediocre weight training. I didn't understand the value of grip strength and hand health until I started learning feats of the old time strongmen. The first people to show me this were Logan Christopher & Tyler Bramlett. They showed me how these small guys like Dennis Rogers & Mighty Atom were able to bend, twist, break and shape steel with such power it looked effortless yet impossible to look at. They were the first men to teach me steel bending short and long along with leverage work and utilizing the flexion and extension of the hands. If these small dudes can teach me how to do things that men twice their size can barely even touch, that gave me the reason to be able to do it too.

For years, I've bent hundreds of spikes, tore through dozens upon dozens of phonebooks, levered sledgehammers and shaped flat bars and rebar till my hands bled (literally) and those were the foundation of making my hands crazy strong, durable and powerful. My fingers would feel like bone, my forearms were hard as stones and my wrists had strength yet were flexible and limber. As time went on in the midst of doing these crazy feats, I started studying more on how to keep the lower arms healthy and as pain-free as possible. When I was learning the unorthodox and strange ways to train using Garin Bader's CoreForce Energy, he also had a course specifically for the hands called Finger Gymnastics. You've all read about my dealings with the meningitis and how it shaped my nerves to the point where dexterity in my right hand is almost impossible with using individual fingers. With FG, it gave me tools that I never was able to learn before as a child and it showed how I can use my hands differently than what I was attempting during therapy sessions. It opened up a new world to me that was unbelievable.

As I got older and shifting away from the strength feats, (is a comeback in the works?) I had put my effort into a more movement based type training and for the last 10 years or so, working with sledgehammers has been my go to for hand strength and conditioning. I also found the Fat Gripz useful as I use them from time to time with my resistance cables to really dig into the muscles and build grip strength at the same time. I've used them also on machines, barbells and dumbbells. Slowly but surely overtime, my hands just kept getting stronger and rarely if ever got injured. 

Because of the sledgehammer work, it has even helped me in arm wrestling; faced all three generations of my wife's family (father, brother and grandfather) as they all challenged me and I won. This family also comes from several generations of loggers and heavy laborers so they have incredible strength in their blood. Neither of them were easy either especially her grandfather who tried to pull my arm off for a second or two but to didn't let up. That was a defining moment where they were like "ok this guy is good for the girl in our lives" in my opinion. Gramps still has that "old man strength."

In a nutshell these days, hammers, fat gripz, occassional fingertip pushups and walking like a gorilla has kept my hands pretty damn strong and healthy. Keeping the wrists limber as much as possible and fingers just keep getting stronger. I have also kept an eye doing joint loosening exercises especially in the hands and wrists for a while now because as we age, we won't always be able to do the crazy shit we did but if we kept our joints healthy, that's what makes living the more important. Be strong, build strong hands and be amazingly awesome. 

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More To Exercise Than Just Stationary Movements

When you have a certain amount of knowledge about exercise and fitness along with the understanding of what works and what is useful, you have the ability to train anywhere you want and not be restricted to a building full of people who can be nasty as hell (verbally and physically). Stationary movements are basically exercises where you're in the same spot working on something and not going anywhere else. If it's just bodyweight, you can switch from one exercise to the next in the blink of an eye. 

It's great to do pushups, deadlifts, squats, curls, weights, bodyweight, machines and suspension training; they're all great in their own way and should be used for the goals people want to achieve and/or maintain throughout their lives, however; there's more to training than just staying in one spot. There's freedom in moving from one thing to another but the true freedom is being able to harness the body's capabilities beyond the stationary aspect of fitness.

The majority of fitness is training in a single spot on the floor or only a stupid short amount of space. Now with Animal Movement training or Primal style training, you have the freedom to move wherever you want, however you want. This is where you are truly open to using your imagination and not be confined to a such a short amount of space that you can't crawl, jump forward or backwards, sideways and under a magic carpet ride. It's about letting go of the caged up mentality. Do stationary movements have their place, of course they do, they're another aspect of training. It's not the full picture though.

Animal Exercises are a form of expression. Yes it's true we can't move 100% exactly like wild animals but as a human, we have the creativity to express ourselves in a different format than typical conventional training. We can crawl, jump, kick, punch, roll, lift, carry, hell we're practically a Wonkavator where we can go up, down, sideways, longways, shortways, bend, twist, go east, west, north, south and everything else in between. Indigenous tribes don't necessarily work out in the sense of recreation but when they hunt or go out to find food, they climb, crawl through the jungle, run, walk, utilize their body's abilities to take down trees, carve boats, fish with nothing more than a stick and string. They're expressing their bodies the way nature intended in order to survive. Fitness is just a recreational version of expressing our human nature and Animal Type Movements is to me the pinnacle of that. 

Some will look at Animal Movements as silly and "make believe" and that humans were only meant to stand up right and crawling and all that stuff is meant for babies in development. It is a huge part of our evolution to be upright and to lift, carry and be able to orchestrate movements based on human evolution but mimicking animals to a small degree is part of that as well. We've studied animals for countless millennia even when we didn't realize it and we partake in how we can move utilizing what we can do. Although Animal Movements can be considered a "gimmick" form of exercise, it's the freedom of expression that gets to the heart of it. 

Is it natural to move like an animal in the wild? Well, you are using your own body as resistance and it's not alien like formalities so you tell me. It's just different, that's all it is when you break it down. It's using the mind and body's ability to express a near exaggerated format of what we as humans are capable of doing. Some of the most basic movements can be done by just about anybody if you're in good health. The more advanced stuff is for the "crazy ones" which is a much lower percentage of people capable of doing. Even basic movements are still freedom of expression and be able to showcase your abilities to train in just about any length of space. 

So, when you practice your training, realize there's more to it than just being in a single spot. Utilize both to really become universal in your fitness journey. Your goals are yours and what you do to get better is what you're willing to do whether through Primal Movements or stationary, they're more valuable than we have been led to believe. Be strong, be wild and be amazingly awesome.

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