Never Feel Small

Have you ever walked into a certain place or been around a group of people and all of a sudden you feel small (mentally) and felt like being towered over? I have a number of times in my life, in the gym, school mates and others. Feeling short in a negative way debunks your ability to overcome your obstacles, say for instance you were told you can’t be a good parent or you were told that it’s impossible to bend a bar because you aren’t strong enough or even that “there’s no way in hell you’re going to be successful” crap. Being towered over sucks and it’s about time you stepped up to the plate.

 There are those that you tower over physically but for some reason at some point you’re going to look smaller than they are because they got into your head. Being tall or short physically shouldn’t ever be a stressful thing for you, if you understood how to mentally defend yourself against those that take away your energy like a vampire that sucks blood; you will see what it’s like to be a strong individual inside and out.

 Now lets let go of height for a second and look at other parts of the body that are small from the outside and let’s be adults here no below the waist jokes. I’ll admit for a big guy I have relatively small hands and an average size wrist, from the looks of it I shouldn’t even waste my time developing hand strength because come on where are small hands going to get me? Here’s the kicker, I mentally picture myself as if these small hands of mine are not small at all, they’re enormous and can crush anything in their path, because of this one simple little thought of mind, it’s helped me bend steel, rip phonebooks, grab a hold of a heavy weight and lift it off the ground. With a simple thought you can change how your body is moved and how big do you want to feel. Dennis Rogers is another example, for his size he shouldn’t be anywhere near above average strength let alone have superhuman abilities but yet for the world’s strongest man he takes objects and destroys them with ease and how does he do it, by picturing himself being strong and block out that governor within us that tells us to stop before we get hurt.

 In order to mentally tower over your obstacle you have to think as if you were something beyond who you are in a human type form, maybe that’s stretching it a bit but the idea is to put a thought that says “I’m taller, bigger, and stronger and nothing will stand in my way.” You can apply this to just about anything. This method in one way is used by Garin Bader which he calls it “The Power of Zeus” which enables from a strength training standpoint to strengthen your mental powers to generate super strength in a matter of seconds. You breathe with it, you feel it as if it consumes you with power, vigor and vitality. This doesn’t just apply to strength, it can be applied how you talk, how you find that powerful presence that people automatically take notice of and have an aura of vigorous energy. The emotional side can be used as well as how you present yourself with your voice, body language and your emotional content of that power.

 It doesn’t matter if you’re 7’ or 4’  you have the power to channel your thoughts and make yourself feel bigger, larger and more powerful and you can apply it anyway you want but use it as a purpose and not to personally bully somebody, that’s just not cool. Funny thing, I have what I call a second mother who’s one of the most awesome women on the planet and she’s no more than 5’3 so the majority of people (except children she takes care of) towers over pretty easily including her own kids and I tower over her with ease but yet she just has this presence and it’s scary sometimes how within a split second make you feel smaller than a pea. In the end she’s one of the sweetest and inspiring people I’ve ever known but damn she’s good at getting people to her level, it was a wake up call when I was a kid and still true to this day.

 The way you present yourself can make you or break you in any situation you’re in. You put too much or too little of a good or bad thing it’s going to bite you in the ass. Finding that balance is a practice that takes time but the rewards are endless. Your imagination is where it’s at and your body language combined with imagination and action will make the difference between feeling small and feeling larger than life.

Combination Training

Doesn’t that almost sound like Cross-Fit? Combining different elements into one method of training? Well, in certain cases you don’t need to lift a barbell than go do pull-ups.

 Creativity starts with your imagination and builds on what you have. I’m telling you from experience and practice, going to the gym isn’t your only option anymore. If you really looked around, you can workout in just about any type of place. If you lived in the woods, you can use nature to make your biggest benefit, tossing rocks, pushing boulders, swimming in the lake or climbing trees. If you lived around an industrial park, you can find little pipes to pick up, lever 2x4s, push-ups on the rails, finding a few rebar and see if you can bend them. Combining different things with what you have can create your own workout without ever touching a barbell or a machine.

 I have been training mostly bodyweight for years now but every now and then I like to use a few things like for instance a workout I did the other day consisted of a towel, Phonebook, my Thor hammer, a 10 pound sledgehammer and my lifeline chest expander. These things alone gave me a hell of a workout, one exercise I did for a combination is holding the chest expander in a one-arm press and with the other hand did swings with my Thor Hammer. In my opinion, books with exercises just teach you a certain type but yet don’t always give you something to combine them with, some do but most don’t so you’re left with “The hell else can I do”, simple, use your imagination and before you know it, you can come up with exercises that can never be found in a book or on a DVD.

 One of the best combos I’m learning right now is combining isometrics with a moving exercise but how does that work? Well remember I told you the about the Chest Expander and the Hammer? You can learn all sorts of combos especially the kick ass stuff here by my man Bud Jeffries. You want to hit as many muscles at once as possible and learning these combos with Isometrics isn’t just building physical strength but teaches how to use your brain from different angles of the left and right side.

 Doesn’t matter if you’re into bodyweight, weights, kettlebells, feats of strength or a combo of all four, hitting your muscles and tendons from as many angles is a key for foundational development as it helps hit sticking points and plateaus and the more muscles being used the better because isolated movements are more prone to cause injury as oppose to multiple muscle groups working to keep your body in unison. Some people see isometrics as isolation but in reality they haven’t done they’re homework very well. Steve Justa once told a story of Bruce Lee holding a 3-5 lb. ball, he’d hold it in his hand and hold his arm straight out, doesn’t seem that hard it’s just a shoulder exercise that works the hand just a tiny bit since the ball is extremely light but here’s where it really gets fun, do it for 8 hours straight, what seems like an easy shoulder exercise will turn into a hard fought battle for the entire body and who’s going to be the bitch at the end of that exercise, you or the ball. Never assume certain things will be easy.

 Remember the phonebook I used in my workout the other day? Well I didn’t rip it in half, sorry to disappoint you because the damn book was wrapped in duct tape from cover to cover and everywhere in between, it was giving to me a few years back from my friend Logan Christopher and ever since I had it I used it to do isometrics to rip up phonebooks for real and to say it’s helped me rip over 1600 pages in one shot would be just the tip of the iceberg. Combining this exercise and moving on to pulling down a tree is just another day at the office for me but it gives me super strength and makes my body feel like a steel rod of one unit of power.

 Using what you have can create endless possibilities for you if you open your mind and expand beyond just a regular exercise. You can turn just about any basic exercise into the most advanced exercise on the planet in a heartbeat, it all begins with your ability to imagine and put it into action. Also put some emotion into it and your results will surprise you by 10 Fold, I’m not joking about that. I have learned the best exercises don’t come from a gym, a book, a DVD or a class, the best exercises come from your own take on them and believe me when was the last time you did a isometric hold while swinging a Thor Hammer, highly unlikely ever. Learn from your own experiences and combine the best you have learned and mold them into something only you can come up with. When you do that, you’ll learn the secrets of true and creative Combination Training.

Make Just About Any Angle Your Strength

The legendary Catch Wrestler Karl Gotch once said that to become strong and agile you always work your muscle from every possible angle. Muscles grow and look larger than life but like everything else there’s a consequence, if you work too much muscle and not enough of your tendons, you will be more vulnerable to injury. Isometrics is the key method not to just hit a muscle from a certain angle but every angle imaginable. Holding a certain position and hammering in only that particular spot will give you a sense of great strength from that position. One of the beauties of Isos is if you hit a spot where you can’t go anywhere else, that’s where you press, pull, squat or whatever to get beyond that position and no matter how you slice it, your strength will skyrocket with enough practice.

 If Isometrics had its own star pupil it would most likely be Steve Justa. This man has got to be one of the most odd ball characters in the entire realm of Physical Culture but yet the way he works his strength and power takes on a whole new dimension both literally and figuratively trust me watch what he does sometime. Out of everything he’s accomplished in the world of Strength, I believe his most treasured wisdom is when he brings up Isometrics. A lot of strongmen credit Isometrics but no one has put them in the same realm as Justa has. His story about his hay bailing and the way he told Bud Jeffries about his dilemma about Diabetes and how Isometrics both saved his life and job is nothing short of remarkable.

 I feel that if you want to accelerate your strength and speed in any sport you do, add in Isometrics and tell me if they didn’t improve your throw or shot or even your ability to kick a ball. Isometrics build positional strength and in sports you need to have a strong position from every possible angle whether its tackling, throwing a football or baseball, shooting a basketball from a long distance or kicking a soccer ball down the field you want to have the ability to be faster than the other guy. Think about this, you’re a pitcher for the New York Yankees; you have a good arm and can throw a hefty 93 mph fastball or a ok 86 mph slider, would you want to increase your speed of the ball by 3 mph on any of your pitches? Be pretty damn sweet if I say so myself and the ball will feel lighter in your hands as if it was the size of an egg, light and strong until it cracks the mitt like speedy Gonzales running into and past a brick wall. Each position you bring the ball as if simulating a pitch from little spots here and there will get stronger to the point where when you throw the actual pitch, it’ll take off like a rocket and the batter won’t realize what the hell hit him.

 Grip strength is the basis not just in sports and the strongman business but in your specific business like carpentry, plumbing, construction, landscaping even a bagger at a grocery store, you need to able to handle things and your hands need a certain amount of strength otherwise you won’t be able to do your job very well. Would you believe that most of your grip strength is mainly isometric? It’s true if you really tested it and if you practice holding an object with your grip for a short or extended amount of time, you’re going to feel it whether you like it or not. For us strongmen, we need grip strength to perform the feats we do, sometimes the things we do don’t always involve the grip but it is practically mandatory otherwise you won’t perform the feats you want to tackle. Bending steel and tearing phonebooks are two of the purist forms of grip strength and like I said before, Isometrics are usually the most credited method for pushing beyond the limits.

 Another form of Isometrics is Muscle Control which is mostly used in Yoga, Martial Arts and Bodybuilding. Contrary to popular belief, muscle heads are pretty smart when it comes to certain things and the way they pose is just unbelievable despite how big they are. Back in the day however, a few guys named Maxick and Otto Arco took this to a level that can never be duplicated again. Their posing was unprecedented and even bringing the little muscles were just off the chain. Check them out sometime on Youtube if you can find them and just watch how they can change from one muscle to the next in heart beat its awesome.

 Now that you’ve read a little more on Isometrics, I think you’re getting a sense that there really are no excuses and you can do this method just about anywhere, if you go to church and pray you can do it, think about it you put your hands in prayer and when you ask for guidance press the hands together hard and tell me you don’t feel a little more energized? You can be in class and press or pull on the desk and you can have no one ever notice it. You can be watching a movie and flex during certain scenes so don’t ever say you don’t have time to exercise because you usually can make the time but it’s up to you to make the effort.

Getting Mad? Get Out & Train

We all have certain emotions that get to us through stress, certain people in your life and many other things but getting mad and taking it out on the wrong things can lead you to a path of destruction that you will have a lot of trouble getting back from. I have had a bit of temper and it makes me sometimes the biggest ass in the world. Whenever I got mad at something, it drove me to a point where I have put holes in door with one blow of my fist and have thrown certain things at a wall or even have punched my own window and shattered every square inch of glass from one hit. I’m not ashamed to admit this and have paid a price with scars both physically and emotionally. So after a few years of self discovery I wanted to learn to control my temper.

 Anger isn’t always the healthiest thing to have because it could affect your body in ways we can never understand and if you’re prone to high blood pressure it’s as fatal as you can get. Instead of just being angry and going off on someone or hit/smash anything, it’s better to just really walk away and whoever said “Oh if you’re mad just go hit a pillow till you cool off” must’ve been out of their god damn mind because that kind of thing will make things worse for you. One of my favorite de-stressers is just training, getting out and moving around, if you have a tire and a hammer, take it and pound that tire, one teacher showed me what you can do with a heavy medicine ball and just throw it down on the ground until you can’t take it anymore. Stress can make you crazy but doing something productive to channel your rage is healthier than just running around being angry at something.

 I have learned that when you’re mad or angry and you feel like you want to hit something or somebody, might as well be hitting yourself because you’re going to hurt yourself more than taking something out on someone or whatever. You want to find a way to relax and have those endorphins kick in that give you that sense of bliss. If you really want to get a natural high, go sprint on the track or up a hill and see how long it takes you to stop being angry. Sometimes training doesn’t always help, its understandable but that’s one way to help balance your emotions. Another way to balance things out if you get angry is to just walk away, go for a walk and breathe deeply, instead of breathing in anger, breathe in blissfulness and breathe inner strength, if you live near a lake or the ocean, go for a swim or go to your local pool and do a few laps, anything to get your mind off things and be happy with yourself.

 Lashing out in a positive manner can actually help you find what is wrong with your emotions and how you can prevent going into a big rage and turn into the incredible hulk and hurting someone. Sometimes certain people can’t control their emotions so they take meds to calm them down and even that can be harmful on the body itself. There are even people out there who beat the person they love so it’s complicated sometimes. Doing something productive that won’t harm you or others or objects is a great thing to balance out certain problems you may have just use it a safe manner that way it’s a win-win for everyone. I personally have never physically hurt anyone in my life and intend to keep it that way because if I did that I’m no better than a possible murderer so being smart about your emotions is a good practice to learn and use in a safe and healthy manner. Don’t hurt others or yourself.

Follow Blindly With Pride

When you first really learn something, you don’t know what to expect, if you did, learning wouldn’t be that fun or adventurous. When you first learn to walk as a baby, do you research and follow the mechanics, no because you don’t know any better and you learn to do it yourself by putting one foot in front of the other than before you know it you’re off and running. People have this belief that following a certain people blindly without looking into who they are or what they really represent feel that it’s stupid and you don’t know what you’re talking about.

 In the strength training world or in fitness for that matter, we follow all kinds of people, programs, diets, exercises and all sorts of things. Even the “experts” who have big egos try to take down those who don’t believe in their system and that they are blind to what they should really strive for. Hate to break it to you buddy but as cool as your name is on a piece of paper doesn’t make you god among men. Not all people in this industry are like that but it’s very annoying when they give you this B.S about facts and scientific methods that are proven and they expect you to believe them. This is where instead of listening to what they say; find out for yourself what works and what’s proven in your own experiment. Testing the waters is one of the best to learn from.

 When you train, don’t just go through the motions, followyour instincts and find what works for you and when that right program just hits you and you find a passion for it, support it and use it your advantage to what makes that program work for you. I’m not saying go out door to door like a Jehovah’s witness and preach that it’s the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, talk about it as if to encourage it. Not every program works for everyone, hell I have followed more methods than I care to count and yet I don’t do all of them. I take the very best things I’ve learned and mold them into something that gives me and only me great benefit. I give my insights and encourage those to try it out at their own pace.

 When it comes to following a blind method of training, nothing broke that barrier more than how Slim The Hammer Man became the world’s strongest man for the specialty feats he performed such as chain-breaking, scrolling steel and his trademark, Hammer Levering. An old man taught him the best ways to tap into the mind and go after a feat that just seemed impossible yet made it happen. This was decades before the internet and cell phones, so the only way to do something is just that do it and see where it leads you. In a sense, Slim followed this old man’s methods blindly by just focusing on what worked and didn’t work. He eventually found that itch and developed his own style of training just by experimenting with his own research and look what happens, he became a beast of a legend, sure he hit a few rough patches along the road to success but it didn’t matter.

 There are millions of blind individuals in this world and it’s a shame that they can’t see the world and look into the eyes of the people they treasure the most but not all is lost, sometimes if you watch really closely (no pun intended) those same individuals develop other senses that are more powerful than the gift of sight. The main proven method today is Eco Location where the senses are sought by vibration kind of like a bat in a cave where the method came from. Why am I telling you this? Have I gone off course and just went off topic? The answer is no I haven’t. I’m telling you this because like blindness, when you follow a certain program or experiment with it, you might find some new senses and find that although you can’t tell if it’s going to work, your body will tell you to either adapt or fail. Your mind is very strong, your muscles adapt and your awareness gives you a keen sense of how certain things will play out. When you find that right moment and all that experimentation pays off, you’ll increase these senses and you’ll be able to adapt to that program however you want.

 One of the greatest masters of wrestling Billy Robinson pointed out that in the beginning, you learn, yet in the end you’re still learning. There’ really no such thing as ultimate mastery. If you stop learning and act like a total expert with an ego than you really haven’t learned a damn thing. Mastery is learning how to learn. You never stop finding that key program or exercise or method that keeps you going for life, you develop new things, new ways to come up with what you learned. Also kinds of like Yoda’s quote “You must unlearn what you have learned.”  If you stop learning and not using your mind, how will you be able to know who you really are and what you can help teach others? Teaching is great tool but yet teaching while also learning about yourself gives great insight to how you follow something while others do the same. Following someone blindly isn’t always a bad thing, just make sure you don’t get hurt or end up killing yourself, give it time and if it doesn’t work for you, move onto something else, keep learning and keep building your own senses to what brings you that ultimate high.