I walk the dog everyday and that little bugger wants to run, so I get good anaerobic with fast walk mixed with running over a 45 minute or so period. Great stuff really and for a 40+ guy walking is very good for you. Less punishment on the joints and you still get a bang for the buck.
Deadlift – I have a few extra bucks and decided to spend it on equipment rather than gym fees. So I purchased “bumper weights” which is a fancy term for a specialty weight that you can drop on a concrete surface, although we have a horse stall mat to cushion the blow to the garage floor. So the point is I do not lower the weight. I bring the weight a few inches past the knee and drop it.
Remember that we are doing this to get my son’s sprint time to an MLB level. So the expression of power in the hamstrings/glutes etc. is finished once the weight is up past your knees. For anyone interested Google Barry Ross and Allyson Felix, it’s pretty interesting stuff but they try to get their trainees to deadlift 3X body weight.
Now does the avg. person need to deadlift? Maybe not but if you are fortunate and can do it safely (especially the way we do it) it’s pretty harmless. If you start doing high rep stuff where you do touch and go with regular iron… Yep recipe for trouble.
Squat – Perfectly good exercise but not quite as good for sprint speed which is our goal. (mostly because it’s using push rather than pull and happens too slowly). My anecdotal experience is this. As a youth athlete I could not touch my toes, nor as a member of the armed forces. Didn’t matter as I could do great things with a ball, excellent vision/awareness etc. Flexibility to touch toes apparently didn’t matter. Enter the ass-to-grass squat when I was older (35?). Suddenly I could touch my toes and put my palms on the ground flat. Mainly because you are trying to touch your ass to your ankles before exploding up, and over time that just loosened me up.
Yoga – There are many well paid trainers these days who do not preach stretching and say overdoing it will hurt. Watch a typical HS football team warmup today before a game. No longer are they laid out doing hurdler stretches. Now a days warming up before a game is about joint mobility and range of motion. High skips, over unders, high knees, arm circles, Karaoke’s. When we were kids it seems like it was 3-4 ways to stretch a hamstring before every game. Not so much today.
This is a hotly contested area and Pavel Tsatsouline and others basically say this. If you want to stretch, stretch. They just prefer you do most of the stretching after your activity. So deadlift, or squat or walk or whatever and do your stretching after you are finished while the heart is elevated.
WW/Scaredy inspired me I am thinking of taking on a Kettlebell swing challenge up to the new year. Should get me back into the swing of things, to start deadlifting. I have 35-44-55 and 75 pound kettlebells to let me work my way up. Just need to figure out a reasonable goal.
