by Chris Stoos
Think back. Do you remember the first time you were in Dane’s Body Shop and saw this phrase on the board:
“50m Jog to SPRINT.”
Ah, how long has it been since you ran as hard an all-out sprint? Just last week at a pick up soccer game, or maybe 10+ years when you were back in school? Strength can be clear-cut in our minds when it comes to training (example: pick up something heavy and putting it back down), but conditioning can take on many shapes and forms, with some being more effective than others. Why do we prescribe both at the Shop?
I can never get enough of strength week. Give me a heavy barbell any day of the week over my running shoes. Building up a base level of strength is essential, not only for life at the Shop, but for whenever you go back to your daily routine. The work that you put into the Shop immediately translates over to real life. Some surprising benefits of strength training can include picking up your dog when he or she is tired from walking, farmer carrying two bags of groceries back to the car or into the house, or for the college student, running to catch a bus to campus with a fully-loaded backpack.
In his book, Intervention, Coach Dan Johns recounts, “My good friend and mentor, Brett Jones, once told me this: Absolute strength is the glass. Everything else is the liquid inside the glass. The bigger the glass, the more of ‘everything else’ you can do. So, lifting weights is the quickest way to build strength. As your strength goes “up,” everything else can be expanded, too.” In this case, “everything else” can be all your abilities and skills. If your strength goes up, then your max strength glass makes all the other abilities glasses easier to fill.
So, how does conditioning factor into this?
For the longest time, outside of playing hockey, I had never programmed my workouts to make me sweat. Sure, I used to do the long bouts of cardio on the treadmill, bike, and even the elliptical, but away from those pieces of equipment, training involved a lot of moving heavy weight around, then sitting (probably for too long). There’s nothing wrong with these long bouts of cardio, but I was foolish to think that doing this same process over and over again would result in something different.
Enter my first day at Dane’s Body Shop. To make a long story short, Dane put me through an entire conditioning workout where I never even touched a barbell, and when everything was said and done, I felt great (and exhausted). Over time, you learn to use all sorts of tools and equipment, including no equipment at all, to push your body and to sweat. We use equipment such as kettlebells, battle ropes, medicine balls, and much more to build that base foundation that many of us left behind in our younger years. In the end, the workouts get you comfortable being uncomfortable.
As I’ve said in some of my classes and emails: What’s the point of lifting 1,000lbs if you can’t even walk to the gym without running out of breath? Life demands so much more of us than just simply picking up heavy objects or just running long distances. We want you all to get comfortable at being uncomfortable, so that when life throws you something that’s discomforting, it’s nothing new to you. As you keep “expanding your glass”, there’s so much more that can be done to make life that much better.
Crush strength and conditioning weeks with Coach Chris at 6:30pm Mondays and Wednesdays, 5:30am Tuesday and Thursday, and 10am on Saturdays. Register here!
