Clif and I have been working on some combo stuff, which is what we are focusing on August.
Our friend, Steve Maxwell, was one of the inspirations for that, and here is a great video of him teaching some guys a bunch of wicked exercises in a circuit. Many of these are incorporated into our own plan. Looks like it’s time to get some rings and clubs!
In preparation of Explosive Fitness month, I too created my own macebell. As you can see from the picture, it looks similar to Maxwell’s macebell, except I decided to leave “Wilson” on there as some safety measure. It weighs in a just over 16 pounds. Close to what I was hoping for. Just gave it a test drive in the backyard and wow. Can only hold the handle about 1/2 way down, did 30 swings and my muscles are smoked.
This month will prove to be our hardest, as we are incorporating the best off our research from Maxwell, Pavel, Statham, and more. Circuits of speed and power. I also jumped on the scales today: 190. Ouch! I’ve not had as good a fat loss summer as Matt, but am hoping to be in around 178 on Sept 2nd.
It begins tomorrow, stay tuned…
August’s focus is on explosive fitness. We wanted to have a “fun” month where we do a bunch of crazy stuff to build total-body fitness and endurance, and torch the bodyfat.
For this month, we go to a light/medium/heavy setup with a day where we continue the SFP2.0, which is a fantastic workout, and throw in a “Crazy Barefoot Nature Day” inspired by MovNat. We are thinking of adding another workout day towards the end of the month. I’ll keep you posted.
This plan was a little harder to come up with, I don’t mind tellin’ ya. I’m not sure why. We discussed a lot of different exercises that could build strength. One thing we wanted to focus on was cutting the 16kg kettlebell out of the mix as much as possible and doing more with the 24kg.
The “medium” effort day (Monday for me) was three sets of three reps of push press, alternating with get-ups (one with each arm). So a total of 6 getups. Not too taxing. That was followed by three sets of lunges with a minute of rest between each set. For lunges, I take one kb in each arm, take 8 big steps forward, going down and up with each step. Then turn and take 8 steps back, lunging on each. Finally 3×3 of loaded cleans. After a couple weeks, I threw in sets of 10 pushups between the sets of lunges.
I experimented over the month with taking longer breaks vs taking shorter ones. I was able to do more work with longer breaks, but felt like the shorter breaks gave me a more intense workout. Not surprising results.
Heavy effort day was five sets of three reps of push press, alternating with five sets of 1×1 getups, then five sets of lunges as described above, and five sets of five loaded cleans. Whew!
There was a run day, which changed mid-month from being a long and slow endurance run to a shorter run with 1/2 mile and 1 mile intervals at higher intensity levels. There was also one day where we continued SFP2.0.
June had two days per week where we did the clean and press, and swings. We tried to mix it up a little with intensity levels and volume. There was one long run day per week, and two days of SFP2.0.
For those of you who have never heard of it, SFP2.0 is the “stubborn fat protocol” and we learned about it on the Dragon Door forum. It takes Kenneth Jay’s Viking Warrior Conditioning (VWC) 15:15 protocol, adds a run, then finishes with some swings. Let me explain in more detail:
Start the workout by doing 10 minutes of snatches, 15 seconds with the left hand, 15 seconds rest, 15 seconds with the right hand, 15 seconds rest. That’s one “set” or one minute. Do that ten times. Then go for a 30 minute run, at your own pace. Upon your return, perform five minutes of two-handed swings. I was doing 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for five minutes. It’s one of my favorite workouts.
