- Good morning trainiacs.
We lifted on this endurance adventure today.
So I'm sure I've told you over the last, wow.
I don't know maybe two years, if you're new here,
I am big into heavy strength,
like once a week away from when you're doing your races,
really really good for improving efficiency.
See the amount of energy that it takes to swim, bike, run,
heavy strength ends up reducing the amount of energy
that it takes you.
I have shown off and shared this heavy hex bar deadlift
routine that I have done a whole a bunch of times,
so we're not going to rehash it.
At the end of the video I'll link to a video
about how to do this and you can go to..
I think we'll put it up.
We've got to put it up down here.
I think it's tri..
Ooh, Ooh, new website.
Instead of triathlontaren.com, you can go to mymottiv.com,
the new website that we just launched
which is going to take over triathlontaren.com.
So mymottiv.com/offseasonstrength
to download this for free, if you want.
So I've been doing this hex bar deadlift routine
that I call the trainiacs secret sauce,
and it was all good, I was really making some improvements.
I think I ended up dead lifting like four times 335,
it was good.
I was feeling stable vertically
when I would pound down running
and especially in the snow out here where there's a lot
of side to side movement.
I still felt strong and put together.
And then I ended up trying to go to some quarter squats,
just the top range of the squat,
so you can load up heavy weight
not really get super deep down
into the squat where you start risking injury
because I know a lot of the strength people out there
will say you gotta do the full range of motion,
but squats just don't feel good to me.
And your strength way down low is very different
than your strength way up high.
And if the requirement to build efficiency is
to load up with heavy strength,
I'm not going to load up with heavy heavy weights
when my strength down here is not very good.
I got to work on that top quarter squat because
that's what's much more similar to the running motion.
Anyway, that's, what's been up.
I'm gonna do a strength workout,
but afterwards I'm going to walk you through everything
that we've built up here that we have created
to give us a home gym that is not lacking whatsoever
in strength equipment from what you'd want
at a commercial gym.
Some of it is really damn expensive
like the squat rack here and not necessary.
There's a lot of smaller that I use much more frequently
that you can get as good a strength workout as what you get
at a gym for a grand total of a few hundred dollars.
So I'll kind of just go
through everything that we've done here with prices
with recommendations, and you can decide what you want.
(upbeat music)
Ooh, it feels awful.
- Three, two, one, done.
- Ooh done done done.
Oh, let me get my Jeff Goldbloom on.
So after two years, I've still got to do this disclaimer
that I dropped the weight on the deadlifts
because I wanna focus on the concentric
as opposed to the eccentric.
There's strength in both, but the eccentric,
the lowering is where you get more muscle tearing,
so it's harder to run tomorrow,
and that's where you end up building more muscle fibers,
building bigger muscles.
And actually what I want to do
is not build extra muscle fibers,
I want to get stronger without building extra mass.
So you gotta improve strength to weight ratio.
And I put on a weightlifting belt for safety.
I have a bad back.
I will trade perfect for safety any day.
All right, time for some overnight (indistinct).
We'll come back and I'll run you through all of that.
Okay.
I have laid out here, the the main things that I've got,
actually basically everything that I've gotten.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to spend just 30 seconds
on each of them with what I use it for
and I'll try to go in order of the most beneficial
and versatile to the least beneficial.
I would say a must for setting up your home set up
with strength equipment is a kettlebell.
And the reason for that is that a kettlebell is really good
for cardiovascular endurance specific strength.
You can work on muscular endurance
by doing like kettlebell swings for five to ten minutes.
You can also do Tabata workouts, where for 30 seconds
you're going like 20 seconds on 10 off 20 on 10 off
or 40 on 20 off.
Things like that, where you're getting your heart rate up
and you're working on cardio and muscular endurance
while you're also working on strength.
So kettlebell.
I used a 25 pound one to get started with,
NTK used a 10 pound.
The next most beneficial thing, it isn't the stability ball,
however that's pretty close, it's therabands, like this.
Like we have all different kinds of therabands,
We got really long therabands,
so they can do stuff like this,
like really coordinated movements like that.
But then more than anything you can use these
narrow therabands for things like,
well, actually, like let's be serious.
You could load up tension and raise it up.
So you're working out the thoracic spine,
you can wrap it around your knees
and your ankles to do stability work for your glute med.
This is like for 10 or 20 bucks, you can load yourself
up on all the therabands you'll ever need
and that is really really important for building stability
for triathlon and endurance training.
We've literally got just a pile of them here.
There's more in there.
We got a lot.
The next thing that I would absolutely recommend
is a foam roller.
Foam roller isn't new to a lot of people,
but the reason that I'm putting it so high up
in the priority list is because it's really important
to keep all of your tissue happy.
Without happy tissue,
you are likely going to end up developing injury.
So the best thing to do is get yourself
any sort of foam roller and roll on any areas like
side of the leg, inside of the thigh, glute med,
your side bump, your lats, and do that a few times a week
after a workout to just help loosen everything up.
Stay on something that hurts a little bit
until the pain dissipates by about 50% or 15 seconds,
whichever comes first.
Cheap and very effective for staying healthy.
Now comes the stability ball.
Stability ball is going to be very beneficial
for a lot of stability movements.
Things that you would expect a stability ball to do.
As a triathlete, if we're not stable,
if our body wants to move side to side,
if it doesn't have the stability to stay firm in the core,
basically from your nipples down to like your mid thighs
and have that connection across, down the side,
along the back, every single pedal stroke that you take,
every single step that you take,
every single stroke that you take in the pool,
is all going to be leaking energy.
And in addition to that,
there's going to be tiny little vibrations
that leak off the energy, leads to slower times.
Those vibrations lead to injury.
So stability ball, really really important.
Next thing, and this will be an unexpected tool high up
in the list for you.
Why I put this high up in the list is
because you need a little bit of weight.
You need to load your structure.
And this is an Onnit 10 pound steel club
and the reason that I like this is
because you can do things that are very very simple
and make it easier and harder by where you grip on the club.
So here seems fairly light.
Here, I'm doing something and having to stabilize..
It is tremendously heavy.
Having something like this allows you
to do things like twisting,
it allows you to do squats with this
while adding a little bit of load and stability
to one side or the other without creating a huge amount
of stress on the body, because it's just, it's 10 pounds.
That's all it is.
And it's a fairly easy way to become really really versatile
with your movements.
The downside to this, is that it's not very common.
So you're gonna have to find workouts online
or on the Onnit website to understand how to use this best,
but you can get a lot out of it.
Now next in line related to that same purpose, same thing,
basically, I won't talk about it a lot.
And off balance off center thing.
It's a little bit less versatile than the steel mace
and you can also get it from on Onnit, but same thing.
You've got to understand how to use this.
These gymnastics rings are the substitute
that I ended up purchasing in place of a TRX.
Just with all of the renovations
that we've had all around here,
I haven't had the time to put these up
because I didn't know where they were going to go.
But the combination of things
like the kettlebell collection that we've got back here
and stability work with something like gymnastics rings
or TRX, really really good combination.
With those two things alone,
you can keep yourself busy for years.
Plus gymnastics rings also looks really cool on Instagram,
If you (indistinct) at them, I hope to one day.
Next and the last thing I would say is critical
that you've got to get is a yoga mat.
Now, you might say,
"hey like I'm a triathlete, Why do I need a yoga mat?"
Well, you don't really need a yoga mat,
which is why it's a little bit further into the video here,
but it's a very inexpensive way
to make yoga a little bit easier to do.
Personally, I've been doing yoga every single morning
in place of my morning 10 minute meditation,
I've been doing a morning 10 minute yoga session,
that is more meditative, like very very chill, yin yoga
and having a yoga mat is like incentive to be able to do it.
Instead of lying on a cold floor, I'm on a yoga mat.
It's pretty inexpensive
and for as good as yoga makes me feel,
I think that this is something
that everyone should incorporate.
Finally, I'll share with you all the things
that I would say are nice to have but not need to haves.
A jump box.
I have a foam jump box here that I find really beneficial
but you don't really need to have it.
If you've got a deck, if you have a step,
if you have anything that you can hop up on
you're going to be fine without that.
This is a wobble board.
This is something that I step on and wobble
from side to side and it helps me keep my foot dexterity
and strength up.
The ankle needs to be strong and it needs to be limber.
So I use a wobble board about 30 seconds
every single morning for that.
Medicine ball, you might've thought would be a little bit
more critical but I rarely use it.
I'll use it to add a little bit of load to some
of those side twists that you saw me doing earlier today.
But I tend to actually not to use this too much
because there's just not a huge amount of versatility to it.
So, get it if you want.
And then some things that are specific to me,
I've got some fat grip that these go on that lifting bar
that I've got, and it really just, it makes it wider
so that I can work on my finger and forearm strength.
That's more so for golfing,
but a little bit like 10% to do with swimming,
having a nice purchase on the water,
but like really a luxury, not a requirement.
This is like a little lacrosse ball that is fused together.
What I do with this is I put this on my back
and then lie down on it, kind of right around there.
And then I do something called the Travolta Peanuts.
So Peanut, John Travolta, go like this
and it ends up loosening up all of the joints in the spine.
And I have wow, just about every triathlete
has really really stiff thoracic mobility.
We have a hard time turning and bending.
So this helps break that up.
Well, I'm sure you might be wondering about however
is what about this rack?
Well, this is a rack that I just use a little bit
for hanging to stretch out the upper torso
and I'll use the hex bar that came with this rack
for hex bar dead lifts.
And I don't use this a ton.
I use this very very minimally more than anything.
It was just a rack to mount all of the weights
for the hex bar deadlift.
But this is not something that I would suggest
that you get.
For the times of the year, off season, base building season,
Northern Hemisphere people, we're talking from like
November to February.
If you really want to start lifting heavy weights
instead of buying one to $2,000 worth of a weight set,
go to the gym and you're gonna be much better off
and have much more access to equipment.
For the majority of your strength training,
I would stick to kettlebells
because it's gonna be way more versatile.
For about an $80 kettlebell,
you can be kept busy for three or four months.
So that's everything trainiacs.
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and hopefully you enjoy getting
your home strength set up set up.
Later trainiacs.