- Morning, Trainiacs.
NTK,
wife, - Mm-hmm.
- otherwise known as No Triathlon Kim
is about to kick my ass.
What we've been doing over the past couple of months
is focusing on strength.
And one of the ways that I've been doing that
and using these
kettlebells, and the reason
that I've really become a fan of these
is because of a few reasons.
Number one, they're super, super versatile.
So you can really add a lot of weight
and a lot of different movements with like $60 weight.
This thing is a 25 pound weight.
NTK has been using a 10 pound weight.
And we kept busy with just those two weights
for- - A couple of months.
- Couple months.
So while she's writing down the workout,
what I want to do is explain to you
how I think about how we should focus
on mobility with strength by using kettlebells.
Like what are the things that triathletes
have as imbalances?
What are the things that we need to stretch?
What are the things that we need to strengthen?
How do we use kettlebells to do this?
How do we use strength in general to do this?
Because it's not just as straightforward as,
"All right, well, I'm gonna go to the gym
and lift a whole bunch of weights."
You have to lift the right weights
and you have to stretch some things
and strengthen others to get the balance right.
- By the way,
I have moved up to 15 and 20 pound weights.
- Whoo!
So with the help of my lovely assistant Kim,
I'll show you some spots that tend to get those imbalances.
So come up here, say hi to the camera.
So one thing that we tend to have as an imbalance
is we get really, really tight in the chest here.
And what happens is we get tight up here
because we're scrunched up.
All of our swimming is out front,
All of our running is out front,
and most of us are white-collar desk workers.
So everything is out front.
So this tends to scrunch up.
What then happens is our shoulder blades
tend to roll forward and then our lats will go to sleep.
So that's a really big detriment when we're trying to swim.
So we want to kind of get that posture open, upright,
and make those lats strong
so that it pulls everything back nice and aligned.
Related to that, again,
everything just kind of rolls forward
and we hunch forward and we scrunch forward.
So everything gets really tight here.
So what we want to do is offset that
by opening up the front of our body
and then strengthening the back.
If you go to any physiotherapist
or I don't know, really, anyone that's a body worker
for Ironman, for triathletes, for runners,
they're gonna say that the glute med, the side bum
tends to go to sleep.
So what happens is something gets tight here
and the opposing muscle goes to sleep.
That's really bad
because that's the muscle that stabilizes
our leg and our entire body
when we plant our foot when we're running.
In addition to that, all of the stabilizer muscles here
need to be strengthened
because that's what allows us to rotate
as we are trying to, let's say, swim and rotate
and actually put force into propelling ourselves forward.
It's what allows us to stay stable
as we are putting force that way.
And it's what allows us to state...
You're shimmying in front of the camera.
You have to keep that in when you edit this.
- Oh.
- Where was I? (laughs)
We're running.
And then of course, when we're running, it's the same thing.
We plant and we've got to stay stable.
So we're gonna start with a warmup here
and then I'll get into a workout
that you can actually follow along
and repeat as many times as you want
to get the amount of time that you want.
But we'll start with a warmup,
which does a lot of the opening up,
so that it unlocks the ability to activate
and strengthen the opposing muscles.
So the first thing you will learn to love to hate these,
everyone on teamtrainiac.com does,
is wall slides, wall angels.
And this is gonna open up the spine.
What you do is just go up against a wall.
And the trick is to put back of head, back of shoulders,
lower back, all up against the wall.
And don't start arcing your back off the wall like that,
keep it all flat,
and then try to keep the back of the hands and the forearms
up against the wall.
And that's gonna help really open up the front here
so that we can activate those lats.
The next stretch is just opening up that front.
And I don't like doing static movements
like where you just do this
and hold it for 20 or 30 seconds before workout,
that actually increases the likelihood of getting injured.
So you want to do a dynamic stretch.
So just going like this,
and if you start having a hard time
feeling it in the first here, roll the lower back.
So the lower back is straight, squeeze the glutes.
Now you can even reach up like that.
So you do that on both sides
to unlock being able to hit the glutes.
So remember, we're stretching the tight muscle
and then trying to strengthen the inactive muscle.
The next movement that we're doing
is just opening everything up, opening up the inner hips.
So we're going into a lunge and just going off to the side.
So this is not just stretching the front
but adding that little bit
of internal stretch to the groin area.
And it's also sort of opening up your hips
because when we run, we just tend to go straight.
So everything just tends to collapse
and we don't do anything to the side.
We want to activate everything laterally,
and that's what's gonna stop us from getting injured
when we're just in day-to-day life
because all of a sudden we're mobile.
We're functionally healthy, and loose, and limber.
This one is probably gonna be really tough for you
and pretty easy to feel in that nether region.
And then the last thing,
I'm a really big fan of this, highly underrated,
is to wake up all the different sides of the feet,
walking on the outsides,
insides,
and tippy-toes, and heels of the feet.
It's just keeping all of those lower leg muscles stable.
That's something that we're really gonna work on
during the workout,
because we gotta make sure that all of our muscles
from the knees down, not just calves,
like muscle bellies in the calves are strong,
but all the little tiny adjustment muscles
that we use to plant ourselves
and actually grip the ground and stay stable,
those need to be really strong and dynamically fit
so that as it's absorbing all those little tiny movements
that it's strong enough to do so.
And when we end up running
and spending so much time in shoes,
all of those muscles will tend to go to sleep.
So one of the things that I really like about kettlebells
is that you can also get a cardio workout
depending on how you end up designing the workout.
So we've got kickstand deadlifts, single arm cleans.
A lot of these are like our lingo that we've come up with
but how you can design the workout
is by creating a hip workout.
So that's going to actually improve your VO2 max
while improving your strength.
So it's like a VO2 max and a cardio focus
actually strength workout.
So you get both benefits that we came up with this
because NTK wanted to start running, but hated running
but wanted that aerobic benefit.
So in this case, she gets that aerobic benefit
and likes to do some of the strength work that she prefers.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do 20 seconds on,
10 seconds rest, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds rest
all the way down and we're then,
after we go through it once,
we're gonna take a one minute rest
and then we're gonna repeat that seven times.
You can repeat this four times, five times.
You can repeat it 20 times if you want.
We just like to do a 30 minute workout.
I'm gonna start the timer.
We're gonna do this in the video in real time.
And I'll walk you through some of the exercises.
Now, you can do this on your own, follow along.
And then if you end up wanting to do more repeats of this,
you just pause it.
You take your one minute rest.
You can scroll it back
and then repeat it as many times as you want.
(beep) Go.
So I've got a 25 pound kettlebell here.
Kim, what do you got?
- 15. - 15.
This kickstand deadlift here, really good
for the eccentric loading, the stretching,
and the hamstrings and the glutes.
Every round we'll switch sides.
(beep)
One,
rest.
So 10 seconds rest.
Then we're gonna go into a single arm clean.
The single arm clean is very good for the lats.
So pull it up.
That's a snatch.
So clean is just to here,
and we'll switch arms.
And to stop it from hitting your forearm,
you kind of just rotate it.
So you want to get a stretch in the lat,
pull from the lat,
contract the shoulder blade back
as your very first movement.
Next is going to be, I'm gonna do a Cossack squat.
(beep)
One,
go.
Kim is going to do a normal squat.
So this is going to stretch the glutes,
sorry, stretch the groin,
activate the glutes.
Kim's doing the regular squat, going as deep as she can,
just because the mobility of going side to side
is a little bit tougher.
Next is, we're gonna do a kettlebell swing with a stop.
So
swing down,
stop.
And I find this is really good
because it gets that long-controlled pause
at the bottom which stretches the hamstrings,
giving that eccentric load.
(beep)
One,
rest.
Next, we're gonna do a bridge crush grip press.
(beep)
Three, two,
one,
go.
Go into a bridge.
And as you're doing this,
the main thing that you're focusing on
isn't necessarily the press.
It's bringing your heels back to your butt.
Focus on trying to curl the hamstrings
(beep)
and bring them, the heels up to the butt.
That's gonna really activate the glutes.
Next is for a little bit more stability.
(beep) Three.
You'll see that I've got
a foam stabilizer block here.
You can use a towel rolled up
or a
(grunts) rolled up yoga mat.
But again, this is building that stability.
It's building the awareness of what our lower leg has to do.
(beep) Rest.
Then for the last one,
is going to be focused on those side stabilizer muscles
in the lower back, it's the pendulum swing.
So just bend over.
A little bit more bend, Kim.
You want to be almost at a 90, and you're doing the movement
focusing on those erector muscles in the lower back.
Oh, wow!
And that's it.
So we're going to rest now for a minute.
We're gonna do that six more times.
Check back in with you in a second.
(upbeat electronic music)
Whoo!
All done.
And
how'd that feel?
- That was tough.
- How is it going?
So you might be saying,
"Well, hey, like where all this kettlebell stuff come from?"
Over the last, I'd say four months, five months or so,
we've been doing this together two, three times a week
because what I found out is, yeah, you can go and say,
try to be the absolute best triathlete you want to be
but that's kind of to the detriment
of being the best athlete
and then the best person that you can be.
What I want to go towards is being well-rounded.
I want to be mobile.
I want to be flexible.
I want to be strong.
I want to be cardiovascularly fit,
but not to the detriment of all of those other things
that are conducive to me being functional
when I'm 50, 60, 70, 80.
This is more well-rounded.
So we're going to be doing a lot more kettlebell work.
If you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
And if you want to see
some of the videos from Brittany van Shravendijk
who is somebody that we've been doing a lot of our workouts.
You can check out one of her videos right over there.
And if you're on Team Trainiac,
expect like before the summer,
we'll have a bunch of these workouts with a coach
that we just signed up with, like-
- Yesterday. - Yesterday, yeah.
A lot of workouts like this coming at you.
Later, Trainiacs.