MoveStrong Strength & Movement
Moving Better Every Day For a Stronger Life
What do you need to thrive in your fitness, strength and health plans?
I’m just a passionate trainer, standing in front of you, asking how can I help?
That’s my goal as a trainer, as a business owner and just plain ‘ol me. My drive and what I want to spend my time doing is helping people, but only those who want to thrive, not just survive.
Watch the very open and honest video below and talk to me.
What’s the best hack to getting results Jamie?
I get frequent and some very awesome questions from both in-person personal training and online clients. One common query surrounds hacks. A shortcut to good ol fashioned time, patience oh, and putting in the hard yards.
I get asked about oils, shakes, best carbs, food timing, supplements, exercise routines, recovery methods for enhanced performance and recovery … all except one extraordinarily simple thing we do every day. This one thing for the most part, we don’t do very well but once improved, really can be a powerful performance enhancer in all aspects of our life.
Drum Roll… Sleep more.
We’ve all experienced those foggy days after waking up prematurely perhaps, or maybe after a late night or an interrupted nights slumber owing to a feisty family of possums who have been practicing their Irish dancing on your roof! This latter fits the description of my last 4 nights … sigh, yawn!
We all know we probably should sleep more, shooting for those recommended 7 to 8 hours a night. Yeah, I know, you’ve probably claimed at some time to do just fine on 5 hours a night like Elon Musk or Donald Trump who claims to sleep 4-5 hours a night and maybe you are one of those rare individuals who claim the same. However, the vast majority of people need 7 to 8 hours of clean sleep per night to recover and rejuvenate.
Contrary to what some say about getting used to reduced sleep periods, the body still needs the 7 to 8 hours+ to sequence a series of bodily processes to recover from the previous day and especially if you exercise frequently and expect to see results.
Board-certified sleep medicine doctor and neurologist W. Christopher Winter, M.D., of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, and author of the upcoming book, The Sleep Solution, says if it takes you about 10 to 15 minutes to conk out, you only get up once or twice at night, and you wake up before your alarm, you’re sleeping at the right level of efficiency – especially if you feel well-rested throughout the day. “You’re really looking for that happy medium.”
As for conditioning yourself to reduced sleep, If you’re falling asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow or while relaxing in front of the TV in the evening, chances are you’re not getting enough sleep though. It is a fine balance.
So, yes, getting those 7 to 8 hours is a balance you get to experiment with but happens during sleep that’s so important for all you exercisers?
A brief look at the stages of sleep
1.
2.
3.
You can see the list of benefits of stage 3 and do you think we’re helping ourselves by missing out on these? Can we really recover from our training and work if we’re missing out on essential snooze time?
Maybe keep track of your sleep over the next few nights, note what time you go to bed at assuming you’re not drifting off on the sofa and of course note what time you wake at. If you’re feeling under par during the and getting less than 7 hours sleep, perhaps it’s time to address what time you go to bed at.
On that note, I’ll stop here so you can plan your bed time – oh, and maybe investigate turning off blue light devices and changing your smart devices night mode to the orange back light.
Night night
Good any thoughts? Drop me a note if you’d like.
First off let me remind you that I’m no expert in anything. Yes, I teach people how to move better, get stronger and fitter and how to make healthier nutritional choices. Whilst I’m not an expert, I am a practitioner of all the above.
Today I am going to let you in on my secret at getting better at the things I hope to make look proficient, natural and better than average – again, I am not at expert.
Every week in the gym I hear people say that they’re not as agile as me, not as strong as me, not as good at lifting heavy stuff as me and not as good at food prep / cooking / choosing healthier food as me. No comment yet as to my beard growing prowess sadly!
Here’s a list of ‘me’:
I am far from an expert in anything but the last point is the driver to improving all the weaker points.
Now, you may consider these weaknesses as an apt description of normal for the vast majority of the population – so I am average, ‘yay’!
You could be thinking I may have some otherworldly control of my will. Ha! Nope. Trust me, when the overload light in my heads dashboard is flashing, I have negligible will power. Every morning starts, like most of us, with the will to win the day or at least to get through it. But you know, stuff happens throughout the day that chips away at the will power block until it’s gone at some point.
This past fortnight I’ve been working on our home improvement list that’s included quite a few trips to ikea. I remembering thinking to myself about assembling flat packs years ago and how fiddly it was (including some early ikea pieces), how some parts didn’t quite marry up, how a screw or 3 was missing and how the piece of furniture seemed to loosen up within a few months. I had this in my mind as I drove home with our chest of drawers, kind of dreading the assembly of our new furniture addition.
There is no long story to cut short – I had the chest of drawers up and assembled without a single blister in 45 minutes. The second piece I bought the week after, a larger chest of drawers I assembled whilst having a phone call with my wife overseas and now, another week later, I’m embarking upon assembling a 40 box storage system for around the TV (the Best system, look it up).
That initial fear driving home was quickly quashed as it became very apparent that ikea was on their A game after I completed the first piece.
The instructions first off, tell you everything you need to know. To scale illustrations of each screw, whatchamacallit, dooda and fiddlymadink. Each step is clearly illustrated without fuss or confusion and little tips are given along the way. Each piece of the chest of drawers was incredibly well designed and the assembly even seemed intuitive, like a smartphone as it where.
What the heck happened? How have ikea mastered the ability to make building their flat-packs so easy?
I imagine it’s been the cumulative affect of fine tuning over many years. Making mistakes, taking feedback, learning and moving forward with lots of little adjustments. This is probably a continuous process, not something that happens once a year, you know, like after Christmas or lent, or because a birthday party is coming up and you’ve to fit into that little black number!
Uur, you get what I mean! They practiced making thing better and they progressed.
So what has this got to do with me, my imperfections and how it seems like I’m better than average at a few things?
Because I fine tune all the time.
Practice Makes Progress
I am certainly not ‘just’ better, stronger, fitter and more agile than everyone because it’s who I am, it’s because I care enough to make these things part of my daily life practice.
‘If it’s at all important, do it every day’
If you care to progress your life and think it’s too much, there’s too much to do, here’s how to start:
Before I sign off, my gym goal for the year is get my first unsupported handstand. Yeah I know, I’m 45 years of age and really don’t need to do a handstand, except I’d like to try to do it. It’s on my goal list.
My handstand lists simplest thing to work on first was wrist mobility to support me. My current item is a tuck balance, where Im supporting myself briefly upside down with my knees tucked into my stomach. From here I’ll gradually work on getting my legs up in the air.
No rush, just reasonable steps to practice towards progress.
The previous three articles (back to breathing, breath like your ancestors, eight benefits of optimising your breathing) have made the case that most people breathe more than necessary and could benefit from reducing their breathing to a more appropriate level. This article provides some first steps in this process.
You will obtain better results by buying and reading one of the books written on the topic, or better yet getting personalised coaching, but many people will want to try out the idea before they make a commitment. And many others will want to get started before their book arrives or before they find an instructor. So here are some ways to get started.
Breathing has the unusual distinction of being both a voluntary and involuntary activity. Thus it is possible to reduce your breathing for as long as you maintain attention.
Unfortunately, when you stop paying attention, your breathing will return to its current ‘default setting’.
However if reduced breathing is maintained for more than about twenty minutes it will begin to make changes to your breathing centre – to recalibrate it towards normal healthy breathing rate. This article will look at some of the ways to do this. The same types of processes can also be used to quickly raise CO2 levels for various short term effects which will be discussed in the next article.
The first step towards reducing baseline breathing is to recognise the factors that contribute to increased breathing in the first place, and try to stop them from happening:
If you suffer from nose blockages there will be tips in the next article for dealing with this on a short term basis. Generally once your breathing is reduced to a healthy level, nose blockages will be drastically reduced.
This can present something of a vicious cycle. You need to breathe through your nose, so that you can reduce your breathing, so that you can unblock your nose so that you can breathe through your nose…. For some people medication may be needed in the short term to break this cycle and make full time nose breathing possible.
Many people even tape their mouths shut at night or use this glue as a way of ensuring that they nose breath throughout the night. Personally I prefer the tape, but for anyone with a beard or very sensitive skin around the lips, the glue is a more realistic option. The improvement in sleep quality can be remarkable.
Practicing reduced breathing
Within the OS system one of the basic resets is to simply spend time focusing on breathing through your nose, using your diaphragm. This is done in a variety of positions in order to make breathing diaphragmatically automatic regardless of what you are doing.
Seeing as you are already doing this (you are, aren’t you?) it is an obvious opportunity to practice reduced breathing at the same time. Your aim is to reduce your breathing to the point that you feel a mild ‘air hunger’ or desire to breath more, but you do not want the process to be stressful at all. If you attempt to restrict your breathing too much you will activate your stress response- which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve.
There are many different techniques to help focus on breathing less, but before discussing them I would like you to try simply breathing less. Lie down and spend a few minutes breathing nasally and diaphragmatically, and simply be mindful of trying to breathe as little as possible while still remaining comfortable.
Ask yourself the question ‘how much do I actually need to breathe?’
When you do this, look out for some signs that you are successfully raising your blood CO2 levels. You may find that any of the following happen:
Go on …. Try it for a few minutes, then come back and keep reading.
Some people will have a significant amount of success simply by following the instructions above, but it is more effective with some extra tips. Here are some to try.
Resetting your breathing centre through exercise
Perhaps the simplest way to increase carbon dioxide levels (and hence reset the breathing centre) is through exercise while nose breathing. As the amount of breathing required is increased during activity, it becomes extremely unlikely that you will be able to breathe more than necessary while nose breathing.
Go for a walk, run or combination of both depending on your level of fitness and the state of your breathing. Simply go as fast as you can while maintaining nose breathing, and staying relatively comfortable. Even people who are used to running up large hills are likely to find that they need to walk up the hills when they first begin – the trick is to not let your ego get in the way. There is no need to think about your breathing –just focus on maintaining nose breathing, and continuing to move at the fastest pace that is comfortable.
The same principal can be applied to any physical activity. Simply let your pace be governed by how much you are able to do while nose breathing. In addition to the benefits to your breathing, this is also a great way to avoid overtraining by limiting your intensity.
Should you ever mouth breath while exercising?
Purely from a health perspective, probably not. From a fitness and performance perspective the answer is a little more complex. For example:
Nose breathing however should be the default option, and mouth breathing the carefully considered exception.
Next time – Ways that reduced breathing can be used for immediate short term relief for various health issues.
(Spoiler – it works way better if you are also making long term changes to your default breathing pattern, as described above – so get started!!)
This article is intended as information only, and should not be viewed as medical advice. It is not written by a medical professional, and it takes no account of your own individual circumstances.
If you have been following this series you may have started to think that I am making some rather wild claims about the degree that over breathing may be harming you, and the extent to which normalising your breathing could improve your health. I have described light breathing as the ideal based on evidence that it is what we were born doing (part 1) and that it is how our ancestors breathed (part 2) But some readers are going to want to know the details – what is actually going on in your body when you change the volume of your breathing? (If that is you then thanks for making it this far) Here are eight ways that optimising your breathing volume can affect your body:
Let’s start with the elephant in the room –‘won’t you get less oxygen if you breathe less?’ Believe it or not, increasing your breathing above the optimum amount barely changes the amount of oxygen in your blood.
If you were to measure the oxygen saturation in your blood it might be 99%. Deliberately hyperventilate and it will rise to 100%. Reduce your breathing as much as you can bare and it might fall to 97% (I am assuming you are not an expert free diver or escapologist who has trained yourself to ignore all of your body’s signals to breath – these people can hold their breath until their oxygen saturation falls below 50%. Even in this extreme case, it might take three minutes of breath holding before oxygen saturation falls below 90%).
You might think that maybe this extra couple of percent of oxygen that can be gained might still make over breathing worthwhile, but there is another factor at play.
C02 concentrations are far more sensitive to breathing volume than oxygen concentrations are, and higher C02 levels encourage the release of oxygen from your haemoglobin. So breathing less means that your blood picks up virtually the same amount of oxygen in your lungs, and then releases a much greater proportion of this oxygen into the cells of your body.
Breathing less actually means that oxygen is delivered to your cells more effectively.
This phenomenon is known as the Bohr Effect. It seems strange… until you consider how it enables your body to function during exercise. We are all familiar with how exercise leads to an increased requirement for oxygen leading to an increase in breathing and heart rate. But what happens when the activity is localised. For example if you are kayaking or bench pressing how does your body know to deliver large amounts of extra oxygen to the muscles being used but not to the leg muscles?
The answer is the Bohr effect – the working muscles produce C02 which then facilitates the release of extra oxygen in that exact area. Resting muscles have low levels of C02, so most of the oxygen that passes through them remains stuck to the haemoglobin. This allows the oxygen to be delivered to the muscles that actually need it. Every muscle in the body will receive an oxygen supply tailored to how hard it is working, as ‘measured’ by the amount of C02 that it is producing.
This mechanism is also the reason that breathing too much, and reducing C02 to a sub-normal level, will actually impair the delivery of oxygen to your cells – and if you have been breathing too much, reducing your breathing to a biologically normal level will improve oxygen delivery.
C02 has a powerful relaxing effect on smooth muscles. Conversely, low levels of C02 lead to the tightening of these muscles. Many health conditions are either caused or exacerbated by the constriction of smooth muscles. In asthma the muscles of the airway constrict. A blocked nose is largely caused by the constriction of the nasal passages. Tightening of blood vessels will produce high blood pressure as well as poor peripheral circulation which manifests as cold hands and feet. Over-excitability of the muscles of the digestive system can lead to irritable bowel. Simply reducing breathing rate can have a significant effect on any of these conditions.
Skeletal muscles are also sensitive to the relaxing effect of C02. Over breathing reduces the level of this natural muscle relaxant, contributing to the stiff, tight muscles, prone to knots, cramps and spasms, that so many of us have come to accept as inevitable.
Poor reflexive stability is of course a huge contributor to the muscular conditions listed above – muscles lock up in order to keep an otherwise unstable area safe. Sometimes, however, even after regaining reflexive stability, some muscles will remain overactive. In other cases the stubborn refusal of some muscles to relax is the reason that regaining reflexive stability is difficult to achieve. In either of these cases it makes sense to try reduced breathing in order to utilize the muscle relaxant effects of C02.
Often when we hit a dead end working within the OS system, we return to breathing as the foundational reset. This approach has been regularly found to help. I would argue that part of the reason it is so helpful is because many people inadvertently reduce their breathing. This increases their C02 levels resulting in the relaxation of muscles that would otherwise remain tight. If this effect was pursued deliberately the effects would be substantially more pronounced.
Over-breathing and the associated low levels of C02 makes diaphragmatic breathing far more difficult than it would otherwise be. This happens in two distinct ways:
If you or someone that you are working with is struggling to use the diaphragm, then the relaxation provided by reduced breathing could be the missing ingredient.
The parasympathetic state is sometimes known as the ‘rest and digest’ state and is the opposite of the well-known ‘fight or flight’ response. It is the state that our bodies are meant to be in for the majority of the time. As described in part two, problems arise when we move into fight or flight mode, but then fail to do any actual fighting or fleeing (or any other form of physical activity) This is when our body tends to get stuck in this mode.
One of the best known ways of moving your body back into parasympathetic land where it belongs is through slowing the breathing. Slowing the breathing rate helps to bring the body back towards a sympathetic state – but you may have noticed mixed results when people ‘take some deep breaths’. Some relax very effectively while others show no change or even become more stressed.
Why?
It depends again on the total amount of air being breathed each minute. Higher C02 levels (from lower breathing levels) push the body into parasympathetic mode. Lower levels (from more breathing) stimulate the fight or flight response.
Imagine three stressed people who decided to calm down by means of some deep breathing.
Reduced breathing is one of the fastest ways into a parasympathetic state, and many people who have had success with breathing exercises have actually experienced this by accident.
This effect is so obvious that it is easily missed. If you are breathing twice as much air as you need (Which is very common) you are taking in twice as many pollutants allergens and pathogens as you would otherwise be. Reducing your breathing to a normal level would halve the amount of unhealthy materials that you are taking in.
If you have studied the benefits of nose breathing you will know that the impacts on your health are huge. (If you have not, I recommend you go and do some research).
Reduced breathing makes it far easier to maintain nose breathing around the clock. There are two main reasons for this:
There is also a great positive feedback loop that you can put into action here. Just as reduced breathing makes it easier to maintain nasal breathing, the reverse is also true. Breathing through your nose helps prevent over breathing. The increased resistance when breathing through your nose means that while it is still possible to breathe too much, you are probably going to notice.
Snoring and sleep apnoea are caused by the collapse of the airways while sleeping. This effect is more likely when air is moving through the airways at higher speed. If the automatic breathing rate is reduced it will continue to be lower during sleep. The air will move through the airways more slowly, meaning that collapse will be far less likely. This can reduce or reverse sleep apnoea and snoring.
Next episode: I will discuss techniques for reducing the total amount of air breathed, not just consciously ‘in the moment’ but the amount that occurs automatically when you are not aware of it.
This article is intended as information only, and should not be viewed as medical advice. It is not written by a medical professional, and it takes no account of your own individual circumstances.
Have you ever taken a drink of something and immediately had a recollection of a previous memory of a food, a smell, a person, a time in your life etc?
I rarely drink herbal tea but this morning as I sat down to update some member gym programs I thought, “mmm, let’s have a cup of Peppermint Tea”!
Oddly on my first sip I was hit with an instant memory of my time in Germany during 1989 and ‘cheese on Pumpernickel’, a flat, dense, rye based bread. Very nice actually.
So this got me wondering about what had just happened and the thought occurred to me, can you use drinks or foods to remember a healthier you?
Recollections are varied of course. Not every memory is of a good time. But, imagine if a food or drink stimulated a recollection of a healthier time in your life, if indeed you are looking for a health overhaul. What if you could recall what you did back then, what kind of foods you did eat, who you spent time with, your hobbies or preoccupations, how you felt in general. Would you use that recollection to try to replicate the conditions that at that time contributed to your healthier self?
Just some food for thought. What do you think?
Right now, I am seriously considering finding some Pumpernickel… yummy!
Keen to read more about how and why your brain gifts you this? Read what Andrea Beaman has to say.
Training, practice, working out, getting exercise or whatever you call it can take oh so many shapes.
Compared to 50 years ago when the choice of health and strength came down to gymnastic endeavours, calisthenics or barbell routines, today we have bodyweight calisthenics, parkour, dumbbells, barbells, machines galore, kettlebells, bands, straps, balls, shake-weights (!?!?!) and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few but you get the picture. There are so many choices today.
One area that has taken the health, strength and fitness arena by storm (if I may say so myself) is that of training minimalism.
Championed by the likes of Pavel Tsatsouline, Pat Flynn and Tim Ferriss to mention but a few, the premise that you should spend your training time on the activities that yield the majority of the results is the way to go. Using a minimum affective dose approach is similar in concept to the Pareto principle or what some refer to as Paretos Law. The principle also known as the 80/20 rule states that 80% of the outcomes derive from 20% of the causes. In other words, 80% of your training results comes from 20% of what you put into it.
Think of it; how much of a standard 1 hour gym session is actually worth the time and effort? All the fiddling around with one body part movements take up valuable time instead of just completing one big compound exercise. You might think that more is better in regards to calorie expenditure, however, if you whittle away your energy on the small ‘stuff’, that have little impact on the metabolism, how much energy do you have to commit to the big ‘stuff’ that has the potential to really impact the metabolism.
Majoring in the minors is one sure way to fail at most things in life.
Talking of minimalism, let’s jump in and look at the Kettlebell and other tools. Is it really the optimal tool for exercise minimalism?
Let’s first consider the important ‘majors’ of any good training session.
These are the majors, the important stuff that training is used for.
To address these important qualities you could go to a gym hugely populated with barbells, dumbbells, strength machines for every body part, treadmills, cycles, stepping, thrusting, vibrating gadgets galore…. I said you could, but how much time is that going to take, never mind figuring out what does what.
What we’re looking for in a minimal training mindset is lack of fluff, no hassle, just get in, get the work done and go home to recover, spend time with family or get back to work.
How about the good ol’ dumbbell?
While a dumbbell can be used for pretty much all the compound moves it is pretty much limited to just doing the strength moves. Try doing an explosive move with a dumbbell and you’ll figure our how hard it is to manhandle and hold onto. Maybe not the optimal tool to get everything done hassle free but a close contender.
What about a barbell, you can do near everything with a barbell?
I spent many years with a barbell and truely love the feeling of training with a barbell. It’s best suited for developing maximum strength in all the big moves and it can be used for quick lifts. With over 20 years of training people I don’t often get to work with someone who is comfortable with a barbell for every big movement. Why? They lack the movement skills to use the bar. They can’t hold the bar on their shoulders to squat. Pressing with both hands often doesn’t work due to shoulder limitations and the same goes for the bench press. Deadlifting is the most common go-to that works fine but as for most other movements, most people, most of the time struggle to use the barbell affectively. Whilst mobility training can address the deficits in some occasions, the very strict linear and bilateral (two limbed) nature of barbell training often causes niggles, tweaks and injury. I love the barbell, but for minimal training it isn’t the best tool for most of the people (in my opinion anyway).
On that note, who are most of the people?
Most trainers start off with aspirations of working with elites, athletes, hot, toned specimens of human evolution. The reality is that most trainers spend most of their time working with mums, dads, grandparents, people who work 40+ hours a week at work, then supporting their families, they’ve household chores to get sorted, grass to cut and meals to prepare. Most of them want to feel stronger, less tired and achey and probably want some sense of achievement as they escape to their training.
Do you think training minimalism is suited to them? Hell yeah!
Enter the Kettlebell.
Look, I am biased as I start to talk about kettlebell training. Funnily enough, when I first signed up to a kettlebell certification back in 2009, I did so with a sense of disbelief regarding all the hype. It’s a ball with handle on it – ‘what’s the big deal’?
I learned very quickly however, what a gem the kettlebell is.
When I start working with a new client I make it clear that we train movements. When it’s time to load those movements we do so. We still train movements though. The load is just added to keep progressing.
The dealio with the kettlebell is with it’s shape. Plain and simple. There is no magic woowoo Russian secret, it’s just an old agricultural weight that found its way into the training world – because it gets a job done.
The handle, the compact size, the ability to do all the compound lifts, the ease at which you can transition from a compound grind lift to an explosive lift, just makes the kettlebell a good all-round tool to use. Having a kettlebell in one hand at a time or a kettlebell in each hand allows users to do a range of movements without the restriction of a straight bar or a wobbly dumbbell.
To save time and hit all the requisites of an effective training plan, the kettlebell can be used in a complex. A complex is simply a number of movements strung together and carried out non-stop. Training is this manor allows for training strength, explosiveness and metabolic improvements, oh, and a session can be done in under 15 minutes if you like.
You can use a bar or a dumbbell or even bodyweight moves for a complex, but for ease of use, the kettlebell wins. And yes, you can mix in bodyweight movements – no hassle is the game at foot, so less is fluff is more win!
Here’s an example of a very simple kettlebell and bodyweight complex that even an exercise newbie can learn to do in a number of sessions:
Do 5 rounds with adequate rest between rounds.
That’s it. Short, sweet and done in no time at all. The majority of the moves we need are there.
An alternative could be:
5 rounds or fit in what you can in 10 – 15 mins. Be your own chef!
Use any rep range specific to your goals. Heavy and short reps for strength. Medium and longer reps for muscle building.
Complexes can be built for many areas and sure, you can still do circuits or pair off movements. The complex is just one way to tick that minimalism box.
Of course technique is vital like in using any piece of equipment, but there are good kettlebell trainers available via StrongFirst, the RKC and other reputable training organisations.
My point here today is this. If you want to pursue training minimalism, I whole-heartily recommend getting to grip with using the kettlebell.
Got any questions? Shoot them my way.
If you’ve ever had a sore, stiff, twitchy or achey back, you’ll recall that you would do anything to get rid of it.
Whilst a couple of pills or a massage might help in the short term, they do nothing to address the underlying reason the back get annoyed in the first place.
In the majority of cases a causal factor is poor strength and mobility throughout the body. The inability to stabilise the spine in awkward position with poorly conditioning core aka torso muscles may result in tweaks and strains and the inability to place the body into awkward positions due to over tight muscles will also lead to increased risk of strains and pulls.
Without going into a lengthy post, I want to share something that helps most people most of the time to strengthen their torsos and in particular, spinal stability.
One movement series we carry out daily is the Birddog. So named due to fact you look like a hunting dog pointing at its quarry.
The Birddog consists of kneeling on hands, knees and feet (initially) and extending a leg and opposite arm whilst maintaining posture and balance.
The progressions are simple:
The videos below demonstrate these and really, they can be quiet challenging even to those who consider themselves ‘barbell’ strong.
The basics are always mastered before progressing to the next level.
Good luck.
Jamie
