SURF FIT (stay home version) April 2020
Clive Rodell, Professional personal trainer
Hi to all the baliwaves.com readers.
May you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy.
I hope that this (some say) Intelligence Test ends up having more people that pass the exam than some of the idiotic things I’ve seen in the Manly area of late.
Even at Dee Why Coles a couple of days ago, two boof heads blocked an aisle talking to a female and just seemed adamant people should squeeze by them! Someone in my building who was in isolation baked cookies and left them in the foyer for everyone! Obviously, they failed the test!
Strange times, nothing ever like this in my lifetime and I’m no Spring Chicken!
Firstly, being resourceful as well as respectful is paramount for survival and camaraderie.
To that end with regards to training, you don’t need fancy equipment, if you know your science, you can improvise. I’m going to post a few pics of exactly what I mean.
We are also going to have to be resourceful with regards to putting food on the table. So we’re going to sell some useful and detailed information on training. We were always going to do this. However, now there’s different reasoning!
We’re going to sell it…. But we’re going to use a ‘Pay it forward’ philosophy. Instead of ‘Market Value’ we’re going to supply great info at 25-33% of what it would have sold for initially. If everyone respects that and doesn’t just ‘lend’ their copy to everyone, we’ll all win!
I am also available to write personal programmes or generic programmes to enhance your surfing.
Available by request initially, so they can be more individualised. Then I can also provide some packages for baliwaves to sell on the site for their loyal readers.
I even have a Full Year Periodised Training and Competition Schedule Template written for a WSL/QS Surfer, but I guess that’s on hold!
I’m going to start with comprehensive and information packed stretch guide. Something that everyone needs.
It’s an amalgamation of a knowledge base, that has spanned nearly 50 years of Competition, Training, Learning and Teaching experiences.
I have put together a logical practical progression of stretches intertwined with explanations (over 7000 words and over 90 pics), for both the layman and more technically minded.
Whilst there is sporadic technical wording, I have done a full circle over the years and try to now teach in a language for all to understand.
The stretches contained in this package are a sum of both trial and error. They form a basis for the most common areas and needs from my lengthy journey of learning. (The day I stop learning, is the day I die) Having said that, maybe I will keep learning in an afterlife, who knows.
I have a strange set of eyes; I was born with a severe reading disorder. It could be described as hyper tunnel vision. I can only see one, sometimes two letters on a full written page. Taking my eyes off the page, I must start again to find my place.
A curse? I didn’t even know until I was 39 years old! A very good friend and genius presenter and communications guru, Allan Parker first pointed it out to me. I just thought it was the ‘norm’.
What I became obsessed with from a very early age was symmetry. I remember sitting in a room at my aunty Gwen’s house looking at the mantelpiece and getting agitated if a candlestick was slightly misaligned with another on the opposite side of the clock in the ‘middle’ of the mantlepiece. I had to get up and rearrange them.
Little did I know that this would be a blessing in disguise. I now think, whilst a hindrance on the reading front, my eyes are blessed.
They have allowed me over the years to carefully and accurately look at movement patterning and alignment for every single person I see. So, in the theory and the descriptive teaching scenarios, I tend towards the minute details to ensure the best outcomes. You will see that, if you buy the ‘Stretch Package’.
As a Surfing Coach and Surfing Judge a great trait to have. Couple that with all the learnings (and mistakes) of 47 years of training with weights and other modalities. I pride myself on being able to dissect turns and then work out how through some training I might enhance their point score. I did this a few years ago with a CT Surfer and enabled them physically to get another 30-40% on their point-score average.
Regarding body alignment I started noticing sometime in the late 90s a discrepancy in people hips and shoulder heights, then followed axis of rotation discrepancies in the shoulder area. Plus, in later years foot rotation and stance alignment.
These issues have been coined by a Physiotherapist in the USA as Upper and Lower Cross Syndrome.
Basically, this can be termed ‘Poor Posture’. However, the slightest discrepancy can often cause major problems over long periods of time. Hence why I also wrote my Exercise Technique Course, as this is what I always try to really address; Not the 85% a Very Good Trainer can teach you, but the extra 15% most cannot.
Not only have a developed a very finely tuned way of adjusting and individualizing exercise prescription I have also fine tunes stretching techniques.
I have tended over the years to be much less technical with the accuracy of muscle physiology, preferring to try and relay the information so most can understand. I am not a Doctor. Physio etc, but I can write a Prescription… for effective exercise. ??
With regards to resourceful exercise, it’s the technique, execution and science that matter, NOT the colour of a round disc or dumbbell with numbers on it.
If you can lift something 10 times only, and that weight is 20kgms, then you put a bag with a few bricks in it’s place, but can only lift it ten times as well, then it weighs the same!!
One of the pics features a client of mine doing a Squat with a ‘Bulgarian Bag’.
The Bulgarian bag is, funnily enough a bag invented in Bulgaria! Originally in the Bulgarian Mountains, Shepherds carried weak sheep around their shoulders. It is on Wiki attributed to Ivan Ivanoff in 2005, a Bulgarian Olympian. I have heard other stories that it has been around for much longer and was (as Ivan claims, he was) inspired by Bulgarian Shepherds. I think there is a good chance they were in fact sheep’s skins stuffed with sand. They are today available as leather bags filled with sand and weighing between 5 and 23 kgs.
Whoever really invented them, it was out of necessity. They didn’t have gyms to train in with fancy weight plates and bars, so it stands to reason a weighted bag would pay dividends.
So, weight is, just that! A load that is not easy to shift creates a stimulus and necessitates adaptation in the body to get stronger etc.
The gyms suppliers are selling out here have been inundated with people trying to get their hands on equipment in this crisis. Stocks are low.
So, a strong bag filled with something (that is safe and doesn’t break the bag) will work. A trolley becomes a strong man sled, a suitcase becomes a load, a disused lorry tie strap becomes a suspension strap the bars in a recreation area become part of your usable apparatus. Think laterally, think of those old galvanized pipes with concrete block ends, made by standing the pole in a bucket full of cement and letting it set. If you cannot find something, think laterally!
For more information don’t hesitate to contact me
[email protected]
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