I am an unabashed “strength guy.” That is to say, while it is nice that as a byproduct of my training I look pretty good naked, it’s just not my goal. In aligning myself as a strength guy I am not a kettlebell guy, or a barbell guy, or a bodyweight guy. Sometimes I do kettlebell clean and jerks and sometimes I deadlift barbells.  All of those things are tools or means to the end of achieving greater strength.

Tools aside, when it comes to types of movement, I generally stick to pure strength things. I don’t particularly enjoy bodyweight calisthenics, I don’t run unless it’s a (hill) sprint, and I don’t do sets of high reps just to get a pump.

So you can imagine what I might say about yoga. In the words of my buddy Mike Sheehan (say this with a thick Boston accent): “How is that gonna make me strongeh?” I’ve generally relegated yoga to women and guys who wear pants that should fit women.

The thing is, I was wrong.

I was wrong, and I intend to tell you why I was wrong.

One of the very core tenets of the Gym Movement protocol that I learned from Frankie Faires is this very simple idea:

Move what’s not moving.

When you internalize that simple idea, doors unlock and gates swing open to a world of possibility. Moving what’s not moving has allowed me to get stronger, more athletic, and get out of and stay out of pain. It’s also helped countless of my clients do the same. Let me give you a few very basic examples to get you thinking:

• If your knees hurt when you squat but you’re not sitting back into your hips at all then your knees are not the problem – your hips are not moving. Move the hips, and the knees aren’t a problem anymore.
• Bret Contreras has made himself famous with one simple idea: Your glutes aren’t moving. Get them moving and all kinds of other functions improve.

Just to show you how powerful this idea is, you can take it out of the training world and apply it to a completely different area of life:

• Spending too much time working lately and no time socializing? How much would your entire worldview improve if you moved what’s not moving: your social life?
• Have you ever had a sudden, persistent, intense craving for a particular food or type of food? Your intution is a powerful force, and it’s probably telling you that you need something you haven’t had in some time.

I could go on for pages giving examples, but that’s not the point of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

Yoga has given me an unexpected opportunity to see or feel what’s not moving, and then move it. Doing that has allowed me to move better during my strength training, making me measurably stronger.

To illustrate what I mean, allow me to describe how I approach a yoga class. Incidentally, I take the classes my wonderful instructors at The Movement Minneapolis teach. Together, we’re developing an innovative approach that allows people to engineer their own process.

1. As the instructor describes and demonstrates the pose, I’ll move into it the best I can.
2. Once I’m “in” the pose, I’ll start moving around in the associated joints seeing if there is something that is stuck or not moving very much.
3. When I find an area that lacks movement, I’ll move the joints AROUND that joint to create more movement. For example, in the yoga twisting lunge pose (don’t ask for the sanskrit name, I’m not a hippie) I might find that I can’t get much upper body rotation. In that case, I’ll move my hips around looking to see where I can find more movement in my spine.
4. Once I’ve moved as much as I can in that position, I’ll move on to the next position.

This process is one that you can only undergo by either doing your very own yoga practice, or by going to a class but being willing to move at your own pace and ignore the machinations of the class around you. Move past a position if it’s not doing anything for you, and spend some more time on it if you need to.

Is this instantly going to take you from being a bodyweight overhead presser to a double-bodyweight overhead presser? Nope. Could it help you move what’s not moving, and unlock untapped potential? Absolutely.

 

 

I’ve been using the same backpack that I’ve hated for just as long for exactly a decade. I know so, because I remember exactly the roommate I bought it from. It’s a K2 ski backpack, and that may be the only thing it’s good for. The problems with it are too many to name, but I can try to start a list. First of all, it’s very slim in general, which may be favorable for staying tight to your body when you’re skiing but it’s goddamn worthless when it comes to packing a day’s worth of work and play gear for the gym into it. Second, I’ve pretty much always got my laptop with me so into the bag my MacBook Pro goes. Oh, what’s that? That’s the sound of the edge of the MacBook slamming into the ground because there’s no protection on the bottom of the backpack. I think the only redeeming feature of the backpack was the padded sunglass pouch in the top. That was always useful.

Nonetheless, I trudged forward with this backpack for ten years. I never replaced it because I was never impressed with any other options. They were either too bulky, had too many “options”, had too few “options” or looked like something Urkel would two-strap. When I got my awesome LiveWell 360 Luxx bag that I stole from Jen it fulfilled most of my daily need for a backpack. Still, whenever I’d ride my motorcycle in to the gym I’d have to switch to the damn backpack for the day.

When my friends at HYLETE announced a the new HYLETE convertible backpack I was intrigued but cautiously optimistic. Like I said, I’ve looked at a lot of backpacks over the years and never pulled the trigger because I was never convinced they’d be any better than the junk I already had. The fact that it was “convertible” made me even more skeptical. Let’s be honest, sometimes when things try to be too many things at once they end up being nothing. But, because I had been so stoked on the previous products from HYLETE (like the shorts, which are still the best gym shorts on the market) I was willing to give it a shot and I pulled the trigger immediately when the bag launched.

Holy hell am I glad I did.

Within about a week, I went on a little writing trip to a cabin in Northern Minnesota. I didn’t need a ton of stuff, but still a week’s worth of clothes and accouterments. I also knew that we’d be spending at least one day hiking, so I needed to bring a backpack as well. What a perfect opportunity to test out the new HYLETE convertible backpack.

 

I was skeptical of the whole “convertible” aspect, but it was quick and easy to do it. It’s definitely not something you’re going to want to do on a daily basis, but having the feature available to turn it into a weekend bag, or if you really haul a lot of crap to the gym is really priceless.

Once converted, it easily swallowed up everything I needed for the week. I actually could have even stuffed everything into it without converting it, since the main load area also expands out like an expanding suitcase. Suffice to say you can fit a LOT of stuff in this backpack.

One of the side pouches is actually insulated which came in clutch when we took a hike on a hot day, and it kept our water bottles cold.

Inside, it has everything you’d expect like the much needed laptop sleeve that protects my portal to the rest of the world AKA my MacBook.

I took this backpack on our honeymoon, since I knew I could use it as a backpack while on the trip and then convert it into a duffel and stuff it full of gifts and things we acquired on the way home. I had a little problem with one of the straps on the trip, and HYLETE already told me they were going to send me a brand new one (with an improved strap design – talk about good service) as soon as I got home. I took this as an opportunity to see how it would handle being overfilled and then checked in as luggage. I jammed about 40lbs of clothing and gifts into it until it looked like a stuffed sausage:

The bag survived two flights, including a trans-Atlantic international flight completely unscathed AND protected the valuable bottles of delicious limoncello and olive oil I packed away in it. This thing is a tank.

I really can’t say enough good things about the HYLETE backpack, and I’m confident that you will dig it if you pick one up.

Plussssss, if you use the discount code MOVEMENT25 when you check out (please note you do have to create an account on their web site for the code to work), you will get an additional 25% off your first order. As noted in my disclaimer, I’ll get a kickback if you buy it, but why shouldn’t I? I only recommend awesome stuff, and there’s no amount of money for which I’d recommend something that sucked.

 

 

When I was a kid I loved trick-or-treating around the neighborhood for Halloween. In fact, I’d say it was probably my favorite holiday. Getting dressed up in an awesome costume (I had a killer gangster costume complete with a burned-cork mustache) was great, but obviously coming home with a pillow case full of candy was even better. That heavy pillow case was filled with fun size candy bars, Sixlets, chalky Smarties, the occasional full size candy bar from a really awesome house and every once in a while the dreaded Chinese finger trap.

I don’t know what kind of horrible person thinks it’s acceptable to hand out Chinese finger traps at Halloween, but maybe they don’t understand that “trick or treat” is not open for negotiation or interpretation. It means: “Hand over the candy.”

In any case, it happened almost every year. I remember the first time I stuck my fingers in it and tried to pull them apart which resulted in sort of a bemused “I see what you did there.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that no matter how hard I pulled, my fingers were not coming out. On the other hand (no pun intended) if I just gently pushed my fingers together, I could easily escape from the snare.

Making easy progress in the gym is the exact same thing.

You can push harder and harder only to find yourself more and more stuck. Results do not come about from effort, and in fact more effort almost always results in more unintended consequences like pain and injury.

When you find yourself pushing harder to make progress, stop. Take a step back. Then find a direction you can easily move in and go in that direction. Before you know it you can make progress in BOTH directions – the one you were originally trying to move in and the new direction you chose. With your fingers free, you can move in any direction.

If this is all too abstract for you, here are some examples:

Your deadlift max is stuck and no matter how many times you pull heavy you can’t seem to budge your best ever 1 rep max.

Try working on a different variation of a deadlift rather than hammering the same one. If you’ve always been a conventional puller, test out sumo and increase your level of strength there. Then when you return to conventional you’ll find that you’re stronger than before.

Your pull-up max number of reps won’t budge. You keep getting stronger at weighted pull-ups, but you can still only to X number of bodyweight reps.

Go the opposite direction. Use a band to de-load so that you can do more reps. At first you might find that you’re doing the SAME number of reps as bodyweight. Given a few workouts, you’ll be able to do more and more reps with the advantage of the de-load. When you go back to test full bodyweight, you’ll find you can do more reps than before.

You keep hammering at away a conditioning test, oh say like a kettlebell snatch test, and yet try as you might you never improve your rep count in the time limit.

Forget the conditioning test for a minute. Get stronger. Strong fixes a lot of things, especially when it’s a question of completing a quantity of movement in a certain amount of time. Improve your deadlift, your overhead press, your lunge, or any other quality of your movement.

Get Unstuck

Next time you get stuck on something, before you push harder think of the Chinese finger trap. How could you make it easy to get unstuck?