Dear Strength Coach and Personal Trainer,

Today’s blog is from guest blogger Ian Worthington from Konkura.com.

I thought that you might be interested in what Ian has to say, so I leave you with his words:

Konkura.com is a new way to make sport and exercise more fun and engaging.

Konkura is completely free and offers users the chance to join or create any sport, fitness or exercise challenge imaginable, making training and exercise more varied and motivational than ever before.

Whether you’re a serious athlete or just someone looking to get in a little better shape, there’s a challenge for you at Konkura.com.  And if you can’t find a challenge that’s just right, you can create your own challenge in moments, then find new friends with similar goals and interests to compete with, discuss training tips or just exchange friendly banter and mutual encouragement.

Konkura provides a free basis for personal trainers, coaches and other fitness professionals to improve client engagement by setting challenges to motivate their clients’ training between sessions.

This leads to improved client retention by making exercise more fun and varied, and by fostering a sense of community amongst groups of clients.  It also acts as a shop front; by creating great challenges that many people participate in, Konkura helps fitness professionals to recruit new clients and build their professional brand.

Challenges on Konkura can involve any event that can be measured, e.g. via time, distance, repetitions or other measures, and can include combinations of many different events.  Simple, single-event challenges can be set up in moments, whilst Konkura’s advanced challenge engine allows users the flexibility to create challenges around multiple events and entire workouts, or include corrections for factors like weight and age.  Anyone can join in a challenge by posting their score together with comments, photos and videos.

Dear Strength Coach and Personal Trainer,

Are you tired of hearing about ways to apply progressive overload? Would you like to hear about something more EXCITING? A new piece of equipment? Or a new APP that counts the reps for your clients or athletes?
I LOVE progressive overload. I LOVE studying it and finding as many ways to apply this NECESSARY principle as absolutely possible. I LOVE knowing as many ways to apply progressive overload for one specific reason.
Knowing as many ways as possible to apply progressive overload gives me FREEDOM and POWER, to systematically train my athletes and clients with ANY exercise in ANY environment.

Here is a third – maybe the most challenging way – to apply progressive overload.

Increase the voluntary intensity of the contraction.

Here is the description of the lower trapezius exercise that I wrote about the in PART III of this series: Lower Trapezius – with the arms in full shoulder flexion, create a fist and press the side of the thumbs hard into the ground to unload the ribcage.

You can create VARIATION with the exercise by, alternating the degree of abduction in the shoulder, so that the arms may either be a direct extension of the body (full shoulder flexion) or form a Y with the body.

Progressive overload can be applied by increasing the volume per set (in this case, mainly time) OR by increasing how hard the fists are pressed into the ground.

Voluntary contraction can be quantified on a 1-5 scale:

1. = The arms are just resting on the floor.
2. = Low press into the floor.
3. = Medium press into the floor.
4. = Strong press into the floor.
5. = Maximal press into the floor.

The lower trapezius is a tonic stabilizer of the scapula and when trained isometrically, a protocol of 10 second contraction alternated with 10 seconds of relaxation, 4-8 minutes total, works well.

Any athlete or client, who needs to improve posture or wants to improve shoulder stability for throwing, punching, striking or batting, can benefit from this simple exercise.

You HAVE to try these exercise yourself, to understand how challenging they truly are and if you have tried these exercise, you will need no more convincing that simple body weight exercises, when done correctly, are TOUGH.

Applying progressive overload by increasing the intensity of the voluntary isometric contraction is a key strategy of our Ground Based Abs Program – the HARDEST, SIMPLEST, “on- the- floor-no equipment”- program you will find in today’s marketplace.

With a simple yet powerful technique, the secret ingredient in the Ground Based Abs Program, the intensity of the contraction, particularly in the abdominal exercises, is MAXIMIZED.

If you or your athletes or clients want to feel MAXIMAL tension on the abdominal muscles, then you need this program. Click here.

Dedicated To Our Success,

Karsten Jensen,
MSc, Strength Coach, CPTN-CPT.M
Author, Lecturer, Founder of Yes To Strength

In the pursuit of world class strength, power, speed or endurance we can afford to leave no potentially beneficially training method on the table.

The best strength coaches and personal trainers embrace the whole spectrum of training methods from extremely simple, no equipment methods, like bodyweight exercises on the floor, to high tech measurement tools like myotest (www.myotest.com).

This blog is about one of the simplest, yet most effective training methods there is, (new) bodyweight exercises on the floor.

When I teach potential personal trainers, I always say that regardless of their background (for some students personal training is their second career) and their personality, there is at least some part of the personal training process where their strength’s come in to play.

The structured, linear thinking, right brain, accountant type will love the planning process, scheduling out percentages and logging progress. The more left brain, artist type will love the process of creating NEW exercises, as the need comes up. (And of course, to reach your full potential, you must be able to swiftly and easily shift between using either the left or the right brain).

As is the case with kids, sometimes the best thing that can happen to our creativity is to have little or no equipment available. You know the saying that “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The creative person does not think like that. The creative person thinks: “If all I have is a hammer, I will find new and not-thought-of-before ways to use this hammer!”

Since the start of my career in 1993 I have worked with athletes from 20 different sports ranging from figure skating, triathlon to wrestling; serious amateur to world class and Olympic  level; and 14 to 55 years of age. I have always experimented intensely with new exercises, often in the gym, but lately also on our living room floor during breaks, when I work from my home office.

Regarding body weight exercises on the floor, some of the key parameters to experiment with include:

• Which body parts touch the floor?
• How many body parts touch the floor? (2, 3 or 4)
• What is the distance between the body parts that touch the floor?

The way to be creative with body weight exercises is to pick one exercise and perform a variation that you already know ( this is when the fun begins)

• Within the framework of the original exercise, try and support yourself on different body parts.
• Within the framework of the original exercise, change the number of body parts that touch the floor.
• Within the framework of the original exercise, change the distance between the body parts that touch the floor.

I would love to hear your results or questions of your experimentation!

Next week, you can read Part 2 of our exploration of 7 SPECIFIC, SIMPLE, HARD EXERCISES on the floor. All these exercise have essentially emerged through experimentation with the three parameters above.

Leave a comment.

Dedicated To Our Success,

Karsten
MSc., Strength Coach, CPTN-CPTN.M,
Author, Lecturer, Founder of Yes To Strength