Backyard Challenge! Using Everything in a Sequence

Earlier today I was training someone with kettlebells and had also brought out a very cool pair of custom made paralettes from Ryan Pitts of Stronger Grip. They are excellent for l-sits as well as slightly raised push-ups (we even sometimes do push up walks up and down the two of them). Later I set up the slackline, then decided to get out the throwing knives and throwing stars, and then the Neuro-Grips, and, and… realized I had managed to drag out a whole bunch of stuff into the yard.  Before bringing everything back inside, I thought it might be fun to create a couple of non-stop sequences that used nearly everything in some way, and that kind of traveled from piece to piece.  So here we go!

I should also share the workout from earlier which was inspired by Zach Even-Esh’s awesome book, The Encyclopedia of Underground Strength and Conditioning. My new client is already extremely athletic, and the ideas in his book are great for the current situation. Especially since they really work on not just strength, but power.  I love working on power, but that’s a dicussion for another time. Short version: being able to generate power is super useful for all kinds of things in life.

Here’s the main circuit of the workout we did (this is not what’s in the video above, but hmm maybe I should make a video for it some time…). This was done after a pretty serious mobility warm up too, btw.

Designed for 4 rounds:

• Lightweight SLOW get-ups 1 each side
• Battle rope, advanced drills* choose 2 drills do 25 of each back to back!
• 6x Tire flips
• 25 medium heavy kettlebell swings (for a smaller person that’s approx. a 24kg-30kg kettlebell)
• 2x “SloMo” Goblet squats with medium-light kettlebell 16kg (slow count of 8 down, slow count of 8 up)

As you can see that’s a fair amount of work!

So these advanced battle rope drills involve plyos or walking in and back out towards the anchor point: basic up-downs with a jump, battle rope jumping jacks, up-downs with a jump towards and back from the anchor point, making large circles with the battle rope (each hand making a circle – tough but great for shoulder health), etc. Zach has a great section for this in his book.