Unleash the Monkey Army

A couple of conversations I’ve had recently have started me thinking about strength and its importance to me. I list it as one of my core values and my social media feed would suggest obsession at almost dangerous levels. And yet, I don’t really think I look like it. Sure, I’m large but that’s easily dismissed as desk jockey/all-you-can-eat-buffet-fan. I have this bad habit of writing these blog posts without a plan, so I have no idea where this might end up, but I’d like to try to explain. The weights room is my happy place. Not in a nip-slip, Gym Shark vest, mirror-posing, cheat-curling-in-the-squat-rack, Brozilla kind of way. It’s also not about ego. I’m only moderately strong and body composition is not my target. I say moderately strong on an objective basis rather than any self-deprecation. I’m stronger than a lot of people but in a strong gym or even a college weights room there are plenty stronger. I enjoy the lifting. So much that normally occupies my mind falls a...

I've noticed something int he lads I train over the years. Well, I've noticed many things but for their peace of mind I'm going to keep this piece about the burpees! It is the same thing that I have seen in a lot of photos on the internet of people doing burpees. Instructional pictures are quite clear, the finishing position is upright. Sounds straightforward enough (or straightuppish enough) but as with many thing in life, it is not always as straightforward as the textbooks would have you believe. I've said before, I'm not actually that bothered about whether you finish your burpee with a jump or with your hands overhead or at your sides. As long as you finish upright, I'm a happy bunny (everything is relative). What I see a lot of though, is the tendency to fail to open the hips at the top of the movement, and that is what I am talking about. I think it comes about because the head does not lead (and I mean that in both senses). And, the individua...

Going back a few years now I first came across Dale Winbrow's poem in a book by Wayne Bennett (as much as I'm a blue rather than a maroon, I admire his work) titled "Don't die with the music in you". The title of the book itself speaks volumes to me, and periodically I look to literary works for reassurance. Here it is, as I first saw it: "When you get what you want in this struggle for self And the world makes you king for a day, Then go to the mirror and look at yourself And see what the man has to say. For it isn't your father, your mother, or wife, Whose judgement of you - you must pass, The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life, Is the guy staring back in the glass. He is the man you must please - never mind all the rest, For he's with you clear up to the end. And you have passed your most difficult and dangerous test, When the man in the glass is your friend, You can be like another and chisel a plum, And you think you...

Ordinary people leading ordinary lives. We look for the extraordinary out there to give us a sense of something more than this. But quite often we end up putting our faith in the witless, the feckless, the pointless, believing them to be something more as a result of how we come to be aware of them. Glossy and distant it seems is better than gritty and close to hand. Familiarity breeds contempt? A prophet in his homeland? Or perhaps that people on our level make us think too much about our own part in all this... Even in the drab ordinariness of it all we plant and nurture the seeds of the very thing that could lead to our own accomplishment of something grand if we would but just point in that direction. Our ability to confront and endure a job; a relationship; a friendship; a life which by all accounts is manifestly unfair and beneath us should give us a sense of pride. OK, so it is not a fate borne with good grace but while not stoic, it is an endurance that most would not ...

The story so far: Our intrepid couch coach has set out, with turgid prose and malice of forethought to burpee on each day for 100 days. The rules are simple: 1 rep on day one; 2 reps on day two, and so on, climbing to day 100 when we climax with 100 reps. Allowing for a little, ahem, life interfering with the art, if one day is missed, it is acceptable to catch up on the following day by completing all of the reps owed. Miss two days and the exercise is ended - rest up for a few days, consider your failings and start again. Our story so far has paused at the end of day 50, half the total number of days notched up. Soberingly though, we've only chalked up 1,225 of the full scope of 5,050 burpees. The next week and a half passed without incident. Occasionally needing to nudge myself out of my torpor to just start. Because once started, even as the air starts to thin with elevation on the ladder, inside of 10 minutes we are finished. Then the entry for Friday 30th November reads...

Charlie Higson as Swiss Toni PT is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman - at first you throw yourself in with everything you've got (and if you've been out of the game for a while, this won't be for long). But, before long, if you're just thrashing around and not working with your head as well as heart and soul, it will either chew you up and spit you out or you'll get bored and be looking for the door. [Before I continue, an explanatory note for my younger or non-UK based readers - Swiss Toni was a used car dealer in the sketch show "The Fast Show" who compared everything to making love to a beautiful woman.  Feel free to swap the word "woman" for man/goat/whatever to suit your tastes, the effect would be the same.] Interlude reducing my political incorrectness a notch out of the way, we can return to our tale.  It's the end of the first week of January and a significant percentage of new gym members will alread...

Last night I saw an old woman in her heavy cotton pyjamas and her belt of authorita giving a demonstration. She proved, beyond all expectations, that her self-defence art only works if the attacker obligingly holds himself in the right position. It reminded me of my childhood and the various martial arts renaissances – most particularly karate. There seemed to be an army of black belts sprouting, like dragon’s teeth, all claiming that they were invincible. Most went on to point out that you were not attacking them in the right way when they were unable to fell you with a “deft monkey” or something like that. All of this brought me on the handful of finishers’ medals that I have for various silliness. I put those in a similar league to the non-competitive sports-days and electoral reform…I know my mind is as cluttered (and as filthy) as a teenager’s bedroom! The medals slice up two ways. Yes, they are a symbol of the achievement of finishing, and that separates those of who received ...

The internet is a wonderful thing and it turns out that it is not just for porn! Every one of us can access research papers in medical sciences or strength and conditioning at the click of the mouse. We open our eyes and minds to more information than at any other time in histroy, Alexander's library contained less than a day's search history of the average primary school child. And yet, the cornucopia does not come with a user manual. We do not necessarily immediately have the requisite skill and training to separate the elixir from the snake oil. every trip to the ether puts us at risk from the next most vociferous programme. It could just be a feature of our societal ADHD. Whether time management or prioritisation in the office; or the student who spends all of her time researching and none actually writing; or the person in training who flits from one programme to the next at two-weekly intervals, we see the hallmarks everywhere. I think it may be a combination of lost pr...

It's been a little while since I last dropped a log in the blogosphere. Partly because I have got myself into something (legal) which has tickled my fancy and caught my interest (although in truth, many things do at first gasp!). More importantly though it is because I have little to say. Controversial isn't it! Don't get me wrong, the mind has continued to whirl. I have not stopped observing the world around me or the people in it. I just have not had anything I felt was additive enough to be brought up or felt strongly enough about to say anything which would effectively merely underscore a point that had already been made or was obvious enough to all but the most slow-witted (no points for spotting the assumptions in play here!) I know that this reticence, often put down to shyness in the young, and ignorance, stupidity or passive-aggression as we age, has held me back. The general look of surprise or prompted contemplation in response to something I do say speaks to t...

I used to know a doctor, a GP to be exact, who when presented with a patient saying "doctor, it hurts when I do x" would respond "well, don't do x then". Now, this was not the sum total of clinical practice but it it seemed to be a frustratingly large piece of her soft tissue/joint injury management. Now, for years, whenever this bubbled to the surface of my mind I would dismiss it with still fresh frustration. As is my wont, I have re-evaluated in recent times, especially during and after the recent POSE running clinic with @PoseRunning (have a look at Naeem's Twitter feed or website at www.runningengineer.com ). My motivation for attending was down to the lack of enjoyment I derive from running, knowing that it can be a bit of a blindspot for me and a thought that there must be a better way of doing it. Couple that with a curiosity and a knowledge that seeing other coaches in action is never a waste of a coach's time and your have the p...

One of the roads to clarity on Monday's mental meander is to think before posting! But possibly more helpful is, in amongst some of the other ideas, is to think about "Dodgeball" (yes, the 2004 movie) for a second. "I found that if you have a goal, that you might not reach it. But if you don't have one, then you are never disappointed. And I got to tell ya...it feels phenomenal" Self-sabotage. In Peter Law Fleur's case it is appears as more explicit in the not setting goals and then not working towards anything. For many more it is a far more insidious authoring of our own demise. Hold on, before you get too upset, let me clarify - few people actively set out to lose (and those who tend to get accused, prosecuted and fined for match-fixing) but nonetheless, we're setting ourselves up for a fall. In terms of missing training defeat is not the objective but by taking the field under-cooked or as a group of individuals you are stacking the deck agai...