Hindsight is always 20/20. Every once in awhile you get fortunate to the point that foresight prevails. The best career decision we made was to operate our business as we exist in our present state. One would assume that profits or that we are so much happier in the present work environment as the reasoning for this. The more accurate answer, however, is the amount we have learned in working with people that possess a variety of training backgrounds, yet mostly beginners to functional movement.
Many of our existing clients have heard me say it, I have learned more in the last 18 months than in any other 18 month learning period in my 44 years. This is not because of any advanced training methods or routines I have developed or stolen, but because you have forced me to go back to the basics of human movement and mechanics. This is something I drastically needed because it made me much, much better at what I do. I watch people all the time, how they move, exercise videos, gait analysis, etc. Fifteen minutes on the floor during a mobility and bodyweight segment usually identifies joint and muscle balance deficiencies. I have yet to work with anyone that does not have some form of a balance deficiency. These experiences lend support to a "rite of training passage" where the trainee must master the basic body movements before proceeding to external resistance devices.
Ghosts of Turkish Get Ups past
Turkish Get Ups HEAL. If there is another exercise anyone recommends better than the TGU then please provide it in the comments section (with your justification). Previous to receiving kettlebell training expertise from the likes of Pavel Tsatsouline, Valery Fedorenko, and Brett Jones I would design a workout at my gym..."10 minutes of as many TGU's as possible". I worked my way up to over 50 TGU's in 10 minutes (I can feel the gireviks grimacing) going up and down as fast as I could with a 16 kg. I really thought I was something else. Then, I moved up to a 20 kg with the goal of getting to that magical number of 50. Really thinking I was something else I decided to "try" this workout on my cleints. I wasn't something else....what I was....was STUPID. I chose a 10 minute workout of get up softness over the technicalities of this movements' shoulder compact principles, trunk stabilization, hip stabilization, the benefits go on and on. That is how good of an exercise the TGU is, it develops every stabilizer in your entire body.
Now that we know that the Turkish Get Up is not an exercise to be completed in a repetition for time format let's cover a bit of history. In the good old days of real gymnasiums old time russian strongmen would teach their newbies the TGU before any other resistance movement. They did this knowing that if their stabilizers were developed, their chances of getting hurt would diminish considerably when switching to barbells and other resistance devices.
23 TGU's (12L/11R) in 15 minutes
On Monday I started a new program.... Kettlebell Burn. In the first phase of Mondays' workout I performed 23 TGU's using a 20 kg kettlebell in 15 minutes. Nice pace, a TGU every 39.13 seconds. Compare that to a get up every 12 seconds.
When you've stopped learning you've stopped getting better and therefore stopped advancing in your career.
