Hail the Turkish Get Up

A good friend, who's a middle-aged, devoted triathlete, told me he's out of competition for a few months due to a pretty serious ankle injury. He's working hard to resume his run-bike-swim routine.

To stay fit during his rehab, he's been doing some biking and Turkish Get Ups (TGU), a smart choice because his body won't miss a beat when he's able to resume running. He sent the following request: "How about a write up - TOJ style - about Turkish Get Ups? Lace it with ancillary tidbits typical of the TOJ exercise profile."

Good idea, and anything for a friend. The Turkish Get Up (TGU) is such a powerful exercise that if for any reason you could only do one exercise, it might be the one because it is a total body exercise, strengthening muscles, ligaments and tendons from head to toe.This is truly an uber-exercise, like the yoga Salute to the Sun, only much more challenging.

The TGU has been around for a long time, maybe 300 years or more. If you Google it, you'll find it was a staple of strongmen in the old days. The TGU has risen in popularity right along with the Russian kettlebell. When you see or experience the intensity of the TGU, you get the Russian connection - simple, cheap, challenging, effective, unfashionable (like their space suits).

Grab your anatomy charts (I don't really expect you to look these up, but if you want to, here they are!). Your body has over 600 muscles. Of the prime movers that enable us to lift, walk, bend, squat, and lunge, the TGU relies on the Deltoids, Erector Spinae, Glutes, Quadriceps, Hamstrings, Adductors, Trapezius, Rhomboids, Flexors, Extensors, Serratus, Rectus Abdominus, Abductors, Gastrocnemius and Soleus. In addition, the TGU enlists scores of smaller stabilizer muscles that enable these prime movers to safely and effectively accomplish their work.

There are two videos below. If you've never performed at TGU, this TOJ suggests you just watch the first them to see how they're done to gain the maximum benefits offered when done properly.

Unfortunately, some professionally-produced videos and YouTube videos show people doing sloppy TGU's, skipping some of the key movements, showing poor alignment, not fully extending, and hurrying like its a race. You want to mimic how the professionals in the videos below execute the movement. Like so many things Americans try to make easy, say frozen gourmet French cuisine, the TGU is not. You are moving directly against gravity, the greatest force on earth.

In the first video, Gray Cook, a leader in the emerging field of functional movement, demonstrates the TGU. Cook is a physical therapist who wrote an influential book called "Movement" that is very critical of the reliance on machines and fancy technology that is so prevalent in gyms because they don't really prepare people for everyday life or athletic competition - they don't build basic mobility and stability.  He writes: "People move muscles without the burden of controlling body weight, maintaining balance or managing alignment, but that is not life." All these "burdens" are in the TGU.

Note that he says he's is not that good at them. The TGU is much like a difficult piece of music that you must practice over and over again. Many times, especially at when you're learning, it's a struggle, but then it gets manageable.

Here's another excellent video by a Russian Kettlebell Association certified instructor. What's worth noting here is the full extension of his legs and back and how he stays centered under the kettlebell.
Note how during the transition from ground to single leg kneeling position, his body is held up by one leg and two feet in a rotated plank.

So why does this TOJ think the TGU is such a great exercise? It looks so awkward and easy - you just have to stand up. What's so awesome about the TGU is that 14 separate movements are incorporated into it that build the legs, core, and shoulder. This is not the typical gym machine muscle grunt in a single plane like the bench press. The TGU involves rotating the torso and sitting up (using deep core muscles like the internal obliques) and single leg lunge movements firing the glutes. From the very beginning of the exrcise, your shoulder performs one of the most challenging tasks there is for the scapula and glenohumeral joint (ever hear of rotator cuff injuries?) -an overhead press while the body moves. Finally, the TGU improves your balance in all multiple planes (up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards) . When you move through all the postures in the TGU, literally hundreds of  muscles are communicating neurally with each other and the brain with reports as to the status of the body in space, and what muscles may need to be enlisted to support other ones.

The TGU is not a beginners exercise. You must have a relatively strong core and strong, stable shoulder to do this safely. The TGU is really a good guage of your overall

If you've not done it before, train for the TGU by breaking it into three stages: the sit-up, transition to a lunge position, then the rise up. The second half is just those same movements in reverse order. At first, just do these movements with no weight, then, when you know how if feels, add a light kettlebell or dumb bell.

You'll notice that both men in the videos keep their eye on the kettlebell during the entire exercise. They do this to maintain good alignment and stay centered under the weight. The further away a weight is held from your body, the more unstable it will be. The TGU increases the challenge of keeping the weight stable overhead because the weight is loaded asymmetrically - that is, it's held in one hand on one side of your body. The challenge for the rest of your body, which is accomplished when the TGU is done properly, is to maintain your body's center of gravity in complete alignment with the weight overhead.

Here are a few other tips if you want to learn or improve with the TGU:

• It's not necessary to do more than 3-6 reps per side of your body. At first you may find it challenging to do it on both sides because you have muscle imbalances such that one side is stronger than the other and you may need to train both sides into parity.
• Concentrate on doing the entire movement properly, not how much weight you are lifting. This exercise is powerful even with light weights.
• Remember to breath throughout the entire exercise. Don't hold your breath. You're going to use a lot of muscle that needs a steady supply of oxygen.

The TGU never gets easy because you'll steadily want to increase the weight and reps to keep stimulating your muscles. Yeah, it's one of those exercises you'll take a deep breath before you get on the floor to do the first one. Sometimes your arm holding the kettblebell and all the rest of your body will tremble and waver as you struggle to maintain proper form. But you will feel exhilerated like Atlas when you see the kettlebell overhead after you stand up, and you feel a wonderful sense of relief and accomplishment when you lay down the kettlebell after that last rep.

The TGU is training for real life, not building faux muscle for strutting on the beach or in the gym. The real rewards are much more important and long term - you can get out of bed, lift up your child, kneel to pick up something you dropped, reach overhead across a fence to pick an apple, roll under your car to see if the muffler is coming loose. As you watch or do the TGU, think of all the everyday physical activities that are rehearsed in the TGU.

The rewards aren't just physcial either. Sometimes life knocks you down and you have to get back up. You have a setback in your health or at work, wherever. The TGU gives you mental stamina and toughness. Do them so, like my friend, you'll get up.










.

A Tale of Two Exercises

I've been reading strength coaches Don John and Pavel's book, Easy Strength: How to Get a Lot Stronger than Your Competition. As a TOJ, I don't worry to much about my competition (what competition?), but books like this usually have some something relevant to fitness that's worth learning. John and Pavel (of Russian kettelbell fame) targeted this book towards strength training for performance-focused athletes and sometimes it really gets pedantic, like whether it's better to do weight lifting with laddering sets of 10, 8, 6, 4 or 4, 6, 8, 10. Answer: Who knows?

That said, it's a good read with some useful information. John and Pavel take turns offering their experienced advice and insights on various aspects of weight training. I found Pavel's especially interesting because he cites the work of several top Russian exercise physiologists whose work had been concealed for decades, like nuclear secrets, behind the Iron Curtain. For decades, the Russians dominated Olympic weight-lifting because they developed unique approaches to building strength and power, including plyometrics and the kettlebell.

Ironically, Pavel gives credit to a Danish researcher who recently discovered a different approach to kettlebell training called "overspeed eccentric kettlebell swings and snatches." Looking for an innovative way to use kettelbells in cardiovascular training, the researcher discovered that if you take a lighter kettlebell than you normally workout with and intentionally accelerate it during the descending part of the technique (sort of like you are hiking a football), generating a large momentum, then explosively pull it back up using your feet, arms, and lock out of the hips, with just 4 sets of 10 reps you get performance improvements in all kinds of other exercises like squats, jumps, lunges, and even agility and throwing. The point is, a lighter kettlebell (Russians pride themselves on heavy ones) swung at a higher speed produces benefits throughout your entire body (your kinetic chain) from head to toe.

Because the horn (loop) of the kettlebell will roll harder in your hand, Pavel even passes along a very simple suggestion by an American kettlebell coach to avoid wrecking your hands by ripping the calluses on your palm. Just take a sock and cut off a few inches of the elastic tube and pull it over your hand. The sock lets the kettlebell move as needed and provides both protection for, and adequate control with your fingers.

See what it looks like in the picture below. (I could still cut off another inch or so.) It works great! I expect some American entrepreneur to start selling Kettlebell Sleeves in neon colors any time.

And speaking of exercise, watch this video, posted by Facebook friend Don Andrew. It shows George Hood setting a Guinness World Record for holding an abdominal plank for OVER TWO HOURS!

Today the Super Bowl is on TV.  Some great athletes will perform. I'm not sure who to bet on. But I would bet that none of the players who set foot on the field could pull off  the feat of strength and endurance accomplished by this 54 year old. A true TOJ!

Kettlebells: From Russia With Love and Macho

A few weeks ago I got a 35 lb. kettlebell. Not one to go to gyms often in the past twenty years, I had never heard of kettlebells until about at year ago, although they've been used in Russia for several hundred years. It's been a happy discovery for this TOJ.

A kettlebell workout is challenging, but very effective and simple. It takes some getting used to because the exercises are ballistic, required you to swing a heavy weight, and involve your total body. But I do think they are superior in many ways to barbells and dumbbells that focus on isolated muscle groups. When I finish a workout, I feel a relaxed fatigue from my shoulders to my feet. And I think they are making me stronger.

When my children were little kids, we had book of Russian fairy tales, all based on animal stories. What was different than those tales and, say, "The Three Bears," was that they all had unhappy endings. They were cautionary tales of animals with human foibles, which would eventually end with the hero of the story being eaten by another animal or freezing to death. I remember thinking that being raised in a culture like this would make for a tough adult.

In the days of the Soviet Union, the Russian athletic establishment was the embodiment of this Spartan view of life. They were notorious for grueling workouts, harsh training conditions, and applying science to "manufacturing" great athletes. And they did. The Soviets were always top medal winners in the winter and summer Olympics.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire back in the 1980's, the Russian Army and US Special Forces started training under the guidance of Pavel Tsatouline, a Russian solider and conditioning coach. To our embarrassment, the Russian soldiers exhibited better strength and endurance than our soldiers. The former trained almost exclusively with kettlebells.

In Russia, kettlebells, used for centuries as counter-weights in farm commerce, were already widely used by soldiers, athletes, farmers and workers to develop and display their strength. Most Russians have always been relatively poor, certainly not able to pay a monthly fee to workout on the Nautilus. So kettlebells kept them strong.

A born entrepreneur, Tsatouline, now Pavel, Inc., found a tremendous opportunity in obese, exercise-starved America, and has created a whole kettlebell franchise with the weights, books, DVDs and trainer certification. There are hundreds of imitators, but he is a credible source regarding how to train with a kettlebell.

His books, though full of solid exercise physiology, can be sort of funny because they are riddled with military macho. Weightlifters are referred to as warriors. He describes the fat-burning aspects of the kettleball as superior to the "dishonor of diet and aerobic exercise." (He reminds me of the testosterone-hyped writers in Men's Health magazine; don't know why the weight-lifter types have such a visceral reaction to skinny marathoners!)

However, Pavel is a master of the kettlebell, which requires a lot of technique to get the benefits and avoid injury. Working out with a kettleball is demanding and different to what I was used to with conventional weights. You use your core muscles to lift and balance a large, unstable (because of the handle) weight overhead with your arm locked. It's important to keep the wrist relatively straight, which can be hard if you do not control the kettlebell well enough to avoid slamming it against your wrist (it hurts!).

You will find tons of video about the kettleball on YouTube, including some that show incredibly strong Russians flipping them around like jugglers. However, be careful because some of the demonstrator in the videos display poor technique.

I plan to incorporate a kettlebell workout at least twice a week. There's no doubt it maximizes overall functional strength, stability, flexibility, and balance. It's perfect if you only have 30 minutes to exercise because in that time you can reach complete muscle exhaustion if you keep rests short between sets.

Now when I think of Russia, I don't think vodka, caviar, Baryshnikov, Tolstoy or Siberia. I think kettlebells.