What the what? What are you looking at? Well, it’s a pic from the upcoming Volume 3, our soon to be released e-book on Asymmetry.
I’m not going to give away what this exercise is, but I will say it is quite common. In fact, I wrote an entire article on this drill for StrongFirst. But, here it doesn’t look anything like what I wrote about there. That is okay. Evaluating movement is just like what our parents told us about evaluating people – “Don’t judge people based on how they look, it’s what’s on the inside that matters.”
Unfortunately, in the social media dominated fitness coach world of today, EVERYTHING is about how it looks. That looks hard, that looks tough, that looks bad. Looks -as we know- can be deceiving. The exercise doesn’t matter, the adaptations (physiological and neurological) are what matter the most. We need to stop “looking” at exercise for what it appears to be and start looking at exercise for the experience it is creating.
I recall at my first RKC during the grad workout I did this same drill over the 100 yards with a total of 106 lbs. I had trained for it. To this day, I still pull that workout out from the courage corner to see if I’ve still got “it”. It sucks doing it, but afterwards it is no big deal – but, I’ve probably completed it 50+ times o0ver the past 8 years. However, change the implement and cut the weight in half and it is an entirely different story. Why? It is a completely different sensory environment. As of today, I would NOT want to do the RCK Grad Workout with a barbell instead of 2 kettlebells.
And I haven’t even told you the drill that is in the pic… IF enough people view this, and share this then I might be motivated to do so. One of the goals of Movement Outlaws is to be “implement independent”. This drill honors that, and gets back to some old school lifting roots from when they wore those black unitards. Don’t worry, we don’t put Jeff in a black unitard…until Volume 4!