I think there is a mistaken notion that exercise is just this thing we subject our physical body to. That’s the way we treat it, anyway. There’s a reason why health clubs position TVs in front of treadmills—to relieve the mental burden of exercise.

This isn’t just about focusing your mind on your physical exercise though. This is about doing things specifically for the mind. It’s about mental training.

I’ve written about mental training before in Exercise is not just physical, but now I want to link off somewhere else. This comes from Ellen Weber’s Brain Leaders and Learners blog: 25 Ways to Reboot Brainpower & Add Innovation.

I think you’ll find some useful and beneficial recommendations in that list.

In Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do he lists four things you can do everyday to get some exercise.

• Take a walk whenever you can—like parking the car a few blocks away from your destination.
• Avoid taking the elevator; climb the stairs instead.
• Cultivate your quiet awareness by imagining an opponent attacking you—while you are sitting, standing, or lying down, etc.—and counter that attack with various moves. Simple moves are the best.
• Practice your balance by standing on one foot to put your clothes or shoes on—or simply stand on one foot whenever you choose.

So, there you have it. No excuses.

A good kind of training momentum is when you train consistently, day after day, month after month, year after year. A bad kind of training momentum is when you do your exercises too fast.

Doing your exercises too fast means that in certain portions of the movement, the muscles are only steering and guiding, rather than actually lifting weight. For example, if I do a squat and come up really quickly, there are entire angles of the movement where my leg muscles aren’t lifting any weight at all.

To kill your exercise momentum, slow your rep speed down. Take two seconds to lift the weight and three seconds to lower it. Focus on the muscles you’re working out rather than blindly going through the motions.

You’ll notice a huge difference in terms of how strong you feel and how much muscle control you have. Fast reps are often sloppy reps.

Of course, there are situations where you are doing fast reps for a particular reason, within the context of sport-specific training. That’s different.

In Rock, Iron, Steel: The Book of Strength, Steve Justa dedicates a whole chapter to isometrics. You never really hear anyone talk about isometrics. Have you ever seen anyone do isometrics? Have you ever done them?

I remember seeing pictures of Bruce Lee training isometrically. He was a real fan of isometric exercise. After doing Steve Justa’s program, and experiencing what isometrics can do, I suspect that isometrics were a huge contributor to Bruce Lee’s strength.

Steve Justa takes isometrics to a whole different level. His program consists of four days of isometric training, two days off, and then sprints on the seventh day. In the program, you vary how long you hold the tension for, how quickly you turn the tension on for, and what percentage of effort you use to hold the tension.

And then, there’s that seventh day when you do 30 sets of quarter block sprints, rest six hours, and then do a two mile run. I was sore for days after that one.

Steve Justa describes how he felt when doing the isometrics:

The isometrics made me feel like a steel shaft. They burned the fat right out of the muscle from the inside out. They made my muscle super dense and super efficient. They gave me super-speedy quick movements. They made me feel light as a feather afoot. They gave me great endurance.

Isometrics let you train at any conceivable angle, using any possible device. You can walk up to a corner in a building and pretend like you’re trying to press it apart. What a weird angle of strength. You can walk up to two poles and try to pull them apart. You can get under your car and try to press it off of you. Or, you can just press your fingers against your thumbs individually.

Isometrics give you tremendous body control. The best way to say it is when you want it, it’s there, and without effort. When I was doing the isometric program, I always felt ready.

One exercise in the program is doing a squat where you try to lift the weight 100 times, in half-second bursts, in sets of five, using 90% power. You learn to turn your muscles on and off very quickly. The real trick of that one is when you stop pressing against the weight, you’re still holding yourself up against gravity. When you relax and stop pressing against the weight, you still have to maintain tension against the bar so you can be ready for the next rep. You learn some serious control.

Doing the program in his book, you’ll most likely feel stronger than you ever have before.

Isometrics are good for anyone at any age. You don’t have to do them as intensely as Steve Justa’s program, but when you do them you have to be detailed. Think about all the angles you want to work out, think how long you want to hold the contractions, and don’t do it more than 4 days per week.

While you’re doing them, make sure to practice any sporting movements (if you have a sport) while you’re doing the isometrics. Isometrics teach to use more of your muscles. If you don’t practice your sport while you’re doing them, and then six weeks into the program you decide to play your sport, you’ll swing/throw/punch with more power than before and you’re likely to hurt yourself.

I was just cruising around on Steve Maxwell’s website and came across a program that makes a great daily regimen. Parts of it remind me of Hackenschmidt’s routine which I still do everyday, although I don’t do the entire routine.

Anyway, over at Steve’s site, you’ll find some nice descriptions and decent pictures for a great routine to get your started off on the right foot.

I’ve read somewhere—who knows where—that something to strive for is to do something you’re not sure you can each day.

It’s a worthy ideal. Life, after all, originally started as a struggle for survival. It’s in our genetic makeup. That’s why we don’t do so well when things are handed out for free. It’s depressing; and it goes against some of our core circuitry. That depressing feeling of going against our core circuitry is not something that changes in a generation or two. Evolution requires time beyond the scope of human intellect.

So there’s something elemental about challenging yourself, doing something you didn’t know you could do. This is where the distinction between exercise / working out and training comes into play. Exercising and working out are maintenance activities, they just get you active and get in decent shape.

There is nothing wrong with exercising and working out. They’re great, in fact. But this is a reminder to myself and anyone who is reading that sometimes you need to train. Training is when you exercise so hard that you’re really not sure if you’re up to it. Training is where you get butterflies before the workout because you’re kinda scared.

Being kinda scared is good, it means you’re growing. That goes back to the ideal expressed in the beginning—challenge yourself each day. Ideals, by definition, aren’t possible. But remembering to challenge yourself from time to time will make you a better man. Or woman.

Sometimes, you have to look like this after a workout.

I’ve seen some interest expressed in using kettlebells for sport and kettlebell for lifetime fitness. In the past, I’ve focused on training hard for sports and being strong in general. Right now, I’m keeping fit, but I’m not setting any strength records and no one is doing a double take at the striations in my arms.

It’s kind of a weird mindset, torn between many different worlds. I think it’s cool to be strong, but I also wonder about training harder just so I have to eat more food to support more muscle growth and tissue repair.

If I was a fireman, I’d feel compelled to have some bulk. But I sit at a desk in front of a computer. How much strength do I need? My strength, or lack thereof, has never impeded my ability to do my job or impacted my day-today activities.

And I can still hit a softball hard, make diving catches, and throw with velocity. Yeah, fitness is a balancing of needs, priorities, and then there’s health. I have to admit I feel better when I’m supple, lean, and strong.

How does the kettlebell fit into all this?

Let’s go back to the beginning.

In 2003, when I started kettlebelling, the kettlebell crowd were hardcore people. I was pretty hardcore, too. One of the sayings that went around then, thanks to the Philadelphia Kettlebell Club, was “In case civilization is temporary.”

From those beginnings, kettlebells have split up into separate camps and at times practitioners have shown a religious devotion to their particular method of training.

What I like about the kettlebell is that the primary exercise, the swing, develops and coordinates the entire back side of the body. If you’re working a desk job, it’s pretty easy to lose that connection, and it’s pretty easy for your back to get very weak.

So, at the minimum, the kettlebell swing, done properly, is an exercise to develop and coordinate the musculature of the backside of the body. There are a lot of side benefits:

• Repetition swing work improving cardiovascular fitness
• Single arm swing work increasing grip strength
• Hand to hand swing work developing coordination, concentration, and grip strength
• Stomach development from flexing at certain portions of the swing movement

People say the swing is the king for a reason.

There are a variety of kettlebell exercises you can do aside from the swing, but the swing is the foundational movement and gives the greatest bang for the buck. It’s not a bicep curl. It’s an exercise where you need to put in the time to do it the right way and get the benefits.

A long term approach to kettlebells—and to fitness in general—includes the swing as an exercise to continually strengthen the back and give it plenty of endurance. That is why the swing must be done properly with attention to detail and respect for the exercise.

In my 20′s, I would never be satisfied with doing just one exercise. I’d want to incorporate new and advanced exercises and see how strong I could get. In my 30s, I have this silent voice that says, “Is this effective? How much do I really need?”

What I’m finding now is that the years go fast once you’re out of school, and things I never thought would happen to me, are. Like poor posture. That one really snuck up on me—I was in denial for awhile. If you’re an office worker, maybe it’s already snuck up on you…

A simplistic reliance on a few key exercises (like the swing), a zest for life, a good measure of self-discipline, a positive attitude, and good, old-fashioned self awareness make an excellent exercise recipe.

I’ve been exercising consistently again after moving back to Wisconsin. It’s just been exercise though—not training.

There’s a difference. Maybe it’s just a difference in my head, but it’s instructive to think of this difference when you’re planning you’re long term approach to life and body ownership.

Exercise is the long term approach to body ownership. Exercise is an acknowledgment of the body and the need to put it through its paces now and again. You’re doing a little something, consistently. It’s not going to build big muscles, but it will keep you lean and trim, when combined with sensible eating.

Training is something you do to elevate your body to another level for a specific reason. You might train hard to develop mental qualities like persistence and determination. You might train hard for a sport.

From an office worked perspective, we only need a consistent program of light exercise.

We’ll leave training to those who really need or want it. Athletes, weekend warriors, people with mental and emotional problems (hard exercise burns off mental and emotional problems like liquid nitrogen burns off a wart), and those people who crave the physical challenge.

So, for office workers, here are some exercise strategies:

• Eat in accordance to what you expend. It’s kind of like spending in accordance to what you earn. With the body it’s a little more complicated because some people like to store fat, but if you’re watching what you eat you’re not going to get morbidly obese, that’s for sure.
• Do a little bit of exercise each day. I like push ups, pull ups, and squats. I like kettlebell swings, too.
• Do things that reverse the posture you spend the majority of your day in. Stand and arch rearward, pretending like you’re wrapping your back around a Swiss ball. Reach up with your arms and stretch your shoulders. Touch your toes. Balance on one foot.

None of these things are going to build big muscles. But what they do is help to use your body and keep it active.

The body has this uncanny unconscious ability to adapt to what you throw at it. If you do a lot of squats, you get good at squats. Your legs get bigger. You might be able to run a little better and jump a little higher.

That same principal that unconsciously builds the body when you do squats and other exercises works in reverse. If you don’t do anything, your body rewires itself to gradually remove your capacity for doing things in general. It’s just a protective mechanism. Your body doesn’t want to get injured so it puts a governor on its capabilities until you exercise or train to alter the limits of the governor.

The problem with the governor is that it’s a slippery slope. Each day, week, month, year, and decade of decreased activity supports the body’s limiting governor. Since we’re living a lot longer these days, it makes sense to stop the slippery slope so you can enjoy your older years a bit more.

P.S. The simple exercise I’m talking about doesn’t require agym membership or research in the latest methods in fitness—you just need to move. Consistently. Hop to it.

The oft-repeated analogy about putting food in the body being like putting fuel in your car’s gas tank is completely wrong.

Your car can’t run on empty.

But, your body can.

Tired and fatigued, your body can press on to accomplish feats of endurance that so-called modern man can’t conceive of.

Take any story from the early settlers in the West. Or, take this story from Bernard Shank’s Wilderness Survival:

A man was mauled by a bear and his hunting companions took his gun and left him for dead. Enraged, he crawled across half the state of South Dakota so he could find his hunting companions and kill them for deserting him.

The car stalls when it’s out of fuel. The body is different, it’s subservient to the mind. We really don’t know what limitations there are with the mind, but the amazing feats of endurance have roots in the mind’s power to will survival, and they offer us a glimpse of what is possible given the right motivation.

I did Chris Caracci’s Navy Seal Burnout PT tonight. It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten, and I daresay that I didn’t eat the best food today. But I nailed that workout because my mind willed my body to endure. And I was afraid of incurring the ex-Navy Seal’s wrath.

If I’m skating by in my training and exercise, I sometimes find that I’m skating by in life, too—that I’m not pushing myself as much as I could. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe avenues just open up for you when you use physical training to destroy conservatively set mental barriers.

Even if avenues don’t open up, you’ll feel and look a helluva lot better.

Form is usually a missing component in the beginner’s exercise program. A lot of people have a hard time coordinating the muscles they haven’t used. It makes sense. Sitting at a desk isn’t the most demanding activity.

That’s why a simplistic approach works well. Get good at a few different exercises and then develop that exercise to a deep level. You can increase the benefit of an exercise over time by making it into a meditative, deepening experience.

Experiment with body position, where you focus your eyes, and with what your intention is. (The deadlift, for example, goes better for me if I imagine pushing the floor away from myself—that’s my intention.)

Learn how to use your entire body to perform an exercise, even if it’s a supposed upper body or lower body exercise. Put your mind into your entire body and try to interpret exactly where every part of your body is.

What many people attempt to do now is to separate something which can’t be separated: the body and the mind. The mind is off reading the news, watching the television, reading a book, or thinking about the day’s events while the body is moving around stupidly, devoid of its master.

Learn to shut all that down and devote a short amount of time to being strictly with your mind and body as you coordinate it in movement.

This isn’t your obligatory 30 minutes of mind-numbing cardio. This is a combination of mental and physical exercise. It’s about using your mind to improve your exercise to get better results in less time. It’s not a quick fix. Exercise is something you have to do for the rest of your life.

Might as well get good at it.

Start by checking out the descriptions and videos on the exercise page.