movement

Kettlebells in the Clinic

October 25, 2022 By Paul Britt, DC 1 Comment

If it wasn’t for kettlebells, I would not be a chiropractor today. I started out with the RKC in 2006 and attended the CK-FMS in 2010. The CK-FMS was the movement program that was based off of the FMS and was taught by Gray Cook and Brett Jones of FMS. It introduced me to movement screening and how to help clients move better, feel better and live better pain free.

I ran my gym based on what the FMS taught. We used the Functional Movement Screen as part of our onboarding program. I loved the results we were getting in members that could not/did not move as well as they should. It started my journey from Law Enforcement/Gym Owner to attending Chiro school. I knew that there was more that I could do to help people with the right credentials, and being a Chiropractor was something that I knew would allow me to help more people achieve even better outcomes.

The ability to look at and screen movement helped tremendously in Chiro school. It allowed me to look at everyone through a movement lens versus just looking at the injury that brought them in. I attended the Selective Functional Movement Assessment certification while in school. That is the clinical variation of the Functional Movement Screen. It allowed me to narrow in on the root cause of the patient’s dysfunction. The RKC/FMS gave me a leg up in the Rehab and improving outcomes.

Fast forward a few years and I am still helping people with better movement and decreased pain with kettlebells. Kettlebells are a significant part of our rehab program. They take up little space and can be used by everyone. The allow us to engage our patients in their rehab due to the challenge and the fun of using the kettlebell. Everyone that walks in wants to try and pick up the 106lb…

We use the skills taught at the Hardstyle Kettlebell Certification (HKC) as our base for rehabilitation and strengthening. You will often hear that the swing, Get Up and squat pretty much fix what ails you. Guess what? It is true. We find that if our patients have those three exercises down, their activities of daily living as well as any extracurricular activity can be performed with little to no dysfunction. Can we fix everything? No, but we can help them improve their lives and make them more injury resistant.

One of our patients, a CrossFit competitor, had to undergo shoulder surgery for a tear. Once we were able to load and stress the shoulder, we started out with the unweighted get up. We started out with rolling to the press. This allowed us to help connect her core to the rest of her body core after six weeks of being sedentary. We performed the movement of rolling to the press without weight. She would lay on her side in the fetal position, roll to supine and press from the floor.

Once she owned the movement, we move to shoulder packing. We use the supine press position and showed her how to pack the shoulder. We accomplished this by lightly pushing and pulling the arm up and down int the press position. This allowed her to feel the movement and perceive what it should feel like when doing correctly. We also showed her to rotate her fist in the press position for movement in the joint. This was for getting fluid moving as well as allowing the body to feel what the shoulder should be doing when functioning correctly.

We like to work the standing to half kneeling after teaching the shoulder packing to get to half kneeling and help with stability. I find that this is often easier to teach than having patients work into the post and to the heist and windmill before they can safely move through the mid-range movements. There is no set number or time frame. We have had one patient work through the parts of the get up unloaded for 6 months before they were allowed to use any weight. Time practicing the get up is never wasted time.

The athlete worked through the rest of the get up without weight and then started with low loads. We moved from 25% internal rotation and 50% abduction to 100% pain free in both ranges of motion in 12 weeks after surgery. She is back to competition weights without pain or dysfunction.

The swing can be used in the same manner. We find the parts of the swing that will benefit patients and work from there. The power of the teaching process and the techniques are often greater than the sum of the swing. For back pain, posterior chain strengthening has been shown to be superior to general exercise and walking programs for treating chronic low back pain. (1)

The swing is a great tool for working with patients with issues in the back. For back pain we start with the basics, breathing. We start with crocodile breathing as taught in the HKC and RKC. A large problem that we find with low back pain and other injuries are breathing dysfunctions. A large portion of our patient base breathe in the upper chest, using traps and accessory muscles to breathe versus the diaphragm. Breathing has been shown to help inhibit the paraspinal muscles and help with spasms. Proper breathing patterns help with balance, pain and the ability to access full strength in a patient. (2)

Proper breathing is essential for being able to develop the ability to use tension and relaxation to get the most out of swings. What do we do, we work on teaching them how to breathe properly. Once they understand how to breathe, it becomes an alert system for us. If they lose the ability to breathe well during an exercise, we have either fatigued them or selected the wrong exercise to use.

The deadlift, the deadlift drag, and the pendulum swing are three of the swing teaching tools that we use a lot. “Deadlifts have been shown to improve low back pain as effectively as low load motor control drills.”(3) That basically says that if the patient is ready, deadlifts are at least as effective as bands, stick drills and similar movements that do not require loads.

Why not make them stronger if it is clinically available to the patient. There is a lot more buy in from the patient when they have that visceral response from lifting real weight and getting stronger each session.

The deadlift drag is a great tool for strengthening the posterior chain and connection it with movement. The set up is deadlift hinge with the bell in front. The kettlebell is moved along the ground in a drag utilizing the lats, rhomboids and other muscle of scapular control as well as erectors and glutes. It has helped us to improve scapular control and function in patients that have scapular dyskinesia.

I have personally used the pendulum swing in my own rehab journey. I suffered a disc injury several years ago that kept me from performing standard exercises. I was able to move into a hip hinge but could not move through the full deadlift pattern with weight. I found that the low position was pain free and I was able to swing a kettlebell in that position. I would get into the hip hinge at a position that did not hurt or worsen my symptoms and perform pendulum swings.

Our end goal with swings is to move through two handed to one-handed swings. Research has shown that this is a great way to help mitigate current back pain as well as help decrease future problems. The one hand swing engages the opposite side spinal erectors and same side external obliques leading to greater stabilization in the back and core.(4)

A specific end user for the Kettlebell Swing as a rehab tool is our Post ACL reconstruction patients.(5) The research has shown that kettlebell swings help decrease the risk of non-contact injuries from high risk to a lower risk profile after 6 weeks of training. We teach them the Get Up, before we allow them to swing. The Get Up is used as a strengthening and screening tool to ensure the patient can load the knee safely before transitioning to the swing. The improvements are due to posterior chain strengthening, the semitendinosus and hamstrings.

The squat as taught in the HKC/RKC are useful in several ways. We like the squat as the end game for connecting the dots of the rehab program. It requires mobility and stability to perform and control of the breathing and tension. We use Bottoms Up Squats to test for connectivity of the core with the movement pattern. If the Bottoms Up Squat cannot be performed, there is a leak in the pattern.

We want to make sure that our elderly patients can get off the floor and the toilet. If they can do that, we have increased their quality of life and survivability. We have found that patients that have gone through the program have reached those goals.

This is a quick look at how you can implement kettlebells in the clinic to help your patients move better, feel better, live better pain free. It does not have to be complicated to work.

***

Paul Britt DC is a Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician and Senior RKC based in Gulf Breeze Florida. His practice, Integrative Chiropractic Solutions utilizes kettlebells as rehabilitations tools to help his patients achieve their goals.

Tataryn N, Simas V, Catterall T, Furness J, Keogh JWL. Posterior-Chain Resistance Training Compared to General Exercise and Walking Programmes for the Treatment of Chronic Low Back Pain in the General Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Med Open. 2021 Mar 8;7(1):17. doi: 10.1186/s40798-021-00306-w. PMID: 33683497; PMCID: PMC7940464.
Stephens RJ, Haas M, Moore WL 3rd, Emmil JR, Sipress JA, Williams A. Effects of Diaphragmatic Breathing Patterns on Balance: A Preliminary Clinical Trial. J Manipulative Physiol Ther. 2017 Mar-Apr;40(3):169-175. doi: 10.1016/j.jmpt.2017.01.005. Epub 2017 Mar 1. PMID: 28259495.
Aasa B, Berglund L, Michaelson P, Aasa U. Individualized low-load motor control exercises and education versus a high-load lifting exercise and education to improve activity, pain intensity, and physical performance in patients with low back pain: a randomized controlled trial. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2015 Feb;45(2):77-85, B1-4. doi: 10.2519/jospt.2015.5021. PMID: 25641309.
Andersen V, Fimland MS, Gunnarskog A, Jungård GA, Slåttland RA, Vraalsen ØF, Saeterbakken AH. Core Muscle Activation in One-Armed and Two-Armed Kettlebell Swing. J Strength Cond Res. 2016 May;30(5):1196-204. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001240. PMID: 26473519.
Zebis MK, Andersen CH, Bencke J, Ørntoft C, Linnebjerg C, Hölmich P, Thorborg K, Aagaard P, Andersen LL. Neuromuscular Coordination Deficit Persists 12 Months after ACL Reconstruction But Can Be Modulated by 6 Weeks of Kettlebell Training: A Case Study in Women’s Elite Soccer. Case Rep Orthop. 2017;2017:4269575. doi: 10.1155/2017/4269575. Epub 2017 Jan 18. PMID: 28197354; PMCID: PMC5286491.

Movement and Learning the Get-Up

June 3, 2015 By Paul Britt, DC 1 Comment

Paul Britt Coaching Get-Up

movement (ˈmuːvmənt)
noun
Movement –

The act or an instance of moving; a change in place or position.
A particular manner of moving.
A series of actions and events taking place over a period of time and working to foster a principle or policy
A tendency or trend
An organized effort by supporters of a common goal.

Movement is the back bone of athleticism and life. But, as a society we do not move the way that we did in youth. We are tied to desks, vehicles, and entertainment that requires us to just sit and become one with a chair. I started this post with the definition of movement as a beginning reference point.

The first two parts (a & b) of the definition are easy to cover and understand. We all move, and each of us has a particular way of moving. The question is, are we moving well? Most people seem to live in a position of flexion. We sleep, eat, drive and watch television from a bent and hunched position. We slouch and sag all day long. Guess what? Our bodies will take the path of least resistance and will stay in the posture that we live in. We were not created to just sit around; we were created to move, run, jump and play.

The third and fourth parts (c & d) of the definition describe what we need to change. We need to change our daily actions and events so that we restore the movement potential we were given at birth. It is time to get off the couch, up from the desk and actually start moving. We need to change our daily habits to allow our bodies to re-learn the movements and positions that we were born to do. Our kids are becoming slugs, thanks in part to videogames and constant visual entertainment. I have seen some kids play twelve hours of PS3, all while slouched and bent into weird positions. What happened to being outside all day, every day until the street lights came on?

The positions that we’re in all day do not help us live a full life. They prevent us from being able to run, play catch, or to live everyday life in the most efficient manner possible. We are held back by being bent and twisted in a life of sitting down. Sitting has been shown to increase the risk of death. Research has shown that sitting is associated with a higher risk of death after controlling for factors including age, gender, smoking status, physical activity, education, body mass index, and living in an urban/city environment.

I know that everyone wants to be active with their friends and family, and stay pain free and mobile into old age. I know I do! I want to be a pain in the rear of my family as long as possible! I think the best way to do this is to be 90 and move so well that no one can catch me!

We should move as much as we possibly can. Better movement allows us to have fewer injuries, live longer and have more productive lives. It is the cornerstone for our overall health.

How Do We Improve Movement Quality?

I teach the get-up as an antidote to improper movement and posture. The get-up is one of the best ways to battle the less-than-ideal positions our bodies grow into from our daily life of texting, sitting, and while working at most jobs. I find that while the get-up works wonders as a transformational exercise, many clients have a hard time learning it. Some even need to earn the right to perform it.

I teach the steps a little different than most trainers. I like to teach the get-up from the bottom to the middle, and from the top to bottom. This approach seems to work really well for grooving the correct patterns into the neurological system.

Get-Up Tall Sit

I start from the Pick Up to the Tall Sit position. In the first step, roll from your side to prone. This strengthens a primal rolling pattern. Rolling patterns are great tools for teaching the body how to engage the core and stabilize the body under load. Why is this important? It allows the body to develop its innate stability and to connect the lower body to the upper body for more strength.

The next step is the Tall Sit. It allows you to work on shoulder mobility and stability. It will reinforce the connection the core has with the upper body. This is often the step that most of my clients need if their mobility is compromised. I kept one client at this stage for nine months while we worked on improving his thoracic mobility and core strength. During that time, the heaviest weight he used for the training was 4kgs. If we had forced the issue, he would have been injured. He was 60 when he began, and last I checked, he was using a 20kg kettlebell for full get-ups at age 63.

I teach the Hip Lift only as part three of the movement. I find that the movement becomes a little harder for my clients to perform after that point. They cannot initially get the idea of the moving from the low sweep to half kneeling or they do not have the proprioception to make the transition.

The next step that is taught is from standing down to half-kneeling. This allows the student to develop leg strength and improve their stability. It has been my experience that many clients lack stability in the lunge position. By working from standing to half kneeling, then moving through the reverse lunge under control, you can train stability while detecting any asymmetries the student may have. This lets us correct the asymmetry before continuing and possibly causing an injury.

Coaching the Get Up

Once the student has practiced the get up from the floor to low hip lift, and standing to half kneeling, it is time to teach the entire get up. I start from the top and have the student work from the standing position to the half kneeling position. We add the low sweep to the tall sit at this time. They finish the get up to the prone position. Then, they stand back up (not doing a get-up, they simply return to a standing position) and repeat the sequence a few times on each side. The student will perform the get up from standing to prone before reversing the process and performing the get up from the pick up to standing.

I have found that this approach has helped my students learn the get up much faster. By working on these pieces as needed, their mobility and stability has improved even on their first day. This sequencing seems to be less threatening and neurologically taxing for my students, which also allows them to learn it faster.

If you look back at the definition of movement at the beginning, the get up fits it to a “T.”

***RKC Team Leader Paul Britt has been an RKC kettlebell instructor since 2006. He trains clients at Britt’s Training Systems, his award-winning Hardstyle Kettlebell Training Facility in Rockwall, Texas. Paul has served as an assistant instructor at many RKC and HKC Courses, is a Certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Specialist (CK-FMS) and works with some of the top Chiroprators in North Texas. Please visit his website brittstrainingsystems.com for more information.

Fundamental Human Movements and Training in Opposite Planes of Motion

February 11, 2015 By Sebastian Müller 6 Comments

Sebastian Muller Push Up

There are many philosophies out there when it comes to improving performance and mastering training efficiency. The following post is about two things that changed my life completely.

Part 1: Fundamental Human Movements

When I stumbled upon kettlebells a few years ago on the Internet, one thing came to mind–kettlebell training is always training of the entire body. Back then, like many people, I used to train isolated muscles and had felt okay doing this for about ten years. When I heard ‘full body training’ I immediately thought about training schedules for beginners. In every forum it seemed like beginners started their training with full body exercises and then switched to split training later. The most popular splits were chest and biceps. On certain days, you only attack biceps and/or chest muscles nicely isolated with tons of exercises.

Through constant research about kettlebell training, one day I stumbled upon Dan John’s The Fundamental Human Movements. His philosophy was suddenly all about training movements instead of training muscles.

Train movements instead of muscles!

At first this didn’t make any sense to me at all. How exactly am I supposed to train movements? It took me a while to understand what he was writing about, and the advantages of this training philosophy. How could these movements be all you ever need to become more fit than the average Joe or Jane?

Here’s the “secret”:

The fundamental movements are push, pull, hinge, squat and loaded carries.

But isn’t this another split and you’ll train isolated muscles again? Not really. Take a look at the recommended exercises for each movement and you’ll see that your entire body is always incorporated and trained, only the focus changes. Here are these fundamental movements and some exercise examples:

Push: push up, military press, push press,

Pull: row, pull up

Hinge: hinge with added weight (sandbag, kettlebell, etc.), deadlift, one-legged deadlift, kettlebell swing, clean, snatch, jumps (vertical and horizontal)

Squat: goblet squat, front squat with kettlebells, squats with barbells

Loaded Carries: waiters walk, suitcase walk, rack walk, press walk, farmers walk, double rack walk, pulling or pushing sleds, cars, etc.

As you might imagine, “push” exercises are mostly favored by everybody. Bench pressing is likely to be a lot of people’s favorite exercise and unfortunately always has priority before squats, pull ups and hinges. Just take a look around in your local fitness studio and try to find out which machine is most frequented.

As for most of the people who hear about the fundamental movements for the first time, it’s now time to get back into balance. It was also like that for me in the beginning. Dan John recommends prioritizing the fundamental movements like this:

Loaded carries
Squat
Hinge
Pull
Push

He argues that he can change your life with loaded carries in three weeks. Here is an example: in his book Intervention he describes a client who was already close to mastering all of the fundamental movements. Dan John could only teach him a little bit here and there about a few movements. But, when it came to loaded carries, it turned out that this athlete had never trained with them before. So they worked together on loaded carries and the results were extreme in a very short time. Near the end of my “traditional” training time in a fitness studio, I always brought my own kettlebell with me. I used to work in a studio as a trainer for rehabilitation and every time I finished working, I fetched two kettlebells and carried them across the studio. I trained in the evenings and the girls and guys on their ergometers were always giving me puzzled looks!

But back then, I recognized that I was getting the same performance improvements that Dan John describes in his book. This is one of the reasons I fell in love with kettlebell training and how this training philosophy changed my life.

But, you don’t have to just carry a kettlebell! Go out there and look for something that you can lift and carry and then do it! Do this for three weeks and see if your life changes.

Part II: Training in Opposite Planes of Motion

Sebastian Muller Pull Up

Hearing about the five fundamental human movements is a good start, but only pays half of your rent (German saying). If you ask yourself how you can use these movements together into an effective training schedule, carry on, because:

Training in opposite planes of motion is the most effective way to make your training more efficient!

Why? Because you will learn to do more and how to do it more efficiently in the same amount of time!

What are the planes of motion? Basically you have top and bottom, front and back, up and down and reverse.

Once you understand which direction, plane and axis corresponds with each fundamental movement, you are the big time winner. With this, you can easily combine the right exercises to train the whole body without ever missing any part of your body.

Here is a list of some exercises split into the fundamental movements. The phase where the most strength is required defines the direction.

Push

Focus on the front of the upper body
Directions: forward (push up), up (kettlebell press)

Pull

Focus on the back of the upper body
Directions: back (rows), down (pull ups)

Hinge

Focus on the back of the lower body
Directions: forward (deadlifts)

Squat

Focus on front of the lower body
Directions: up (front squat)

Loaded Carries and Groundwork

Focus on total muscle interaction from up to downwards and front to backwards

How can you use these movements and planes to make your training (more) efficient?

The answer is supersets, they are the best way to save time during training efficiently. Supersets are movements or exercises executed consecutively without a break between them. Here is an example of a superset, where lower and upper body alternate and frontside and backside are focused in turns.

Example: Deadlift (backside lower body) in a superset with press (frontside upper body)

So although you train your whole body with these two exercises, the focus alternates between these two, giving you ‘active rest’ from each fundamental movement in between.

Put a corrective movement into the breaks between the sets and you will attack the next set fresh and recovered.

Sebastian Muller Kettlebell Swing — Sebastian swings a Dragon Door kettlebell custom painted with his gym’s logo

Example of an entire training session with kettlebells and bodyweight using the fundamental movements:

1. Turkish Get Up 1/1 x5 (Groundwork)

2a. Double Front Squat 5×3 (Squat)

2b. Pull up 5×3 (Pull)

Break: 2 minutes – corrective movement: mobilizing t-spine

3a. Swings 10×5 (Hinge)

3b. Push up 5×5 (Push)

Break: 2 minutes – corrective movement: hip flexor stretching

4. Farmers Walk (Loaded Carries)

The plan above contains almost all fundamental movements except the horizontal pull and the vertical press.

According to how many training days your weekly plan involves, it’s always possible to do fewer exercises in one set on some and more on other days. A lot of people split the focus on lower and upper body for example. You could do Monday and Thursday movements with focus on lower body, Tuesday and Friday focus on upper body. This way it would still be effective because you would intensely train the different planes of motion while still having two recovery days.

How the distribution comes out in the end depends on your own personal training goals and your current fitness level. Nothing is carved into stone, but hands-on-heart:

Knowledge about the fundamental movement patterns combined with the different planes of motion is an immensely powerful tool to shorten your total training time while make training more intense.

Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you!

Athletic Achievement—And Why I Chose to Stay with Dragon Door’s RKC

March 15, 2013 By Andrew Read 21 Comments

It may surprise people to hear it but I never attended the RKC because of kettlebells. I had been using them myself, and had moved all my clients to using them and gotten rid of nearly everything else we did, but the RKC wasn’t my actual goal. I wasn’t sure whether or not a trip to the USA was worth it in terms of learning enough to justify the cost. The goal was CK-FMS.

I am a big believer in success leaving you clues. I had been seeing Gray Cook’s name all over the place and had bought some of his DVDs and loved what I saw. Then Dragon Door announced that they were going to run an RKC-only FMS based course called the Certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Specialist (CK FMS). So I made the choice to go to this RKC thing and see what the fuss was about before attending the CK-FMS.

I’m glad I did because I learned that the RKC isn’t about the kettlebell. I also learned that it wasn’t really about how to lift them either. The drills and concepts within can be applied equally to training anyone from regular Joe’s to world championship level athletes – and I’ve certainly done that, training people to lose over 30% of their body weight as well as guys like Major League Baseball pitcher Peter Moylan, world no gi BJJ champion Sophia Drysdale and everyone in between.

If you’ve been in the game for any length of time you know one thing with absolute certainty – there’s no “one thing” that people need. Maybe one client has done years of yoga but never any resistance training – they may need to add strength. Others may have the opposite problem – years of heavy weight training may have wreaked havoc on their bodies and what they need is to rebuild and gain some mobility before they end up hurt, or worse. Others may need to lose weight or risk a heart attack. And then there’s sports performance clients who may need all of that at the same time.

Truthfully I almost walked away from the RKC about twelve months ago. I thought that we were in danger of falling prey to our own marketing and that we were missing sight of our core business. As many RKCs work as trainers, allow me to digress for a moment. We are in the fitness industry. Unless you make a majority of your income from training elite athletes you are not a strength coach. You are a fitness trainer or whatever other buzz word you choose to label yourself with. That means you operate in the fitness industry.

There’s no such thing as the strength industry. The majority of your clients will come to you seeking to look better, and likely drop body fat, and feel better through a combination of increased strength, movement and fitness. The faster you come to terms with that the better off your bank account will be.

One of my big issues last year was the removal of the weighted pull up from the RKCII standards. I have always felt that the weighted pull up forced people to be realistic with themselves about their own weight and take appropriate action. In the lifting world there is often a misperception that bigger is better and that a bigger guy is a stronger guy. Whatever happened to “skinny strength” the driving force behind Power to the People? Looking at the average weight of competitors at the London Games – 72kg for men and 56kg for women – tells us something. Namely that if you want to be truly athletic then body weight plays a large part in the equation and if you’re carrying too much weight then your chances of being successful diminish.

Not only that but returning to my point about being in the fitness industry it’s important to remember again why people come to us – to look better. If you can grab a handful of stomach fat do you really think you’re a great role model for the fitness lifestyle? And do you think your pull up might be easier if you dropped some of that? Being your product is always good for business. People can tell from a mile away if you’re actually truthful and stand 100% behind your product or if you’re just on the bandwagon of the next trend and hoping to cash in. Regardless of how you try to justify it to yourself your personal appearance counts very much in your clients’ eyes.

This also ties in to actually following in the steps of what the industry leaders are doing. When a guy like Cook comes out and says that to develop athleticism you need a base of mobility, stability and proprioception I pay attention. He doesn’t say you need strength as your first priority. In fact, both Cook and McGill state that after developing the base level of performance through mobility and stability you then work on endurance before moving onto strength and power.

So it’s strength last, not strength first. Movement is first and we need to recognize that the RKC is about teaching correct movement.

You can see this continuum developed through the HKC, RKC and RKCII. In the HKC we pattern the swing by teaching the hinge, the deadlift and numerous other drills. We use the goblet squat to develop the hip and spine mobility to squat with heavier loads. Then at RKC we add weight to these patterns but by placing the load asymmetrically we are still assessing movement quality, In addition, as anyone who has been to the RKC will tell you, there are lots of reps – endurance. Then finally at RKCII we develop strength and power with movements like the jerk and the heavy single press. From start to finish the system follows a path that I very much believe in.

The RKC understands its core business is in creating the best possible instructors. Instructors who know and understand how to teach and breakdown correct movement above all else. It often previously felt like all we were concerned about was the personal abilities of candidates instead of their teaching abilities.

I have to be honest and say that I have never had a client sign up with me because of what I could do. They’ve signed up with me because of what I can get them to do and the results they see in my other clients. Think about a high school PE teacher for a moment. Do you ever see one post on Facebook a picture of them out-performing the kids they are in charge of? I’d hope not because that kind of ego has no place in education. Our role as RKCs is no different and that show-off attitude as well as having the focus solely on our physical abilities has to go. It’s all about your clients – your kids in this sense – having the best experience they can with you, not about what you can do.

Without wanting to go too deeply into the psychology of training I also need to point out that if you base your sense of self worth on what you can do, when you get to forty and beyond you’re in for some depressing times. Performance drops as you age and there’s no hiding from it. The average age of medal winners at London was twenty-six. That was a good fifteen years ago for me. If the only thing that I derive pleasure from is breaking my personal records I’m going to have a very sad next forty years. But there’s no reason why we can’t be interested in trying to maintain performance, and by that I mean movement as that is the base, as we age.

For me, that is one of the reasons why I am so interested in movement based programs like the FMS and Primal Move – I instantly knew that these things could make a huge difference and that if I wanted to keep my clients healthy long term than we needed to add these kinds of elements into training.

Interestingly these are the exact same things that help to build athleticism. In a world that is overly sedentary we are seeing more and more people try to maintain fitness in later life. If they haven’t moved much since they were six (a likely scenario in these days of no physical education in schools and low sports participation numbers) they are going to need to build some movement patterns.

I hate to break it to you, and it pains me to admit it, but RKC training will actually hinder some athletic components if you avoid other movements (i.e. actual athletic events). Standing still lifting weights doesn’t make you athletic. In fact, other than make you better conditioned, it doesn’t make you anything – not tough, manly, hardcore or any of those adjectives. It only makes you stronger, and maybe fitter.

If you want to be more athletic you need to be involved in athletic endeavors. That can mean anything from martial arts to dance to triathlon to even things like the Crossfit Games or events like Tough Mudder.

(Here’s an interesting thing about the Crossfit Games – even though most of the events are lifting based the strongest doesn’t win. Last year a female competitor named Ruth Horrell from New Zealand came twelfth. The interesting thing about Ruth is that she competes for New Zealand as a weightlifter and is trying to gain Olympic selection for 2016. You’d have to realize that she would be a standout for strength amongst the ladies and yet she still didn’t win. The reason is obvious – her sports skills, and in the case of Crossfit that would be the huge anaerobic conditioning needed to be successful, are lacking. For her to get better at her sport she needs to play her sport more, not get stronger. This is across the board for athleticism – to win more you need better skills than your opponents, not just a single motor quality in high amounts. Martial artists will immediately understand this as they’ll have seen plenty of Herculean looking guys get beaten up and down the mat by someone who looks far more ordinary but has superior skills).

My interest in all training comes down to one thing – what can I learn so that my clients will be able to go out and use their fitness and enjoy their lives more? If that means they want to go in Tough Mudder, then I need to know how to help them run better and get over obstacles. But it also means I need to make them robust enough that they won’t break while running in training. If it means they want to do triathlons or martial arts or rock climbing or even hike to Everest base camp then I need the skills to help them do that too.

I’ve never heard of a client being stopped at the end of a triathlon and asked what their deadlift is, only their finishing time. In other words – the lifting is secondary to the performance. Making that vital difference to clients is all I really care about. I literally can’t afford to think that I only need one tool or one method to get them the result they’re paying me for. I can’t allow myself to think that all someone needs is to get stronger or be tougher. It’s just not that simple and it’s why I’ve traveled the world for the last decade to find the best answers and it’s precisely why I stayed on as an RKC at this point.

As trainers we often forget that our clients don’t share the same endless enthusiasm for training that we do. They want the maximum result from the least effort. There is one thing that has always stuck in my mind about the RKC:

A school of strength and movement with incidental conditioning. This allows a solid base of GPP to be formed that sports skill and conditioning can be built on.

I’ve been doing that with my clients since before I was an RKC. With a background in performance training both as a coach and an athlete that has always been my focus. We need to keep in mind as we forge ahead that every person will need something different and not allow ourselves to be distracted down the path that we enjoy the most when it comes to their training.

We need to make clients more athletic and find ways to embrace our own athleticism so that the base layer of movement and strength can be added to in an appropriate setting. Being in the gym is not the goal nor is having success in it. The goal has to always be making your clients’ lives better outside the gym. That is a product of many fitness qualities and methods.

That is RKC.

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Andrew Read, Senior RKC, is head of Dragon Door Australia and Read Performance Training. Recognized as Australia’s leading functional strength trainer he is a regular contributor to Blitz, Inside MMA, International Kickboxer, Oxygen, Ultrafit and Breaking Muscle. His coaching background spans nearly twenty years having worked with many Olympic and world championship level athletes.