• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Contributors
    • Matt Beecroft, Master RKC
    • Martijn Bos, Master RKC
    • Andrea Du Cane, Master RKC
    • Angelo Gala, Master RKC
    • Chris Holder, Master RKC
    • Steve Holiner, Master RKC
    • Dan John, Master RKC
    • Mike Krivka, Master RKC
    • Thomas Phillips, Master RKC
    • Robert Rimoczi, Master RKC
    • Phil Ross, Master RKC
    • Max Shank, Master RKC
  • Workshops
    • HKC Workshops
    • RKC Workshops
    • RKC-II Workshops
  • Find an RKC Instructor
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Forums
    • Kettlebells
    • Products
  • Blogs
    • PCC Blog
    • Strong Medicine Blog
  • Archives

RKC School of Strength

Official blog of the RKC

pcc

The Fitness Program of the Future—Now!

July 5, 2017 By Kirk Adams 3 Comments

Kirk Adams, RKC Get-Up

I’ve been in the fitness industry for almost 18 years. Most of that time has been spent looking for answers to age old questions:

  • How can I best help my clients reach their goals?
  • How can I get my clients to workout more consistently?
  • What are the best tools and exercises to get them the most effective results?

There are many sources for answers—and many great systems producing outstanding results. About eight months ago, I was fortunate to join the Dragon Door family when I passed the RKC Level 1. It was an amazing weekend filled with learning, challenges and camaraderie. Since then, I have taken RKC Level 2 and have been fortunate to assist with an HKC and RKC Level 1. While these experiences have taught me many things, the most important is that what Dragon Door has to offer—specifically in the RKC and PCC—is exactly what people and the fitness industry need!

To get the most out of a fitness program, make progress and reach goals, it is important for people to work out as consistently as possible. Just the thought of having to travel to a gym before or after work—then spend an hour or more fighting over equipment—is enough to keep even the most dedicated person from sticking with a fitness program.

Kirk Adams, RKC Push-Up

An ideal fitness program—the fitness program of the future—would be short, portable, and use minimal equipment. Kettlebells and bodyweight training check all three of those boxes. Get-ups, swings, and complexes like cleans and presses offer so much “bang for your buck” that you can get a great workout without committing much time at all.

With a few kettlebells and maybe a pull-up bar, you can create a workout program with almost endless variety and challenge. These exercises are also extremely portable. Whether you’re at home, the office, or on the road, it’s easy to get in your workout—and there’s less room for excuses.

Kettlebell and bodyweight training reinforce several of the most positive aspects of the fitness industry. Most people would benefit from mastering and strengthening basic movement patterns with exercises that focus on improving their ability to squat down, lift, push, pull, and carry weight. This more functional approach can help people easily accomplish daily tasks and with less pain.

Kirk Adams, RKC Goblet SquatIt’s important for a successful training system to be appropriately challenging for everyone—no matter where they are on their fitness journey. Some of the best elements of both the RKC and PCC Workshops are the built in progressions and regressions for each exercise. Whether it’s someone’s first day of training or they’re an elite level athlete, these systems have safe exercises and workouts which will challenge someone to improve. This is an excellent way to bring more people into a fitness lifestyle and encourage them to continue training for a lifetime.

Training consistently and reaching your fitness goals is always harder when you go it alone. Having a community by your side with standards that hold you accountable help increase your chances for success. Dragon Door has built that community through its courses, books, and instructors. A community gives people somewhere to turn to when they have questions or need support along their journey. Dragon Door has also set standards for basic and exceptional levels of fitness based on gender, age and weight. These standards are excellent training goals. These goals and community accountability can help everyone stay consistent with their training even when personal motivation drops.

The most successful fitness programs have a few things in common: consistent workouts which can be done any time, anywhere and exercises that improve our ability to move well and get stronger no matter our current fitness level. But, people also need a community for support and standards that motivate. That’s why I’m excited to be part of the Dragon Door family. They’ve provided me with the knowledge and tools to help myself and my clients be better tomorrow than we are today!

 

***

Kirk Adams, MS, RKC is the Head Performance Coach at Golf & Body NYC

Filed Under: Fitness Business, Motivation Tagged With: accountability, calisthenics, community, fitness, fitness program, goals, hkc, kettlebells, Kirk Adams, pcc, RKC

Top 3 Strength Exercises That Carry Over Into Other Training Areas

October 23, 2013 By Shannon Scullin Leave a Comment

sandbag carryThroughout my life I have trained for a variety of different reasons, competing in events such as team sports and endurance racing, to further my knowledge as a trainer by attending certifications such as the RKC and PCC as well as training simply to improve my own personal strength, mobility and coordination.

Quite often I like to I bite off more than I can chew, booking into and training for multiple events at the same time. As a result it is important that I follow a smart strength training program that carries over into all other areas of my training, including not only strength training but also rehab and mobility work too.

finish lineAs I look back through my years of training diaries there are three staple strength building exercises that I have always reverted to, not only for my own training but for my clients too.

The trifecta of training, as I like to call them, not only builds strength but they compliment and carry over into all other areas of training. They can be regressed or progressed, depending on your level of skill, slightly varied or coupled with other drills to ensure that I get the strength, mobility and rehab work required for me to continue training efficiently, yet are basic enough that it does not take up hours of my day to train them or severely fatigue me neurally. The trifecta are:

  • Deadlift
  • Press
  • Pull Up

Whether you are male or female, beginner or advanced, the deadlift, press and pull up, combine to form a well-rounded training template.

PastedGraphicpngA basic guideline for programming works the following – push/pull movements, legs and abdominals. The beauty of the deadlift, press and pull up is that it not only meets these guidelines but they are exercises in which the entire body is required to synchronise and utilise multiple muscle groups in order to perform these movements. This synchronisation is referred to as intermuscular coordination.

Intermuscular coordination is what we should be aiming for in training. The more synchronised your muscles are the more strength you can recruit to lift heavier weights, in order to get stronger, faster, and more explosive.

The press, pull up, and deadlift are commonly referred to as “grind” movements. This means that they are performed slowly, like a truck grinding its way up a hill in a low gear. The slow “grind” allows you time to focus on keeping your form throughout the movement while creating as much tension as possible, linking your upper and lower body together via the core, teaching it to synchronise and function efficiently as one unit.

So how do you program these exercises to get the most out of your training?

I structure my workouts in 2 different ways:

1) Warm up – mobility/stability drills; these drills should be exercises that work the mobility/stability
required for the exercises in the main set of your workout:

Armbar x 5/5

Hard rolls x 5/5

Towel toe touch x 10

TGU x 1/1

**repeat x 3

Main workout
– strength building or sport specific skills; this is where I train the deadlift OR press and pull up:

Deadlift x 5-3-2 (increase weight each time)

** repeat x 2-3 – at the start of each new round add 5kg to the starting weight. If you are using kettlebells and you started with

the 24kg start the next round with the 28kg.

Finisher – core/ballistics:

Because once your core is fatigued your session is finished.

Push press x 1-2-3-4-5

Pull up x 5-4-3-2-1

** repeat x 2-4. Complex – no rest until each ladder is complete. If you cannot do pull ups then do chin ups. If you have not yet progressed to chins then do hanging leg raises. If you cannot do hanging leg raises do knee raises….

The other method of programming I use is:

2) Mobility/stability + strength exercise – With this method I couple 2 x mobility/stability exercises with one strength exercise. This allows me to focus a little more on rehabbing specific areas of concern. It also allows me to actually feel the effect the corrective drills have on each exercise.

Armbar x 5/5

Bretzel x 5/5

Half kneeling press x 5/5

** repeat x 3

Towel toe touch x 10

Single leg deadlift x 5/5

Deadlift x 5

Hard rolls x 5/5

Hollow body hold x 30 sec (squash towel under lumbar spine to ensure hollow position is achieved)

Pull up x 3-5

Which program I use is dependent on the amount of time I have as well as the way my body is feeling at the time. If I am feeling good I go to work on structure #1. If I am lacking in time and/or am feeling a little fatigued structure #2 is my go to program.

For those of you who love to participate in a variety of sports and fitness events, get your variety from your events not your training. A solid training plan transfers to a variety of events. Remember, smart training provides a general physical foundation for all things, not just for one thing.

Happy training 🙂

Pull Ups***

Shannon Scullin is an RKC Team Leader and PCC Instructor based out of Dragon Door Australia.  As Australia’s first, and highest ranked female RKC Shannon brings a keen eye for technique to training and is renowned for being very focused on form ensuring that clients with previous injuries are able to train safely. As the head of Personal Training at Read Performance Training she uses the CK FMS to test and evaluate all clients before training, ensuring that not only will they look better from training, but they will also move better too. With a background in triathlon, adventure racing, rock climbing, cycling, hockey and running Shannon fell in love with kettlebells and the FMS system when she saw the immediate result that improving mobility, stability and strength has on sporting performance. She can be reached through: www.readpt.com

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Workout of the Week Tagged With: athletes, australia, extreme, instructors, kettlebells, pcc, recommended, RKC, strength areas, top 3, trainers, women

Run for Your Life

May 29, 2013 By Andrew Read Leave a Comment

run-for-your-life-517

Distance running was indispensible; it was the way we survived and thrived across the planet. You ran to eat and avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and you ran off with her to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love – everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires” it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known. – Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

Like many who found Dragon Door, I first came to the site looking for kettlebell information. Back then I was looking for a training method that didn’t make me feel so awful all the time. I wasn’t training stupidly, far from it, but I was starting to notice that my body wasn’t feeling good very often. My back would be stiff like a block of wood and no amount of foam rolling, mobility work or massage was even making a dent in it. But it wasn’t until my shoulder started to act up that I really started to look in earnest for whatever piece of the puzzle was missing.

Up until that point I’d had what I thought of as a fairly active life. I’d done martial arts for more than twenty years with some decent competitive results, spent some time in the mud and fooled around with just about every form of training you can think of – from sandbags to Olympic lifts to body weight and everything in between I’ve pretty much done it. (No Shake Weight though, because, well….you know.)

But I’d never really done much running. Growing up I’d been a good swimmer and spent many hours in the pool but ‘d never been comfortable as a runner. Even when I was in the military and would run most days it was a rare occasion that I would finish a run feeling the same sense of whole body joy that I did from a good weights session.

But once I started training with kettlebells I found a whole new level of what I should be thinking of as “good”. My movement got better; I became accidentally more mobile. I was really only training with a single bell at this time learning the lifts but the benefits started happening so fast that they were impossible to miss. The odd thing was that as my movement got better my desire to move more increased too. Suddenly I wanted to run.

The problem with that, as any person over thirty will tell you, is that if you haven’t built the skill as a runner early in life you are going to suffer when you take it up later on. But as McDougall says in the quote above – we are hardwired to run. Without it we’d all have never made it out of the Paleolithic era. And the better my body felt the more I wanted to run, because the human animal is designed to run.

One of the things that often draws people to the kettlebell is its usefulness as a go anywhere, train you for anything, all in one hand held gym nature. It’s for that reason that they’ve been taken up by many military units around the world so they can set up small workout areas, so called “courage corners”, on far flung bases to help keep the men fit.

The modern fitness world is full of people telling you that such and such is the key to tactical fitness or that this certain thing is what SEALs use to stay in shape. But the bit no one is telling you, is that the toughest, fittest, baddest men on the planet all have one thing in common – they run.

Man evolved to be an apex predator because of our running abilities. We aren’t the fastest by any means but given time we can run down just about anything eventually. Due to our ability to regulate heat without needing to stop and pant we can literally run an animal to death by heatstroke. Persistence hunting has been around for about two million years and was one of the main ways we could catch more nutrient dense prey when all we had was rocks for weapons.

Over the last few years this idea has become more and more firmly planted in my head – that training has to be about movement. Not just mobility work but being outside, connected to our planet, moving over the earth – and that our fitness work should support that instead of being done solely inside an artificial environment and judged against artificial parameters – who really cares how fast you did a workout, or if you lifted slightly more weight? How did it make you a better animal and get you back closer to your apex predator status?

So how do we transfer our gym fitness to actual useful fitness? I have to be honest and say that there is often, in the world of performance training, an over simplification by people with vested commercial interests in saying things like “just get stronger”. While many people do need extra strength, when it comes to covering ground quickly, particularly with a heavy pack, there is no substitute for putting in the miles. Getting miles in the legs has been a time proven method of developing Spartan stamina and elite fighters for as far back as we can find records. From Ali to Dan Gable, from Tito Ortiz to SEALs and the SAS, aerobic efficiency is the most highly prized commodity and the only way to gain that is to spend time practicing it.

I’ve been fooling around a lot with this for the last two years, developing a base strategy to use for anyone that covers a lot of ground. From Ironman triathletes to those attending special forces selection the results are now there to show that it works across the board. Here’s my list of essential exercises:

Hinge exercises –

The single leg deadlift is king here. Many will wonder why no barbell deadlift. To them I say go try to run for two hours the day after barbell deadlifts and you will understand the reason. Single leg training gives you the same hip strength benefits, plus anti rotation and a stable single leg stance from which to base your stride. Because the loads used are lower there is less stiffness in the following days meaning you are better able to swim, ride, run or pack march. While there is a place for maximal strength work it needs to be well away from operational periods or racing.

The swing. Kettlebell swings have a therapeutic effect on the back. Because they can be done for higher reps it’s possible to flush large amounts of blood into the back and offer it some relief. Believe me when I say that a hundred swings the day after a six-hour ride in the aero position will make you feel like a new man.

For lower body assistance work nothing beats a sled/ prowler. Concentric only work is similar to cycling in effect, has near zero cost in terms of muscle soreness and helps get you up hills faster. If you have no sled then high rep step ups can be substituted (step height needs to be high enough that thigh is parallel to floor).

Upper body –

Nothing beats body weight work. If the goal is to move your body fast for extended periods of time you need to practice moving your body. My personal favourite are ring dips and pull ups, or if you’re able, muscle ups. While barbells and kettlebells have a place here one of the problems faced is extra weight being added to the frame. Speed and efficiency have a lot to do with how heavy you are, and on operations that extra muscle needs feeding too. Keeping your bodyweight down has many big benefits too in terms of injury prevention. (A 2kg/ 5lb weight gain is equivalent to dealing with an extra 15,000kg/ ~7,000lbs of extra force through your spine and joints while running over 5km).

Core work –

Keeping your spine in place for long periods of time means you need to spend time on core training. Many relegate core training to the banished list figuring that all the load bearing activity they do is enough. It’s not. My current training sessions are roughly two hours long and I’m focusing on many harder body weight skills. These skills all have one thing in common – every single one of them is a plank or hollow position drill. With limited running since an Ironman event I am actually running faster – my body feels far more stable and locked in place when I run, thanks to my daily single leg deadlifts and core work.

Assistance/ conditioning work –

There’s only two lifts worth worrying about here for my money. Snatches and long cycle clean and jerks are the two biggest bang for your buck kettlebell exercises. But unlike normal training sessions where your goal is a certain number of reps you need to focus instead on time. I often intersperse these with some running – think of it as kettlebell roadwork. A minute of long cycle followed by an 800m run, four times through is a solid session. I tend to reverse these so that a longer interval of snatches or long cycle is followed by a shorter interval run and vice versa. Don’t try to do five minutes of snatching then a 1km interval run. (Because you’ll only try that the one time, trust me).

Running and walking –

While elite runners are out there pounding away daily we do need to make some concession to them being elite runners – in other words they are genetically selected to being able to withstand daily running. At Read Performance Training we use a run/ walk strategy alternating each daily. Walking has an enormous recovery benefit, is a good way to continue strengthening your aerobic system, and also to keep building the body to handle more running. Don’t discount how powerful walking can be. Our running is built around three to four days per week with two easy runs of 30-40 minutes and a longer run of up to two hours with the last 20-30 minutes hard. If they can handle a fourth day we do a harder interval session, like the long cycle/ 800m run option listed above. On non-running days our clients walk for an hour.

Now you’ve got the tools, get out there and get moving. You were born to do it.

 ***

About Andrew Read, Senior RKC, Dragon Door Australia: 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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: aussies, australia, door, dragon, fitness, hkc, kettlebells, life, pcc, RKC, run

Primary Sidebar

Featured Products

previous arrow
BOOK-RKCBookofSnC
HardStyleKettlebellChallegeDanJohn700
BookCoverMasterTheKettlebell1
RKCiconKettlebell512
KettlebellGoddessdv040
next arrow

Recent Posts

  • RKC Big Six Workout
  • The Kettlebell Swing & Low Back Pain
  • Key Kettlebell Exercises To Help You Create Better Balance
  • How to Most Effectively Use Kettlebells to Meet Your New Year Goals
  • 1 Exercise That Checks All The Boxes
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER!

Archives

Copyright © 2025

Dragon Door Publications / The author(s) and publisher of this material are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any injury that may occur through following the instructions or opinions contained in this material. The activities, physical and otherwise, described herein for informational purposes only, may be too strenuous or dangerous for some people, and the reader(s) should consult a physician before engaging in them.