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Recommendations/Reviews/FS/WTB AleksSalkin 9 min challenge

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Ege

Level 6 Valued Member
Hi all;

I couldn’t find a thread about Aleks Salkin’s 9 minute KB and BW challenge. It is a free challenge with a nice documentation especially for a free content. Aleks Salkin - Aleks Salkin

I have no correlation w Aleks Salkin, most probably we will never meet w him in person or even ever talk.

Its’s a challenge that you do some fundamental exercises daily for 9 minutes in total.

I have been doing this challenge for a week now, and I wanted to share my initial observations.

This is a program that fits in to some of SF teaching and principals very well.

It’s in my opinion a very successful minimalist program. The exercises are carefully selected, they don’t tax you at all (you could do any exercise to absolute failure and exhaustion with in 9 minutes but training to exhaustion HIT style is not this program’s intention for obvious reasons to SF followers)

I think there is a magic in it self of daily repeated exercises, especially when you do a select few exercises. Because you see amazing fast progress without even forcing yourself. I believe this is the beauty of minimalist programs. This is not a thread about minimalism, and yes there are many other flows or movement programs that involves much more number of exercises and hence so called cover all your aspects, this one is not trying to be an answer to all your problems. But while not trying to cover everything, it indeeds cover “ a lot “ because let you get polish your most basic moves over and over again without effort.

This program started to improve my fundamental movement patterns and even mobility of my problematic over head shoulder ROM only in a week. If you consider how little effort I put in to it, and I am putting zero brain cells in to it :) this is quite an achievement.

Are there any one out there who tried this challenge ? What are your experiences and thoughts on this one.

I think it improves your mobility, the way u move, and your strength in a beautiful way.
 
That's really interesting, thanks for posting that! I've been hanging and crawling every day in the mornings, but I'm going to do this routine and add hangs to it. The big thing I got out of this is to RELAX during these movements, which I do not do at all.

I wish he talked more about loaded marches. I'm not sure how you could do that besides adding a weight vest or carrying weights.

EDIT: I just noticed the carry on Day 2 is with two kettlebells so I'll swap that out for hangs. I'm looking forward to this -- this fits so nicely with what I've been doing!

EDIT 2: i just finished the Day 1 workout because I wanted to start the program on a Monday and thought I did great, but realized I should probably do easier carries and easier variations of the dead bug because it's supposed to be easy strength.
 
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Haven’t fully done the 9 min KB challenge but I do like the approach @AleksSalkin takes. I have taken up a few of his programs but the one that I found a lot of use was his Crawlidays challenge. Simple yet effective. Worked great on my core, definitely strengthened my squats and presses. Those reverse crawls are something. Sort of fell in love with them. For a pressing session I do a few paces of crawls - forward and backward - and it activates all the right muscles. Would definitely recommend his work to anyone interested in building strength applying concepts from gait patterns and original strength.
 
Parenthetically, I would recommend checking out Aleks Salkin’s website, Alekssalkin.com

The nine minute kettle bell and body weight challenge (free!) is fantastic. If you are in a time crunch , it allows you to get a surprising amount of work done in nine minutes
It also dovetails nicely with any program you might be on. It doesn’t burn out your central nervous system, so you could do it practically every day.
It’s a great way to fill in a lot of gaps in your movement and overall strength in a short amount of time. Highly recommend
 
So I looked up Louie Simmons' loaded marches and he loved marching with weights attached to a squat belt. I also saw some marching while pushing a prowler.

The most minimalist options seem to be:

-weight vest or backpack
-hand / ankle weights
-marching while dragging a weight

So I guess I'm going to carry some dumbbells and do a marching version of Heavy Hands.
 
Aleks knows his stuff. The 9minute challenge from the title is just one of his masterpieces. Everybody should check it out. It‘s for free and easy to do almost every day of the week. I do the program as warm up or cool down (depends…) and I always do it on off days as a minimal movement snack. It never burns me out but always leaves me feeling better than before.

Some weeks ago I bought his Original Strength Experimental protocol. It came with lots of bonuses all about Original Strength. I have a long history with problems with my hips and my lower back, but this program made my back feeling MUCH better. Since doing the 3 weeks of the program I kept on spending more time doing the resets and I use the tipps from Aleks which resets should be done before other exercises almost every training.

I have no financial relation to Aleks and I don‘t know him, but I can tell you if Aleks throughs something at you, you better prepare to catch it and have a look into it.

From me: +1 for the 9 minutes challenge and +1 to the OS experimental protocol. I guess there are some other great programs from him out there.
 
Does anyone know if Aleks Salkin has a hypertrophy program? Or the easiest way to turn a Salkin program into a hypertrophy program? He's basically mixing what I'm trying to mix (and I'm sure he's doing a much, much better job of it than I am), but we seem to have different goals.
 
Does anyone know if Aleks Salkin has a hypertrophy program? Or the easiest way to turn a Salkin program into a hypertrophy program? He's basically mixing what I'm trying to mix (and I'm sure he's doing a much, much better job of it than I am), but we seem to have different goals.
He was promoting a hypertrophy program a few weeks back. I think he called it "summer swole". I'm not sure if he's still selling it, if you shoot him an email or tag him on here I'm sure he'll answer and questions you have. @AleksSalkin
 
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