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Kettlebell Do you need grinds?

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WhatWouldHulkDo said:
But seriously, you touch on an important distinction here. I usually interpret questions like this thread as saying "I don't like X even though I know it's good for me, do I have to do it anyway?" To which I say, "yes you big sissy." But it's a different thing to ask "I want to do Y, but I then won't have time/energy for X, is that bad?" That question has more complicated/situational answers.
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I happen to have great interest in this question because I'm probably another in a long line of people who are engaging in a certain amount of avoidance.

I don't like exercise. I don't like training. I don't enjoy exertion activity or sport. I'm not here to indulge. I'm here to pay a tax.

And I mean to minimize those payments in terms of time and money.

I want to be fit enough to keep wearing a certain uniform for as long as I want to. But beyond that I have one goal. I want to be able to move my own furniture until the day I die. Into and off of a truck. Couches fridges and boxes.

Yeah. Whatever I can cut, I'm cutting. So I empathize with that question: I don't wanna do x . So can I get away with not doing it. Without a goal. Without any specific metric of movement or ability. I understand in my mind's eye, that's an important question. Can I spend that time on dishes instead? Or being within arms distance of a young toddler. Or being able to close my eyes and rest instead of putting in reps.

This is an important and valuable consideration for me to make.

And it's the primary value proposition of s&s, for me. And probably q+d in the distant future. The smallness of the program is the most important quality, and if I can get more smallness I'll take it.
 
Nice topic and really good discussion, as always :)

Looking to as we get older, sarcopenia kicking in about 35 to 40 (with me being 50, this is an issue). From my understanding and a conversation a year or so ago with Scott Iardella (where is he now, website static for about 6 months!!), we need hypertrophy to keep sarcopenia at bay. So, from my (very limited) understanding:
  • Q&D builds minimal hypertrophy
  • S&S is GPP (is there hypertrophy?)
  • Grinds build hypertrophy
    • C&P and LCCJ being best (Dan John about pressing being good for Tonic/phasic muscles)
    • Squats
So, from the above, I would argue grinds are important - at least one block of training a year.....

P.S. feel free to correct any of the above, always happy to learn and improve :)
 
Adachi said:
I don't like exercise. I don't like training. I don't enjoy exertion activity or sport. I'm not here to indulge. I'm here to pay a tax.

And I mean to minimize those payments in terms of time and money.
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Hey, I respect that. Self-awareness is important.

My gripe/concern is that nobody can ever really answer the question of what is the minimum you have to do to prepare for absolutely nothing. Maybe your life will play out in such a way that you really don't need to do anything other than stretch a few minutes a day. Or maybe someday you'll find yourself donating a kidney and wishing you had a deep well of reserve strength to draw from. I think most of the people who hang out around here tend to want to prepare for the second case, and hence the answer to these questions will always be "yes, you should do it".

Unless you're asking about curls. You have my permission to skip those.

Adachi said:
I want to be fit enough to keep wearing a certain uniform for as long as I want to. But beyond that I have one goal. I want to be able to move my own furniture until the day I die. Into and off of a truck. Couches fridges and boxes.

Yeah. Whatever I can cut, I'm cutting. So I empathize with that question: I don't wanna do x . So can I get away with not doing it. Without a goal.
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OK - but back up, you just defined a pair of goals. Whatever it is you need to wear that uniform, and moving furniture. Both of those I would say are very worthy goals too. So that should be your measuring stick. Every so often, do your uniform test. Pick up a fridge or a couch and move it around. If those feel the way you want them to feel, then you're doing the right thing, and you don't need anybody around here's approval to skip whatever it is you choose to skip. If they don't, then you've got the right questions to ask - what's the minimum I should I do in order to make X easier?

This is why my view is that defining some kind of real goal, however modest, would benefit anyone.
 
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WhatWouldHulkDo said:
This is why my view is that defining some kind of real goal, however modest, would benefit anyone.
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There's a great deal of Common Sense and simple genius in your reply.

I hope I can offer a valuable bit of food for thought, by going one step deeper on the tax I'm paying.

For your consideration:
Would it be hard as a trainer to design a program wanting to be able to move furniture in my old age ?
Would it be difficult to help someone with such distant vague minimal interest?
Would it be worth it, as a value proposition to be paying for and receiving payment for such a program?
How many programs are sustainable into your 60s or beyond; effectively in perpetuity?

There is a chasm between where I was, basically afraid of free weights, lost in any gym, and where I am now. I have the next couple years of training mapped out based on s&s and q+d and a+a. It may continue indefinitely with just 3 kettlebells. And I'm seeing progress in the program and WTHE outside the program; unlike everything that came before. It's a long winding expensive story.
To be honest, barbells are still an intimidating investment of money time and attention. Reload hurt my brain.

I don't play football baseball or soccer.
Giving credit to mark rippatoe:
I play the not being dead game .
That's what I'm training for .
 
Adachi said:
For your consideration:
Would it be hard as a trainer to design a program wanting to be able to move furniture in my old age ?
Would it be difficult to help someone with such distant vague minimal interest?
Would it be worth it, as a value proposition to be paying for and receiving payment for such a program?
How many programs are sustainable into your 60s or beyond; effectively in perpetuity?
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These are all good questions.

I'm not a trainer, I'm just a general strength junkie, so I can't answer most of these intelligently, particularly the first one.

I do think it would be hard for a trainer to help someone who really doesn't know what they want - but I also think a really good trainer could potentially help expose you to ideas that you didn't have before, and maybe help you find what really interests you. It sounds like you are starting to get a little of that effect already just from reading books and this forum, yes? Maybe a trainer like that would be worth the money. I'll be honest that I've never paid for a trainer myself, but was very fortunate in my youth to have exposure to a lot of great coaches through the sports I did that instilled me with ideas that I've carried long after I stopped competing.

As for what can be sustained into your 60s and beyond... I think you'll be surprised to find out many sustainable ways of staying strong there are. Watch what @Steve Freides or @offwidth or @LoriLifts do, and see if it looks like they're doing anything unsustainable.
 
Adachi said:
Would it be hard as a trainer to design a program wanting to be able to move furniture in my old age ?
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Not a complete answer to your question, but there is some interesting thoughts in This interview with Peter Attia. The interview is quite long, but what interests you here is towards the beginning, just after the introduction. Look for "Centenarian Olympics", which is basically the sports of being able to do stuff when you get old.
 
Adachi said:
There's a great deal of Common Sense and simple genius in your reply.

I hope I can offer a valuable bit of food for thought, by going one step deeper on the tax I'm paying.

For your consideration:
Would it be hard as a trainer to design a program wanting to be able to move furniture in my old age ?
Would it be difficult to help someone with such distant vague minimal interest?
Would it be worth it, as a value proposition to be paying for and receiving payment for such a program?
How many programs are sustainable into your 60s or beyond; effectively in perpetuity?
Click to expand...

There might be, but first you'd have to really dial in the attributes you need, as specifically as possible. Then test. Then design the program to address what wasn't working.

As for programs that can be done forever, I think you need more variety than that as you age. But almost any programming can be adapted, just have to ID the why. We get the adaptations we train for.
 
Manuel Fortin said:
Not a complete answer to your question, but there is some interesting thoughts in This interview with Peter Attia. The interview is quite long, but what interests you here is towards the beginning, just after the introduction. Look for "Centenarian Olympics", which is basically the sports of being able to do stuff when you get old.
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Wow. Just, Wow. So, what I want to say is: He stole my idea. But, I was no where near as deep as he is in this explanation of the idea, and I officially join him in training for the Centenarian Olympics. Now to come up with my events.
So far, i've got the fridge pull... the couch drag... the chair clean...
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Please see a snippet from the interview below (Emphasis Mine).
So the first thing I have on my list about excited stuff is the Centenarian Olympics, which is my favorite sport. It’s the sport that I am exclusively training for, and it has become one of the highest priorities within my medical practice in the past probably two years.

So the idea is the following. I had this, I think I can call it an epiphany actually, maybe 18 months ago to two years ago. I was at the funeral of the parent of a close friend. And like all funerals, there’s a somber nature to them, but on some level, people are also generally rejoicing in the fact that a person hasn’t suffered too much. And in the case of my friend’s parent, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the time from diagnosis to death was like six months. And everyone was like, “Ah, that’s great.” There wasn’t much suffering there.

But I knew that parent for many years. And what I realized in spending more time talking with everybody was that the last 10 years of their life, even though their brain was still intact, shy of the last six months of that 10 years, the body had broken down. And the two things that gave that person the pleasure, beyond spending time with their grandkids and things like that, which was golf and gardening, like landscaping, really some killer landscaping were basically off the table, courtesy of hip injuries, shoulder injuries, back injuries, all these other things.

And so I sort of reflected on this for a while and realized that’s pretty much the standard path that people go on, which is before they actually die their physical death, the sort of what I call death certificate death, they tend to die some combination of a cognitive and physical as an exoskeleton death. And so we’re sitting there at the funeral, and I don’t know, I’m just thinking there’s got to be a way to stop this. Because nobody’s really thinking about this. We do all this amazing training for athletes who are trying to go to the Olympics, or even being weekend warriors, or doing whatever they’re going to do.

But why aren’t we training to be kick a#@ 90-year-olds? So my hypothesis was, well, it’s just a lack of specificity. I mean what separates a professional athlete from a weekend warrior is generally the specificity and the intensity with which they pursue this thing. So I said, well, what if we came up with an event that actually defined what one would want to be able to do when they’re 100, using that just as a benchmark. You may never live to 100, but to train to achieve this thing when you’re 100 you’ll obviously be in great shape when you’re 80.

And so I sort of came up with the city of the Centenarian Olympics. And the first thing you’ve got to know about the Centenarian Olympics is it’s very personal. It’s individual. Everyone will have a different set of events. So you and I might have a different looking Centenarian Olympics, though I think there are some common things to all.

So the first thing I did to figure this out was I, for myself, which is the person I’m solving for in the first iteration is sort of mapped out how old everyone in my life would be when I’m 100. So how old would my kids be? How old would their kids’ kids be? And all the way down. And that gave me kind of a mental model of what the world looks like when I’m in my 10th decade.

And what I realized is the things that are probably going to give me the greatest joy at that stage will involve interacting with those littler people. And my kids won’t be that little, there’ll be in their 60s or whatever, but their kids will be in their 20s and 30s, and their kids’ kids will be basically the age of my youngest kids now.

And so I just started paying more attention to what I do with them. And it’s stuff that, Tim, you and I would take for granted. I’m guessing anybody listening to this is going to take it for granted. But kids, you’ve seen my kids a million times, they play on the floor. So step one, can you get up off the floor? Can you lay on the floor? Can you do something on the floor? And can you get up under your own support? Again, you could do that blindfolded today, but watch how many people even in their 60s, let alone 70s and 80s, can’t do that. And then you start to deconstruct why. What are the structural misgivings that prevent someone from doing that?

Another thing I noticed is how often toddlers come running at you head first, and they don’t actually stop when they get to you. So there’s an implicit assumption that as they’re running to you, you’re going to be able to pick them up and stop that momentum. And if you can’t, you’re going to get a headbutt to the groin. So that’s a very essential part of the equation here. So I started saying, well, how many times does my son, my youngest son, come running at me and how often do I have to drop down into a goblet squat, grab him, and pick him up.

And so basically I listed out 18 things that I can do today that I want to be able to do when I’m 90, for example. And those events constitute my Centenarian Olympics. And so I’ll rattle off a couple of them, but a 30-pound goblet squat. Again, could you do that today, Tim? Yeah, you could do 100 of those today. But how many 90-year-olds can do that? Very few. Walking up three flights of stairs with 10 pounds of groceries in each hand, and walking down under the same load. Again, biomechanically that’s not a trivial task. The walking down has its own challenges. The walking up has its own challenges.

Being able to pull myself out of a pool where the gap between the water and the surface, the lip of the ground, is six inches away. So being able to actually pull myself up. As I said, getting up off the floor with a single point of support, being able to put a 30-pound suitcase over my head, all these sorts of things.
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Great podcast, yeah. Peter Attia's own is great, but when he gets together with Tim Ferriss it's always gold. The Centenarian Olympics contest is truly a "train for life" type of strategy.
 
njrick1 said:
Theoretically, if one is training for GPP, and has achieved the simple goal it seems to be a good idea to move on to Quick and the Dead and A+A protocols which use explosive movements. At this point, is the addition of grinds (presses, barbell work) recommended, or are they an unnecessary secondary pursuit if one is training for GPP? In other words, what is the value of adding grinds to Q and D/A+A protocols, and what are the drawbacks of not adding grinds to Q and D/A+A protocols?
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Going back to the original question, the answer, to me, is to do blocks of different types of programs. We usually think about adding this and that to A+A, or to S&S, but instead of adding, we can just do 3 month blocks of whatever we want to improve. I dont think we need grinds per se, but at some point they might become the low hanging fruit.

Why would we add anything to A+A, when we have seen @Harald Motz get great results with snatches only? Why would we miss the hypertrophy of squat and bench press? Who doesnt want the shoulder health of doing TGU? We can do a cycle of each and have it all, and our gains in any given field are not going to go away significantly during the other block. At least, this is what I´m doing and plan to keep doing.

We have a tendency to try to find the holy grail of training by adding everything to a single program, instead of having faith that we can improve something during one block, then something else during the next block, and be stronger overall when we start the following cycle.
 
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I think that we should not stop the grind entirely. Even when you choose A+A template with balistic movement like swing, snatch,..practice the grind for few reps per week will bring many benefits. The grind teaches how to apply tension continuously, unlike the ballistic (tension - relax - tension). When someone need to carry a heavy box, pushing the car...the tension skill from the grind is very useful.
 
q.Hung said:
I think that we should not stop the grind entirely. Even when you choose A+A template with balistic movement like swing, snatch,..practice the grind for few reps per week will bring many benefits. The grind teaches how to apply tension continuously, unlike the ballistic (tension - relax - tension). When someone need to carry a heavy box, pushing the car...the tension skill from the grind is very useful.
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It's not just skill.

It's also the biological adaptation of having strength that lasts beyond the ~10 seconds or so of alactic fuel supply.
 
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I figure if I can maintain my SFG I & II certs for the rest of my life I'll be good to go for most anything I wish to do. I like S&S and Q&D as well. I also like to mix and match the eleven different skills that are tested during those certs. I like the variety. I like having several different tools to use. I'm in the masters age group, when I jack something up it sometimes stays jacked up for a while. Nice to have the skills to work around such things.
 
I'd ask the question the other way. Do we need anything _but_ grinds? Strength training and a normal, active life have been very good to me. "Normal, active" means you walk outside for at least a half an hour most days. If you lifestyle doesn't allow this to happen easily - mine does - then park your car at the far end of the lot and walk into the mall from there. Get off the subway one stop sooner than you need to and walk an extra 10 or 20 blocks. You get the idea. :)

Better conditioning is great, and I cycle it in and out of my own training, but I submit that, for your health, you need to be strong first (hey) and by doing that and "enduring" things like walking a mile twice a day at a comfortable pace, you can be in great health (provided you eat and sleep well).

-S-
 
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