Double Dose of Dragon Door Delight...

Proud and Powerful.¹

Issue 172 of Power to the People, the e-newsletter by Pavel Tsatsouline had not just one, but TWO real gems this week, both involving Master PT and strength coach, Gray Cook.

...modern fitness has become a sort of sport to itself instead of being what you do to be better at a goal activity. So what is a modern fitness seeker to do?
-Gray Cook

I've been meaning to do some blogging on Gray Cook, and specifically his book "The Athletic Body in Balance", which centers around Cooks "FMS" or "Functional Movement Screen". The brilliance of Cooks method is to identify weakness in your movement pattern and then develop a training regimen that addresses the dysfunction, while at the same time achieve a training effect.

His method is also fairly lean. Instead of a trillion different movements, he's stripped it down to basic movement patterns and then relates exercises back to those.

For example, he identifies the squat, lunge and hurdle step as basic "lower body" movements. As a conditioning tool he reccomends skipping rope, and shows some classic techniques, which he relates bake to the squat (skipping with both feet side-by-side), the lunge (skipping with one foot forward and one foot back) and the hurdle step (skipping with "high knees"). If you've done his FMS you know which of those three patterns is your greatest weakness and you focus on that.

So for example, if you've been identified as having a squat deficency, you'd use the squat style skipping in your conditioning until you've been cleared on that movement pattern.

I used the training methods (in a basic way) laid out in "Athletic Body in Balance" to prepare for my KuoShu match in Baltimore MD last year, and I would say that I was the best prepared athlete in the Unlimited weight class (in terms of GPP).

Beautiful Strength²

The old time strongmen used the Get-Up as an "entrance exam" requiring a 100-pound Get-Up on each side before beginning any other training. The Turkish Wrestlers used the Get-Up to train for combat and grappling. And today the Get-Up represents an opportunity for everyone to regain the "beautiful strength" and symmetry that our so-called fitness routines should bring us.
-Gray Cook

Read the Kalos Sthenos article.

It may be difficult to understand how movements such as crawling or rolling relate to strength and performance enhancement, however development of fundamental movement is the foundation that leads to effective functional performance. This foundation is often neglected in the approaches we take to enhance function and/or performance through exercise programming.

Baby learning to roll over.³

Read Cook's Primitive Movement article.

Here's a partial FMS with analysis:

Credits:
Images can be found in their original form here¹, here² and here³.