Prolwer Season

You may remember the end of prowler season last fall. It was a sad affair.



Things are warm and for the most part dry and the prowler has been out a few times already.

I'm going to go on record and say that May will be the official start to the prowler season at Ultimate Fitness.



On a side note, I've been shipping prowlers all over the country, so I'm hoping we will see and hear of the prowler flu from all corners of Canada.



Last night was my 5th prowler session of 09. The first 2 sessions came in march, when the warm and rain cleared up the snow for a couple of days. I was getting pretty bored with the rower and we jumped on the chance to push. I can't remember what the protocol was but it didn't feel too bad.

Sessions # 3&4 came last week. They sucked. I felt like a true beginner. My legs were't co-operating and my lungs burned from start to finish.

I did single plate suicides for both sessions. We push in the one way street beside the gym and I use the parking spaces as markers for the suicides. Roughly 10yds per parking space.

(Suicides means you push to the end of the first parking space and back to the start, then without stopping, to the end of the second space and back, then all the way down (aprox 40yds)

and back.



Last night was the first night I dared to put my hands on the low handles. I did 2 singles (low/high) and 3 double ups (low/high) all with one plate per post.



Here's Sarah hitting a double-up last May at the EFTS compound

Things are coming around.



I noticed that Elitefts has put the call out for the most cases of prowler flu caught on tape. I'm going make sure the camera is out from now on to document our suffering and improvements.



You can buy a Canadian Made prowler HERE

Horn Blowin'

Yesterday, while eating one of my 7 meals, I was reading the elitefts Q&A. I came across a post by Joe Defranco that was titled, "Need a reason to train today?"

Of course it was a pump up video compiled of highlights of the training that goes on at his facility. Some of the noteables; Mike Guadango's 54" box jump, The Spoon running a 4.16 40yd dash, Deon Anderson, being Deon Anderson and most recently Brian Cushing's doing a really high seated box jump(with a weighted vest on).

It was a pretty damn good compilation. It definately gets the job done. I was pumped after watching it.

Check it out. Watch closely right around the 19 second mark. (This part is my personal favourite)


So obviously I was feeling pretty good about myself, having made the cut on a montage as good as this one. I immediately emailed Joe, and thanked him for including me in the Dirty Jerzy Highlight reel. I also told him that I would promptly be kicking ass in the gym, as the video is intended.

Here's a portion of his Reply;

You don't have to thank me...you definitely DESERVE to be in that reel
amongst the best athletes/performances in the gym!! All the athletes
here were like, "who the fuck is that dude doing the trap bar
deadlift?!" HAHA!!


It sure made my day. And hopefully the vid will inspire you to kick some ass, today and all weekend.

More Bang For Your Buck

With all the doom and gloom news about the economy I think a few tips on value and savings is in order.
But I am not talking about financial value and savings....I'm talking about training economy.


What exactly is training economy? I could be off a bit by what a textbook would tell us, but my version of training economy is getting the best bang for your buck when training.

I want to get bigger and stronger, Sally wants to lose fat and get leaner, and we both want to do it as fast as possible. We want results yesterday. So naturally Sally and I are going to choose the training plan, and exercises that yield the biggest results in the shortest possible time.

First I will tell you what is NOT a good "bang for your buck" exercise; (there are a lot of them)
Calf press
Wrist Curls
Crunches on a fitness ball
Triceps Kickbacks
Anything involving a bosu ball
Pedalling a recumbant bike
The list could go on for a while, but I think you get the point.

Here is my qualified opinion on what the most common and most effective "bang for your buck" exercises ARE:
Squats
Clean and Press
Deadlift
Bench Press (any variation of)
Chin-ups
push-ups
Sit-ups
Sprinting
Prowler Pushing or Sled drags
Rower Sprints

If I was heading to the gym and only had 30 minutes to train, I would choose 1 of the first 4 on the list and get to work. If you or me or Sally applied ourselves to working our asses off at any of these, or any combination of 2-3 of the listed exercises, there would be results on the way, without a doubt.

When you're in a hurry and/or just want to get results faster, pick a couple of the "bang for your buck" exercises and look the hell out. These are garaunteed to make the sweat drip from your face and have you crawling for the exit in no time.

Layin' the Smack Down

I was reading a Q&A Question on Elite yesterday, and the answer was way over my head, but something caught my attention and had me worried I was missing the boat when conditioning our hockey players in the summer.

So, since the answer was way over my head I sent it off the Coach Foley to translate it for me.

After he translated and explained a few things, everything made good sense and I was relieved to know I was using proper programing with our hockey players. (Not that I needed any other proof than the fact that our guys kick ass in training camp)

I'm sure glad to have the kind of resources that I do. Thanks Jordan.

Tomorow morining I'll be packing up and heading south to not so sunny Wykoff New Jersey.

My wife and I will be 2 of the first 6 people to take part in the Defranco's Mentorship Program. We will be spending the weekend shadowing Joe and his staff while they run work-outs for their NFL combine athletes, some college guys and also some high school athletes. We are going to learn all the ins and outs of how Defranco's Training systems is run as a business.

I hope to bring back as much info and experience as possible to help our summer athlete program flourish. We had great success with all the guys we worked with this summer (using the WSSB template) and I am anticipating even more top level athletes in 2009.

NC Double WOW!

I took a drive (A long damn drive) to Schenectady NY this past Saturday. My wife and I went to watch one of the athletes from our summer elite program, Jason Walters, play hockey. He plays for Union College. They have a Division I hockey team in the ECAC division. The game was impressive. Very fast, not chippy at all and squeezed into an intimate 2200 seat facility. It was great to finally see Jason play as we have worked with him for the past 2 summers and we know he's going to take his hockey career to next level. Oh yeah, they beat providence 4-2.

On Sunday morning, after breakfast we got a tour of the rink and the campus. The campus was nice, packed with history and great buildings, but the rink is the defiantely the centre piece.(In my opinion)

Messa Rink @ Union College

The dressing room had an NHL feel to it. Each player had a stall with all the equipment hung up on hardwood shelves. The floor was wide open with a huge "U" inlayed in the rubber matting. Across from the equipment stalls was a tiled bathroom shower area that looked like something from the newest YMCA or maybe even biggger. Around the corner on the way out to the players bench and ice was a wall of hockey sticks. And if you continued down the hall instead of heading out to the ice area the room opened up again (this is the impressive part) to host 2 power racks with platforms, 10 spinning bikes, a GHR and a Reverse hyper. Sweet set up
Jason was proud to add that his prowler was also kept in the dressing room gym area, thus making it the complete set up for any athlete or powerlifter. (not that any powerlifter will ever touch those bars and bumpers)

So, they have a crazy good set up right in the dressing room. But that's only in the dressing room. Downstairs underneath the ice surface, was a 2000sq foot room that looked kinda like a physio facility. It had 4 or 5 massage tables, ice baths, hot tubs, rehab equipment, electro stim machines, you name it, they had it. Just a sick set-up.

Across the hall from the physio room was the full weight room that is only used by the men's and women's hockey teams.

(pause for a deep breath)

It was about 4000sq feet. It had another row of spinning bikes, a bunch of jump boxes, a good stash of kettlebells, 5 double racks, 2 deadlift platforms, a full set of color coded bumpers for each rack and platform, another GHR, a crazy looking reverse hyper machine (that I took a shit on because it wasn't the west-side style) that was a cable and stack set up that somewhat resembled a lying leg curl (I was very un-impressed that they had this contraption, but at least they had a real one in the dressing room), a couple of pulldown cable stations and bunch of benches and DB's.

They've got 5 of these bad boys

This post has gotten way out of hand. Bottom line is the Div I NCAA schools have all the good shit, when it comes to training and sports facilities. It was very mind blowing.

I also carried 370 per hand farmer's walk handles on Saturday morning before heading out.

Prowler Playoffs

So now that we have a good 4 inches of snow all over the place, (I think it sucks and I don't care how much you spent on that new Snow mobile) our prowler season has come to an end. It's very unfourtunate that we dragged the regular season out too long and didn't get a chance to have a true playoff season.

I'm sure some of the crew was temporarily relieved by the coming of the snow and the end to our prowler sessions. Especially Dirty Frank, who's broken schedule had him coming back to more plates on the prowler after every layoff he took. We eventually worked up to 3 plates per horn on the prowler and were getting pretty good at double ups with that weight.

We will now be focusing our attention to the rower. The anxiety is still there when I look at that long, slender bastard. 500 meters has been our standard. I look forward to working back up to 3 500's at the end of each training session, as one has been kicking me in the guts lately.

It's going to be a long winter.

To make sure we can crown a true prowler cup champion at the end of next season, I've already laid out the playoff schedule for 2009.

I already miss that scraping sound, but not the nausea, pounding head, dizzyness, stupids and massive prowler hang-overs.

Oh No, Here Comes The Snow

Well, the snow has started to fly in Renfrew County (Canada) and I'm already worried I'm gonna miss pushing the prowler.

For most of us in Canada and the northern U.S. prowler season is pretty much over. So here's my alternatives to pushing the lambo (our gym prowler is Lambo Orange so I call it the lambo):

-Rower sprints, we usually run 500m and 250m sprints with 2-4 minutes rests in between sets and work up to 3 sets of 500m when we are really pushing the conditioning and fatburn.

-Barbell, Dumbbell or Kettlebell complexes, the variety that's possible here is vast. You can blast your conditioning and work any weak points at the same time. I like to pick about 5-6 movements and blast out 5-10 reps per exercise as one giant set, usually completeing 3-5 rounds of the complex.

-The Ulitmate BootCamp WOD, when I'm in a hurry or looking for a change I'll throw down the WOD. Why not? I've usually pushed our campers through it twice during the day so it's fresh in my mind. It also gives me more arguing power in bootcamp if I do the work-outs too.