Can you change the way you train? It’s common to find yourself caught up in a comfort zone of utilizing fitness equipment to accomplish common movement patterns and building what I like to call “copy and paste” workouts. Fitness is an art.
Movement is beautiful and powerful at the same time and when we look at it as an artform, we might just find ourselves changing the way we train.
I’m going to inspire you with a fitness movement that caused me to evaluate the way I train, coach, and re-focus on the artform of utilizing existing fitness equipment and creating movement patterns to build sport specific exercises to help clients out on course.
You might be asking, “what sport and course are you talking about”? I’m referring to the fastest growing participatory sport on the planet the past 7 years – obstacle course racing (aka OCR). Millions are competing and/or participating in races all over the world. In the United States alone there can be 15+ races around the country every week. The two largest race brands Spartan Race & Tough Mudder have well over one hundred events every year in the US and many of these races have 10,000+ participating. I would argue that OCR is the largest fitness movement to ever take place. If you’re in the fitness industry, you have clients who have participated and/or are thinking about participating. Get out in front of the movement and prepare yourself to change the way you train.
As the owner of YancyCamp.com, I coach 25 pro level athletes in the sport of OCR and I have approximately 500 online OCR clients in 18 countries. To provide the best for my clients, I had to change the way I train. I had to become more creative. As an OCR competitor myself, I had to pick apart every obstacle, the different terrain, and I had to figure out the most time efficient way to train my clients to ensure they see results out on course.
Using much of the same equipment we’ve used for years in the fitness industry, I made adjustments to movements and created new movements to create OCR specific strength training programming. We were (and still are) seeing world class athletes from other sports merge over and compete in OCR events. They were getting soul crushed by the obstacles. For example, it took more than being a world class runner from a different sport. It took changing the way you train and changing the way I coach. I had to immerse myself in the programming. I used myself as the guinea pig with certain movements and over time I started to see great results with my own training and with my clients.
There are four key pillars that hold up a good training program for the sport of OCR. I’ll list them in order or importance. Running, grip & pull strength and grip & pull strength endurance, ascending steep terrain, and carrying heavy objects for long duration. For this blog, I’ll focus on grip & pull strength and grip & pull strength endurance. Lack of training in this area is the number one cause of obstacle failure out on course. Check out the video that accompanies this piece as I show you several examples of how I took common movements and common fitness equipment and “changed the way I train” and coach to ensure myself and my clients were maximizing our training time to improve grip & pull strength and grip & pull strength endurance.
Thank you for checking out our Power Systems blog post, big love from Austin, TX & Knoxville, TN. We’ll see you out on course!
