Burn your gym membership

Do you want true strength and physical development? First, you must work your grip and your thumb. We will do this by using a lighter, and burning our gym card.
Let's run a game of percentages. We will look at the average crossfit or kettlebell training client, and the average training client from a 24, Gold's etc. Which do you think will have more true fitness and a better training experience? This is like me asking which shines brighter, the sun or a bucket of black paint at midnight.
We must divorce ourselves from this idea that we cannot train without a gym. If you have a few kettlebells at home and some learned technique, just think of how much time you save! Going to the gym and running through this workout that we seem to time at a totally arbitrary block of one hour becomes much more than that when we factor in travel, etc. the actual exercise portion of my kettlebell training rarely exceeds 30 minutes, because it doesn't need to. I used to see people at Equinox training for 2 or even 3 hours! Yet they couldn't even come close to my clients when it came to true fitness.
Time does not equal fitness, intensity and work output do.

We got the space!

No longer will I just be that crazy guy in the park with the kettlebells. I have secured a space for the average to elite training facility in the Richmond District of San Francisco at the corner of 26th and Geary. It requires some work to bring it up to standards, and it will always be 'spartan' in decor, but for those of you who know me, you will agree that this fits my training style perfectly. Not that wide, but long and with concrete floors with a little office for all of the office work I do. :)
This will give us the opportunity to do more traditional style lifting such as deadlift, push press, etc. and ultimately get into some Olympic lifting.
The current date to begin operating out of the house of pain- I mean- training facility is August 20th.
I still intend on having a space in Palo Alto within the next 60 days.

Lisa the kettlebell tamer

This is some footage of Lisa from Equinox doing kettlebell drills with other exercises at the athletic field in Palo Alto, CA. While Lisa has a strong gymnastics background and extensive strength and conditioning training, she is attacking a new form of training in order to further her conditioning. This type of training and her level of conditioning is something that is totally attainable for anyone who is committed.

Yelp! and E-book links

I know some people had issues with my previous links, as I posted them wrong. :)
So now here are new links for the e-book and my page on Yelp!

Yelp! Reviews

Fitness E-book

A trip to Girya

This morning I went down to Mark Reifkind's training studio 'Girya' in Palo Alto to watch him training one of my clients, the notorious 'Cindy'.
Yeah, that's right. You're notorious.
Mark is doing specialized training with her as she prepares for the RKC.
Mark is a Senior RKC and has forgotten more about training that you or I will ever know. His wife Tracy is a phenom, and I will soon be starting a church in Nevada where the sermons will be entirely based upon her youtube videos.
I ama big fan of learning, particularly when it comes to fitness. I can pretty much just sit and watch people train all day. It was good to watch Mark training Cindy as it gave me an idea of what they're doing, so that's we're not running over eachother (well, mostly me getting run over) as we train her separately. It was also nice to see that there were some common threads in out instruction methods and verbiage, although we definitely have uniquely different training styles.

A double dose of the 20 kilo

These are two videos using primarily the 20 kilo kettlebell. The first is Chris Gaines, a trainer at Equinox Palo Alto that happened to be on the field the same time I was. I like how he just tosses the 20 around like it's a toy. No, I hate it. :)

This one is of me doing a drill I used to do before I messed up my hand and became deconditioned. It is just ten squats in the rack position, and straight in to 10 snatches. I first do it with the 20 kilo, then try to roll straight into the 24 kilo, which doesn't work out so well. I think I hadn't realized how much doing everything with one arm takes out of you. On my next attempt I manage to pull out six snatches with the 24, but that's it. I'm also still conditioning my left hand after ripping the callouses off last week doing high rep snatches with the 20 kilo. Hey, it happens. I need to do some more work with the camera and editing, as the footage is looking more and more tweaked, in a bad way.

A window into my own private hell

I thought this was a joke. I thought at any minute Pavel was going to jump into frame and kick this guy in the stomach. Of particular note is the fact that the 'kettlebells' are hollow.
Sorry I have to do this to you, but we cannot pretend it isn't happening. That's how they win.