weight room
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“Khaos” Training Old but Becoming New Again - By: Gunnar Thompson, NASM-CPT, PES
Take a look around at your gym, weight room, or training facility. Do you see a squat rack? Good. What about a bench, free weights, or maybe plyometric boxes? Awesome. Maybe if you’re one of the fortunate ones, you see some resistance bands, medicine balls, or kettlebells? Terrific. This means your place for training is like 100% of the population. This can be a good thing. You have strength equipment, speed equipment, and power equipment. This sounds like it covers all the aspects in being a great athlete. However, the majority of training programs lack the single critical component in creating the ELITE athlete. This is of course being prepared for every chaotic movement involved in sports. Continue reading → -
Gymnastic Rings: A Great Functional Workout
Now that I am no longer playing ball I probably spend too much time in the weight room working on my “beach muscles.” After several months of lifting weights and doing very little functional strength work I decided to switch up my routine and focus on some body weight exercises. I pulled out my pair of Gymnastic Rings that I have used extensively in the past but hadn’t used in some time in order to focus on the most basic lifts. With the rings I generally do 3-5 sets of pull-ups, dips, reverse rows, pushups, and chest flys. These 5 exercises kicked my butt enough that I decided to dedicate a blog to them. Continue reading → -
Strength Training: Trap Bar Deadlift
On several occasions I talked about improving flexibility, mobility, and stability in athletes. While I believe these are the most important areas for athletes to concentrate on in order to stay healthy and improve performance there is another aspect of training that I have not talked about much—power. Power is important to athletes in all sports but the reason I... -
Forearm and Grip Strength Exercises
It has been a couple of weeks since my last post regarding forearm strength, but there were some other topics which surfa
ced that I felt like I needed to address first. As for forearm/grip strength, there are many ways to strengthen it and I'm going to tell you of some that I have done as well as seen others do. There are really two different types of forearm strengthen exercises: those that directly target the forearm and those that indirectly work it as the athlete performs other dynamic exercises. I'll talk first about those which indirectly work to strengthen it.
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