“As a coach, teaching a lifter to perform potentially complex, multi-joint exercises correctly and consistently is a skill.”

Besides offering premium swim lessons to the greater LA community, Coach Rippetoe is also a strength training coach, utilizing the Starting Strength method to help clients become fitter, stronger, and faster.

We’ve discussed Starting Strength methods many times before on the blog, but if you aren’t familiar with the tenets of the program, here is a quick refresher.

“Starting Strength System makes use of the most basic movement patterns that work the entire body as a coordinated system, gradually increasing loads that make the whole body stronger, in a logical, understandable, time-tested manner – the way athletes have gotten stronger for millennia.” – About Starting Strength

The foundational exercises of Starting Strength are the Squat, Deadlift, Press, Bench Press, and Power Clean/Power Snatch. (Below is a list of articles on our blog discussing the various exercises and proper techniques). Unfortunately, if these exercises are not done correctly, you can end up with injuries, muscle imbalance, and loss of flexibility.

Are you squatting correctly? 
How to train for a chin-up?
The number one way to burn fat faster. 
Wonder Women Strength Training. 
From Weight to Weightlessness. 

“The coach’s cue is some form of communication that the coach employs during a lift, or part of a lift, that is designed to produce a physical response from the lifter, usually in the form of an adjustment or correction to the lifter’s movement.” – Starting Strength

These are primarily in the form of verbal communications but can be visual and tactile as well. Starting Strength offers a theoretical approach to developing the coach’s cue, from both the lifter and the coach’s perspective. Effective cues come from both the strength coach and the lifter’s shared understanding of the lift, knowledge that comes from training, experience, and trust. As a lifter, make sure you choose coaches (not trainers) that exercise an in-depth comprehension of appropriate cues, used in a manner designed to support the lifter effectively.

Coaching requires building a program that will accomplish a fitness goal. The best way to do that is to use a proven system used for over 40 years. Build your strength, and you’ll meet your goals. Use the Starting Strength system, and you’ll build your strength. Call Coach Rippetoe to schedule your first lifting session.

Molly Huggins

Molly is a member of our creative team, mom of four water-loving babies, and a fierce advocate for CPR training and really early swim instruction.

The post Does your strength coach communicate effectively? appeared first on One with the Water.

The simple truth is, strength training is the number one way to increase metabolism and burn more fat. Increasing muscle mass is the ticket to losing fat. Metabolically speaking, muscle tissue burns calories by using the energy produced through contraction – i.e., strength training, using barbells, specifically.

Strength Training to Burn Fat

Barbell strength training provides you with the most efficient way to gain strength, lose fat, and increase your conditioning. For beginners using Starting Strength, the method we coach, with just three exercises, you can work the body’s most muscle mass at one time per exercise. Learn to use your body as the beautiful system it was created to be, and effectively burn fat in the process.

The squat: A compound exercise involving the bar resting parallel to the ground on your shoulders while squatting down to a set point, then rising from the squat position. The parallel back squat trains the erector spinae muscle groups, as well as the gluteal region, the hamstrings and the quadriceps. The only squat method we use and recommend is the technique outlined in the Starting Strength method.

Press/Bench Press: The bench press, another compound exercise, trains the pectoral muscles as the primary mover, but uses the triceps and deltoids as secondary muscles. The exercise as we teach it merely utilizes the bar, a flat bench, and barbell weights: no expensive gym equipment and no complicated machines.

The Deadlift: Commonly referred to as the king of weightlifting, this exercise involves lifting the loaded bar off the ground, rising to a standing position with the bar at hip level, then lowering it to the ground. It targets the largest group of muscles, including the gluteus maximus, all major muscles in your legs, your lower back (Erector Spinae), your neck, (the Trapezius muscles), and both your rectus abdominus and your obliques. To avoid injury, it is imperative that you train the exercise correctly, and for that, once again, we use the Starting Strength method.

Secondary Methods

Cardio is secondary to strength training for fat loss, but a tool nonetheless. Of course, our preferred cardio method is swimming. Because water is so much denser than air, swimming provides a full-body resistance workout, building lean muscle and burning calories. Swimming for an hour at a medium intensity or higher burns anywhere from 600-900+ calories, depending on your weight.

Additionally, swimming is kinder to your body than other traditional forms of cardio, especially your joints, with the bonus of supporting overall cardiovascular and mental health. In fact, there is scientific evidence that swimming and other aerobic activities specifically help lessen the systemic inflammation that leads to heart disease. Also, swimming can help reduce stress and alleviate symptoms of depression. Aerobic exercise relieves depression and decreases stress thanks to the rush of endorphins and other mood-lifting chemicals in the brain. Alongside the brain boost, swimming incorporates the same alternating stretches and regular breathing patterns of many yoga and other relaxation practices, creating a calming, meditative experience.

The bottom line is, if you want to burn fat, you have to get under the bar.

Molly Huggins

Molly is a member of our creative team, mom of four water-loving babies, and a fierce advocate for CPR training and really early swim instruction.

The post The Number One Way to Burn Fat Faster appeared first on One with the Water.

The short answer is this: It’s about keeping your spine rigid and aligned throughout the full movement. Thrusting your hips forward at the end of the exercise takes your spine out of alignment and reduces the productive work on muscle mass. The forward thrust movement creates an arch in your back, breaking the plane of your spine and making your movement inefficient and ineffective. It’s all about the angles.

Squat Mechanics

How do you keep your spine rigid and aligned? According to Starting Strength (the method in which I coach my clients), and contrary to popular opinion, the squat utilizes a non-vertical back and neck angle (generally accomplished by fixing your gaze at a natural point on the floor in front of you.) Your squat should be a hip-dominant movement, and this is only accomplished with the correct back angle. Keep the angle of your hip flexion the same as the back angle to keep the spine rigid, and your back an efficient conveyor of force.

In short,

• Use your hips when you squat. This involves a more horizontal back angle than you are probably used to using.
•  Keep your spine rigid, and aligned, not necessarily vertical.
• The angle of hip flexion has to equal your back angle to keep your spine rigid and the components working together correctly.
• An easy way to ensure correct angle is to point chest at the floor or utilize your natural gaze at a point on the floor.
• Don’t look up. You are just fighting the correct angle.
• As you come out of the squat, drive your hips up while maintaining the proper angle until about halfway up, then simply stand up straight.

Interested in learning more?  Barbell strength training provides you with the most efficient way to gain strength, lose fat, and increase your conditioning. Focused on just 5 exercises, you can work the body’s most muscle mass at one time per exercise, using your body as the beautiful system it was created to be. Sign up for your personalized fitness coaching utilizing the Starting Strength method.

Kenneth Rippetoe

Kenneth is a Life-time member of the American Swimming Coaches Association and holds certifications as a Level 4 Disability Coach & Level 3 USA Swimming as well as US Masters Coach. Coaching since 1985, Kenneth specializes in Swimming, Strength and Conditioning coaching.

The post Are you squatting correctly? appeared first on One with the Water.

Recently, one of our international Paralympic swimmers asked about ways to become a stronger swimmer, as getting under the bar isn’t an easy option. We always recommend push-ups and chin-ups. What’s the best guide on training yourself to do chin-ups? Glad you asked. There is a Starting Strength protocol for that, too! Read on for the basic exercises and a link to programs for both beginners and expert chin-up champions. 

(For a quick reference on the chin-up versus the pull-up, check out this video from Starting Strength founder Coach Mark Rippetoe.)

Starting Strength Chin Up Training 

Before starting your training, there are a few key points to remember. 

• First, your progression looks different than it will using a bar. Because you are lifting your body weight against an external immovable object, and your bodyweight fluctuates, you won’t be starting every workout with the same weight. 
• And second, the programs linked to below assume that you are regularly lifting weight from the floor – i.e. – deadlifts, power cleans, or the barbell row. The chin-up exercises should come at the end of your regular workout or on a rest day. 
• And third, because most dryland exercises for kids are a waste of their time and ours, we recommend doing chin-ups to become stronger when getting under the bar isn’t an option or if your child is too young to lift. Scroll down on this website to find out when they can start lifting. (https://startingstrengthonlinecoaching.com/online-coaching/)

Whether you can do an unassisted body weight chin up or you can barely hang from the bar, there are three primary exercises used in various combinations to develop your strength, and these particular exercises were chosen because they offer a complete, consistent range of motion when done properly. 

1. The band assisted chin-up:

“Start by standing on a box or a bench close enough to the chin-up bar that you don’t have to jump to it. Loop the band into itself around the chin-up bar. Place the band under the arch of one of your feet. Grab the chin-up bar with one hand on either side of the band and hang off the bar with straight arms. Straighten both legs and cross your other leg over the banded leg to keep the band in place. Pull yourself up to the bar”

2. Negatives. (Essentially the second half of a chin up.) Stand on a box, holding onto the bar with straight arms, and jump up to get your chin up over the bar. Then slowly lower yourself down to the standing position.

3. Lateral pull downs. These are standard lateral pull downs on a machine, using your chin up grip.

If you are starting at zero, unable to do a single unassisted body weight chin up, then these three exercises will constitute the base of your chin-up training. For more details on the full programs to add into your existing workout, check out the links below!

https://startingstrength.com/training/training-the-chin-up (For the beginner.) 

https://startingstrength.com/training/training-the-chin-up-pt-2 (Start here if you can already do an unassisted bodyweight chin up.)

For more questions, nutritional tips, and strength training wisdom, give us a shout and Coach Rippetoe will help you out!

Molly Huggins

Molly is a member of our creative team, mom of four water-loving babies, and a fierce advocate for CPR training and really early swim instruction.

The post How to Train for a Chin-Up appeared first on One with the Water.

One of my clients transferred to a personal trainer for 6 months. She started with me to learn the lifts in the Starting Strength Barbell Training Program and stayed for two months and then decided to start training at one of those fancy cross-fit places. (To learn more about Cross-Fit, read this article: https://startingstrength.com/article/strength-training-crossfit-and-functional-training).

They had better time options that fit her schedule. She sent me a photo of her squatting and kept telling me her new trainer said, “Whoever trained you on technical aspects of the lifts did an excellent job!” That’s because I attended the Starting Strength seminar twice, and have read the book multiple times. The other Coach Rippetoe knows what he’s talking about!

Starting Strength

I took her from squatting 30 lbs to 70 lbs in two months, deadlifting 55 lbs to 110 lbs. It’s always great to be a novice because the linear progression looks great on a chart, and it builds your confidence like nothing else will. (https://startingstrength.com/article/programming/who_wants_to_be_a_novice_you_do).

So, after a hiatus from July 2017 to December 2017, she comes back in for a technical tune-up. No problem. I am always happy to make sure clients continue to lift safely and efficiently. I figured she would be capable of lifting much more after 6 months. Per the program, we start her on squatting. She was able to do 15lbs more than when she left, that’s at least an improvement, albeit a small one. And it wasn’t easy for her as she came really close to failure. We went on to press; that was only a 5 lb increase from when she left. Still an improvement. And then the deadlift. We had to go backwards, a 5lb decrease which should have been more but I wouldn’t let her get away with it. After all, she told me she had implemented Power Cleans, the 5th exercise, into the program, usually brought into the workout rotation once a lifter is able to deadlift their own bodyweight, so I figured she could deadlift her body weight at least. I was “dead-lift” wrong.

What was this Cross-Fit trainer doing with her? She knew a new squat style – Sumo Wrestler stance, and after hearing that I didn’t care to know any more. But I think what’s more important here is that a trainer isn’t a coach and has very little education and next to no experience in coaching. Coaching requires thinking, planning and developing a plan that will achieve a goal. Granted, maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a great goal if you are predominately a couch potato. But this client swims multiple times a week, walks her dogs multiple times a day, and has to appear on the Hollywood red carpet several times a year. She can’t just be maintaining, she has to look great and be thin for the cameras! Trainers just aren’t going to be able to do that long-term, maybe for 6 months or less, but after that you’re most likely starving your body of nutrients or you’ll start to see that fat creep back into your arms, usually in your triceps area, and around your thighs. Two places which you don’t want the camera to see. The fashion industry just loves making clothing to hide those two areas.

The Program Works

I guarantee my female clients that they’ll lose weight, rid their bodies of fat in those two places (and just about everywhere else) if they stay on the program. Leave for 6 months though, and all guarantees are null and void.

Trainers are great at watching you and cheering for you as you do the exercises they pull out of a hat for that day – “What should we do today to make you sweat?” Coaching on the other hand, requires building a program that will accomplish a fitness goal. And the best way to do that is to use a proven system used on a multitude of people for over 40 years. Build their strength and they’ll meet their goals. Use the Starting Strength system and they’ll build their strength.

Kenneth Rippetoe

Kenneth is a Life-time member of the American Swimming Coaches Association and holds certifications as a Level 4 Disability Coach & Level 3 USA Swimming as well as US Masters Coach. Coaching since 1985, Kenneth specializes in Swimming, Strength and Conditioning coaching.

The post The Difference in a Coach vs. a Trainer appeared first on One with the Water.

I know that there have been some controversial articles about it, but the main point is that a woman can be feminine, beautiful, compassionate, empathetic, a goddess, princess, nurturing, maybe not all at the same time, all the time, but at least when she needs and wants to be. Mama Gena and Lisa Haisha are my favorite life-coaches for women. They’ll teach you to manage your time and wear different hats. Me, I can help you to become Wonder Woman – a strong independent woman – through  swimming and strength training.

Barbell Strength Training

Barbell strength training provides you with the most efficient way to gain strength, lose fat, and increase your conditioning. Focused on just 5 exercises, you can work the body’s most muscle mass at one time per exercise, using your body as a beautiful system as it was created to be.

One of my clients was featured in an article in the Huffington Post article, “9 Women On Why They Switched From Cardio To Weight Training” by By Stephanie Hallett. 

You can read it for yourself as it speaks about a lot of women that are switching to weight training, or at least adding it into their exercise programs. I don’t coach people for exercise, I train them for life. There’s a difference and until you’ve taken a few sessions with us, you’ll start to understand the difference, too. For our client,

“… the weightlifting is literally cutting through the fat. I am being trained by Kenneth Rippetoe of One with the Water. This is all foreign to me and I have tremendous resistance. My attitude doing it is not very good. But afterward, I feel really good.”

I always recommend a weight lifting program that is progressive in nature, efficient in accomplishing it, and uses the most muscle mass in your body for each exercise. Isolating your muscles with curls, or on silly machines just isn’t going to accomplish the same thing and will not give you the overall outcome of becoming Wonder Woman. Spoiler Alert: In the movie, Diana trained for decades, starting at a very young age to become strong enough to kill a god. Granted, she too, is a god, but without the long-term training and coaching, she would not have saved the world.

The world needs women to be strong, loving and nurturing. Adding barbell training to your workouts, will help you get there. Just be ready to face the gods when you get out of your comfort zone. No other exercise or tool can do that better than a barbell.

Kenny

Kenny is a baby Bottlenose dolphin, of the genus Tursiops, one of the most common and well-known members of the family Delphinidae, the family of oceanic dolphin. He is very playful and friendly and loves to frequently leap above the water surface. Kenny plays with water toys, enjoys making bubble rings, and plays well with other dolphins or other animals.

The post Wonder Woman Strength Training appeared first on One with the Water.

For some folks, though, strong and brave isn’t just a tagline or an  ideal, or even an effective way to feed your children healthy food.

For those living with Type 2 Diabetes, strong and brave is a life-saver.

WHAT IS DIABETES

Diabetes is a metabolic disease occurring when the body is unable to process food to use as energy. The pancreas, an organ located close to the stomach, makes insulin to help sugar (glucose) enter the cells of the body. Diabetes prevents the body from making enough insulin or using the insulin it has correctly. As a result, sugar builds up in the blood. Complications from diabetes range from heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, and amputations. According to the CDC, it is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.

Pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance and PCOS, are all conditions that progress to Type II diabetes, a process that can be halted with diet and exercise.

About 90% of all diabetes cases are Type 2, or adult-onset Diabetes. There are a variety of risk factors that make a person vulnerable, including age, weight, race, and family history. The usual treatment of Type 2 involves home monitoring of blood sugar, diet, exercise, and sometimes insulin injections and oral medicine.

At One with the Water, the exercise is where we come in!

BENEFITS OF STRENGTH TRAINING

While aerobic exercise has always been prescribed to help manage the disease, the American Diabetes Association also recommends that adults with Type 2 Diabetes start strength training to better control blood sugar as well. But that isn’t the only benefit! Studies completed over the last 20 years show clear benefits of strength training for diabetics. They include:

• Improved sensitivity to insulin – most important!
• Also, reduced risk of heart disease and lower blood pressure
• Weight loss
• And finally, stronger bones

This is applicable to pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance and PCOS, all conditions that progress to Type II diabetes, a process that can be halted with diet and exercise.  Also, mismanagement of glucose leads to high cholesterol levels which can contribute to heart disease.

Did you know that One with the Water provides private or semi-private barbell workouts using the Starting Strength training program? We’re not in the business of building bulk, only to make you a stronger person, inside and out. Barbell workouts will build your confidence and strength like no other exercise in the world. We guarantee it!

And P.S. – Check out this graphic from Positive HealthWellness for more activities beneficial for fighting diabetes

If you or someone you love is living with Type 2 Diabetes, contact us today to start your journey of courage and strength.

*Always check with your doctor before starting any strength training program to monitor your success.

Have you already experienced what swimming can do? Partner with us today to teach economically disadvantaged children, special needs children, and Service-Disabled Veterans to become One with the Water! Be a hero today, and when you donate now, you can help reduce the risk of drowning for children by up to 88%! Be a hero and help us save the life of a child.

Want more details? Visit our foundation page to be a hero.

Sources:
http://www.diabetes.org
http://www.webmd.com/diabetes/strength-training-diabetes
https://www.cdc.gov/media/presskits/aahd/diabetes.pdf

Molly Huggins

Molly is a member of our creative team, mom of four water-loving babies, and a fierce advocate for CPR training and really early swim instruction.

The post Strength Training for Diabetes appeared first on One with the Water.