Building Your Own Gym - The Essentials: Car/RV Living Edition

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Welcome to Part 4 of the "Building Your Own Gym" Series. This series will focus on the top 5 items I believe are best for creating your own "gym" based on your individual situation. As the title indicates, part 4 in this series is focused on best equipping the fitness needs of those living their best lives on the road, in their own cars or RVs (or any other vehicular device).  1.  Kettlebells: Incredibly versatile, a kettlebell is an absolute game-changer for your fitness if you love to travel and are living out of your RV or car. Living in your car/RV necessitates that you take maximal advantage of your space.  Kettlebells take up very little space and are extremely fun for training.  Buying one kettlebell will absolutely suffice for your nomad training. A single kettlebell will allow you to do any unilateral pressing and rowing movements for building your upper body, while also allowing for kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and snatches for training your l...
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GTG: Get Stronger Through "Grease The Groove" Training

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     GTG Training. Greasing the Groove. This training technique has been popularized in recent years by the Russian Kettlebell Master, Pavel Tsatsouline. The technique is simple, effective, and - surprisingly - relatively easy. When you train with the "Grease the Groove" technique, your primary focus is to increase your neural muscular efficiency in whatever exercise you are choosing to grease the groove for.

    The primary focus of GTG Training is not hypertrophy (muscle growth). The primary focus is strength adaptations. GTG helps you become stronger in the movement you are practicing by improving your "muscle memory". 

    When you reflect on how you have improved your skills in other aspects of your life - think shooting a basketball, playing the guitar, driving a car - it becomes very apparent that you became better at those skills through increased repetition - increased practice. And what type of practice allowed you to best increase those skills? unstressed, "perfect" practice, when you felt "fresh" and energized. You probably can remember how your practice slowly went downhill once you reached that point where you were fatigued and couldn't concentrate as well, physically or mentally, on the task at hand. 


Below are the principles of "Grease the Groove" Training:

  • You perform the exercise when you are fresh, and you stop well before failure. 
    • As a Role of Thumb, perform the given exercise you are trying to become better in for half the amount of reps you could do for a max set
      • ie. If you can do 10 bodyweight pullups, you would perform no more than 5 pullups for your GTG sets
  • You perform 5-10 sets of the exercise movement
    • The high number of sets = more practice = greater neural efficiency = greater strength gain potential
  • You rest 15 minutes or longer between sets
    • This long, extended rest period is extremely important. It allows both your nervous system and your Creatine Phosphate energy stores to fully recover in preparation for "perfect" practice on the next set. 
    • The nervous system and CP energy system are the primary systems used by the body to gain strength when it is practicing physical movement patterns and becoming more efficient in these movement patterns. 


    Unless you have a home gym - and if you don't (shameless plug) please check out my friends at Rogue Fitness and Kettlebell King's. They are amazing - this style of training works best with bodyweight exercises simply because bodyweight exercises can be done practically anywhere (ie: your home). Just to further illustrate the point, let's use the example of John who can do 3 pullups on a max set and wants to be able to do 5 or 10 eventually.

If John were to implement Grease the Groove Training for pullups, he would do 1 repetition, 5-10 times throughout the day, resting at least 15 minutes between each set. I know this long rest period may seem like overkill, but remember; you are not trying to fatigue your muscle! You are trying to become more efficient in the movement pattern - the pullup in this case. Greater movement efficiency = greater strength.



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