Thursday, June 25, 2009

Functional Fitness and Combat Conditioning Workshop: An Overview

I was excited and truly grateful that I was able to attend this workshop. My husband took a half day off work to be with the kids while I headed off to the Israeli Krav Maga Training Center in Hamilton, NJ.

Upon walking into the training center, I saw good sized group of people. I'd say about 40 people, mainly men and I was 1 of about 6 women. The first thing I noticed was the varying ages of the people. It was great to see!

We all started by taking our socks and shoes off and entering the training area. From here Dr. Cheng started talking about the two things that will hold you back in your training: 1. not paying attention to the details, and; 2. being overconfident.

We then started with basic squatting/deadlifting technique. Keeping the feet facing forward and flat on the ground, and pushing the knees outward and hips back while squatting. He had us partner up and had our partners watch our form and give feedback. Were the arches of the feet lifting? Were the knees buckling in during a part of the movement? He also had our partners kneel down and put their hands on the lateral part of the knee and gently push medially while we tried to squat and fight the resistance and push the knees outward. This is known as Reactive Neuromuscular Training or RNT to help reprogram the nervous system to perform the squat effectively.

This by far was the most interesting part of the workshop for me. I recently posed the question on Twitter about what shoes one should wear while lifting and most people responded with either nothing, or something with a little cushioning like Chuck Taylors, or Vibram 5 Fingers. I asked Dr. Cheng the same question, and he agreed with those suggestions. I couldn't believe how the muscles in my feet and ankles were just untrained. It took me a while to be able to keep my feet flat on the ground while performing the squat without weight! Imagine I was adding weight in the form of a barbell and plates while doing this dysfunctional squat!

From there, we learned the swing and Dr. Cheng said I should use a 16kg kettlebell which I thought might be too much but it was fine! Once the form is good, it is much easier. We also learned the deadlift. We learned turkish get ups without kettlebells, also known as naked turkish get ups. Wow! An amazing amount of detail in this exercise. Dr. Cheng said we should not even think about adding a kettlebell until we can do 5 good form turkish get ups on each side. I better get practicing!

The workshop was assisted by a few local RKCs. One of them, George Samuelson, did a short write up on the workshop and you can find it here.

All in all a very interesting and informative workshop. 4 hours went by so quickly! I feel as though I am still taking in and processing all of the information. If you have the chance to take a workshop with Dr. Cheng, you most certainly will not regret it. Keep an open mind and be willing to learn!

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like it was a great workshop!

    Lauren
    http://www.teamgiles.com

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  2. Hi Julie!!!
    Thanks for sharing all this information! Sounds like a terrific workshop...so happy for you that you could make it! Sandy Sommer had/has me doing 'naked TGUs' as well...I chuckled a bit when he first suggested them. He has me balancing a shoe instead of using weight at this point...still hard to do!

    Great post, Julie!!! Thanks again!

    F.

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