Jon Ingram

I’ve been overdosing on olympic weightlifting recently, although admittedly, more on the observing, rather than actual doing side. If I can sort out my mobility issues to a satisfactory level, I would love to try to get more proficient at the snatch and clean and jerk, but for the moment my training focus is purely on the slow lifts, deadlift, squat and press.

The snatch is a legit test of strength, speed, mobility and athleticism

So my own personal efforts have been restricted to watching the recent Weightlifting World Championships in Turkey, the CrossFit USAW Open and the Commonwealth Games.

Eurosport televised the entire World Championships and I managed to catch the 94, 105 and 105+kgs men’s categories.

Evgeny Chigishev won the snatch for the 105+ category with a lift of 210kgs. The angle below does not really justify how close he was to losing it. He made an amazing recovery from the bottom of the overhead squat when his right foot falls forward. Not so easy when you have 210kgs over your head!

That lift was enough to take the title in the snatch, but unfortunately Chigishev was unable to clean and jerk (which is performed after the snatch in competition) due to a leg injury.

Matthias Steiner went on to win the clean and jerk with 246kgs, although it was Iranian lifter Behdad Salimi who took the overall title with a total of 453kgs.

Thanks to a quite remarkable story, Steiner has become a well known name in Germany since the Beijing Olympics where he won the gold medal in the 105+ category.

Originally from Austria, Steiner moved to Germany after a dispute with his coach at the 2005 European Championships. Married to a German woman, Steiner decided to apply for citizenship and compete for his adopted country, a decision which would keep him out of international competition for three years due to IWF rules.

If the exile from competition was not hard enough, Steiner suffered further tragedy in July 2007 when his wife was killed in a car crash. Despite the loss, Steiner returned to international competition in 2008 and won the silver medal at the European Championships that year.

Steiner began his campaign for Olympic gold in the snatch and his lift of 203kgs left him in 4th place going into the clean and jerk. Chigishev, the favourite for the title, led the pace with 250kgs in the clean and jerk. That left Steiner with a final chance to win the gold medal, but to do that he would need to clean and jerk 258kgs, a full 12kgs better than his personal best of 246kgs.

With gold on the line, Steiner promptly stepped up and nailed the lift and a huge personal record. Check out the lift below and his reaction afterwards, powerful stuff.

As well as the World Champs, I took great interest in watching the USAW CrossFit Open (highlights here) which took place at the beginning of October. This was a chance for both competitive crossfitters and weightlifters to compete in a hybrid of the two sports. As well as the traditional snatch and clean and jerk, a third event was added, a 10 minute amrap of 6 squat cleans, 12 pull-ups and 24 double unders.

It was very interesting to see the performances of the top weightlifters vs the top crossfitters. Unsurprisingly, both excelled in their own disciplines and did not do terribly well in the other.

A good example was US national team weight lifter Chad Vaughn. He competed in the 85kg division and posted lifts of 141kg in the snatch and 187kg in the clean and jerk. To put that into perspective, that gave him the highest total of any competitor in all weight divisions, 313kgs. His closest rival was Josh Everett who posted a total of 267kgs. And just to put that in further perspective, Vaughn’s best ever total is 347kgs, so he was taking it pretty easy.

Chris Spealler proved once again that he is an absolute beast. He posted the highest overall total of the day (559 points), which was a combination of the total in the lifts and score of the amrap. Unsurprisingly, he blew everyone away in the CrossFit worked where he finsihed with 359 reps.

His lifting was also impressive in the 62kg category and he completed a 91kg snatch and 109kg clean and jerk for a total of 200kgs. In that weight class, that total would be good enough to earn Spealler a top eight ranking in the entire USA!

Last, although definitely not least, I came across British lifter Zoe Smith the other day. I haven’t been following the Commonwealth Games too closely, but Smith caught my attention as a bronze medal winner in the 56kg class.

Zoe Smith

She is only 16 but her total of 188kgs (85kg snatch, 103kg clean and jerk) won her a bronze medal. Weight lifting is a tiny sport in the UK, so I really hope that Zoe can help bring some media exposure, and maybe even a medal at the London Olympics.

Here is a good story on Zoe and her background.

It’s been ages since I have updated this blog. No excuses really to offer, other than pure laziness and not having anything particularly worthy of writing about.

I did, however, want to write an account of my trip to Michel Isoz’s farm at Fenil-aux-Veaux to visit my recently adopted cow, Rosette.

Rosette

The basic concept of mavachamoi, as mentioned in a previous post, is that anybody can adopt a cow for a period of one to three months. In return for a fee, you get a guided tour of the farm, the chance to do some basic farm work and the opportunity to buy produce at a discounted price.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this was to learn more about farm life, talk to a real life farmer and find out more about where my food comes from. Nutrition is a huge part of performance and anybody who is interested in fitness will sooner or later gravitate to learning more about nutrition.

One of the first things I learned about nutrition is that from a science point of view it is extremely complex. There seems to be very little consensus on what human beings are supposed to eat and there are endlessly divergent factions out there, all claiming that their system is the only way to optimal health and performance. These factions make the subject very emotional, as die-hard followers of different approaches battle it out on the internet which has become the de facto front line of modern day popular debate. Check out the comments on this blog if you want to see what I mean and/or waste several hours of your life.

I am by far an expert on nutrition, but to my simple brain, the paleo diet seems to make sense. I don’t think you can go too far wrong by eating lots of meat, veggies, fruit, nuts and seeds. Plus it is relatively easy to follow and has given me results, two huge factors in diet adherence.

Ultimately the best diet is the one you can follow. I think as long as you are conscious of what you put into your body, experiment a bit and find what works well, you are good to go. Who cares if it is not 100% paleo, zone, Ornish or whatever? Just do what works for you, while bearing in mind that just because it works for you, does not mean it will work for everyone else.  For me, paleo works pretty well but I also eat dairy products and oatmeal because I like them and they have no ill effects on me in terms of digestion, performance or body composition.

This, admittedly rather long-winded aside, brings to me to my second point about nutrition, food quality. Once I had discovered that paleo worked well, I started to wonder about the quality of the food I was eating. I read books like Fast Food Nation and the Omnivores Dilemma which contains horrifying accounts of the way animals are intensively reared and slaughtered.

Cows should be kept outside for most of the year

Growing up in the UK, I distinctly remember the BSE scandal which came about because farmers were feeding their cattle a number of delicacies not designed for the bovine digestion system, such as meat and bone meal from the cadavers of sick animals. In the US and much of Europe, cows are fed a diet high in grains. This makes them reach vast proportions in very little time, meaning more profit per animal. In the US, steroids and growth hormones are added to the diet for even bigger cows.

Cows are herbivores and designed to eat grass. As with any animal or human, a diet high in crappy food (in this case grains) means they often get sick. No worries though, because the farmers can just give them regular doses of antibiotics to keep them “healthy”. Health also suffers from lack of movement and most cattle raised in industrial feedlots have no access to open air or space.

Mmmmm bacon

The bonus with this system for us as consumers is that we can buy cheap produce in the supermarkets. But if the conditions in which the animals are kept are deleterious to their health, how does that affect us when we consume those animals? Once again, this is a debatable issue and the authorities tell us that battery farmed chickens, industrially reared pigs/beef or milk cows etc are perfectly fine.

My personal view is that the health of the animal affects the quality of its meat in terms of the nutrients it provides and its fatty acid profile. I would also like to think that the meat I eat has been raised, fed and slaughtered humanely. Not only will this benefit me in terms of the quality of the food I eat, but the environmental and ecological advantages of sustainable, organic farming are well documented.

When I visited Mr Isoz, I was hoping to find a farm full of healthy animals roaming the mountain pastures and eating their fill of grass. I have to say, I was not disappointed.

Fenil-aux-Veaux is actually the highest altitude farm in the whole of Switzerland and it is a beautiful area marked by green pastures, mountain peaks and expansive valleys.

The view from the farm

Mr Isoz has beef cattle, milk cows (including my adoptee Rosette), a few pigs and chickens. He also makes his own cheese, salami and dried meat products. Interestingly enough he told me that he does not sell any of his produce to the supermarkets. His customers are the general public and small delicatessen/general store type places in the area.

He took me for a tour of the farm and I was able to ask him what he feeds his cattle (grass in the summer and hay in the winter) and his pigs, a pretty rank smelling mixture of bread and the by-products of cheese making. I watched the milking process which was rather fascinating. The cows are used to the routine of being milked and make their own way from the fields to the barn without too much encouragement. They even have their own stalls in the barn and they automatically return to the same stall every time they are milked!

There were quite a few calves also on the farm

One of the goals of Mavachamoi is to educate city folks such as myself on the realities of farm life. Running a farm is definitely not an easy existence and the work never stops. I asked Mr Isoz when he takes a day off and he told me he didn’t understand the word. At first I thought it was my poor French and tried to explain what I meant, but then I realised he was joking. Farming is definitely a 24/7 endeavour. He also had a bit of a laugh at my expense when I wanted to buy some milk. I asked him if it was pasteurised or raw and he gently explained to me that all the milk on his farm was raw, and that is exactly how it should be.

I took the opportunity to buy some meat, eggs, butter and cheese directly from the farm. I wish I could say that the taste was amazing compared to the produce I usually buy (which is usually bio), but it was pretty much the same, as was the price. The only difference I noticed was the eggs which I bought as they were absolutely gigantic.

The best part - the food!

Overall it was a really great experience to visit the farm and I highly recommend mavachamoi. It would be a fantastic place to take kids so they can learn a bit about farm life. I still don’t know whether all the produce I buy in the supermarket has been fed, treated and slaughtered properly, and if I continue to buy from supermarkets, I guess I will never know. I have learned quite a lot from this web site about Swiss farming standards, which seem to be very high and gives me a lot of comfort. But in future I also have the option of buying produce directly from a farm and I will definitely try to do this whenever possible.

I surf the internet way beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable for the average human being. The problem is there is just so much damned information out there! Granted, a lot of it is crap and many is the time I have wasted hours reading ridiculously pointless pissing matches on forums. Nonetheless, there are gems out there waiting to be uncovered.

Here are a few of the highlights that I came across this week. 

Werner Günthör

I have developed a serious man crush on 80′s Swiss shot putter, Werner Günthör, primarily due to the training video below. At 2.00m tall and 130 kgs, Werner was an absolute beast of an athlete.  He was a three-time world champion and one-time European champion, as well as possessing an awesome mullet and classic 80′s style German porn moustache.

The video below is a in-depth look at Werner’s training. As a shot putter, strength and power were his primary goals as can be seen from his focus on heavy squats, cleans and plyometrics. For a guy 2.00m tall and 130 kgs, Werner is fast, explosive and flexible (check out the hurdle jumps). Great stuff!

Christian Holm

I may have posted this video before, but it never fails to astound me so here it is again. Christian Holm was an Olympic champion in the high jump in 2004 and is one of only two jumpers to clear 2.40m indoors since the great Javier Sotomayor. Standing just 1.81m (short for a high jumper – Sotomayor is 1.95m), Holm holds an unofficial record of the highest jump above his own height – 59cm. This is a short video of Holm training and is very cool.

San Fransisco 49ers Training

Here is another video, a tour of the San Fransisco 49ers weight room by head strength and conditioning coach Duane Carlisle. I’ve come across some interesting stories about NFL players’ training programs. Many of them are genetically so ridicoulously strong and powerful, that they can do whatever they want in the gym and it doesn’t make any difference. That means that they may not be the best people to learn from. Nonetheless, this is a pretty cool insight into the 49ers facility and training.

Shock Scientific Study shows exercise is beneficial!

This is a scientific study that show the benefits of exercise in the workplace. Basically they took two groups of 32 people working in a call centre for an airline in Sao Paolo. The experimental group did 10 minutes of exercise during the day, the control group took 10 minutes rest. Each group was then given some tests to guage their levels of mental fatigue.

Exercise for the experimental group consisted of joint mobilisation and static stretching drills, holding each stretch for 10 seconds. The test subjects were an average of 34 years old in the experimental group, with a body mass index of 22.8. The control group were an average of 31 years old with a body mass index of 22.9, so all the test subjects were young and healthy.

Overall both groups reported decreased muscle and joint pain and the experimental group showed increased mental acuity.

Now all this stuff seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Taking breaks and performing some light stretching or movement of any kind during work will make you feel better – duh! However, a lot of us lose sight of this. It is easy to sit at your desk, tapping away on the keyboard for eight hours straight. It doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that this will create postural problems as well as mental fatigue.

Everyone should be taking 5-10 minute breaks at least twice per day to do some stretching or just walking. I have a couple of strategies to help me with this. The first is that I drink loads of water during the day, at least 4 litres. This means I have to get up at least every 30 minutes and walk to the bathroom, which prevents me sitting for too long.

I also keep a hockey ball and exercise band next to my desk to do some foam rolling and stretching. I try to do this twice per day. Yes, my colleagues think I’m a complete loon, but I’m the only one in the office who can actually climb the stairs without having a cardiac arrest (we are on the 5th floor), and am therefore way cooler. High five!

Movnat

I wrote a piece a while ago about the Methode Naturelle, or Movnat. Just to recap, Movnat focuses on primal movements such as running, jumping, throwing etc, but also in a natural environment, rather than the confines of a commerical gym.

I’ve been meaning to try more of this, especially considering that here in the French Romande we are blessed with wonderful topographical features such as the lake and mountains. But of course, in reality, I have done nothing.

I guess it is possible to practice the Movnat methods indoors, and I came across this video the other day showing some cool looking drills. 

Beware the lure of the “sexy metcon”!

I love the principles of CrossFit, the constantly varied functional movements peformed at high intensity make for challenging, fun and rewarding workouts. Nonetheless, it is sometimes a bit too easy to fall in love with the challenge side of things which can lead to the mentality that “a good workout must leave you absolutely destroyed, otherwise it is a waste of time”.

I believe the goal of training should be to consistently progress, and goal setting and planning should be a part of that. Constantly trying monster chipper workouts which take 30 mins and leave you in a puddle of your own juices for 30 mins afterwards are probably not the best way to progress your fitness.

Here is a very interesting article on programming and the dangers of the “sexy metcon”.

I was reading an article the other day about the amazing lengths that Tour de France competitor Team Sky went to in order to prepare their riders for what is undoubtedly one of the most arduous challenges in all sports.

Sports science plays a key role in how the team approaches nutrition, fitness and equipment. Sky are the only Tour de France competitor to have appointed a dedicated Head of Apparel to the team. According to his calculations each cyclist’s clothes can hold up to 1 kilo of water (rain or sweat) and he has worked to produce clothing that can limit this effect. As a result riders have a choice of two different gloves and helmet to wear, with one of the helmets giving them an advantage of 1 second per kilometre due to its ‘closed vent’ design.

Bradley Wiggins of Team Sky

Nutrition is not left to chance either and the team has its own chef, providing each rider with a customised nutrition plan. Hotel food is absolutely not on the menu and the team controls each morsel of food which passes the riders’ lips. Hotel beds are also not required – they bring their own, along with pillows duvets and sheets. That means the riders get to curl up every night in their own bed, even if it is not in their own bedroom.

Team Sky’s goal here is obviously to get an edge over their competition. At this level of racing all the riders are insanely talented and train as hard as possible. It’s the little things that separate the guys at the very top.

Down at the level at the weekend warrior, there is very little need to focus on such tiny performance details. Nonetheless, sometimes we can get caught up in the latest equipment, nutrition and even technological advances, which can often lead to a paralysis by analysis scenario.

I heard that x powerlifter or y strongman is doing the latest Russian squat routine – do I need to be doing that too?  Am I taking enough creatine every day, or should I add some BCAAs to my post workout shake? Should I go for a 40/30/30 macronutrient (carbohydrate/protein/fat) in my diet, or would I benefit more from 20/40/40? I definitely need a heart rate monitor because I have to make sure I am working at 70%, not 65% of my max heart rate.

"I just can't decide whether I need 45 or 55 grams of protein in my post workout shake to synthesise maximum fat loss."

The above is all minutae. If you are a top level athlete then maybe you need to look at those things. If you have reached all your goals then maybe you need to delve more into the little things. However, for most of us worrying about tiny details usually means we forget the big picture and the basic building blocks for success.

If you have all the below issues in place and are progressing as planned, then you can start worrying about the details. Otherwise, focus on the basics, be consistent, train hard and you will reach your goals.

Sleep

This is one of the biggies that most people completely ignore. The key here is both quantity and quality How much is enough? According to T.S. Wiley, the author of “Lights Out! Sleep, Sugar and Survival”, 9.5 hours per night. Now that might be a bit difficult in terms of fitting in other commitments like family and work. Robb Wolff has a nice saying here, which goes something like “get as much sleep as possible, without getting fired or divorced”.

Sleep quality is also very important. Ideally, your bedroom should be completely pitch black. That means no light from outside and no digitial alarm clocks or mobile phones with bright screens in the room.

The idea of increasing sleep is in line with evolutionary biology (similarly to the Paleo diet) and our ancestors whose sleep patterns followed the rising and setting sun. According to Wiley, increased sleep can help weight loss, curb carbohydrate cravings, eradicate depression, lower blood pressure and stress levels, reverse type II diabetes, minimise risk of heart disease and help prevent cancer. Not bad for an investment of 9.5 hours per day (and yes, naps also count).

There is no doubt that lack of sleep will derail efforts in the gym, particularly with regards to fat loss goals. Here is an interesting sleep experiment from Dan John, with convincing results.

Not a conducive condition for hitting your fitness goals

Nutrition

Nutrition is definitely a huge subject, and a quick surf around the web will reveal hundreds of phliosophies and plans, all of which are touted as the best for optimal health and physical performance.

Personally, I like to keep things as simple as possible. Eat real food. Anything which has four legs, swims in the sea or river and grows out of the ground is fair game. Anything which has more than 1 major ingredient, or anything that you either cannot pronounce or have no idea what it is (think things like monocalcium phosphate or polysorbate 60) is not.

Delicious? Maybe. Real Food? Absolutely not!

Once again, consistency is the key. If you consistently eat processed foods and junk, your results in the gym will be compromised. As with sleep, fat loss in particular will be completely derailed by a bad diet. If you must have some comfort food, limit it to once per twice per week.

Stress

Stress can be a seriously limiting factor when trying to achive any body composition or performance goals. Stress leads to the secretion of cortisol in the body from the adrenal glands. Cortisol is also known as the “fight or flight” hormone which kicks in when you are faced with stressful situations.

Chronic stress, however, means the adrenal glands work overtime in producing cortisol. Among other problems, high levels of cortisol can lead to:

• Decreased bone density
• Decrease in muscle tissue
• Higher blood pressure
• Increased abdominal fat

Exercise can also be a stressor on the body and too much exercise or workouts that can last too long can also lead to elevated cortisol levels. So while it is fun and challenging every now and then to take on a 25-minute plus CrossFit metcon beatdown, it should not be a part of your regular training.

Reducing stress of course is no easy feat, especially in today’s modern world of mobile phones, internet and around the clock communication. Some interesting research recently from Brigham Young University reviewed 148 studies that tracked the social habits of more than 300,000 people. The findings were that those with strong social networks of friends and family had a 50% lower risk of dying than those with less social ties. They went so far as to suggest that having few social ties could be as harmful to health as smoking a packet of cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic.

You might not be able to avoid the everyday stresses of the work place or an idiot boss, but spend your time with family and a cool group of friends and this can go a long way to allieviating those cortisol levels.

Goals

This is an absolute basic part of both body composition and fitness. If you don’t have any goals, you will never get anywhere. Likewise, if you don’t record your weights, times etc, you will never know if you are getting better.

Going into the gym and deciding on the spur of the moment to poodle around on a few machines with a few bicep curls and some cardio thrown in is not training, it’s wasting time. Every time you go into the gym you should know exactly what you want to achieve.

Have some goals and join a decent gym

Having goals means getting specific. I want to get strong, or I want to lose weight is not a goal. I want to squat 150kgs or I want to lose 8cm off my waist is a goal. Again, that is where the measurement comes in. Is your squat increasing with every session, is your waist size decreasing? If yes, great, if not maybe it is time to assess your program or take an honest look and see if you properly followed your plan for the week.

There is an argument to be made that for those who just want to “get in shape” or sweat a bit, there is no need to worry about goals. That is of course ok, and a general physical preparedness program like CrossFit is the perfect fit. Nonetheless I would always recommend that people set goals as it makes training much more fun and rewarding.  

Exercise

This is of course a no-brainer, but a lot of people get it wrong. Join a decent gym (please, please, please not Silhouette, Holmes Place or Curves!!!), have a smart, well thought out program and stick with it! It’s easy to fall into the trap of jumping from program to program and not really achieving anything, I’ve certainly been there.

If you can, find a decent trainer *cough, cough CrossFit Leman in Gland* a bunch of friends who want to train with you, or failing that, go ask the strongest, fittest guy in your gym for advice.

So there you have it. Remember that you are not a pro cyclist or athlete of any kind so leave the advanced protocols for them. Keep it simple, consistent and measurable and there is no reason why you can’t achieve your goals.

Good movement is an absolute essential part of health, wellbeing and perhaps more importantly (at least for me), ball-bustingly impressive performance in the gym. As someone who has documented his own shortcomings in this area, learning about and improving human movement has become something of a passion of mine. 

But what does good movement actually mean? For my purposes, good movement means having good range of motion around the major joints (shoulders, hips, knees and ankles). In this context, good range of motion means being able to squat, deadlift and press without any restrictions or form breaks. 

If you can perform a deep overhead squat maintaining the bar over your head and a neutral spine position, you are also primed to not only exercise safely, but produce optimum amounts of strength and power (i.e. be a complete badass in the gym). 

If you can do this with your bodyweight for 15 reps, you're already a certified badass

Unfortunately, most people spend the majority of their time in the below position. 

Spending our days seated, often with shoulders hunched forward tapping away on a computer is not a good way to maintain mobility. Most people who come to CrossFit Leman, especially the guys, have some kind of restrictions either at the hip, knee or shoulder and sometimes all three. 

Tackling poor mobility is as important as getting that first pull-up, deadlifting 2.5 times your bodyweight or reducing your Fran time to sub 5-minutes. Unfortuantely, it is nowhere near as fun as any of the above goals and possibly more painful, yes even more so than Fran. Nonetheless, in athletes with poor mobility, improving restriction can result in dramatic increases in performance and that is something we can all relate to. 

There are many strategies to improve mobility from different forms of stretching (static, active), dynamic movements and getting a good massage from a sports therapist. All have a place in the toolbox for tackling poor mobility, but what I want to talk about today is foam rolling. 

Foam rolling is a form of self myofascial release (SMR). SMR works by stimulating the Golgi Tendon Organ, a mechanoreceptor in the muscle-tendon attachment which is responsible for protecting muscles from injury. SMR also helps to rid muscles of trigger points, areas of muscle which are over stimulated and unable to release from their contracted state. 

A good analogy is thinking about a muscle being like a rubber band with a knot in the middle (to represent the knots, or trigger points in our muscles). Every time you stretch that rubber band, the knot will get tighter. That is what happens in our muscles when they contract through movement. 

Trigger points are often sore to touch, which is why foam rolling can be painful initially. 

For a much more detailed overview of how SMR works, check out this article. 

I have been foam rolling now for a few months and it has made a huge difference in my training. It can be painful, although peversely enough I have come to quite enjoy the pain, but it really helps to loosen me up and is a vital part of my movement preparation before I train. 

One of the great things about foam rolling is there is no right and wrong. You just roll over any sore areas in any direction you want, and try to focus for 20-30 seconds on any tender spots. 

Here is a great video on how to use the foam roller. 

In terms of where to buy them in Switzerland, mostly you can find them in shops which sell yoga gear. Here are a few online options.

Stone Sports Nutrition
Sport-Tiedje
Amazon

An even more low maintenance option is to use a tennis ball. The tennis ball helps to target problem areas more efficiently than the roller and really gets right to those sore areas.

Below are two outstanding videos from Kelly Starrett on how to use the tennis ball to loosen up tight muscles. 

I think everyone should incorporate some form of foam rolling into their preparation/recovery regimes. But if you have some mobility problems or restrictions, there is absolutely no excuse not to try it and see if it has any positive effects.

I’m an unashamed basher of commercial gyms, especially the ones in Switzerland. I just don’t believe that they offer the kind of atmosphere conducive to getting fit. Most trainers who work in these places are able to do little more than show you how to use the machines. If they write you a program, it will probably consist of the standard 3 sets of 10 reps at several weight machines, followed by 20 minutes of cardio on the treadmill. You should follow that program for the next 18 months, which will no doubt lead to little progress and much frustration.

Yes, commercial gyms have nice machines, treadmills with tv screens and jacuzzis and saunas. All those things are well and good if that is what you want, but they offer precious little in the type of equipment need to get fit and strong. Barbells, power racks, kettlebells, chin-up bars and good old fashioned floor space are in short supply, and as for intensity, forget about it.

Unfortunately most people who go to these places are unaware that there are much better options for getting in shape. Not only are they cheaper, more readily available and more fun – they are right on our doorstep. I’m talking of course about training outside. There are a myriad of different bodyweight exercises that can be done anywhere, and most parks in Switzerland also have playground equipment that can also be used for exercise.

Add some other cheap and portable items like a skipping rope and rings and the workout possibilities are endless.

Here are some examples of exercises that you can do at any park. All of these exercises can be scaled and below you will find different progressions based on your own fitness levels.

A quick disclaimer on the below video and the demo of the squat. Please don’t try to imitate my form! As I have extensively documented before on this blog, I have horrific hip mobility due to a malformed hip joint. That is why my back is not straight at the bottom of the squat – please don’t imitate this and keep your back straight!

The above exercises are just a dip in the ocean and other simple options where no equipment is necessary are burpees, broad jumps, lunges, bear crawls, handstands, forward/backward rolls, planks etc etc. If you want a really good fat loss workout, throw in some short sprints.

Rather than separating strength and cardio, combine them a la CrossFit. Try 5 rounds of 60m sprint, 10 body rows and 10 push-ups and see if that doesn’t test your strength and cardiovascular system. It will also test your mental strength and how long you can put up with that kind of pain.

There is no right and wrong to putting together a great workout on your own. Incorporate any of the exercises above, watch your form, ratchet up the intensity and keep it short and sweet. Set the clock for 10 minutes and do as many rounds of 10 lunges and 10 burpees as possible. What about swimming? Last time I checked Geneva had a large, accessible lake, another great option to potentially add to a workout. The options are endless, get creative, get outside and get training!

 I definitely have some kind of strange sports equipment fetish.

Ever since I was a kid I have always loved going to sports stores and poring over cricket bats, lacrosse balls, swimming goggles, snooker cues and all types of equipment that I would mostly never use, but wanted to possess.

When I was into basketball, I used to love leafing through catalogues and fantasising about the latest “gooseneck system with fibreglass backboard and authentic breakaway rims”. More recently my attention has shifted to fitness equipment and power racks, bumper plates, prowlers and kettlebells have become my new objects of desire. I’ve visited www.roguefitness.com countless times to mentally equip my dream gym.

Looking at pictures of cool fitness equipment is one thing, but getting to actually try out new gear always gets me juiced. I recently spent the weekend in London to celebrate my birthday and took the opportunity to visit CrossFit Central London. Not only was it the chance to get in a workout in an otherwise fairly debauched weekend (paleo it was not), but I got my mitts on some pretty cool gear.

I actually visited these guys 1 year ago when they were situated in a small room in an office building. They have since graduated to a much larger location and have loads of space for their toys (see the pics below).

The pull-up rack they have is a thing of beauty with multiple options for pull-ups, hanging rings and even rope climbing (something I had always wanted to try but never got the chance).

There was a ton of other stuff I wanted to try out (glute ham developer, prowler, 32kg kettlebells, high rings), but I was totally spent after the following workout:

4 rounds
8 pistols (or single leg squats) per leg
8 single arm kettlebell swings per arm (24kgs)
20 burpees

It took me over 14 minutes and was a real burner. For me 20 burpees is almost the equivalent of running a marathon – no fun whatsoever.

If anyone is in London and wants a great gym, I would highly recommend CrossFit Central London. Check out their web site for more details.