There is always room for improvement! 💪🏼

Depends on what your goal is. If you’re lifting for max gains and don’t care about weight loss, you would eat before, during and after workout. I use to do this a lot when chasing pr goals.

Have you been to a match before? People routinely eat after weigh ins (to a point, not gorging) for energy to hit the lifts.

If your goal is to lose some weight then yes better to eat a light snack, empty stomach as the workout doesn’t have to burn the readily available calories from eating. It can tap into fat stores for energy.
 
I usually work out around 11 am. Couple hours after breakfast...and before lunch. Then I make an unflavored protein / creatine drink when done. Tastes like crap but I don't care since I just drink it down in a few gulps.

I used to work out in the morning on an empty stomach before work, but now I have the luxury of not doing so. (Although we could work out at work as well if time permitted.)
 
David Mary said:
When I saw the video thumbnail I thought you were making a joke post… okay looked at it. Weird guy. But looks like a solid workout. I question his form and implementation one arm push-ups though.
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About the only thing in that video I’d comment about, is that doing knuckle pushups on a hot asphalt parking lot IS an incredibly effective way to quickly build up calluses on your knuckles 😁

First experience with that, was switching to a Goju Ryu karate school, from the Shito Ryu school I’d been training in, because I wanted to fight, and the Shito Ryu school did not have kumite.

The Shihan made us do knuckle pushups in the parking lot (girls were allowed to do them in their palms).

He was also an oldschool a-hole. I remember one of the first times we were doing these pushups, one of the guys stopped because there was a small sharp piece of gravel under one hand.

The Shihan yells, “Boone! What are you doing?!!!”. Boone yells out, “Just moving a pebble, sir!!!”. Shihan yells, “Do you expect to ask your opponent to remove their jewelry and anything hard or uncomfortable before you hit them? GET BACK DOWN!!!”

After that, we made sure to look where we were standing, to make sure our knuckles didn’t wind up on anything too bad (it was a common use parking lot. You’d occasionally find shards of broken glass, too). Still wasn’t uncommon to stand up after a set of pushups, and pick out small bits of gravel from our knuckles, but we developed calluses very quickly.

As for the guy’s technique;
1) if you’re going to condition your knuckles, then do it properly. None of that thumb on the ground, stuff
2) if you’re conditioning your knuckles for striking, then condition the correct ones. Depending on martial art, that would either be the 1st and 2nd knuckles, or 2nd and 3rd.

The wrist alignment for landing a punch, varies by school/style. My preference is the wrist alignment to hit with the 1st and 2nd knuckles, for a very simple reason; you want to avoid landing a punch on the pinkie knuckle.
A) it is the smallest knuckle and metacarpal. Condition it all you want, you will never be able to make it as impact resistant as the other knuckles
B) poor wrist alignment/punching technique that results in impact in the pinkie knuckle is crap form/technique.

Make a fist. Place your knuckles against a wall. Do this with the 1st and 2nd knuckles in contact with the wall. Try it with the 2nd and 3rd knuckles in contact with the wall. For me, with my 1st and 2nd knuckles against the wall, my pinkie knuckle is close to an inch away. With my 2nd and 3rd knuckles against the wall, my pinkie knuckle is only about 1/4” away.

Now angle your wrist/arm to put your pinkie knuckle in contact with the wall. See how much you need to angle your hand/arm, for that to happen? Landing a punch with the pinkie knuckle tends to impart a significant amount of lateral force. That, coupled with the the pinkie having the smallest, weakest metacarpal, means it breaks much more easily, and the break is always towards the edge of the hand, due to those lateral forces. The break is so common from poor punching technique, it’s nicknamed the Boxer’s Fracture.

Now look at the video. His fist is resting on the pinkie, 3rd knuckle, and thumb.
 
David Mary said:
When I saw the video thumbnail I thought you were making a joke post… okay looked at it. Weird guy. But looks like a solid workout. I question his form and implementation one arm push-ups though.
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the 1 arm push ups are for stronger punches. it's a martial arts specific set of exercises.

p.s. I'm going to keep doing it until I can do the 1 arm burpees clean
 
I’m not talking about his knuckles, I’m talking about the fact that his body alignment takes all the skill requirement out of the push-up. He’s doing “Rocky” one arm push-ups which don’t challenge the core at all. But I get it because he’s doing it in a somewhat cardioish program.

If the one arm push-up were for strength he’d have his feet much closer together and wouldn’t be massively rotating his torso on every rep.

Maybe it’s for hand conditioning but it seems superfluous because you can train the surface of the hand and structure more efficiently than doing nerfed one arm knuckle push-ups, and you can definitely train punch strength better with strict one arm push-ups than his winging the shoulder version as well. If you want to train as effectively as possible for stronger punches, then your one arm push-ups will be with the feet as close together as possible and your torso as square as possible to train the core stabilizers which are heavily involved in delivering a powerful strike.
 
David Mary said:
I’m not talking about his knuckles, I’m talking about the fact that his body alignment takes all the skill requirement out of the push-up. He’s doing “Rocky” one arm push-ups which don’t challenge the core at all. But I get it because he’s doing it in a somewhat cardioish program.

If the one arm push-up were for strength he’d have his feet much closer together and wouldn’t be massively rotating his torso on every rep.

Maybe it’s for hand conditioning but it seems superfluous because you can train the surface of the hand and structure more efficiently than doing nerfed one arm knuckle push-ups, and you can definitely train punch strength better with strict one arm push-ups than his winging the shoulder version as well. If you want to train as effectively as possible for stronger punches, then your one arm push-ups will be with the feet as close together as possible and your torso as square as possible to train the core stabilizers which are heavily involved in delivering a powerful strike.
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There’s also the difference between strength vs explosive power.

For punching power, either commandos (pushups where you try to do them explosively enough to clap your hands at the top of the rep), and/or punching the air with wrist/hand weights.

Another factor of punching power is the impact conditioning you’re doing with the makiwara training.
 
Come to think of it he’s got an awfully wide two hand push-ups stance with his hands as well. He’s putting a lot more shoulder into it than he really should be, with suboptimal alignment for power generation in a punch.

I’d rather see him doing push-ups the way the military teaches them, except on knuckles, but with his first oriented vertically relative to his body rather than horizontally.
 
David Mary said:
Come to think of it he’s got an awfully wide two hand push-ups stance with his hands as well. He’s putting a lot more shoulder into it than he really should be, with suboptimal alignment for power generation in a punch.

I’d rather see him doing push-ups the way the military teaches them, except on knuckles, but with his first oriented vertically relative to his body rather than horizontally.
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Yep. That’s how we did them in that Goju Ryu school; on the asphalt in the parking lot, with the weight on the 1st and 2nd knuckles (and the thumb tucked, so it wasn’t contacting the ground/supporting weight).
 
Nothing in his video develops power per se. All it does is condition. Those little plyos he does are the closest thing to power training in the video but a kettlebell clean and jerk with 70 lbs will develop more power than those will, and with better transfer to punching as well.
 
bluemax_1 said:
Another factor of punching power is the impact conditioning you’re doing with the makiwara training.
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Yes. It doesn't develop power at all, but it conditions the hand to survive landing a strike that expresses power.

Clapping Pushups develop power-endurance biased towards endurance.

Taw Kwon Do bouncy boys are training power-endurance biased towards endurance.

Olympic weightlifters are training raw power.

Kettlebell lifters who use small kettlebell (like 15-25% of their bodyweight) are training power-endurance heavily biased towards endurance. Bump that up to 35-50% bodyweight and I think you're getting much more towards power bias.

I've always believed the healthy approach is to train everything, strength, cardio, flexibility, agility, mobility, power, endurance, coordination, balance, speed, reaction time, proprioception, bodily toughness, and metal toughness.

It sounds like a tall order, but I think a person only really needs to own three kettlebells and to know a handful of exercises to be able to execute high quality training that does it all. Based on a supposed bodyweight around 220, I think a person only really needs a small (15-20% of bodyweight) a medium (25-35% of bodyweight) and a large (40-50% bodyweight).

The only part that a kettlebell doesn't let you train directly (or I have not figured out a way to) is bodily toughness but that's easy to accomplish with calisthenics (i.e. burpees, breakfalls, knuckle pushups, etc.) and good ol fashion body hardening (i.e. makiwara, iron palm/fist, and just beating yourself up a bit)
 
I was working out with a friend a few years back. Little fella. Maybe 140lbs but trained like a heavyweight. He was great helping me set personal records but he couldn’t be bothered to be pushed. Excellent coach, but going to the gym with him was an outing. Few sets, run to gas station for energy drink / creatine intake. Few more sets …..well, a lot more sets than meal break. Jambalaya or some form of pastalaya. It was about 3 hours. Sometimes morning and night. Fella could push you to pack on pounds of muscle / growth in a short time. But he wouldn’t touch heavy weights. Only time I truly hit muscle failure, as in could no longer feel my arms. I took a week off after cause they physically hurt to touch. Couldn’t do much of anything, but I’ll be damned if he couldn’t get results.
 
"Okay little fella, tell ya what? Come to the gym with me, while I workout, and I'll buy ya dinner after". 🤣
 
Moved the small kettlebells inside, since the kitchen is both large, and tall enough to do almost all my standing movements in (just barely, as my knuckles grave the ceiling slightly on some overhead reps... can't do bottoms up presses inside though).

I did this because in the winter it is just too risky to try kettlebell movements in potentially slippery conditions. So yes this means no medium, large or XL kettlebells for me again til spring.

Which is fine. Because with those in the mix, I had a tendency to stick with them more than the small ones, which was great for the shoulder muscles, but not so great for the mental toughness or conditioning, since there is no way I can move those a number of reps in proportion to their weight. Like the 48 kg bell, maybe I can push press it three or four times. The bell half its size? Definitely can push press it for well more than twice the number of reps.

So having the smaller ones inside over the winter will kinda force me to get the reps in, instead of just being addicted to the bigger weights. Translation= I will be all but forced to work on my conditioning more than I have been over the past year.

Also decided to drop down the number of reps on any given set and focus more on accumulated volume rather than all out intensity.

For example, my Hindu Squats are no being done in sets of 25, because 25 is easy enough that I can do it at the drop of a hat any time of the day or woken suddenly in the middle of the night, but just approaching intense enough that I believe I will still gradually layer on the the fitness gains by sticking to it.

I told myself I would build up to daily volume of 250 over the course of ten sets in a day, but even there I was putting the cart before the horse. So far I have only done 100 on my most voluminous day, but decided (after the next two days were met with non-negligible soreness, stiffness, and discomfort) that I would allow myself to just push when I feel like pushing, and back off when I feel I should back off. And simply treat my workouts like an all you can eat buffet of movements. When I haven't worked a certain movement for a while, I will just throw it in when I feel the time is right.

I have been having this same argument with myself ever since I was a S&C greenhorn. Tried programs multiple times (like 5/3/1), but I think I am just not built for them. I got partway in some, and definitely made gains, but in the end I always go back to a kind of autoregged training. Same with my most recent post here. Yep, I was up at 6 am that morning. And guess what? That night it was 2 am before I felt like my body and mind would let me sleep. Been up late each night since then, even to the point of working in the shop one night last week until almost 3 am.

So here's what I got up to for today's workout session in the kitchen (all reps on the unilaterals were done on one side before switching to the other):


Steel club swing x 10/10/10 per hand, per the video I posted here a while back
Kettlebell snatches x small x 10 per hand
Kettlebell strict press x small x 10 per hand
Kettlebell bent press press x small x 10 per hand
Pistol squats x 3 per side (proper form this time, much better stability, all reps on one side before switching)
Hindu squats x 25
Kettlebell snatches x semi small x 10 per hand
Kettlebell mini complex with semi small of 3 strict press, 3 snatch, 3 clean and jerk x 1 per side
Kettlebell bent press with semi small x 3 per hand
20 straight punches per side on makiwara
Pistol squats x 3 per side (minor cheating this time)
Hindu squats x 25
Steel club swings - wasn't able to do the whole usual complex
Plank x 5 seconds (yes only five seconds, until I realized I had guzzled too much water between sets to hold this position and keep everything down....)

That was enough for today. The focus here was on not allowing myself to rest too long between any sets, since, again, I really need to rebuild my conditioning.
 
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