How To Cycle Your Workouts

Over the past week TACFIT Commando and Deisger, Scott Sonnon has been sharing with us his unique program that offers bodyweight movements, active recovery and injury prevention designed for anyone from a beginner, to intermediate or at an advanced level.

Before we end this expert interview series I would like to jump back to yesterday’s post where Coach Sonnon touches on motor progression.

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Craig Ballantyne: So, Chang from Toronto asks a question unique to women. If you’re women who isn’t able to do a pushup with your elbows tucked in close to your side. What would you recommend for a basic pushup in the recruit program?  Do you recommend a wider pushup or knee pushups?

Scott Sonnon: So most westerners have tweaked peck minor and interior deltoid, because of our seated culture we tend to sit slumped forward with our neck extended. This is mainly due to the fact of modern technology like laptops, smart phones, the way we drive sitting behind the wheel and working behind desks. So, our shoulders tend to be junk as well as our hips and knees.

When it comes to being able to regain that strength instead of thinking wider, which is immediately what you want to do is go wider. Only because it feels like it’s stronger, that’s because the peck minor and the interior deltoids are doing so much work. You don’t want to train those right now; you want those to be the backup band. What you want to do is to hit into the long fronterior chain.

In order to perform this think of doing a knee pushup up the stairs. So, start at the bottom of the stairs, with your arms tucked in (these are little techniques that we use in TACFIT), then go up to stair four, start your pushups form there. This might be too easy for you, if so you may be able to go back to step three or even step two possibally down to step one. USE THE INCLINE in order to use the proper technique instead of changing the technique to where you feel strong.

We know that you’re strong there, but what we want is to give the strength back to the large tissues and let the small tissues to just be supporting personnel. They’re there to stabilize you, we don’t want to use those to actually do the work.

Craig Ballantyne: All right. Then our last question comes from Mike in Kissimmee, Florida, who asks when you’ve completed each phase of recruit, grunt, and commando. Where do you go from there? Do you continue to do the commando phase and just up to the intensity?

Scott Sonnon: No. It like it’s a gradual progression you just keep doing more and more, it’s just like martial arts. You work from white belt up to black belt and then as you continue to progress as your black belt starts to fray turn grey it gets tattered and turns white again.

So, you want to go all the way back to recruit level and see what you’ve capitalized upon. A lot of people tend to get greedy; they don’t want to lose the results.

So what we have to do is go back down to your recruit level do the same program again, if you’re prepared for this. You should see about a 25 percent gain  over the last time that you did the cycle.

When I travel I hit recruit level very hard, because I have a very busy day the nervous system can’t differentiate between types of stress. I’ll drop all the way down to the recruit level so I can get my exercise in, in a way that doesn’t fry my nervous system and then do more recovery methods.

When you do this you should be more thorough on your recovery and your compensation movements so you can go deeper into the actual technique. It takes about two to three years to develop  what I would call a mastery level of any one program. You’re not doing the same program over and over again; actually you cycle out of it.

So if you put down your TACFIT Commando, go through a full cycle of Turbulence Training and then come back to your TACFIT, you will see that you’ve contributed to your ability to do better in TACFIT and vice versa. If you know how to cycle effectively start all the way back at the beginning and you’ll see a 25 percent gain.

That’s why there are nine different programs in TACFIT Commando; actually TACFIT has a fleet of all different types of programs.

Craig Ballantyne: That’s awesome. Well, Scott, man I learned a lot it’s really motivated me to get back and do some more TACFIT and train in different ways. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to everybody.

Scott Sonnon: Oh, I appreciate it, Craig. It’s really been an honor for me. I’ve heard so much about you and all of the people that come from your audience who come to me, they are hard workers and they all have positive things to say about you. So, it’s really been an honor for me to be on the call.

Craig Ballantyne: Great, Thanks so much and hopefully one day I’ll learn from you in a seminar. But, until then thanks everyone! I really enjoyed it and maybe we’ll do another one to follow up. Thanks, Scott. We’ll talk to you soon.