Day 2 of mentorship with Nick Tumminello

Omelette making - round 2:

After well oiling the pan this time, I produce a near-perfect omelette. As I'm expertly sliding the masterpiece onto my plate, I notice that the tea towel I used to pick the pan up is on fire and the flames are pretty close to setting me on fire. Naturally, I finish the task at hand and then throw the pan and towel into the sink, extinguish the blaze and pretend it never happened. Only one person saw me do it and I think he's left, so I've totally gotten away with it.....

Back to Performance University. Nick has just had an article published on T-Nation, called '5 drills that are better than the prowler'  and tells me how the idea came to him. He also tells me a bit about his writing style, which is very noticeable if you've ever read it - it's straight to the point. There's no fluff and you'll always get something out of it that can be used immediately.

In response to his article, I show him one written by a friend of mine about 'Treadmill Pushing', which he loves and thinks is a great idea.

Before continuing on with the mentorship, some of Nick's clients turn up to train at the same time as a new client turns up for his first session. If this ever happened to me, I'd probably crawl into a small space and not come out until the day was over. Not for Tumminello as he handled the situation like a true professional and got me to look after 2 of his older ladies (he told them what to do and I just stood there trying to not muck up). It was a great chance to watch him take a new guy through everything we had spoke about the day before and watch some of his older clientele train like athletes.

Day 2 follows the assessment procedure and now we talk about programme design. Firstly, who you are training will determine the type of training you do. There are likely to be 3 clients:

Fitness clients - don't care abut how they look - they just want to be fitter and feel good
Physique clients - want to look better naked
Performance clients - want to perform better at something and win

Fitness and physique clients frequently merge together, so for the rest of the day, we treat them as one. The physique clients training would revolve around training the muscles and the performance training client would focus more on movements (this is just an emphasis and both clients should train both elements.)

We then discuss the merit to increasing muscle size and getting stronger and then I am given the task of writing 2 programmes - 1 for the physique client and 1 for the performance client. It is a 4 day split, with an upper body pulling day, upper body pushing day, lower body knee-dominant and lower body hip-dominant. Not blowing my own trumpet too much, but I excelled at the task and Nick said that he loved it.

I didn't have to state reps and sets or anything about periodisation, he just wanted exercise choices - to make sure I'd understood everything he'd told me up to that point.

The rules were to choose 3-4 exercises consisting of 2-3 movement based exercises appropriate for the performance client and 1 muscle based exercise and then 2-3 muscle based exercises for the physique client and 1 movement exercise. Here is what I chose:

Yes, I did put down leg extensions - as it MAY be an appropriate choice for some people when it comes to leg hypertrophy and they don't care about function. The squat is also a suitable exercise choice for both muscle and performance (obviously).

Then we trained lower body:

Warm-up:

Swiss-ball press-ups
Bent-over T raises on swiss ball
Reverse hyperextension on swiss ball
Jacknives

2 sets, 12 reps of each on the first and 10 reps on the second.

A1) Fat bar deadlifts - upto 6 reps
A2) Overhead medicine ball throw - 5 reps
A3) Neck complex:

Front neck holds
Side neck holds

No specific number of sets, just keep going until we weren't as explosive in the throws or grip gave in during the deadlifts. Once we had finished, we took a load of weight of the bar and did one set till failure of Romanian deadlifts with the fat bar.

The fat bar makes is an absolute killer on grip, so the loads you use are much less in comparison to a regular bar.

Then we went outside and did some tyre sprints:

And tyre drags:

Both of which are about as fun as they look.

We conclude the session with some seated 1 arm shrugs. Nick makes a great point in that people will argue that 'shrugs make the upper traps tight' - well how can that be if you train them through a full ROM with a good stretch on the end?

That night there was an 'All you can eat BBQ for $5' at the hostel. Sounds awesome eh? I ate 2 measley cheeseburgers before the chef had run out of food. Total con-job.

5 lessons I learnt today:

1) The core doesn't transfer force - if it did you'd hurt your head and neck. It dissipates force instead.

2) When training elite athletes, most of the time you're just trying to not hurt them

3) If movement quality is good, athletes need to spend less time on doing agility work in the gym as they'll get enough "agility training" playing their sport.

4) With older clients, unloaded spinal flexion can be ok. In fact, not doing it can be a problem because if they go into a position of spinal flexion in life and their back isn't used to it, pain may arise.

5) Taking a bench press from 400 pounds to 405 is unlikely to improve performance (unless it's powerlifting), but will almost definitely put an unnecessary strain on the shoulder joint. This principle can be applied to other exercises too.