The “Leveling Up” Fitness Challenge

At the time it was one of the most controversial ideas we’ve ever had. Almost ten years ago we introduced our DVRT Clean and Press test for our DVRT certifications. Of course it was first just seen as some random fitness challenge but the reality was we had MUCH more meaningful goals around this standard than just being a fitness challenge that made people tired. Like everything we do in DVRT there was a lot of thought that went into setting this standard.

The idea of a fitness challenge like the Clean and Press test stemmed from a lot of places. I had seen and gone through the fitness challenge of many different organizations and programs but I wanted ours to be very different. For the most part those other standards were more about just toughness and fitness. While that was fine for them, I wanted to give a bit more meaning behind what we were doing with DVRT. That is why our fitness challenge started with thinking about what were the components we believed to be a great coach. We came up with ideas like…

-Being able to create a program to achieve a specific goal.

-Problem solving both movement limitations one had, as well as improving fitness levels for a specific activity.

-Being technically proficient themselves in base movement patterns.

While we could identify more qualities that make for a great coach, these seemed to be a solid start so that when someone became DVRT certified it meant more and reflected the ideas of being a good coach. Ultimately, we thought the Clean and Press was a good measure for these qualities as well as being an exercise that had multiple movement patterns involved with also requiring a balance of stability, mobility, strength, and power. If any of those qualities weren’t trained well, passing our fitness challenge of the Clean and Press would be very difficult. Plus, our version of the Clean and Press in DVRT adds in the need for great movement accuracy due to the instability of the Ultimate Sandbag. So, just coming in and trying to muscle your way through the drill wasn’t going to be possible, you had to possess great movement skills as well as strength and conditioning.

The standard was also created around the idea of power-endurance. I’ve never been a big fan of just one repetition maximums unless you are a competitive weightlifter or powerlifter. Most people want/need to be able to reproduce strength and endurance more than once, so it made sense to make the fitness challenge set around this idea, but also not be too crazy where only elite people could even pass it.

Over the years we have had hundreds of people with all sorts of backgrounds go through the Clean and Press test (yes, it is really a push press, but that gets wordy) and we’ve had the great stories of people not passing it their first try and then working through the process to ultimately achieve the goal. Through that journey they learned far more than just passing some fitness challenge, they learned about programming, problem solving, and how the details of a movement are so important to the outcomes we want from an exercise. Like the old saying goes, the journey was the more important aspect of the Clean and Press fitness challenge.

Not everyone liked the test, many people who couldn’t pass it their first time out wanted to say it was “stupid”. They were missing the point of the standard not being about your current fitness level, but how good of a coach you are and what you have learned about going through the course to be able to help both yourself and others to a higher level. If people didn’t have the current upper body mobility, how would you go about solving it? If you didn’t have the fitness for it at the time, what type of program would you create to do so? You get the point wasn’t the actual fitness challenge, but how you addressed your needs so that we could evaluate the coaching skills you acquired from our DVRT courses. What is so shocking to so many people about our DVRT education is that it isn’t “how to use a sandbag” but truly a coaching course with the intent of building diverse skills of a coach.

With all that said, recently we were speaking to DVRT Master, Steve Holiner, after he taught a DVRT Level 1 & 2 certification in Boston and we thought that we could have a “fun” time with our DVRT community in giving a new fitness challenge. Since our DVRT Clean and Press test has been around for many years now and many people are looking for something to train for, we thought we would give a “leveling up” challenge to our DVRT Clean and Press test. What does that mean?

If you aren’t familiar with our DVRT Clean and Press Standards they are listed below for both gender and weight classes (we haven’t had much of a need for age one’s yet in case you want to ask).