Developing Real World Strength

It made me sit back a bit as it doesn’t seem to matter, when things get further away you forget some of the emotion attached to them. As many of you may know, Facebook will offer you memories that you have shared in the past. For me, the other day was a good reminder of how far I have come in a bit over a year.

A lot of you may remember my story of my 25 year old back injury finally going out on me. Given a diagnosis of two years to get back my right leg was more than humbling. It put things in perspective for me, especially that of how I chose to train.

The picture on the right is less than six months after my surgery, you can see that two years was not an acceptable prognosis for me. While I had been focused on developing more well rounded fitness than just “gym strength” for the past few years, this experience made me hyper focus on getting better at that, really understanding how the body works and creating better solutions.

That’s why this past year you have seen not only seen upgrades in our Ultimate Sandbags, but the reintroduction of our Core Strap and our new ARES sled. Both were super exciting to me because they allowed us to expand DVRT concepts even deeper and layer even more progressions.

Being able to hit the body from new angles, create new vectors of force, and giving proper feedback to new movements with the Core Strap has definitely been a game changer in helping people become better!

To be honest, having people be enthusiastic about the Core Strap was easy. Maybe because it was so unlike anything else they had seen and of course, once you use it, you get it! Giving people better solutions is what drives us all the time here at DVRT.

This ARES sled though did welcome WAY more questions. The idea of a sled is nothing new, I wrote about that before HERE. Here is the really confusing thing though, we didn’t want to create another sled! Huh? What we wanted was a means to layer more progressions and train angles and positions that so many people continue to ignore in the gym. It goes back to intent as you COULD just use it as a sled, but then you don’t get DVRT.

“When I was first introduced to the ARES, I think I had the same initial thought as a lot of people – “Why not just a regular sled?”

I knew better since I am fully immersed in the DVRT system, but I still needed to feel it. Then I used it and realized right away.

It adds another element of “variability” and versatility that we havent had previously and fitting perfectly into our DVRT system of progressing or regressing exercises without simply relying on absolute load.

So far we are loving how it adds a frontal plane or dynamic lateral load to exercises like USB Rotational Pressouts, Lateral Lunge variations and loaded lateral band walks.”-Danny Twoguns, Twoguns Training Systems, Erie, PA. 

Strength in Motion Studio has been using our ARES sled to help their runners develop more specific types of strength and improve weaknesses to run faster and be more resilient to injury. 

We always know though, no matter what, there is the obvious comparison of our ARES sled to “just another sled”. How fast people find it to be a completely different feel and solve so many needs is what makes it profoundly different!

“I thought the ARES sled would be a nice complement to programs, but it’s quickly becoming a foundation. For my clientele, it’s joint friendly, fun, self limiting, easy to change loads, and I can work every movement plane. For me personally, it’s been a great way to superset functional movement in a bodybuilding type program and I don’t have to count reps, just between sets”-Marc Halpern, Halpern Fitness and Nutrition

“First of all my older clients are not intimidated and seem to be willing to do more using this amazing tool. I love that I can implement it to add resistance to springing mechanic, slow marches with lifts , pulls , pushes , unilateral, sling system ..etc
It’s so smooth yet still provides drag In a consistent ratio..standard sleds are limited by the handle system and length of he front bars …these attach from the base so you never” topple over the push/pull or loose any of the length from the ground.”-Larisa Lotz, Coach, Raleigh, NC

I share this with you because people often think of training tools as “toys”. Don’t get me wrong, they can be tons of fun to use and hopefully that IS a key motivator. However, if we don’t look for purpose, if we don’t delve deeper then we never really have anything of value or that we believe in. I hope DVRT can continue to be a way to accomplish so much and have so much variety with very few pieces of equipment. As the saying goes, “more is not better, better is better!”

We want our tools to be more accessible than ever to you. For the remainder of February, save 25% off Ultimate Sandbags, Core Strap, and our ARES sled with coupon code “vday” HERE