Are YOU Serious About Strength?!

I have it as the equivalent as “you are Mr. Poopy Pants!”

That is when people that have never used DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training try to say we aren’t SERIOUS about strength training! Yea, they look at the loads of our Ultimate Sandbags and think, “that CAN NOT get you strong!!”

The loads of our Ultimate Sandbags can be a bit confusing on getting serious strength, but the DVRT exercises equally get people. Are they corrective, conditioning, strength? What are they?!!! The answer is YES! They are all of it.

So, how do we change how people see not only DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training, but functional fitness overall?

Obviously the biggest challenge is talking about strength is deciding what that means! Of course it is easy to say that a heavy bench press, deadlift, or squat is strength, but they why do we also say that gymnastic moves, martial arts, and wrestling have incredible amounts of strength when we rarely see an external weight being used? We can’t define strength only as simple as “lifting more” when we also agree these other feats are impressive demonstrations of strength as well.

Where do we start with real life strength training? Merriam-Webster defines strength as  “the quality or state of being strong, capacity for exertion or endurance.” Sounds like A LOT of what most of us actually think of when we think of functional training, yet, we fall prey to “traditions” rather than thinking critically of how strength benefits us in life.

Renown physical therapist, Gray Cook, shares a pretty solid thought process of the role of strength, “Unless you are lifting because powerlifting is your sport, you’re lifting for some other benefit. Whether it’s simply fitness, preparation for ski season, preparation for boot camp or some other hobby or physical activity, we should be able to agree that work capacity will allow you to develop more skill because you have more resistance to fatigue—your practice time will be not only filled with volume but integrity as well.”

It may not surprise you that fitness has gone through some extremes in this line of thinking. For many years, the best way to develop this type of strength was through really light weights, tons of repetitions, and very long training.

Then we were told that if we just get lifting “heavy” we will improve every quality. That is true to only a small point as most miss the term “optimal strength”. Yes, a science term that refers to improvements in strength may not improve performance.

That’s why talking to interesting people like DVRT Master, Troy Anderson, always give me focus. Troy grew up on a farm in Wyoming and actually moved back there somewhat recently. He is always fascinated how people who never lived on farms talk about how farm life benefits fitness.

After listening to Troy, I can agree, farm life isn’t necessarily “sexy”. Especially the day in and day out work that so many people miss. WHY do we think of “farm strength” and old time strength as a time where people were so strong? As Troy describes, so much has to do with volume of moderately intense work over time. Yea, doesn’t make for a cool social media post, but man it works!

How do we know, we can look at history as an answer. The movie “300” got a lot of people pumped about a new way of fitness, but didn’t actually teach us about what ancient civilizations did! Well, Dr. Rossiter, who is an exercise physiologist at University of Leads in the UK did work on what made ancient civilizations able to do things that would be elite today! (cool article on Athenian rowers HERE)

“Our data raise the interesting notion that these ancient athletes were genetically better adapted to endurance exercise than we are today.” The work that these people were able to do is pretty incredible because, well, they had to! In today’s world we are pumped about 10 minute workouts.

We are proud that DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training is a part of our modern warriors thanks to people like Captain, Jordan Ponder!

Is that bad? No. Is it enough, probably not! Especially when people use that time to focus on crazy aerobic work, or just a few heavy lifts. The truth is that the strength of cultures like the Athenians, wasn’t from a singular effort or lift, but building massive work capacity and so many different movement types.

How do you accomplish all this if you aren’t going to move to a farm, or give up all the comforts of modern society? If you think differently, these DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training workouts make WAY more sense and explain how you are going to get strong in ways that you wanted, but didn’t know how to achieve!

If you love workouts like this check out our DVRT Ultimate Sandbag Training workouts HERE