DEAN COULSON

Home

Maximal Strength, Strength

7 Kick Ass Core Exercises You Should Be Doing!!

Today I want to bust some myths about working your abs and doing endless crunches.

Everyone these days seems to want a six pack and think endless crunches and sit ups will get you there. Lets get one thing straight, unless you change your diet and your training you ain’t gonna see them.

You need to strip away the body fat because guess what? every one has a six pack, it is just covered over and the only way to see it is to strip back the fat and put some hard work in.

Once you are nailing your nutrition, you can enhance their look through proper exercise selection.

So forget about endless crunches, the best way is to focus on strength and stability. If this area isn’t stable you are going to end up with a whole host of potential issues including muscle imbalances and lower back pain.

The following exercises will definitely give you a rock hard midsection….

Ab Wheel Rollouts – A simple exercise with minimal equipment. A Power wheel is good for this or you can buy a cheap wheel from a sports store, you can even use 2 dumbbells or even a barbell. This is a great exercise to hit the midsection. from your knees or standing place the wheel out on the ground in front of you and whilst bracing your abs roll forwards as far as you can, you are looking get your head in between your arms, pause and roll back. The key hear is to roll back and curl your abs tight, don’t try keep your back straight on the way back. To make it harder, work from a standing position.
L-Sit – Commonly performed by male gymnasts, so you know that these are going to work. Support yourself in the top position of a dip or from a dead hang on a pull up station. Bend both knees 90 degrees and raise your thighs until they are parallel with the floor. As this gets easier work your way toward extending your legs. Hold this position for up to 30 seconds per set. Or start from the floor by sitting with your legs out in front, keeping your back straight, arms on the floor either side of your body, engage the core muscles and try taking your legs off the floor. Progress this by using stools and benches of equal height, bar dips or even suspension straps. Anyone who has seen a male gymnast perform this exercise knows this will give you rock solid abs. I like performing this whilst doing chin ups, a great bang for buck exercise. If you’re not strong enough to do this on rings you can use dip bars or even two benches or stools of equal height.
Deadlift – The major muscles of the midsection work damn hard when picking heavy weight off the floor. Legendary powerlifting coach Louis Simmons constantly talked about the importance of strong obliques in locking out a deadlift.
Suspended Pushup – There is always core engagement when performing push ups if done correctly, but using suspension straps, such as rings, trx or a zTrainer increases this greatly by adding an unstable element to the equation. Set up the straps so that the handles are a foot of the ground. Using a 12″ box for your feet, get into push up position. Always remember to squeeze your glutes and abs to create stability through the core when performing any push up. Do not let your hips sag or stick your butt in the air on this one!
Farmers Walk – Pick a distance of anywhere between 20-50 metres/yards, grab a pair of dumbbells, kettlebells or farmers walk equipment and walk. Make sure your posture is solid, chest up and shoulder back, head looking forwards.
One Arm Overhead Press – Unilateral overhead movements are great for working the midsection hard, this exercise will work your obliques hard! Make sure you pause a few seconds on lockout to take full advantage. Grab a dumbbell or kettlebell and simply press it straight overhead.
One Arm Flat Dumbbell Press – The key to this is stability. Take a flat bench and lay down offsetting your midsection to counter balance using one dumbbell in your hand. The non-working arm should be out to the side to counter balance. Make sure your feet are planted solidly, Bring the dumbbell down and forcibly explode upwards. Do a few heavy sets and you will really feel the midsection working hard.

These are 7 of my favourite core exercises, I find that they are much more functional than doing sit ups and crunches.

Give those a try and let me know how they work out for you. I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the results. If you have any questions post them below or hit me up on Twitter.

To your Strength and Health

Dean Coulson

Exercise, Fat Loss, self mastery

You Got Your Stress Management Down?

I often hear about how stressed people are and how they are struggling for time, not sleeping, exercising etc. There is a lot going on, fitting home life, work and exercise can become a tall order. Never before has there been so much information. Unfortunately it can and often does lead to information overload and being completely overwhelmed.

I should know, it has happened to me. In my line of work I get to help a lot of cool people, each on their own journey. I love the fact that I can help facilitate change in people’s lives and help them to be the best they can be. But in that, I myself can try and do far too much and when it starts to work against me I know I have to step back and redress the balance.

It made me appreciate how important the relaxation side of life is when you’re training and working hard!

People often assume that because they all have busy and most often stressful lives, those of them who do make the effort to exercise think training hard and fast would relieve the stress they are under. Whether it is weight loss or muscle building, stress can impede both, it can have to opposite effect.

At a more basic level everybody has a stress hormone called cortisol. This should start naturally high in the morning. It rises to give us the kick up the backside to get up and start our day, then as the day progresses, it should dissipate so we can head to a more relaxed state as we approach bed time. When this remains high due to stressful lives, it has many side effects including increased fat storage, anxiety, depression, even illness.

Make no mistake, stress can be a killer!

This means that if we don’t correctly manage the stress in our lives, ‘doing more exercise’ actually may NOT be good for you as it is another stressor your body needs to manage. If you are piling on more stress, ‘training harder’ isn’t going to get you anywhere which is VERY frustrating, because you expect it to work.

Don’t get me wrong, You should put everything into your training, doing things half arsed does not get you the results you want.

However, it is more about training smart than training hard. Don’t beast yourself day in day out or do 2-3 exercise classes in a row. You may think that you are doing the right thing, doing one class was helping so surely 3 in a row will be even better right?

WRONG!!

As much as we need to move and be fit and healthy, we also have to rest and recover, this means that you train hard, but then you play hard, you step back you allow your body to heal itself. You take a break or back off everything every 4 to 8 weeks. Hammering your body day in day out will burn you out and increase your chance of injury.

Add to that the daily mental stress of running your household and or working and everything starts taking its toll.

On a daily basis we can all put on a smile and try to get through the day, but over time it will catch up with you. When the balance is upset you can start having trouble sleeping, you become anxious because you aren’t able to keep up and start feeling low and depressed.

Many of you all assume that other people have got it good, but nobody really knows what is going on behind closed doors. I have caught myself doing this in the past and the truth is it doesn’t matter. Everyone manages their life in their own way, each unique and so cannot really be compared. Stop worrying about what people “might” think, concentrate on you.

Pretty soon your training starts to suffer, the niggles appear, you feel exhausted all the time, you start to miss sessions. You feel like you are gaining weight and losing fitness, but you just cannot physically and mentally perform at your best.

This has to change!

I mentioned before about training smart. This is when you complement short duration training with more relaxing activities such as:

going for walks in the fresh air is a great way to clear your mind, away from your daily stresses.
Try yoga or meditation to calm your mind. So many people dismiss such practices, but believe me it is a necessity in this modern life. I practice meditation on a daily basis and it is an incredible way to relieve stress and gain more clarity in your life.
Diaphragmatic (belly) breathing is a great way to reduce stress levels and done before bed makes a massive difference to your sleep.
Reading a fictional book, immerse yourself and switch off your mind from daily pressures.
Dust off your bike for a leisurely bike ride away from the daily pressures is another great way.

By trying some or all of these methods will almost certainly help you reduce your stress levels and to feel better about yourself.

I know a lot of people are going through stressful situations right now and sometimes just can’t bring themselves to train. However, you deserve to exercise, you deserve to be the best person you can be so you can be the best wife/husband/father/mother. By managed your life better, you can manage your stress better.

listen to your body, understand what it is saying to you everyday and take control of your mental stresses before they take control of you!

To you strength and Health

Dean Coulson

Conditioning, Power, Strength

Time under tension, the Tempo Factor

Hi Guys

Just wanted to talk to you today about a training principle, which not many people use. Now I don’t know if that is because they have not heard of it, or that it is challenging and they would rather now use it because it is too hard.

You are missing out if you don’t apply this to your training arsenal. It is simple to use, but can be very challenging!

What I am talking about is tempo training. When going for maximum recruitment of muscle fibres, nothing else comes close to slowing that shit down and really working the muscles.

I use this principle with my clients to really make them work, but also to understand that by slowing down you actually get more out. You don’t always have to go full tilt!

Time under Tension

By working exercises slower in a tempo you are keeping the muscles under tension for longer.

The result is that the body has to recruit more and more muscle fibres to perform the exercise and your body has to adapt accordingly.

It also helps with movement patterns and muscle memory. By slowing everything down you actually focus on the muscles worked and make a deeper connection with your brain, which is very important.

If you are using this protocol with weights you will most probably have to drop the poundages to what you are used to. Control becomes paramount and is much kinder on your joints!

Neural Efficiency

When you do any exercise, your brain wants to perform it as efficiently as possible. It wants to be neurally efficient. It wants to use the least amount of nerve recruitment and the least amount of energy to perform a movement.

This is why when you perform a new exercise e.g. a squat, It is important that you get the movement pattern correct. It takes about 300-400 reps of an exercise performed correctly for it to be ingrained in your head. But if you perform it incorrectly it can take up to 4000 reps to undo the pattern before you can correct it!

This is why it is majorly important that you get it right at the start!

You can use this in a number of ways, from bodyweight training to lifting dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells etc.

You can also change and vary the tempo depending on the training session goal or who is using it.

For example. a perfectly valid temp is 4-0-1-0, using this with a squat:

4 seconds – Eccentric (lowering)

0 seconds – no pause at the bottom

1 second – Concentric (rising)

0 second – No Pause at the top

This allows the muscles to be working under tension and no rest for the entire duration of the exercise.

You can change it by adding in pauses slowing down other parts. The combinations are endless and you can determine them by knowing what you want to achieve.

4-1-2-1

3-0-1-0

5-0-2-0

2-1-4-1

the list goes on and on.

The training…

Here is a training session I did today using minimal equipment, I used the 5-0-1-0 tempo on odd rounds and 1-0-5-0 tempo on even rounds to fully utilise this protocol on eccentric and concentric parts. Each exercise was done for time, in this case 40 seconds work and 20 seconds rest.

You can also do it for reps too, there are infinite possibilities. Make sure it is balls to the wall challenging. You must make it difficult!

I went for a number of rounds in this case 6. The number of rounds you do depends on your fitness levels. I also went for 45-60 seconds rest in between rounds, you can adjust that again by your fitness level.

Depth Push Ups

Db Split Squat (Left) Db Split Squat (Right)

DB Renegade Rows

DB Squat (Tempo) to press (explosive)

Burpees

Adding burpees at the end really taxes your conditioning.

If you have no equipment you could just drop everything and simply go for

Push Ups

Split squat (left)

split squat (Right)

renegade rows

Squats

Burpees/squat jumps/ high knee sprints.

Have a play around with it and let me know what you think.

Yours in strength and health

Dean

Nutrition, performance nutrition

3 Nutrition Game Changers

I get asked all the time about the best nutrition plans, what diets to use, what I think are the best.

My Answer?

it depends

I work with a whole host of people form the general public – office workers, professional people, mums to athletes – MMA fighters, kick boxers and so my answer depends on their own journey and goals.

Since my principles revolve around health, my primary focus is always removing reactive foods and replacing them with health giving nutritious foods that serve the body and allow it to look after you.

The focus of this article however is to go further in breaking that principle down to reveal 3 “game changers”, which not only focus on health, but also lean gains and fat loss.

1. Carb cycling

This has been one of my mainstays for like forever. based on the fact that depending on your lifestyle you do not need excess amount of carbs every day. In fact if you are sedentary, you need minimal carbs every day. you simply do not use them. Lets think about that..

you get up in the morning and then sit down to breakfast, you get ready and sit in your car and drive to work. You get to work and sit down for 8 hours. then you do the reverse you did in the morning.

so why you need to eat cereal/toast for breakfast, a carb based snack such as crisps/sweets, then a sandwich, then another carb based snack, then you dinner, which has pasta or rice or potatoes.

you are eating carbs all day and simply not using them, so guess what, your body stores the as lard round your body.

The principle of carb cycling is based that over the week, you have either high, medium or low carbohydrate intake. You then make sure that the high carb days are when you are lifting heavy at the gym and low carb on rest days or low intensity training days.

Why should you do it?

Increase fat burning
Increase lean muscle mass
Improve insulin sensitivity

2 Intermittent fasting

I can remember when I first read about this 5 years ago and I actually dismissed it. At the time from a performance perspective I was all about the protein and didn’t look at it objectively

It certainly seemed to go against the grain. But I have since researched the subject in depth and used it my self and had great results with it. There are many ways to do it but what I have found works are 16-8 and 24-0.

16-8 is when you fast for a 16 hour period and eat with in the 8 hour window. so lets say your last meal was 6pm, the next meal would be 10am the next day. I also like to add a 24 hour fast 1 day a week on a low intensity day. This may sound extreme but it really isn’t. your body has plenty energy reserves and it actually helps to enhance fat burning.

Why should you do it?

Improved fat burning
Increase lean muscle gain
Improve insulin sensitivity
You are not tied to traditional meal times
Improves sleep

3 Calorie Cycling

Similar to carb cycling, calorie cycling is another method that I have found can help to get great results. Calories are cycled instead of just carbs, with a similar outcome. Increase the amount of calories on training days and reduce them on non training days, where you are less active. The main difference between carb cycling and calorie cycling is that with calories you can increased intake using fats. This is perfect for increasing calories when on a low carb diet.

Why Should You Do it?

Improved fat loss
Increased muscle mass
More Energy.

Understanding food.

You must have a basic understanding of good foods to use whilst avoiding the bad.

Good Choices:

Protein: chicken, beef, eggs, fish etc

Carbohydrates: quinoa, rice, gluten free oats, sweet potatoes etc

Fats: avocado, nuts, seeds, coconut oil, olive oil etc

Vegetables: Broccoli, Cauli, Kale, green beans, spinach etc

Bad Choices:

Anything low fat

sweeteners

dried fruit

cereals

bread

Dairy

As you can see, to get the most from a nutrition plan, you must understand that it isn’t just about calories in and calories out, it is about balancing hormones through proper food intake. You can still lose weight and be unhealthy, but looking good isn’t enough, you have to feel great too and bullet proof your body and keep your immunity high and the only way to do that is to help your body from the inside out.

Putting a plan together

In order to put a weekly plan together I like to categorise the different daily meal options, then you choose which day of food you will use in accordance to your training plan. I categorise them as
A1- High carb (Carbs at breakfast, post work out and in the evening) – high Calories
A2- High carb (Carbs in the evening only)- normal calories
B1 – Low carb (no carbs just green vegetables) – normalcalories

Here is an example of a 4 day weight training program

Day	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Sautrday	Sunday
Training	Upper Body Weights / Conditioning Finisher	Lower Body Weights / Conditioning Finisher	Low intensity cardio (walk) / Rest	Upper Body Weights / Conditioning Finisher	Lower Body Weights / Conditioning Finisher	Optional – Interval Session	Rest
Nutrition	A1	A1	B1	A1	A1	A2	B1

If you have any questions about the article then let me know in the comments. if you want to try it out then let me know how you get on.

If you would like a custom nutritional plan, then contact me through the website and I will contact you to see what your goal is and how I can help you.

to your strength and health

Dean

Martial Arts, Maximal Strength, Mental Strength, Strength

Full Body Functional Strength Workout

Great training session coming up for you today.

As I said in my last email I like to switched things up and it is about time I dragged my arse back to where it should be, back in beast mode.

4 sessions down for the week, with yesterday being a kettlebell session with one of my PT clients, world champion kick boxer and all round gent Kenn Forrest.

I am training Kenn for his next fight at Clash of the Titans, an event organised by the UK’s leading martial arts magazine, martial arts illustrated. It attracts fighters from all corners of the UK and is always a great rumble.

Kenn is a true warrior in every sense of the word, a heart of a lion, with warrior like killer instincts on the mat. The guy towers above me at super heavyweight and kicks with the speed of a light weight, an awesome combination.

This guy will nail it next week, no pressure mate 😉

Anyway, back to today’s training.

Today is all about hitting the muscle explosively and then immediately going for hypertrophy.

Working in exercise pairs the first exercise is going for explosive power with no more than 5 reps, paired with a second exercise which is body weight only and doubling the reps of the first exercise doubling the reps.

Do warm up sets first to get things moving, remember you should always perform a thorough warm up including joint mobility and muscle activation before training ALWAYS! it should be an integral part of each session you do.

To give you an idea of weight, you want to pick a weight you could do 6 reps for and do one less to help save your central nervous system. The second exercise double the first rep count and is done 30 seconds later.

Once you have found the weight, you want to perform each pair 3 times. Each time you complete the pair rest for 45-60 seconds and go again.

a1) Db chest Press

a2) Push ups

b1) Pull ups

b2) inverted strap rows

c1) db military press

c2) Pike push ups

d1) dbl kb box squat

d2) Pistol squats

e1) Hanging leg raise

e2) Ab wheel rollout

I got an awesome buzz from this, grinding it out and working with intensity is key, stick to the timed rest to get the most out of it

Click Here to Download the work out

let me know how you got on.

To you strength and health

Dean

Page 1 of 8

First

Last