Over the past week TACFIT Commando and Deisger, Scott Sonnon has been sharing with us his unique program that offers bodyweight movements, active recovery and injury prevention designed for anyone from a beginner, to intermediate or at an advanced level.

Before we end this expert interview series I would like to jump back to yesterday’s post where Coach Sonnon touches on motor progression.

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Craig Ballantyne: So, Chang from Toronto asks a question unique to women. If you’re women who isn’t able to do a pushup with your elbows tucked in close to your side. What would you recommend for a basic pushup in the recruit program?  Do you recommend a wider pushup or knee pushups?

Scott Sonnon: So most westerners have tweaked peck minor and interior deltoid, because of our seated culture we tend to sit slumped forward with our neck extended. This is mainly due to the fact of modern technology like laptops, smart phones, the way we drive sitting behind the wheel and working behind desks. So, our shoulders tend to be junk as well as our hips and knees.

When it comes to being able to regain that strength instead of thinking wider, which is immediately what you want to do is go wider. Only because it feels like it’s stronger, that’s because the peck minor and the interior deltoids are doing so much work. You don’t want to train those right now; you want those to be the backup band. What you want to do is to hit into the long fronterior chain.

In order to perform this think of doing a knee pushup up the stairs. So, start at the bottom of the stairs, with your arms tucked in (these are little techniques that we use in TACFIT), then go up to stair four, start your pushups form there. This might be too easy for you, if so you may be able to go back to step three or even step two possibally down to step one. USE THE INCLINE in order to use the proper technique instead of changing the technique to where you feel strong.

We know that you’re strong there, but what we want is to give the strength back to the large tissues and let the small tissues to just be supporting personnel. They’re there to stabilize you, we don’t want to use those to actually do the work.

Craig Ballantyne: All right. Then our last question comes from Mike in Kissimmee, Florida, who asks when you’ve completed each phase of recruit, grunt, and commando. Where do you go from there? Do you continue to do the commando phase and just up to the intensity?

Scott Sonnon: No. It like it’s a gradual progression you just keep doing more and more, it’s just like martial arts. You work from white belt up to black belt and then as you continue to progress as your black belt starts to fray turn grey it gets tattered and turns white again.

So, you want to go all the way back to recruit level and see what you’ve capitalized upon. A lot of people tend to get greedy; they don’t want to lose the results.

So what we have to do is go back down to your recruit level do the same program again, if you’re prepared for this. You should see about a 25 percent gain  over the last time that you did the cycle.

When I travel I hit recruit level very hard, because I have a very busy day the nervous system can’t differentiate between types of stress. I’ll drop all the way down to the recruit level so I can get my exercise in, in a way that doesn’t fry my nervous system and then do more recovery methods.

When you do this you should be more thorough on your recovery and your compensation movements so you can go deeper into the actual technique. It takes about two to three years to develop  what I would call a mastery level of any one program. You’re not doing the same program over and over again; actually you cycle out of it.

So if you put down your TACFIT Commando, go through a full cycle of Turbulence Training and then come back to your TACFIT, you will see that you’ve contributed to your ability to do better in TACFIT and vice versa. If you know how to cycle effectively start all the way back at the beginning and you’ll see a 25 percent gain.

That’s why there are nine different programs in TACFIT Commando; actually TACFIT has a fleet of all different types of programs.

Craig Ballantyne: That’s awesome. Well, Scott, man I learned a lot it’s really motivated me to get back and do some more TACFIT and train in different ways. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to everybody.

Scott Sonnon: Oh, I appreciate it, Craig. It’s really been an honor for me. I’ve heard so much about you and all of the people that come from your audience who come to me, they are hard workers and they all have positive things to say about you. So, it’s really been an honor for me to be on the call.

Craig Ballantyne: Great, Thanks so much and hopefully one day I’ll learn from you in a seminar. But, until then thanks everyone! I really enjoyed it and maybe we’ll do another one to follow up. Thanks, Scott. We’ll talk to you soon.

Now there are many benefits of having a strong core. In last day’s post Flow Coach, Scott Sonnon gives a few tricks and tips in order to get more volume out of an exercise so that you can hit that high intensity workout.

Proper form and technique is something we have to keep in mind with all levels of exercise. TACFIT Commando programs are specifically designed with this in mind guiding you through pain free movements. Today were going to discuss how to strengthen the most common injury most people have.

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Craig Ballantyne: All right, Curtis in Las Vegas and Mark from Chicago ask a good question. So people who have shoulder injuries that do exercise like the tripod overhead and the arm swing, how are those done properly to avoid shoulder injury or do they need to be modified or avoided if somebody has preexisting shoulder injuries?

Scott Sonnon: Okay. That’s a great question. There’s obviously a surgical limit to certain exercises. Let’s say you’ve had a disc fused in your neck, there will be movements that you will not be able to do. In the tripod overhead, I’m assuming that you’re talking about the Israeli Special Forces TACFIT challenge. I used with the IDS and their secret service. Now, this is a Commando level movement.

The basic version of the tripod overhead extension is where your feet and your hands are flat, and you’re in a crab position with your legs together. The basic motion is being able to press your hips up until you have full hip extension and your head is in alignment with your spine so you look like a table belly up.

If you CAN’T do that without pain or pins and needles in your shoulder or running down your radial nerve then you’re at the surgical limit, and you should not do the exercise, because that’s the screening test for whether you can work up to the overhead extension that you see in the Israeli Special Forces challenge.

If you CAN do this without pain, but you can’t perform the table position with one arm your legs separated then you should stay at the full table position. You’re still getting 100% of the fitness and medical benefits even though you’re doing it at a lower level.

I know it’s really cool to do complex movements, I get it, and I’m a fan, but the point isn’t to do the higher level movements. The point is for there to be an option to increase the complexity so that the nervous system can create more fingers in your brain. It increases the plasticity this is the technical term used in neuroscience.

Your brain becomes more complex, which is the same neurological phenomenon that happens when you experience A SECOND WIND. It happens when you are in a circular respiratory distress, you’re breathing really heavy, you’re panting, you have cold sweats, and you have little phantom pains, all of these things.

People think that this is the limit of their conditioning, that’s just a first gear. If you’re able to step through that safely, I’m talking without pain or pins and needles, and you step through it. The brain makes it easier for the rest of the body to continue the rest of the activity.

So, if you start with a primary exercise, in this case, the table, and you’re able to do the 20/10 program. With a lower sophistication, you’re still going to be able to hit that second gear getting that second wind and that’s really where it starts to happen with the fat burn and the muscle gain, because the brain forces a change to happen in the body. As long as you don’t have pain and pins and needles.

So you first have to screen the movement, in this case with the shoulder, if you can do the table without pins and needles and without any local sharp pain in the shoulders then do that movement. Soon as you can do that movement without feeling pain than the next time you do it separate your legs and lift one arm off the ground pointing it at the sky.

The next step is to take the arm overhead to get the full spinal arch. The HEALTH OF THE SPINE is directly related to backward flexion. If you can’t flex your spine backward it’s an unhealthy spine basically.

So, the goal is first to get it into normal alignment then slowly encourage backward flexion. Each one of the motor progressions is a screening for the next subsequent one. If you have pain choke down in sophistication until you can do it without pain.

Remember that you have to do the mobility exercises to prepare for it. Then the compensation exercises afterwards to unload the tension so that you don’t diminish the movement. That’s the other end of the spectrum.

The cool down is absolutely critical to your ability to do the next workout. Remember bigger is not better, faster is not better, stronger is not better, only better is better.

Craig Ballantyne: Awesome. That’s it for today’s post. Join us tomorrow where Scott Sonnon explains how to properly perform another compound exercise that uses muscles in the chest, shoulders, triceps, back, abs and even the legs. Click here to read part 9.

Hey folks, there’s no doubt that high intensity and low intensity exercise such as a Tai Chi program, or a light Pilate’s work out can also be very beneficial.

In part 6, of this interview series TACFIT Commando Designer and Founder, Scott Sonnon recommends integrating“circuit style” training into high and low intensity level programs.

Now today, we’re going to look at what a new person coming to TACFIT can expect.

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Craig Ballantyne: What can an average person who works out and has been doing more traditional weight training, some interval training, a little higher intensity stuff except to feel like after those first workouts?

You mentioned having more energy as soon as you’re done, which is going to be great compared to you know most people who do these work outs until they’re completely exhausted. Tell us a little about the physiological response they’re going to have from the first couple of workouts they’re going to have?

Scott Sonnon: Okay, it’s a solid request. So, basically what happens to be if we move in a way that is a natural to the range of motion of our joints, this is what tactical means, and when we think of tactical we immediately think of camouflage, for some reason, but we’re all neurological predators. The way our nervous system is organized is to be able to survive in a crisis. We have binocular vision; our eyes aren’t on the sides of our head like fish.

So, when we move in a certain way that opens up all of our joints throughout the movements we get flushed with this sudden influx of energy. All of our energy isn’t locked in cold storage; it takes a high intensity workout to not just give us the movements to release that, but also the intensity to burn off the barriers to releasing that energy.

When we go into a workout, say there are six movements from a very basic movement to some of them you may not have seen before. You’ll be able to do them right away because there are four levels of sophistication to each movement. The basic three levels we call recruit, grunt, and commando.

Everybody gets to use the same family of a skill. If I’m doing a push up and the guys who are training next to me may be doing a ply metric screwing push. It’s the same skill family but we all train together. I can do the same basic gross movement even on my knees, the point isn’t to do the movement but to complete the program with the caveat that I must progress in complexity, to BECOME BETTER not just bigger.

Bigger, stronger, faster is fantastic when it’s necessary, but it’s only the first step, it’s sort of like nutrition. Calories in, calories out isn’t all of nutrition, but it is the first step. We have to first be able to consider what we’re putting in our body and what we’re putting out energetically. The same is true when it comes to movements.

We also have to realize that only better is better. So we have to improve the movement that we’re doing. These six exercises you could be doing a basic knee push up; there are little tricks that we give you to be able to put out more volume. If we know how the core works, it is like a Coke can, you know you have a bottom and a top on the can. The only way to truly crush the can is to spiral twist it and then press it together and that’s the way our core works.

We have the transverse abdominals that we have to pull in. We have the rectus abdominals that have muscle (six packs) on top we have to crunch down. However, we also have the pelvic wall on the bottom which we can only do by squeezing, gals you know it as Kegels, guys you know it’s the muscle that you have to squeeze in order to avoid peeing. We have to pull up the bottom of the can as we crush down with the tight exhale to push the diaphragm down and that crushes the can.

If we don’t have a solid core then anybody that has children knows that when a child’s having a tantrum trying to pick up that child is like trying to pick up a 200 pound sandbag. The sand just pours out the other side, and you have this really awkward heavy thing to try and pick up. A 200 pound plank is much easier to pick up because the weight is evenly distributed, so the tighter the lighter. The goal is to make the body as tight as possible and that means it’s as light as possible.

We have to start with the CORE so that we can create a union between the upper and lower bodies. Every technique has little components to it in order to get more volume out of it so that we can truly have high intensity. Even though there are only six movements that we have to do there are little tricks and tips to each one of those movements and the protocol that we do them is very important.

The first protocol that we use is 20 seconds of work with 10 seconds of rest, also known as Tabata protocol. It’s the first in six protocols, six programs that we use in TACFIT. This is the entry level, because we have to trick the nervous system.

Nobody can tell us that we need to work harder. To be able to actually do that requires some type of motivation that doesn’t come from our mind. You can’t tell the mind to do more you have to tell the spine to do more.

So, “In 20 seconds I have to do as many of these as I can, and then I have 10 seconds to recover before I have to do it again,” that encourages us through time to be able to push harder and recover faster. And there are specific recovery methods during those 10 seconds. THE 10 SECONDS are more critical than the work.

Recovery is king workout is queen. It tends to be viewed the other way around. It’s the recovery methods that we need to focus on in the 20/10. So, the methods that we use are, they can seem a little strange, but it’s amazing the change in numbers that happens.

If you think of doing one activity for 45 minutes, let’s say riding a stationary bike unless there’s some type of program on the stationary bike that encourages us to have the intensity our mind can’t push to high intensity.

When we compress it to 20 seconds we can push hard for 20 seconds chemically. We can push really hard and in those 10 seconds we can RECOVER before the next set. It’s much different than doing the same thing 45 minutes in a row. Twenty seconds is short enough that the spine can push, 45 minutes, we lose focus. It’s like Zen Buddhism, 45 minutes of the same activity.

Being able to hold your form, most people are damaging themselves every single time they’re taking another turn of those pedals, because if the minds not absolutely prepared to handle the technique than the body starts to find a cheat, it tries to find the easiest way to accomplish the activity.

In 20 seconds, we can hold our attention. We can actually use high intensity and use these little tricks and tips that will give us all the benefits that we need. Twenty seconds are more important than 45 minutes and that’s the first protocol, the 20/10.

That is it for today. We’ll be back tomorrow with part 8, as the TACFIT author  Scott Sonnon answers more questions on complex movements.

Hey folks, in part 5, TACFIT Commando Designer and Founder, Scott Sonnon articulated the benefits of exercise as it can turn back “the Clock” reversing the aging process.

He has helped so many people discover pain free moment through his revolutionary approach to exercise. As we read on we’ll see how he brings it all together.

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Craig Ballantyne: We have a question from Raja in Bangalore. He wants to know how does someone integrate TACFIT into another training program?

How, are you going to recommend that they take a break from the other training program or can it be integrated into another type of training program?

Scott Sonnon: Good question. The answer that we have and the way of remembering it, you want to cycle or circuit, but not cocktail.

By a cocktail, unfortunately, what we tend to think is when we want to pick the best things from an array of different choices and put them together that will somehow be something better, be larger than the sum of its components, but it doesn’t work that way.

So, in order to do them “circuit style” you want to think of instead of pouring a bunch of drinks into a glass and mixing them together and hoping it tastes good, you create a circuit.

In this case, we have a formula for that, a four day circuit.

• NO intensity workout, that could a Tai Chi program, or a light Pilate’s work out.

• LOW intensity workout, which could be a heavy deep stretching session, myofascial stretching, it could be PNF; it could be good scientific yoga.

• MODERATE intensity workout, which is your strength training, so you could do your RKC kettle bell lifting, your power lifting, or some of your elliptic lifts on your moderate intensity day.

• HIGH intensity workout, your metabolic conditioning, and your conventional type of cross fit workouts.

Even if you were not to do TACFIT, and you followed that model you’re going to get the biochemical recovery from the types of workouts that you’re doing.

If you plug it into that formula, do it for three months following that four day wave.  What you’ll discover is that you’re performing better on your high intensity days, and you’re doing so without the pain that you typically associate from doing a high intensity workout.

Anybody over the age of 40, you tell them a high intensity workout,  and they’re not thinking about what it’s going to take, because at 40 or 50 years old, they know what it takes.

What they’re thinking about is the day or two afterwards of where they’re horizontal from the pain. However, if you take that pain component out of there then you get progress.  So, plug it into that four day wave.

The other way is to cycle, and we have very specific cycles that are located in our program, 28 days. If you follow one cycle and then say you cycle in a strength or hypertrophy phase, we have different types of programs depending on whether you want strength, hypertrophy, endurance, stamina, specifically shrink wrapping your body fat.

Each one of the programs has a specific intention, but it cascades through all of the other benefits if you know how to cycle them one after another. So, there are specific ways that you can plug it into the formula, and you can also cycle them so that you’re getting more of a cumulative effect. Think of Turbulence Training on your moderate intensity day and then following that with TACFIT Commando on your high intensity day.

If you only did those two things and then took two days off, I’m not saying do active recovery, what I would suggest is going to YouTube. I’ve put out my basic active recovery program for free on YouTube just Google “flow.” Do that for two days, then hit Turbulence Training again, then follow that with TACFIT Commando. Do that for several cycles and you’ll see the benefits.

Not only will you accelerate your recovery, and you’ll feel better, you’ll move better, but you’ll have a cumulative effect. The exercise physiologists are fond of calling it EPIC. EPIC is exercise post oxygen consumption, so basically it’s just a scientific way of saying that there’s a lingering benefit from short high intensity exercises that are full body, and it lasts much longer than we think.

The initial research came out that said it lasts for a couple of hours after your work. Now our researches are now showing us its 48 to 72 hours afterwords that we’re STILL GETTING THE BENEFIT from that short high intensity workout.  But, to do high intensity, to actually do a high intensity workout we have to have those active recovery methods in there so that we’re prepared for them, and we can recover from them.

In that four day wave, you’ll get more body fat loss and more muscle gains simultaneously if you follow the four day wave then you would if you were to do the individual components separately for the same amount of volume.

Craig Ballantyne: That’s very interesting. Man, you’ve taught me a lot of stuff here. Scott, I really appreciate you going into depth on all these topics it’s been very interesting and obviously very helpful to people as well.

Find out why the 20/10 circuit is so important from TACFIT author  Scott Sonnon in part 7 of this expert interview series.

In last day’s post, TACFIT Commando Designer and Founder, Scott Sonnon tells us about his training program and how it utilizes specific dynamic body movements to give you a complete body workout in a short time producing fitness results.

As we stimulate the muscle growth with these short bursts intense movements we have to be careful not to fall into overuse injuries as we read in today’s interview excerpt.

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Craig Ballantyne:  Can you expand a little bit why the TACFIT training works so well describing the actual workouts and the methodology?

Scott Sonnon: Well, in functional training we’ve used the slogan, “It’s about movements, not muscles,” and that’s absolutely the truth. We need to train complex movement’s not just basic movements.
Usually when a person starts, they feel very uncoordinated and a lot of people don’t go to the gym because they’re embarrassed about the poor physical shape that they are in and their size.

Well, they can start right at home and there should be a way that somebody can stand up or fall off the couch and begin to exercise in a basic movement. However, that basic movement must progress, or it can develop into exercise specific injuries with diminishing returns and those injuries turn into illness.
It’s at this point that we need to revisit why we’re doing exercise. There has to be a way to increase the complexity of our nervous system.

Aging has been proven to be a loss of complexity, so if we are only doing simple movements over and over and repeatedly, we’re actually accelerating the aging process. I learned this the hard way because of where I came from genetically, but the solutions that I was given from different people around the world challenged the very notion of what we know about exercise. Our nervous system creates complexity so there has to be stages of an exercise.

So, take a basic push up, when you achieve the results that you were looking for you should be able to quantify them by tracking how many you are doing, then improve it upon it.  As soon as you achieve that threshold change the exercise making it a little bit more complex.

Turn it into a screwing push up, which is what TACFIT Commando has become infamous for, it’s close to being a one armed push up but as in a rotary action. Each one of those movements continues to become more complex.

It’s about movements and not muscles. If we want to turn back the accelerated aging process and become more youthful in our movement then we have to make each movement more complex every time we schedule out a training program.

TACFIT makes it dummy proof. I need to be able to follow a schedule, so, everyday has a particular calendar of what I’m doing, telling me when I should progress as well as other factors that I can use.

The fitness benefits are helping my nervous system so the body fat loss and the muscle gain are byproducts. They happen because I’m becoming more neurologically advanced. That sounds like a bunch of gobbledy gook, but with this is a four day wave of intensity.

Olympic teams have been using this for years; it is only now starting to trickle down to the average fitness consumer. Basically, what we were told when I was a kids competing in different sports is if you want to prepare for an event you take the day off before.

Unfortunately, what we learned is that our metabolism then comes in cold, and we’re warming up during the workout, so we actually have little performance in comparison to, say if we did the similar workout as we did the day before just to get the engine cooking to prime the nervous system so it can prepare.

So, if this applies to sports it must apply everywhere. The nervous system can’t differentiate between types of resistance; it only knows resistance, so it doesn’t know if it’s a barbell, sandbags, or your human body weight. If that’s true, then to prepare the body for our exercise the day before we want to peak, we have to do the same workout but at a lower intensity.

You have two types of people when it comes to fitness. You have the people who need confidence in their movement, and then you have the hard chargers which have been pushing themselves so much that they’re in a constant state of deterioration. They’re under restored and subprime conditions.

So, to get them to the point that they can actually do high intensity you have to force feed them, the active recovery and the compensations for the movements that they’ve been doing. So, there are four days that you need in order to recover completely from a high intensity performance. Most people, even professional athletes, even the elite spec ops guys whom I train don’t know what high intensity is for a couple of years.

It takes that long, INTENSITY IS A SKILL THAT MUST BE DEVELOPED, and if they’re not recovered they’ll never develop it. So, if they keep on trying to do high intensity every single day in every single workout they end up doing moderate intensity all the time and lower and lower and lower intensity, because of the injuries and the pain that accumulates since pain competes for performance, it goes to the same entry point in the spine.

This format that we developed, is a very short high intensity program with levels of sophistication. So there are levels of complexity where everybody gets to train together, but we may be doing different levels and depending upon where I am in my recovery, I may choke back in a level of complexity, I may drop down to a regular push up if I’m not fully recovered.

Then four days from that will be my next high intensity performance that I’m going to prepare for, and that sounds like a lot for the normal person because we tend to think, “Okay, so I have to exercise everyday this guy is saying, seven days a week.” Well, yes, you have to exercise seven days a week, but not conventional endurance standpoint you know hours of grueling exercise where you have to pull yourself home in a bucket.

A lot of the active recovery methods we’re talking about are eight to 14 minutes in the morning and then suddenly you just feel better and you have more energy throughout the day. The nutrition in a body is locked in the inside bag wrapped around the joints the synovial and the ground substance around the bones. So, you can have the best diet in the world, but if we’re not doing these active recovery methods it’s not being shipped out to the tissues that are literally being STARVED TO DEATH, so your diet means nothing.

It’s only through these mobility exercises that we’re actually able to bathe the body in its own nutrition and accelerate the recovery process so that we get the benefit from the high intensity that we’re hoping to do. If we don’t do it in advance we only will get the high intensity. So, this four day wave of using different types of exercise for a few minutes a day is how we structured our program.

We fumbled about with it for years, and until we were able to knock all the bugs out, I didn’t want to release it publicly. It was only since 2005 that I’ve been teaching this to the public, and I’m impressed, Craig, that the average fitness consumer has fallen in love with this.

We’ll be back with part 6 from TACFIT author  Scott Sonnon to discusses integrating the TACFIT training program.