The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [173]
Fat Gripz (www.fourhourbody.com/fatgripz) Thick-bar training increases grip strength fast. The problem is that thick bars cost $200 or more. The solution is Fat Gripz, each the size of a Red Bull can (easy for travel), which slide onto normal bars in ten seconds. Take a week after every four weeks of heavy training to use Fat Gripz with lighter weights (I do stiff-legged deadlifts). Trust me, it will be harder than you think.
End of Chapter Notes
1. To avoid shoulder problems, do not lower the bar to the chest, but to approximately 4–5″ (the width of your fist) above the chest. Use a power rack if needed, and set the pins at this point. Doing competition-standard lifts is of no interest, as his athletes are training for sports performance, not powerlifting competition.
2. Once athletes can complete 12 standard push-ups, Barry has them elevate their legs to increase resistance. The legs aren’t elevated above 50 degrees (relative to the floor) because it would involve the shoulders more than the pectorals. For pure runners, the exercise is for general pectoral work, rather than for the purpose of the sport. The pectorals are just about the only muscle group not stimulated by the deadlift, which follows.
3. The idea is to keep ground contact as short as possible on each landing, six landings maximum. In Barry’s training sessions, these jumps are sometimes onto a box, sometimes over a box, and standing triple jump or broad jump can also be substituted. Personally, to keep it simple, I used a standard flat bench and tapped both feet on the top (rather than landing) before returning to the ground, repeating six times.
4. Also referred to as “turnover.”
5. Lamar appears to be slightly rounding his back in his photos, but it’s his thoracic (upper back) spine and not his lumbar (lower back) that’s rounded. This upper rounding is common in the conventional deadlift when handling world-class poundages. Mere mortals should maintain a flat back until deadlifting well more than two times bodyweight.
6. Note that the opposite is not true. Lifting before running is fine, but running before lifting is asking for injuries.
7. This is one place where I diverged from instructions and performed warm-up sets of 1–2 reps leading up to my heaviest work weight. If I have an unidentified injury, I’d prefer it to blow out with 100 pounds instead of 400. This is a topic that Barry and I agree to disagree on.
8. This format wasn’t practical at my closest gym, which is crowded and only has one rack. I opted instead to simply step sideways over a bench with knees as high as possible, which I followed with an immediate parallel squat and sidestep that increased in width with each repetition. The lateral “unders” are particularly important for increasing hip mobility before heavy “sumo” style deadlifts, which both Barry and Pavel recommend when possible.
9. It’s not limited to 15–30-year-olds either. Take a look at Professor Arthur DeVany and his version of alactic training. Art, a professor emeritus of the University of California Irvine in economics and mathematical behavioral sciences, is 72 years young, 6′1″, and 205 pounds at 8% bodyfat.
10. Felix used the conventional stance with her legs inside her arms, but Barry suggests sumo-style for those who can perform it.
11. This was also inconvenient to set up at my gym, so I either used a decline bench press bench, where I could hook in my feet with bent legs; or I simply sat on a BOSU ball at home with my feet hooked under the couch (be sure to weigh down the couch; I used a 24kg kettlebell).
12. If unable to recover, the deadlift can be reduced to Monday and Friday.
13. One-legged squats with the unused leg extended straight in front of you.
14. Note from Tim: Coincidentally, I’ve made my greatest strength gains outside of the deadlift using two work sets of six, two exercises per workout.
15. Heart rate–based tests of work capacity appear to peak in