The question comes up from clients on how to eat for increased muscle mass. The answer is to improve digestion and assimilative capacity.

Slamming protein shakes and eating too-frequent meals throughout the day is a sure way to overwhelm digestive capability. This brings on toxemia, illness, and decreased vitality.

A long flight of stairs is hard to beat for conditioning versatility and makes a great training tool; flights of 75 steps and up are a great challenge. While a lengthy, steep hill can be substituted, it's not quite as good. The stair training protocols I'm about to describe produce conditioned strength, or strength-endurance, also a strength subset known as power-endurance.

It takes a great deal of energy to propel the body up a steep flight of stairs; the heart rate and breath are rapidly elevated. In this kind of effort, you must discipline the breathing to prevent harmful mouth breathing, ie, panic breathing.

I've had a lifelong love affair with throwing-ever since I was a little kid.

I've been fascinated with throwing objects for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories include learning to skip stones across the Conodogquineg Creek, as well as life-or-death rock battles with the kids who lived on the other side of that creek. We didn't know those kids; they didn't know us, but the fact that we each existed in the other's self-deemed sacred land, called for rock fights of epic proportion.

Luckily, the creek was too wide for any of us to gain real accuracy behind our throws, but I still remember how mesmerized I was watching the stones arc up, then come down -- as well as my fervent envy of the boys with a strong throwing arm.

Q: Hi Steve! I'm about to teach my first KB clinic this month, and I wanted to ask you about something...

I have my own reasons for wanting to teach the Reverse TGU instead of the regular TGU, but why do YOU do it?

A: Few people know that I introduced the "Turkish" get-up to the Kettlebell community.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Almost daily, I read articles about America's growing obesity epidemic. This, along with the general decline of citizen health, is a frequent topic of discussion. I read that 60 to 70% of Americans are sedentary--and Western Europe and the UK closely mirror the US. Of the 30% of the population who report exercising on a regular basis, only 5% exercise vigorously.