It’s kind of hard to believe I started this blog in January of 2010 as a record of the daily workouts we did. I had done a similar thing on a Blogger site (coachhays.blogspot.com) since I resigned from football coaching to record the workouts and learn how to blog. Then along came this thing called “WordPress” and I was intrigued, so I started http://www.coachhays.com.
What began as a record of workouts, rest day reads, and workout songs soon turned into an outlet mainly for my stupidity. This is the 342nd post on The Coach Hays Blog and the stats monkey says there has been 19.008 visitors to the site and 40,344 page views. The stats monkey may be a tad bit skewed as I’d guess about half those numbers might be attributed to my mother. The writing portion of it all started with a silly little serial story called Alien Dog Attack I wrote just to make my mother laugh. She did. After that the stupidity took over and now I rant, rave, tell stories of the olden days, and use the blog to present and discuss things (mainly sports) that are on my mind.
Today, we go back to the roots. Back to training and exercise. Swinging Through November is a workout I’ve done for the past three years and have had others join in for the past two years. The workout is simple. The workout takes 30 minutes a day and can be as hard or as easy as you wish to make it. The important thing is doing something to improve health and/or maintain physical fitness as the daylight hours fade to the darkness of winter.
The workout is simple. We do five weight swings on Day One, followed by a movement for the remainder of 30 minutes. Every day, we add five weight swings. So on Day 30, November 30, we will do a total of 150 swings (I usually break them into sets of 15-20 with minimal rest between sets.) and walk, run, jog, on the road, track, or treadmill for the remaining minutes.
If you don’t know what weight swings are (they are awesome and you should give them a chance.), below is a link to a training video for the exercise from BreakingMuscle.com.
Or try this one by Jeff Martone.
Bonus video of Jeff Martone talking about how to work at flexibility and body position for the swing.
I like the weight swing. I hope you do too. It is a great exercise for power endurance. They are great for teaching body control, flexibility and body awareness. They will work you if you give them the chance.
If you’re new to swings, take it slow. Work technique above the amount of weight. The beauty is you can use just about any weight you can grip with two hands for this. Plastic gallon jugs, small sandbags, dumbbells, kettlebells, shot puts, rocks, etc. I like my Weider weight plates because of their built-in, open hand grip allows for a good swing grip.
Happy swinging.
THE COACH HAYS 