How do you encompass in an article what happens in an amazing weekend like we just had at the second Super Human Workshop?

I guess I could start telling you about the individual things that happened along the way and the hilarious stories that people inevitably get when you have time together with friends. We try to cultivate that atmosphere within our seminars of having certainly the most productive learning and knowledge packed experiences that most people get at any kind of strength and physical culture seminar, but along the way we make friends. We keep the seminars small on purpose to create that one-on-one content and that hands-on learning experience. It really is an amazing feeling to see people return again and again and even better to see people return and watch them progress.

For instance one of the gentlemen at one of our last seminars went from bending a 60D penny nail and in only a few months training post to this seminar, is now right on top of bending the Iron Mind red nail. That Friends, if you don’t know, is ten jumps in strength in just a couple months time. He had made massive progress. One of the ladies returned to our seminar and had phenomenal progress as well and is close to one of her all time goals.

I guess I could tell you about the dozens of PRs that people set along the way as well as the amazing dinners, the hospitality of Laurel Blackburn and her family, her tremendous gym, which is 5,000 sq ft of awesomeness – every kettlebell you could imagine, tires, prowlers, couple of really killer power racks and much more. Or I could tell you about the time we got to hang out with some SWAT officers and see some insane gear. I could wax poetic about the multiple trips back and forth to dinner and the airport and the conversations and anecdotes on their collective backs. I could tell about the individual learning that took place outside of the seminar as well throughout the weekend.

Questions were answered, theories were expounded upon, and personal stories were shared as well as the general greatness and the inspiration of other incredible strength athletes. I could also share the inspiration of really crazy feats that were developed over the days as well as new informational training material and the performances that took place.

Let me kick off with what happened on Friday.

Noah and I drove up on Thursday, hung out and got started with actual work on Friday. Friday we were preparing at the gym for the kick off to the seminar which was to be a strongman show. We pulled in anyone there who had experience or who had arrived early at the seminar, organized it and had multiple performers do their thing over a dozen feats, some of which were totally unique. This included the invention that day of the brand new strength feat – The Juggling Bridge of Death, which you can see in this video was a pretty intense feat. It involved me doing a human plank or bridge feat with my shoulders on one box, my feet on another and a platform placed on my chest to which my partner Logan jumped from the ground, onto the platform and was then handed a kettlebell and proceeded to juggle while standing on my human bridge. This actually took an insane amount of both strength and coordination on both people considering the instability of the surface on Logan’s part as well as the constant shifting of pressure on my part and just the general guts to do it.

That’s how these things work. They create an amazing effect on your personal outlook on what’s possible and many of the PRs set along the way are because of the energy of the room, the focus of the people there and you’re being cheered on by incredible other people, then to learn and do things you couldn’t do before. The strongman show players included myself, Logan, Noah, Nigel Blackburn, Matti Marzel, Ryan Pitts and Eric Gutman. All performing one to three feats of strength a piece including pressing people, the human cyclone, ripping phone books in the teeth, in the hands, bending nails, bending red nails, long bars in the teeth, thick spikes, driving nails through boards, very cool bridging feats as well as dragging a sled with the teeth. This was the beginning to our amazing weekend after which we all had a wonderful time hanging out.

When we got started on Saturday with the real info we began with the I Will Be Iron advanced series. In this we end up with about three hours of DVD footage, which shows the entire progression of why the training is put together the way that it is, how it helps you do what you’re supposed to do and how to progress to the next level from the swing. You all know that I Will Be iron is essentially about the programming of the swing and how to put it together with heavy lifting and intense cardio with the maximum benefit of third way cardio for weight loss. It is also to simply open a brand new paradigm in what’s possible for human strength and endurance, to radically affect your health and do it in a time-sensitive manner.

We’re not requiring 19 workouts of 87 hours each week. It’s literally 3 or 4 hours per week and you’re gold. What if you want to use that as a jumping off point to progress? There are actually four levels that I’ve established in my kettlebell training, only one of which has been released and the I Will Be Iron advanced series is the beginning of that next level.

So what does that cover?

It covers changing your strength patterns around for what you want or changing the training to fit what you might do (work wise or athletically). The training is specific about what the intense cardio is and what the heavy lifting is and the transitional moves from the swing to three other areas of kettlebell.

The kettlebell has 1,000 exercises and I like to perform many of them, but from a mainstay standpoint, meaning that I spend large amounts of time concentrating on them, I focus on the one arm kettlebell press and push press, the one arm snatch as well as the swing. Transitionally – something I’ve begun to concentrate on, is the combination moves of those three exercises. This would be differing combinations to transfer the cardio of the swing, to ramp it up or down from a speed or intensity as you see fit, to move on to extremely high volume and extremely high output one arm pressing and push pressing as well as extremely high volume one arm snatching.

There are specific paradigms to improve them once you have gotten used to the massive load of pressing or snatching, but this is the transitional load from how to add together the swing with other tools as well as with the press and the snatch and transition to going to say 1,000 swings to 1,000 push presses or 1,000 snatches in one workout. It also focuses on how to take them heavier and harder depending on what you need and what you’re doing. I cover exactly how I do the push press, how I use it for cardio and why as well as how to begin training the snatch. I cover how to mix them in a couple of ways that you probably have never heard of such as true chaos mixing, which is a complete randomization of moving through the three exercises for an extended period of time as well as organized patterns like the prison swing challenge, the snatch and swing challenge, the snatch, press and swing challenge done for straight repetitions as well as for ladders, etc. It also works on mixing the swing with other implements for instance third way cardio done as a mix with swings and other implements for time or swings and other implements for reps. Mixes with other implements include things like swings and sledgehammers, swings and heavy bag done for high repetition, high volume and the high cardio output style of third way cardio.

(Signup here to see one example with The Prison Workout)

Along the way people became extremely proficient at performing their swing. They changed to the very exact details of why and how do you use the target swing, exactly why I change hands the way I do, which is a very specific style of hand change for the swing and many more details that are included along with answering the questions that arise when training.

Then we moved to Logan Christopher’s excellent presentation on mental paradigms, how to adjust them and how to change them. Logan began to scratch the surface of what’s possible in mental training and do this by asking specific questions that give you insight into yourself and how you train and how that can affect your strength, your endurance, your fat loss, and your performance. He explained this for training both singly and in a group and to give you areas of strength and weakness that you can work to build up or take advantage of to make the most out of what you do. He specifically shared tips on how to answer the questions to use your personal style to ramp up your fat loss and to keep it going as well as having audience members live answer the questions. In doing so this gave insight into exactly what personality and perception gives you in training and how you can manipulate that to keep yourself training harder, training faster, getting better gains and training stronger.

That really opened up an amazing set of insights especially for trainers and those who work in groups to help those groups be more effective as well to help the individual training of people be more effective, not to mention your own personal training. Along the way throughout the seminar there was significant work on different people’s individual strengths and weaknesses with kettlebells as well as personal records set in all kinds of lifting, bending, etc.

Stay tuned for Part 2. And in the meantime, be sure to signup here to get exclusive videos from the workshop.