you to build strength and muscle.
Period.
I know that's a tall claim to make, and I didn't write it out of any false hype or
salesmanship. I wrote it because Grind Style Calisthenics (GSC) may be the
best way to eliminate the guesswork from building an impressive physique
through bodyweight training. After reading this book, you will no longer be
distracted by trends that tempt you to program hop from one routine to the
next; nor will you waste hours of your time hoping to achieve results through
blind luck. Every chapter contains information that will empower you with
the clarity and confidence to know exactly what to do, in every workout, to
get the results you want.
What makes the Grind Style Calisthenics program so effective?
GSC is not another workout program or progressive calisthenics system.
There are already enough of those in the world as it is. Instead, GSC is a
collection of simple, yet very powerful, tools that will teach you how to
progressively control your own body. The more neuromuscular control you
develop, the more you’ll unleash your inhibited potential and make every rep,
set, and workout more effective for building muscle and strength.
Who the heck am I?
My name is Matt Schifferle, and I’ve been studying the art and science of
physical training for over 20 years. I’ve practiced a wide variety of
disciplines, from martial arts to kettlebells and I’ve never been lacking in the
discipline and motivation department. Yet, despite my best efforts, progress
used to be an elusive and random occurrence. It didn’t matter how much I learned or how hard I worked; making progress was always hit or miss.
After years of trying to sift through all of the conflicting fitness information,
and trying to work myself to death, I came to the profound realization; that neither hard work nor endless education was the path to success.
This simple realization inspired me to search for the ultimate answers in fitness. My quest has to lead me down many rabbit holes, and I still continue to share my enlightening discoveries through my YouTube Videos and Podcast at the RedDeltaProject.com One of my most empowering discoveries was that training success, towards
any goal boils down to the creation, and manipulation, of muscle tension.
Everything from lowering your handicap in golf, to running a marathon
depends entirely on how well you can use your own muscles. Of course, this same lesson also applies to develop strength and building muscle as well.
It’s taken me over 20 years to learn and prepare the information in the next several chapters and it’s my sincere hope that this book will help you accomplish amazing things for the next 20 years and beyond.
The Body Transforming Laws of Muscle Tension:
Muscle tension is the active ingredient in your workouts and it’s responsible for the results you want. So if you want to get bigger and stronger, or get rid of joint pain, your ability to produce and control muscle tension is the path to those results. Since it's so important, let's get right down to what tension is,
what it is not, and the natural laws that give you the power to control it.
Tension Law #1
It’s all in your head
Muscle tension is the product of your neuromuscular system. That very term
neuromuscular highlights the origin of tension and how you control it. When
your muscles contract, they are responding to an electrical signal they are
receiving from your nervous system. The origin of that signal is your brain.
It's crucially important to understand the origin of muscle tension because it
gives you the power to control your tension at the source. Without this
essential awareness, your ability to produce, and control, muscle tension is
left up to chance and hit-or-miss workouts. You can feel this process in action right now. As you're reading this sentence take a moment and flex a muscle, any muscle in your body. You don't even
have to contract it very hard, just tense it up and hold that tension for a few moments.
Take a second and feel that muscle contracting. Note the sensation and savor it like a connoisseur. Now let it relax and release the tension. I know it's a simple exercise but observe that there was nothing external (other than these instructions) that made your muscle contract. There wasn't a fancy weight machine or heavy piece of equipment, that made your muscle turn on. You weren't practicing a sport or exercise technique either. You make the conscious choice to put tension into that muscle and hold it there for a few seconds. I also didn't tell you which muscle to contract; that part was up to
you. It was a completely conscious choice on your part to help you
understand that all of the instructions in this book are dealing with the
deliberate pro-active use of creating and producing muscle tension.
The bottom line is that you cannot make any muscular gains without first working toward a stronger visualization of your training first.t took me a long time to understand this lesson after years of sub-par
workouts. I always wondered, why would a set of squats make my quads burn one workout, but then I would hardly feel those same muscles working during the next workout? Sometimes, an exercise could feel very different from one set to the next or even change over a few reps. It was always a mystery until a fellow trainer gave me a simple exercise to help me with some chronic knee pain I was experiencing. As it turned out, I had poor tension control in my hamstrings, and he gave me a simple isometric technique to make my hamstrings stronger. At first, it didn't feel like the exercise was doing anything at all. Even so, it was a simple exercise, and I could do it any time I was standing so I got in the habit of practicing it throughout the day. It took about three weeks of daily practice before I started to notice a slight tingling in my hamstrings. After another few weeks that tingling had grown into a full-on the burn. After a couple of months, I started to notice I was using my hamstrings more when I
would stand up out of a chair or climb a flight of stairs. As my tension control improved the stress on my knees disappeared.
Since then, I've noticed several other of my muscle groups that have suffered poor tension control. My biceps, lats, hips, abs, and shoulders also had a poor mind-muscle connection. I've been making steady progress, but I always start with a slow trickle of tension in the muscle that eventually grows as I keep practicing. What's more, I know I can continually improve my tension control. I started working on my hamstrings three years ago, and I'm still making progress. Just like any skill, tension control is always something you
can improve on and should strive to do so.
The biggest challenge with tension control is that we all tend to use our
muscles in a habitual, near-subliminal fashion. People usually don't think about how they use their muscles in everyday activities like walking,
standing, or going about their daily chores. They operate their muscles
primarily on autopilot, which makes it particularly challenging to reverse old habits and make progress.
Teaching improved tension control has been one of the biggest challengesI've faced as a personal trainer. How can I possibly teach someone how to improve something they aren't even aware of and can’t even feel? That's why
I've compiled my best tension control exercises in this book. They will help you learn how to improve your tension control as quickly as possible.
Your mind controls your muscle tension and, your brain is one heck of a
habit-forming machine. In fact, you've been conditioning your tension control
habits ever since you were a toddler and have continued to do so to this day. It's a myth that exercise is the only time you're training your body. The truth is, your body is continuously training every second of every day. So whenyou proactively control your muscle tension and perform an exercise, you're not turning on some switch marked "condition body." You're always conditioning your body; it's just that your workouts are when you're purposely controlling the direction of that conditioning. I find this idea both liberating and scary at the same time. On the one hand,
it's good to know you don't have to move mountains in your workout to make
your body change. You're already changing, all you need to do is a guide where
you want your physical changes to go. However, it's also somewhat nerve-
wracking to know that everything you do is telling your body how it should
perform and behave. You never get a day off as your neuromuscular system is undergoing constant renovation, and it doesn't take much for things to start headed down the wrong path.
Nevertheless, I find understanding this lesson is very motivating because even the smallest tension control habits can make a big difference over time. You're always one workout, set or rep away from steering your physical fate in a more positive direction. There are only three variables in controlling muscle tension
There are a million different ways you can perform physical activity. From yoga to Yo-yo and powerlifting to power walking, you can apply muscle tension in an infinite number of ways. You can lose yourself down an endless rabbit hole trying to contemplate all of the different ways you can use your body.
So I'm going to make things simple for you. I'm assuming you're reading this book because you primarily want to a) make your muscles stronger and b
)make your muscles bigger. If you want anything other than that, this is not the book for you. Granted, GSC can help improve athletic performance, decrease joint pain, improve posture, and help you burn fat but if those areyour primary objectives I recommend starting with my first two books,
Fitness Independence and Smart Bodyweight Training.But, if the strength and size thing is your objective, then there are only three
things you need to concern yourself with from the standpoint of physicaltraining. The first of which is that all-important tension control because it's impossible to stimulate a muscle to get bigger and stronger if you struggle to engage it in the first place. Naturally, this is why so much of the GSC workout strategy focuses on tension control and muscle activation. The second variable is the amount of tension you can put into a muscle which often correlated with weight. While weight is a big influence on the
resistance against a muscle, there are several other factors to consider. The technique you use and your environment can also influence how much tension you can put into a muscle. You can even change the amount oftension in a muscle, even if the weight you're lifting is the same, due to focus
and concentration. So it's more accurate to claim that a weight you lift
influences the amount of tension in a muscle rather than directly correlates to
it.
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