Stew Smith Fitness News

The Pull-up is the great equalizer when it comes to hard exercises to master. Questions from how to do more, how to do any, how to ace pull-up fitness tests come in all the time. Over the years, we have created and used many workouts (like the ones below) to improve pull-ups, but one of the first elements you should consider before doing pull-ups is: How much do you weigh?I had an email the other day from a 30 year old man who is 270 lbs and can do 9-10 pull-ups. Naturally, I am impressed because when I put on...

            If you take a look at one of the pyramids, you will notice that it is numbered on both sides. It goes from 1-5 on one side, with the number 6 on the top, and then 5-1 on the other side. Each number represents a step in the pyramid. Your goal is to climb the pyramid all the way up, and all the way back down. So you can consider each step a "set" of your workout. At the bottom, you will find "pullups x 1, pushups x 2, situps x 3". What this...

Every year, I have the honor of exercising with America's Heroes of Tomorrow bright and early at the Naval Academy during a one week course called Summer Seminar. At 0530, Tuesday morning I exercised with over 700 motivated High School seniors who are more than likely to become Midshipmen in the Class of 2009! The goal of the workout is to show the future Midshipmen that PT can be a stress reliever NOT a stress increaser IF they arrive prepared for the daily grind of military/boot camp style of physical training. Military PT is the one stress you can control...

Even though you may be working out several times per week, many get into a rut of doing the same old routine. It is true that this “rut” is better than the alternative of not exercising at all, but it can lead to plateaus in progress whether your ultimate goal is performance or aesthetics based. This can be somewhat de-motivating. A recent email prompted me to create a method for people to develop goals by using a standard PFT style program for testing.Do you have any previous research on making physical fitness tests to give my workout group some goals...

This week I received an email from a soldier who writes:Every time I take the PFT, I ace the PT part but my run is much worse than if I ran first. Does the PT take that much out of me that I cannot run my normal pace had I not done the PT first?As with any test, you have to learn how to take tests to score better. There are entire schools and curricula devoted to helping students pass the SAT, ACT and even the ASVAB. The schools are not so much devoted to teaching subjects, but showing students...