 In our last Garmin Run 4 blog, I spoke about my own limitations in the running that I do and specifically around my whole physical health and the fact that sometimes I think I neglect my strength and conditioning a little bit and perhaps could do a bit more. So I wanted to speak to Tim Stevenson from School of Calisthenics who knows a lot more about that kind of stuff than I do. Nice to see you, Tim. Great to be on. Thank you. We're looking forward to the conversation. Now, just to give a little bit of context for this conversation, I think we first met something like perhaps ten years ago when you were working with the British Paralympic team. Yeah, it would have been a while back. I was doing some work specifically with Richard Whitehead at the time when I think we first connected, was looking after his strength and conditioning programme through the London Cycle and then through Rio as well. And Liz obviously was working with Richard at the same time as a coach. So yeah, it was a nice connection to make some time ago now. One of the things that I really liked about your approach and I think we'll get the opportunity to talk about it a little bit more is working with Paralympic athletes in particular means that you've really got to consider individual differences and strengths and abilities with a lot more understanding. Yeah, I think it's a population that I've really kind of specialised in over the years. And it's something working with Paralympic athletes makes you understand and appreciate the complexity of the human movement system. And it's not just about what one muscle does, it's about a whole system. And if you're a dynamic and innovative in your approach about how you train a Paralympic athlete, that system is capable of doing incredible things. But it's definitely an area that challenges you to think outside of the norm of strength and conditioning and how are we going to adapt and manipulate a training environment and ultimately work out what an athlete needs to be able to do to be successful and how are we going to change what we do to make that happen. And that for me, I guess in my intro, I'm like, look, I mostly just run. Yeah, I'm one of those runners who knows that conditioning is one of those overlooked things for me. Particularly at the moment when actually, you know, I've got a bit of an opportunity where I could be doing some focused intentional purposeful conditioning, mobility, strength work at home. Do you see that a lot in runners? Yeah, runners are actually a really interesting population. I've been working in strength and conditioning for over 12 years, trained a number of runners during that time of different levels. And it's fair to say, and this is not, I don't want to make a big broad statement, but runners are rarely gym animals. Well, we look affectionately to return as gym rats would rather be out running than be in a gym training. And it's a little bit of a, I completely get it. Like one of the things that we do now around Calla Saints is around body weight training. I love training outdoors. I would rather be doing that than being inside a gym. It's just my kind of focus of intention and intention is around strength based work. But it is a challenge for runners because everyone's got a limited amount of time. So it's an opportunity cost, isn't it, in terms of you can go out for a run or you can do some work on your strength and conditioning in half an hour or whatever it might be. And I think it's so many people get away with running to a level without needing to do strength and conditioning work or not feeling like it's as important as getting out for a run. Let's think about that at the moment. Just in the current situation, we've got a focused amount of time perhaps that we can exercise. And so for me, I'm heading out for a run because it's my preferred thing to be doing. Yet we see a lot of quite heavily exposed, particularly in social, to look at things that say, we'll do this workout, try that workout, do this particular strength or conditioning work, kind of, and I'm a bit lost. So I think firstly, like, why calisthenics? What is calisthenics? Why calisthenics? Why is it good for now? Why is it good for runners? Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? The current situation that we're in is everyone's a home training expert now, aren't they? And there's a lot of stuff which you can get bogged down in. To answer the question, calisthenics comes from two Greek words. Kalos and senos means beauty and strength. And effectively what we're talking about is body weight training. Oftentimes people will think about body weight training as being for beginners. So you think about push-ups and pull-ups, but it goes a lot further than that. We would include things like handstands, muscle-ups, pistol squats for the lower body, anything really where we are starting to just move the body in different ways and learn to move in new ways. So it's a very easy and accessible form of training. Anybody can do it if you've got a body and a little bit of space. You don't need a lot of equipment to get involved. And the really interesting, and I think from a sports performance perspective is where we at the School of Calisthenics do quite a bit of our work these days is around, as I mentioned before, about with the Paralympic ATHLEAS, it respects the human movement system. It respects the body as it is designed. Rather than breaking it down and go, this is a bicep and therefore I'm going to do a bicep curl. If you want to go and do a handstand or a pistol squat or any of the movements that we can look at in calisthenics right through so a human flag, right, there's some pretty gravity defying iconic stuff that comes into the mix, you have to be able to move all the joints or most of the joints together, stabilize multiple joints and start to think about how we transfer forces through the chain. And we have to do that in running. It's no different. It's just that the way that we train it in calisthenics is slightly different but essentially it's a more complete approach to training movement. So, you know, just hearing you, and I've seen you do one of those human flag things and like when you do it and when Jaco does it, you know, you do it and you like, you kind of, you put yourself on a post basically and you kind of, in some kind of weird way, you lift your whole body up and then you hold it there, right, so you're out hanging on the post and I'm thinking to myself, I could do that, you make it look so easy. And then I go and I try and have a, how did it go? And I'm like, I am miles off this, miles off even being able to, you know, lift my feet off the ground for a second. I simply can't do it. Talk to me about like the relevance of progressing to that and really human flag or handstand and running. So, there's a progression relevance and then there's a specificity relevance, right? Because I'm a runner, how is doing a handstand going to help me? Yeah, that's a really fair point and there'll be a lot of people thinking the same that it doesn't seem like a great endeavor in terms of how is running going to improve my handstand. And if I was being perfectly honest, if I was to sit down with a runner and look at the perfect training program, I might not pick a handstand or a human flag because, as you say, from a specialization perspective or a transfer or training effects, it might not have a massive difference. But there's a number of different things I think that we can, if we go sort of general athletic movement to start off with, because that's for me the most important thing as a strength and conditioning coach, label that maybe a movement coach. It's the same thing as strength is part of being able to move well. People who can move well get injured less. Their systems are more efficient and they can learn to move in new ways. They can change aspects of their sports performance in new ways because they have a good body awareness. They know where they are in space. If you ask them to do something, they'll pick it up quite quickly. These are the sort of athletic types that we would have, we would often see people who are good at a number of different things. Why not all the way back to what we should be able to do as humans? We should have a full range of movement squat, feet facing forward. That would be a contentious point for some people, but let's say, I'm going to say we want feet straight facing straight forwards. We should be able to sit on our heels. That's how people have sat around campfires and gone to the toilet for many, many years. But it's an ability which we've lost. If you can do that and you can spend 10, 15, 20 minutes sat in a deep squat position, we know that we've got a good range of movement around the joints. We know we've got a certain level of stability around the joints and we've got some level of structural integrity. The body can do something which is a very basic pattern. What I think is interesting with running is that you can run, but you don't use a particularly great range of movement in terms of a wide range of movement. You don't have to be particularly mobile to run. Good runners and there's levels obviously between how a performance level. But what we're interested in from a movement perspective is I want to maintain some of that natural ability to be able to move because good movement, we need mobility, stability and strength. When you're going to run, if you've got a system which has those components, your running is going to be more efficient. It's going to be more effective. You're going to run faster, you're not going to get injured. We might be able to then get more adaptation out of certain training phases that we're going to go and work on particularly. What calisthenics is going to bring to this is you have to respect mobility, stability and strength. If we take something which is more transferable, let's say we are our basic body weight calisthenics movements for the lower body where most runners will probably go to, might be something like a pistol squat. It's a single leg squat all the way down, so back side to the ground pretty much. One leg sits out in front and you stand back up. Some people go, it's bad for your knees. If you've got range of movement, stability and strength, you can do it. It's not bad for your knees. It would be bad for your knees if you try and do it with 100 kilos on your back potentially, but that's not the way that it's designed to be done. We might have things like a shrimp squat, but even the basics of body weight squats, lunges in different patterns and planes. So if we start getting better at those positions, we build some strength through these ranges. The pistol squats are a good example. You can work backwards and forwards, but it's not the same movement we're playing. It's in the same movement in which we're going to run in and it's going to help us to control essentially the knee position. Move up the body a little bit. We start to also think about the importance of, let's call it pillar. Core stability makes people think about crunches and it's a bit of a misleading term. But if you think that your body needs a pillar of strength from basically around muscature, which supports the spine and the pelvis, that's going to be our major stabilizing structures and all the muscles which attach into that part of the core. So even some of the shoulder musculature is core musculature. If we can keep that spine stable and the pelvis stable, it means we can be more efficient with how we produce force and transfer forces through the system and therefore our running performance is going to improve. And that's where things like a handstand come in. You can't do a handstand unless you've got a good range of movement and you can link that stability from the shoulder through to the pelvis. The legs aren't doing a huge amount. That's fine. The runners need rest days as well so it can be on a training day. But you can't hide from it. What we know about running performance for general speaking and it's different if you go and watch the London marathon sometimes when I talk about posture and optimal mechanics. But for most people we spend a lot of time hunched over in front of computers and in cars and when I run, this is not a great posture for me. I want to be able to get the shoulders back. I should have full range of movement overhead. Because as soon as you get dysfunction in the system anywhere, you're going to start a cascade of compensatory movements. Shoulder gets jacked up all of a sudden we've got ankle pain because we are talking about one big piece of muscle all connected by fascia and connected tissue rather than a calf is sore, let's fix the calf. The calf could be sore because shoulders jacked up. And what calisthenics is going to do is force you to take a systems level approach. And my last point and I'm going to get a word in edge ways and ask another question. It's just around the focus on a tangible goal. If I said to you go do some stretching work or do some strength work because it's good for you running you might kind of go, I'd rather go for a run. But if I set you a challenge of going do five pistol squats back to back on each leg that now gives you a tangible outcome and a reason to actually start thinking about the progressions I might need to work on improving calf ring or ankle dorsal flexion improving range of movement of ankles stabilizing the knee, getting the hips a little bit stronger those things come kind of part and parcel of a tangible outcome that actually is interesting to you rather than do some stretching. I think actually as well, you know, like at the moment I don't think I can do two pistol squats. Seriously, you know, but I would go I would go for a run, you know with reasonable frequency, but pistol squat probably couldn't handstand. I'd have a go, but I don't expect it would be especially effective. Might be fun to watch. There's a few kind of things to think about around so one of my obstacles is I'll claim there's no time for me to do it. So if I'm thinking, you know what I could give that a go, like what's the how do I get the most return for the calisthenics that I might attempt first. Yeah, I think a lot of people we've kind of been misled in fitness and a strength session needs to be an hour or 90 or 90 minutes. We need to kind of dedicate a big block of time and that's where I'm gonna do my strength work. The reality is that we, the body's not really bothered if it's 90 minutes or five minutes in terms of intensity, but it could be as such an easy thing to start off sticking in a chair, spend a bit more time to sit on the ground or sit in a deep squat position for five minutes a day play around with some we call it ground based movement, but there's lots of hip mobility drills that you can do all form around basic movement patterns of the squat and the lateral lunge. You can spend five minutes just getting a little bit of work done in those kind of positions. You might be that you're gonna go, I've got 15 minutes so I'm just gonna do a few pistol squats on each leg. I think trying to go from no strength and conditioning program to doing an hour three times a week is unrealistic for most people because it won't happen. But if you can start to just build in and we sometimes talk about movement snacks, like can I do a little movement snack during the day? Just can I even hang from a bar, can I just play around with some hand balancing progressions with the kids because they think it's playing and they're enjoying it and just try and find these ways to sort of challenge yourself a little bit more regularly, but just find something which is interesting, find something which you need to do or if you're a competitive person, find something which you can't do like a body weight squat and realise that you should be able to do that and that's a a movement pattern which you're gonna want to keep into old age because as soon as that starts to kind of you lose your ability to move, life is gonna start to look pretty bleak. Some interesting, exciting, simple challenges around calisthenics that we could do at the moment, but that also we're gonna benefit our physical health for the long term and complement our running, is that right? Yeah, absolutely and it's definitely that combination of looking at longevity and improving performance now and if people do something as simple as pick up a few body weight exercises, you don't have to do a core workout anymore because core has to be part of calisthenics so you're ticking a box in there if we're doing some things like sort of lower body exercises we've talked about you're ticking stability and mobility doesn't necessarily have to be broken down into lots of different training components. Pick a couple of things take a lot of boxes and get out for a run and I think it's definitely something which people should just again have a look at what else is out there it doesn't have to be fighting over a barbell in the gym to do squats it can be as simple as putting your foot up on a chair or something at home and doing what we would call a rear foot elevator split squat but it's just strength based work and what I would hope people would sort of might be interested in people like to bother about getting injured until they're injured then it's the worst thing in the world when they can't run but injury prevention is an important concept that we are proactive about it and stronger people to a point and again it's top level conversation but stronger people will withstand training volume more. I do a lot of work in swimming and one of the greatest benefits of getting a guy as strong is they can just handle volume and the same thing will happen in runners stronger lower body is to a point as long as it's still functional for the distances that's going to stop you from picking up as many niggles it's just robustness and solid basic foundations for training. Any advice to people to go well if they think well actually I'm going to give this a crack I'm going to give it a go I think you guys at school of calisthenics have a very detailed and thorough YouTube channel you run some beginners programs any advice for us to get going. I mean Garmin also do some brilliant workouts that you can do at home through some of the Garmin workouts on download so there's different things you can get involved with but what would you give us to get involved as a starter? For runners my first port of call I think will be we have on our online training programs we have our lower body foundations class and it's not anything too difficult it's not pistol squats or anything crazy it's just regaining full range of movement squat and multi-directional lunge those are foundation patterns that we should have so you can find out that information on our website as a quite structured corrective exercise style program there's also some fun stuff like our YouTube channel it's got a lot of videos on there we've been doing lives a lot recently there's a shrimp squat one on there I'm going to do a pistol squat live soon as well so that will be up on the site and I think it's have a look around to see what sort of stuff takes you fancy and just incorporate it into into life at home and if you've got families like the kids that absolutely smash some of this sort of stuff because it's just play and it's just movement and it's not training to them it's just messing about and that's why we like it and it sounds like something that once you get into you can take forward in a sustainable long-term way so that so often we see particularly the moment things which are going to be helpful to do right now at home on your own but they're not going to stay with us for long but this is more about building this healthy long life long movement habit to support and complement other things that you might do and the truth is as we get older we aren't going to we're going to lose strength we're going to lose range of movement and I think this is an important conversation also about lifetime the longevity we talk about investing in physical pension lots of people will have no problem putting money in a financial pot but how much time or effort are we investing in how we're going to move now and how we're going to move on with 60, 70, 80 years old and running is a great part of that keeping moving, keeping running is going to keep a lot of boxes in that regard but I go back to the point around just keeping the number of movement options available you've gotten just one of the points that I thought the comments and the information you've put out recently around mental health running as well our brain is going to benefit from longevity if we are stimulating with new exercises, new ways to move, new skills so that could be learning the piano or learning to draw it could also be learning to move in a new way and those things have been proven to stave off Alzheimer's and dementia later on in life because we're investing in the neural circuitry so learning to handstand is not only going to help with your shoulder, hip stability, postural control force you to think about some of the issues that you've got but it's also going to lay down new neural circuitry that keeps the brain sharp and it keeps us active mentally longer that's what's good about starting to move in new ways we are investing in different areas that the whole system needs and running can be part of that but everyone who runs already knows how to run it's not a new skill it's just doing it faster or for longer it's like you're never too old to start either something like Karstenix the oldest guy in our community is 72 years old and he kills it and he loves it and he says it's the best thing he can be doing at 72 because he's staying strong and stable imagine he's right so right I'm off into the garden to start my pistol squats Tim thanks for joining us as part of the Garmin Run 4 blog series my pleasure thanks for having me