Some exercises I just hate.

In fact, I won’t do them at all.

I’m sure you feel that way too.

You know something’s good for you, and you should do it, but you won’t. You just can’t bring yourself to do it. I know, I know – you have the same five excuses as me.

One of those exercises for me is the Get Up.

Yup, I hate it.

Ok, not really – not anymore.

I had to start liking it after I accidentally told Pavel how much I hated it.

Then guess what happened?

He made me start teaching the darn thing at the RKCs!

This of course made me rethink my approach to the Get Up.

The main reason I hated it is because it just plain hurt. It hurt my knees. It hurt my hip. It hurt my ego. So I did what any sane person would do – I skipped it.

Boy was that a big mistake.

Not only was I not addressing my weaknesses, but I was literally sabotaging my own strength progress.

You see, the Get Up is the one exercise I think everybody should be doing. I mean everybody. And now that I can do them well, I have all my clients doing either the whole Get Up or variations of the Get Up.

It’s a necessary exercise for the following reasons:

1. It teaches you how to get up from the ground safely and comfortably – a skill we often lose as we age
2. It improves general coordination
3. It improves brain function due to the crossing of the midline of the body
4. It teaches you how to move your body under and around a load (holding a KB over your head)
5. It teaches you how to lock your ribcage onto your pelvis to not only generate force, but to protect your spine while doing so
6. It rehabilitates busted shoulders – creating just the right amount of stability and mobility in the shoulder
7. It strengthens the Core
8. It rehabilitates the hips and knees
9. It produces within the athlete (You!) a feeling of being “put together”
10. It’s a great “systems check” to see if everything is working correctly to use before you start the main part of your workout

Now, you may be doing the Get Up already and I applaud you for doing so. Keep going. But if you’re like me, you could probably be doing it better – that is – get even more benefit from doing it. (And isn’t that why we do this “stuff” – to reap the benefits???)

So, I could post some great pictures of me doing the various steps of the Get Up, or I could defer to the real experts: Brett Jones and Gray Cook.

Do yourself a major and massive favor – check out Kettlebells From the Ground Up. It’s the Get Up on steroids. Working through this will literally make you feel “bulletproof.”

I know, because that’s how I feel now and this is one of the reasons why.

Now ask yourself this question – “Why wouldn’t I want to feel ‘bulletproof’?”