Grylls Bear - Your Life - Train for It

YOUR LIFE TRAIN FOR IT

Bear Grylls with Natalie Summers

Fit or BG fit... Your choice!

I would like to dedicate this book to Natalie and the BG EPIC Training team, who have worked so hard to bring this style of Express High Intensity Interval Training to everyday people looking to get fitter, leaner and stronger than they ever imagined possible. This is right at the heart of what we stand for and together there are few missions as fun as building a community of like-minded enthusiasts and helping people achieve their fitness goals. Natalie, you have done so much for me in guiding us down this road of endeavour and positive change and you have made it all so much fun! Heres to the continued adventure...

CONTENTS

Introduction4 1Training Principles8 2 Training Disciplines14 3 Getting Ready to Train18 4 Exercise Library24Kettlebell Resistance Training26Bodyweight Training58Primal Power Stretch100 5 The Workouts128 Focused Workouts140Bears Hero Workouts166 6 Designing a Workout Unique to You180 7 Fuel and Recovery190 8 Appendix: Tracking Your Progress198

Introduction

First up, I am not a natural athlete. And boy I wish I was! All my life, from school, through the military and then into the climbing and expedition fraternity, I so often found myself surrounded by people who effortlessly accomplished feats of dizzying strength, endurance and agility. And to top it all, they hardly ever seemed to train. I was always sick with envy.But the truth is, very few of us are made like that. For most of the world me included getting and staying fit, building real muscle power, flexibility and stamina, takes time, hard work and dedication.It also takes knowledge, and that is where this book comes in. I spent years of my life trying and trying to get lean and ripped but I was busy going about it in all the wrong ways. I would train and train but I would never change very much. What I did have, though, was the fire and determination to persevere, to adapt, to train even harder and somehow to try to close the gulf between me and those many natural athletes who inhabited my world.And it kind of worked. I got fit, and strong, and bendy. I persevered where many would have fallen by the wayside. I achieved those summits and those military badges. But looking at me, youd never have believed it, as I never really looked that strong or fit. And, if Im really honest, I wanted to. I know its a bit vain to say it, but I didnt just want to be fit and strong; I wanted to look it too.So I bought the books. But what is it with most fitness books?! Where we seek inspiration

we often find intimidation, and where we hope to discover a way to look and feel fitter we often experience a sense of How can I ever measure up to that? But I read them anyway. And I kept training. I had a goal.One other thing that motivated me was that I didnt want to get old and look back and think, wow, I never managed to walk on my hands, or I never could swing my body round a pull-up bar, or do back somersaults, or back flips, or touch my head on my knees. So I learnt how to do all that. I almost killed myself a few times in the process, but I stuck at it and I did it. The hard way. But I still looked the same, and I couldnt quite understand it. Then doubt crept in. And so I convinced myself that maybe we are a product of our genes and that we cant really change how we look, feel or perform to any great extent. I began to believe that I could never look really fit as well as be really fit. Yet still part of me was determined to make changes happen to find a smarter and more effective way to achieve my fitness aims of functional strength, endurance and flexibility; to make me lean, fast and ripped. That was the goal. My military training and then my mountaineering had helped me build up decent endurance and strength, but when I started filming survival shows I really began to require lean strength, speed and flexibility not just brute power. So I got busy. Motivated by a partially flawed mix of pride, vanity and the fact that my job was demanding a certain type of fitness, I started on a quest to try all the fitness

INTRODUCTION

Theres a magic to just beginning...

push-up on one foot with the other knee up by my elbow. Sometimes done explosively or sometimes done as slow isometric exercises. The workouts were always done to a clock intense movements followed by a brief few seconds of rest, then back in. This was a programme that seemed to combine the best of cardio, weight training, yoga and the increasingly popular HIIT High Intensity Interval Training all in one.The workouts were based on three training disciplines: Kettlebell Resistance training, Bodyweight training and flexibility/Primal Power Stretch training (all of which are explained in more depth in Section 2). Soon I noticed almost every newspaper and fitness magazine was beginning to recognize the results that can come from this type of cross-training. And of course by now Natalie and I had been doing it for over two years. I loved that we seemed to be ahead of the curve!Above all, I found my body shape was starting to change. All the time, I was getting trimmer, fitter and more flexible. I was getting faster, more dynamic and stronger. And what was so crazy was that it wasnt taking me six hours a day (like I kept hearing that Madonna was doing!). Here I was, training hard and intensively for just a maximum of 30 minutes. I felt almost guilty! How could this be working? We would sometimes shorten the workouts even more, doing ultra high-intensity workouts of just 10 minutes but normally we would never train any longer than 30 minutes. This in itself was a game-changer for me. Could I really get substantial, tangible benefits and results in so short a time? Could I really get lean, ripped, flexible, strong and fast in under 30 minutes, a few days a week?My body seemed to think so, and I noticed that invariably my muscles were still twitching some four hours later in a way I had never experienced through conventional programmes.

Post military and Everest I definitely let it go for a few years. Aged twenty-nine, I was a stone and a half heavier than I am now.

programmes out there. And I did them all. Well, at least a ton of them. I fell flat on my face a few times sometimes literally but slowly I began to learn what worked and what didnt. I was searching for a style of training that was fast, efficient and achievable. I wanted a regime that was also fun, dynamic and above all gave real results to regular folk. It wasnt an easy thing to find. Then, through a friend, and a load of recommendations, I started training regularly with Natalie, one on one and very soon it kind of felt like the scales were falling from my eyes. I was training in a way that I never had before. The workouts were not only much shorter than I had ever been used to, they were also much harder! They werent based around lifting heavy weights for endless sets, nor did they involve miles and miles of running, or boring, repetitive routines. Instead, the training was always functional and core-based meaning that it never targeted muscles in isolation. Instead, every exercise I did worked on multiple parts of the body and they were exercises I had never even come across before. It was never just a push-up, but instead it would be a

INTRODUCTION

That after-burn (see page 10) was a good thing it signalled that there had been shock to the muscles, which meant stimulation and growth, plus it meant I would be calorie-burning as well, long after the session had finished. I knew neither of those things happen when you just run or do repetitive weights.So I kept training. Kept changing.I also began to see more and more research supporting this view that short, sharp, intense training has a much more beneficial and lasting fat-burning effect than long, slow runs or gym sessions. I read about the dramatic health benefits to cholesterol and much more. But, above all, I loved the fact that as I was getting older, I was getting fitter than ever before. I also made the effort to educate myself in the other part of the equation: good nutrition. This is something they definitely never taught