Episode #7: This ain’t your uncle’s body building plan… an Interview with Josh Henkin

September 08, 2021

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time. -Bill Gates

While the majority of the fitness world is still stuck on the barbell, Josh is paving new ground.

Josh’s DVRT system uses sandbags, kettlebells and a couple other tools to challenge the body in a whole new way. He has done an incredible job develop exercises and systems that will give you real world strength on the mat and in the cage.

This ain’t your uncle’s body building plan…

Josh Henkin’s approach to strength will change the way you think about getting STRONG.

Download the Full Podcast here.

In this podcast, Josh Henkin and I discuss:

Trends in the strength and conditioning world.
What athletes and coaches have done in the past.
How people define strength.
What today’s champions are using to stay ahead of the curve.
and more

You’ll learn how thinking outside the box can yield incredible results, like reduced injury, increased speed, better coordination. more power, muscle gains and more.

Professional athletes, coaches, teams and other organizations around the world are using Josh’s systems.

3 DVRT Challenges and Exercises

1. 5 Minute Clean and Press Test

2. Rotational Lunge Test

3. Sandbag Get Ups

For more information about this Josh and the DVRT program, visit DVRTFitness.com

#fightcampconditioning

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Josh Henkin

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley from fightcampconditioning.comand I’m here with Josh Henkin. Josh, how’re you doing?

JOSH: Good Corey, thanks for having me.

COREY: Absolutely. It’s always a pleasure. Yeah, Josh, today what we wanted to talk about with everybody that’s listening is just to kind of run through some of the common mistakes that people are making in combat training world. And Josh, give everybody just kind of a quick snapshot of what you do and who you are and what you’re doing these days.

00:32

JOSH: I’ve been in the strength and conditioning industry for about 20 years now. I started off actually working in the university, studying with athletes, went out my own, there’s a lot of general population but then probably most people know that I created our DVRT UltimateSandbag Systemin about 2005. And that really launched us an opportunity to work with a lot of different people. I’ve designed programs for military, we work with all different fighting programs, [incomprehensible] fighting magazines and military stuff and now we have a diverse — from the housewife [distortion] elite navy seal that we sort of talk to and communicate with. So it’s been a really eclectic and a wonderful experience.

COREY: It’s awesome. Josh, for a lot of the guys that are listening, typically people are going to big box gyms or weight rooms, the bodybuilding and power lifting world has kind of dominated that market for the last 30, 40 years. What are some of the tools that you guys are utilizing with your system?

JOSH: Great question. We do obviously a lot with our ultimate sandbags. But we are also implementing bodyweight training, suspension training bands and then kettlebells. To me the philosophy we always have is if we’re going to use something it has to do something better than something else could. It’s not just from blind variety as you can but that can produce a better outcome for a very specific goal. Is variety okay? Sure, that’s fine. But that shouldn’t be probably the driving force in the majority of the training. So we try to be very particular and specific in why we use certain thing that we do.

COREY: Right on. So a lot of sandbags, heavy resistance band, kettlebells. I know, when you came out to our gym, we had the wall slides that we were using as well. They’re always fine tools. When you’re laying out programs and developing your system, what are some of the pillars of your system?

02:33

JOSH: Great question. As far as actually what are we trying to do, that’s a little bit on the individual side and we can talk about that but as far as like a broad scope, we adhere to the idea of trying different movements and I’m going to be a little bit more specific, because we should say oh we push, we pull, we squat, we hinge, we lunge and all those things and about hundred and million other coaches would probably say the same thing, but we delve a little bit deeper we look to see not just how we do the foundational pattern but then how can we layer complexity to those movements.

Your body is basically a really smart organism. People say it’s a machine. It’s not because machine does one job, it’s made for one thing and that’s what it’s supposed to do. Your body is made to do a lot of different things.So it’s this continually evolving system. And so what we try to do is stress it in different ways. But we try to do in a systematic way. If you try to add too much complexity too fast, you get a negative outcome. We try to layer these very small and fine layers of complexity to movement and see how well you’re able to maintain the proper movement pattern while you’re under this stress and the better you are at it, the more complexity you can tolerate.

03:43

So then, as you do so, your body becomes really so much more aware of what it can be, what it can do and how it can do things. And so when you go back to something more foundational, you’re definitely stronger but you’re also more injury resistant and you find it actually easier because you body works in a more efficient manner.

03:59

COREY: Gotcha, absolutely. Can we give everybody like an example here. So you talked about movement patterns and then adding complexity as we go. Let’s give them an example like if we’re working with say, a hinge or a deadlift.

JOSH: Okay, so I’ll give you two different examples. So we work with a hip hinge. For example, when we do our ultimate sandbag, everyone goes, oh you know the bag is going to go 150, I can deadlift 400. So they stack multiple bags on top of each other. I’m like, No, no, no, no, no. One is that we can start changing your stance. I try to remind people and it’s hard that, adeadlift is an exercise and hip hinge is a movement pattern. So a hip hinge doesn’t have to be a deadlift but deadlift is always a hip hinge.

So what we try to do is change how we stand whether it’s a very small change, maybe going to our staggered stance, where the toe of one foot is in line with the heel of front foot. Just that little change in stability we can actually see people start to rotate their pelvis which they shouldn’t. They laterally bend, they shouldn’t. So just that little bit destabilization in the body position allows us to really sort of examine how well they’re able to maintain those connections within the body and how they’re able to produce the movement pattern under some complexity because when you’re doing something so dynamic like MMA, you should be able to maintain these patterns under some very drastic conditions, then if you can’t go from heel to toe and keep a good deadlift pattern, we definitely have some issues and how really “strong you are”. Because obviously should we destabilize you just a tidbit, you start to fall apart and what you’re able to produce strength because people think strength is purely what you produce in force but it’s not. Strength is also what you resist. So we need to be able to produce great force while we resist other forces acting upon our body. And that’s what those different patterns and destabilizations do.

05:51

We can also just change the holding position and we get in that front hold that we do what we call front hold good morningwhich is just another hip hinge, but now we have stress coming through more of the trunk area. Again, guys collapse and their feet trying to collapse and their core, these guys say they can hold on a plank forever but can’t do a 50 pound Good morning because their [incomprehensible] isn’t strong because they’re not used to actually stabilizing a one segment moving dynamically in another segment. And that’s the type of stuff we want.

06:16

Another great example and I’m sure the MMA guys will know is squat pattern. So we’ll do abear hug squatto add load in the pattern squat, it allows them to get the foundational moon patternbut just having the weight on the shoulder, people usually do this mindlessly. Now putting the weight upon the shoulder, the whole goal on that is to add instability to the squat.

Now unless you have perfect squat with weight upon your shoulder, can you do the same weight and the bear hug that you can in the shoulder position, if you can, that tells me you are pretty darn strong because we’ve added instability by where the load is placed upon the pipe. But now, when you’re trying to move up and down the squat, the weight is trying to pull you to the side, pull you to rotation, pull you off balance. I want to see how well you’re able to resist those motions. So again, I think it’s kind of a new concept for people to see strength is not just what we lift but what we resist too.

07:02

COREY: That’s awesome stuff. So basically just to refresh what you’re talking about, obviously, there’s movement patterns, right? squat lines, push, pull, bend, twist all these different things. And I think that’s a really cool point because just by adding complexity either by changing the body position or where the load is placed, can have a dramatic impact on how that movement pattern is done and how it affects our bodies. Right?

JOSH: Oh, absolutely. There’s times that we change planes of motion, we go laterally in a hip hinge and people that have dead lifted for years look like they’ve never done the movement pattern before. So they’ve grooved something very specific. And that’s why I’m not such a big fan of athlete playing in this rigid Olympic or power lifting type of routines, is because I understand some of the general philosophy building this foundation, it’s great but the sport of power lifting, Olympic lifting was meant to be done in a very stable environment on a platform and most other sports are anything but predictable.

I think power lifting and Olympic lifting are the only two predictable sports that we have, whether you go tennis, baseball, football, rugby, everything else has a action and reaction to it. And I think your training have to have some elements of that and how much you provide is going to be upon the individual’s fitness level and the strength level. Some people can handle more, some people can handle less. Some people can handle more than one movement pattern but they can’t handle another.

08:34

So I think the hard part is to understand that you don’t want to do novel crazy looking exercise I think you and I were talking too about really do [inaudible] down the phone but you want to have some rhyme and reason to be able to see how you’re adding layers of progression to the movement pattern.

When I was in Russia and I was joking with you that I had a gentleman, he was well meaning is like, he asked me if this is functional training or is this strength? I’ve never heard someone put it that way but I think a lot of people think or feel like functional training is so empty and it’s some weird stuff that you do and it’s supposed to emulate life and then there is strength training and that just makes you strong. Well, they’re supposed to be the same thing. That’s how you systemize and how you layer progressions that allows you develop core. I think a lot of people think, functional training is crazy wacky throwing exercises and jumping all around like a monkey and strength training is very rigid on the platform with the heavy bar and not really either one, it’s a combination of a lot of different things.

09:35

COREY: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I know that at our gym using the sandbags, using kettlebells, using ropes, using chains and different odd implements I guess, that just aren’t very conventional. I have a lot of people that come through and then I hear or overhear them talking about going to the gym so that they can squat and lift weight.

JOSH: Yeah.

COREY: I think that’s a pretty common misconception with a lot of — I don’t know if you want to always call it unconventional training because I think for the average Joe, it probably is because they’re all still used to weight rooms.

JOSH: Oh, it’s [incomprehensible] and because I’ve been to the same thing as what you’re describing. Well, we have this contradiction going on, because as I said, we believe we have this philosophy that guys from the farms are really strong, right? We have this whole farm boy strength concept, the romantic idea, right?

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: And those guys can never lift traditional weights, but we think that they’re really strong. Well, okay, they did so by lifting these odd objects, not granted they did volume over time but — so we know it’s possible to get really strong but we fight with this idea that we need to see big numbers and we get really consumed with big numbers but big numbers are so misleading because it’s really — if I took the guy that you’re talking about training in your gym, he could adapt to the typical gym environment really fast. Right? Conversely, the guy from the gym could not convert to your environment nearly as quickly.

COREY: Yeah, I see that always.

JOSH: And that’s what people miss.

11:18

COREY: Yeah, very good. I like that idea of action and reaction that you were talking about before. With any sport, like you were talking about rugby, football, MMA, whatever it may be, wrestling, there is absolutely an action and reaction and I think there’s a lot of common weak links in the chain, so to speak. Even with guys, I think because when you talk about big numbers versus people like farm boy strength and one of the farm boys being able to adapt very quickly in the weight room, but a lot of guys that are just from 24 Hour Fitness or LA Fitness or whatever, just big box gym, when they try to transition back to the other direction and try to do odd implements, they’re not able to adapt. And I would think that’s because they have certain weak links in their chain or just from a coordination standpoint, what do you think is the cause of one not being able to adapt as easily?

JOSH: Well, I think odd objects, if you do — and I think we have to put this in the big bold print as we’re talking, if you do them well, because people don’t think that there’s a right way to do odd objects. And you and I both know, listen, you’ll get trashed if you don’t do them well. In fact, I just read an article which had a breakdown of common lifting sports and strongman had the highest risk of injury or highest incidents of injury. But the counter of that is well those guys are doing extreme loads and stuff and obviously, and so forth. But my point is that just because of the tire, just because it’s an ultimate sandbag, just because it’s this and that, doesn’t mean there’s no technique to it. There’s probably more technique to these odd objects because they aren’t moving in predictable manner.

13:05

So assuming we’re doing it well I think what’s happening is your body has to start to learn how to constantly turn on one area and turn off another area. The athletic movement like you’re talking about MMA guys, you can’t throw a punch or kick and just have high tension the entire time, right? You punch like I do. You have to have this very quick amount of tension relaxationand through different areas of your body. Well inherently you’re sort of dealing that same element when you’re doing odd objects. When people deadlift, like I’m not the heavy deadlifter guy for MMA guys because it’s just super high tension the whole time. Well we can get your hips strong in a logical way. When in a fight, are you going to see super high tension unless you’re just in a bad position, but we can simulate that in probably more productive ways than the deadlift.

So my point is, I think what happens is [distortion] that needed to adjust to the non-cooperative load that odd object allows for, I think also metabolically, because every repetition is different, you’re not grooving any lift. Now you can get better but you’re not going to groove it. It’s not like okay, I know the path to barbell though the implement thing is the same the entire time. People wonder why our ultimate sandbag is so hard to clean and it’s not because the weight is shifting so back and forth because we’re just moving up and down. That’s because it moves just enough where they have to be precise on every movement. If there’s a little nuance that they’re off on, then they can’t clean it correctly. And that’s what they have to deal with specific and that’s why their froation goes up.

14:36

I always tell people you can kind of muscle through a barbell clean, you can even kind of muscle through barbell thing, but a lot of really odd objects, you can’t muscle through them, that just doesn’t happen. And I’ve seen big burly dudes try and it’s just ugly. And they wonder how the guys smaller than them are doing so much better. I remember when I was at strongman competitions seven years ago I was competing at there was a dude that [inaudible] most of us, I mean he looked like right out of the cartoon and he was saying I was going to annihilate everyone because he works out the gym all the time, and he got crushed, because he just didn’t understand how to move with the sort of fluidity and detail, attention to detail and how he coordinated body and he just didn’t metabolically have the endurance because everything was such a greater [distortion] front because he didn’t learn how to move more efficient.

15:24

COREY: Right. Absolutely. Josh, when people are wanting to mix these things up, they’re wanting to adjust body position and load and planes of motion and they want to start implementing some of these things into their workouts. Obviously, it’s something new. What would you recommend on the best place to start for them?

JOSH: Our general rule of thumb is when you’re looking at upper body dominant lifts, changing how you stand is easier than changing the position of the load. And lower body dominant lift, it’s easier to change the position of load than how you stand.

So I’ll give an example. If we’re doing a press overhead, it’s a lot easier for me to adjust whether I’m in a staggered stance, the military stance, a half kneeling stanceor tall kneelingand then trying to adjust the position of the load or the trajectory of the load.

Conversely, if I’m in a squat pattern, it’s a lot easier for me to go from a bear hug, up front hold or clean or shoulder position than it is to go staggered or something more unstable body position squat. So in general, upper body dominant lift, we change body position first and the lower body we change holding position. Now, whenever you change one you have to understand that the load is going to have to adjust too because you’re changing the exercise and people go, what weight should I use?And unfortunately, I can’t give them a definitive number. It’s whatever weight allows you to do the movement pattern well once you’ve added that layer of complexity.

16:53

What happens with complexity is that it’s really hard to cheat it. Means, you and I have seen bad barbell squats for years, right? You can cheat a squat pretty easily. By just start adding different layers of complexity, it’s really hard to muscle through and just grunt it out.

So what happens is, people can’t lift the weight or they start to tip over or whatever it is. So it’s sort of a self limiting exercise in a lot of ways. So the weight has always got to be dependent on what they can do well and you have to understand you’re actually introducing another element to the lift, like we talked about earlier. It’s not just what they’re lifting, it’s what they’re resisting, and that becomes increasingly more fatiguing. So you might actually find that people that were used to not going out squat up right, they go change the holding position or they change the [distortion] looking tired really fast, because they’re getting all this nervous system input because they’re going so much more stress upon fights.

17:42

So I always reduce the volume and reduce the intensity and build up over time. We do want people to load because you’re letting go the other thing — in our travels where people saying, think we’re in Japan and people thought functional training net lightweight, that I could associate with lightweight and crazy movement almost. There’s like no you should be exposing yourself to the world but progressively in the [distortion] patterns like we want you to lift load not just doing cool circus trick.

So I think whenever you change one attribute you have to understand it’s going to influence the other. So I think where people get excited about it, they want to change the body position and the holding position, it’s too intense. So change one or the other. So for example, if we change the — we do what’s called anarcprep, so we shoulder a USB on his shoulder will press it to the other side. So we’re changing the holding position of the press. If I’m doing that and I’m not bringing it back to a bilateral stance position, I’m not going to make you do it immediately from kneeling position, so that’s changing body position and holding position. That’s too much unless you’re really advanced individual. So you got to approach it like any other training variable. If you change one variable, you got to bring back the rest to a little bit easier level. Does that makes sense?

18:53

COREY: Yeah absolutely. Josh, when you’re starting out with someone, what type of assessment or testing do you do before getting started even to know like, okay, here’s the first couple of exercises I’m going to do with this person.

JOSH: It has really changed over the years. Basically, over the years I’ve gone through a very complex to very simple assessment, just because a couple of things: One is, if I’m going to assess something, that’s going to change the way I’m going to program. And then there’s people that are [distortion] they’re working and they find all these problems, but it doesn’t change what they’re doing at the end of the day. Does that make sense?

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: So if we’re going to assess something, it means that we’re going to do something and if I find something to be not optimal, it’s going to change the way I’m going to program. And so what we do is a really quick postural test. So I will just see how you stand, how you go with your arms overhead and see how high you’re able to do that. Everything else, outside of doing just a quick questionnaire like, have you had any injuries, because that’s an important thing.

20:04

My legendary stories that I tell everyone and probably this not that exciting but I had a client years ago, an older gentleman and I had him do a health questionnaire and one of the questions was, have you ever had a surgery?He said, No.I said, are you sure you never had surgery?He’s like, No, I’ve never had surgery. Like never, ever, ever. He’s like no, I never had surgery. I was like, what’s that giant scar going down your chest?He said, oh that’s years ago.

So my point is that, especially even athletes who I think are used to pushing through pain, they sort of think some injuries aren’t important and they’re actually very important. Whether it’s something as simple as spraining ankles or jammed shoulders or being hit — concussions are huge obviously in science sports because it changes your nervous system. So that’s something I become increasingly more aware of especially for military and fighters and football players, as the impact upon the head can change how their body sees itself and how it moves. So that’s something we have to address in the training a little bit. Obviously, it’s something we can’t prevent because of the nature of the [inaudible] a little bit.

21:13

But from there, we’re going to do movement patterns. So the great thing about our DVRT system is that, all we have to do is we’re going to start you at our foundational level and from there we get to decide, do you stay there or do you get to progress, then if we need to spend time there and work on some things, we can, because we’re going to use a load, we’re going to use exercise to actually teach you how to move back. We’re not just stretching your system. People think exercise is just about stretching your system. But we’re going to use it to, yes get you in better shape, but as a byproduct, rather teach you how to move better. We’re going to try to heal up some of these issues, then we’re going to try to progress you and layer that complexity into your program over time.

So just learning the foundation, and they’re the building blocks. But I like the word foundation better than basics because the basics sound like it’s [distortion] a lot of people. We all at times have to refer back to foundations because that allows to see why something’s not working later on. But we’re going to see can you press? Can you squat? Can you lunge? Can you hinge, on very foundational levels because if you can’t, then that’s where we start and that’s fine. I’ve seen some very advanced athletes starting at very foundational level, because they’re very good. They’re sport, they just weren’t very aware in general, how they move. Does that help? Does that make sense?

22:23

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. So if you build in, obviously, step one here is, there’s some basic things we can do to assess and make sure the person’s healthy and get an idea of their exercise history and stuff. Once we have that and we’re building that foundation, your system has very well thought out progressions for each movement pattern. Right?

JOSH: Exactly, I was sort of telling our programs the story of like, when I first got in the industry and I [inaudible] I know but by day, no one overhead, it was bad on your shoulders, right? And then it went to it’s okay, as long as you got the magical 90 degree line, I’m sure you remember that one.

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: And now, we press everything overhead. And so like, well, were we wrong then and we’re right now or we are wrong now and right then?

And my point is this that we were wrong in the sense that pressing overhead above your shoulders. We were right, the fact that so many people have limitations to their [inaudible] and shoulders, they probably shouldn’t start there. And just because it’s a good exercise doesn’t mean it’s good for you. It may be something we have to develop over time. And as I’ve talked to some fighters, some fighters are never are gonna be able to do it because of the nature of the sport they’re in that first position so much, the best thing you can do is just try to open them up over time, but they may never actually overhead press because they just never had the prep ability to do and so we’re not going to try to jam square and do a round hole. It’s like the analogy of hey, if you assess Peyton Manning and told him he did all these things off, he’s like really? Seems like it’s doing pretty okay in the world, right? But I think you’ve to be careful sometimes of having a blanket philosophy that you use for everybody. I think you have to be aware like, yes, we want people to get good at movement patterns, we want them to move well, we want them to possibly be at best level they can be for whatever their demands are. And there’s gonna be certain exercises that are very foundational for them and there’s gonna be some exercises that they may never ever do. But as much as we [distortion/inaudible] to expose them to those movement pattern in some form or another.

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. So Josh, as we’re going through this, obviously, there’s your DVRT system, you are using sandbags and kettlebells and other odd implementsto get people to build a strong foundation, add complexity to those lifts over time if it’s needed, or the right moves to do right for that person, trying to get them to move well, adding them being able to act and also react to the implement and the surroundings around them. What are some other things you do with your athletes to get them not only strong but coordinated and improve your balance and body awareness and control and speed and multi directional movement and all those types of different things that come into play with sport?

25:17

JOSH: Great question. I think you and I talked about before we got on the phone, which is to me, if you asked me to define functional training, to me, it’s simply just about making connections. So that’s a little bit vague. But what I mean by that is that you’re constantly learning how to connect yourself to your own body. So an example of that, I just give a hip hinge as example of that. People can develop, they can’t laterally develop. What happened there, they lost the ability to connect when we change the plane of motion.

So what complexity basically is doing is it’s building that coordination, because when we’re changing that plane of motion, they’re holding to this body position, the speed of movement, the load, all these things factor into complexity. And when we start to combine different elements, then they’ll have the demand for coordination go much way upward. So we’re always building coordination and basically the efficiency of movement.

26:11

So the part of the goal of strength training people forget, the reason to get stronger is to get more efficient. Right? That’s really our goal. To be strong for the sake of being strong doesn’t help you in a ring or most sporting environment, so that you can be more efficient at your movement power, so you can express more force, you can decelerate faster, you can react better.

So if you’re training and you’re just getting stronger without pain, without challenging your ability to connect to your body and you’re having issues. So but like, I think one thing I’m very proud about our system is, like you said, we have a thought process in a way to progress each of the things like, changing planes of motion is not a unique idea to our system. But how we progress it, is. We don’t just talk today we’re gonna do I don’t know transverse plane work. That sounds good. We haven’t done that in a while. Okay, have we established fundamental movement competency in the sagittal plane, in the frontal plane and now we can introduce transverse plane. You know what I’m saying? So that’s actually how we sort of plan out the planes of movement versus going hey, it was a cool YouTube video on this guy doing this crazy movement he said he was gonna frontal plane well, let’s go do that. So that may or may not be good for you at that time. The same thing with all those other elements.

27:26

So the system is constantly working to combine holding positions, body positions, speed, load and plane of motion and adjust them and by that you’re also increasing conditioning. There’s this Mr. Russian fighter that I don’t want to mess as he’s the top the town. But he kept asking me how does he build endurance for the ring? Because he was doing CrossFit and he just wasn’t getting better shape. He doesn’t feel the transfer. I said unfortunately, he is not a unique position. We feel like if he needs to get in better shape, [distortion/inaudible] body as hard as possible. And for him getting in better shape may have been actually training a little bit less because he wasn’t recovering from anything. He was training technically in different arts for four hours day. And then he was doing this really hard workouts and like man, he’s just probably not recovering.

So for him it sounds so counterintuitive to get better endurance to do, like that doesn’t make sense. I also explained to him that when I tested him from the stability drills that we do, he was really having a hard time with it. He had strength and power. But if you asked him to do it in an environment he wasn’t comfortable with, he couldn’t keep his connection.

So that for me he’s either spending a lot more energy in the ring, because he’s not efficient. And he’s not keeping those connections well, he’s having to overcompensate for stability issues. And so he’s losing his balance, he’s just losing his ability to strength, he is working harder to do the same movement pattern.

So it wasn’t just a matter of school run more go run harder do harder things is, well, we gotta look at the overall scheme of program, are we making more stable, are we making more efficient that exposes him to different movement patterns and these different loading positions, and then you try to do the same movement, it should seem simple. If it seems simple, you’re going to spend less energy and that’s going to step up your endurance, it will go up. So my point is, I’m trying to say like something as simple as like, getting in better shape again and gaining better endurance is more multifaceted than just going harder. You know what I mean?

29:21

COREY: Absolutely. I just had a client that I’ve been working with for a few years and she decompressed for eight weeks. Because her cortisol level of all her stuff was off the charts. She’s just obviously training too much. And I think that’s a very common problem that a lot of people have and they do think harder is better.

JOSH: It’s in the culture we live in, right?

COREY: Absolutely, I mean this is grinding themselves into the floor. So I think that’s a very good point for people to know just allowing their bodies to recover but then also fixing those energy leaks that they might have, just because of their body, their injuries in the past, their work ethic, whatever it may be that’s affecting that.

JOSH: Absolutely. And that’s a great point. People don’think injuries cause issues once they stop huring. And the whole problem is that they actually change the whole dynamics of your body’s movement. So no wonder the reasons we’re working on those connections is because we want to make sure that we want to identify it something cause something else to shut off or something else to work too hard, and now that’s causing a problem. And so I think that’s definitely true.

And again, it’s our culture. We’re so counterintuitive especially with fighting. I always said, athletes and military are always really hard people to work with not because they don’t want to get better, but they’re almost always their worst enemy. Now, they always want to go harder. They never think they’re going hard enough and nine times out of 10 you usually have to back them off on something.

30:51

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. That’s killer stuff. Josh. Josh, if people are wanting to learn more about that system, your system DVRT, you have workshops, where can they go to get more education about what you’re doing?

JOSH: Yeah, they can check out our blog that we update, at least three, four days a week or the content that’s in the dvrtfitness.comand there we have a workshops, we have our certifications and we’re also just having our little bit programs about a brand new book, which I’m really happy with [distortion] put out great pictures of knowing what to do but what not to do, and allow movement patterns, our philosophy and how to progress it along with program. So people can check out we try to give a ton of content for free so that people can really understand where we’re coming from and how we can be very helpful to their training goal.

COREY: Awesome, awesome, good stuff. Guys, I’ll put that link up on the website when I post it. So it should be right underneath this audio piece. Josh, thanks again so much for your time, dude. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you got some killer stuff going on man.

JOSH: I appreciate Corey as always, thanks for having me.

COREY: I will talk to you soon and guys have a great day. We’ll see you soon.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Josh Henkin

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley from fightcampconditioning.comand I’m here with Josh Henkin. Josh, how’re you doing?

JOSH: Good Corey, thanks for having me.

COREY: Absolutely. It’s always a pleasure. Yeah, Josh, today what we wanted to talk about with everybody that’s listening is just to kind of run through some of the common mistakes that people are making in combat training world. And Josh, give everybody just kind of a quick snapshot of what you do and who you are and what you’re doing these days.

00:32

JOSH: I’ve been in the strength and conditioning industry for about 20 years now. I started off actually working in the university, studying with athletes, went out my own, there’s a lot of general population but then probably most people know that I created our DVRT UltimateSandbag Systemin about 2005. And that really launched us an opportunity to work with a lot of different people. I’ve designed programs for military, we work with all different fighting programs, [incomprehensible] fighting magazines and military stuff and now we have a diverse — from the housewife [distortion] elite navy seal that we sort of talk to and communicate with. So it’s been a really eclectic and a wonderful experience.

COREY: It’s awesome. Josh, for a lot of the guys that are listening, typically people are going to big box gyms or weight rooms, the bodybuilding and power lifting world has kind of dominated that market for the last 30, 40 years. What are some of the tools that you guys are utilizing with your system?

JOSH: Great question. We do obviously a lot with our ultimate sandbags. But we are also implementing bodyweight training, suspension training bands and then kettlebells. To me the philosophy we always have is if we’re going to use something it has to do something better than something else could. It’s not just from blind variety as you can but that can produce a better outcome for a very specific goal. Is variety okay? Sure, that’s fine. But that shouldn’t be probably the driving force in the majority of the training. So we try to be very particular and specific in why we use certain thing that we do.

COREY: Right on. So a lot of sandbags, heavy resistance band, kettlebells. I know, when you came out to our gym, we had the wall slides that we were using as well. They’re always fine tools. When you’re laying out programs and developing your system, what are some of the pillars of your system?

02:33

JOSH: Great question. As far as actually what are we trying to do, that’s a little bit on the individual side and we can talk about that but as far as like a broad scope, we adhere to the idea of trying different movements and I’m going to be a little bit more specific, because we should say oh we push, we pull, we squat, we hinge, we lunge and all those things and about hundred and million other coaches would probably say the same thing, but we delve a little bit deeper we look to see not just how we do the foundational pattern but then how can we layer complexity to those movements.

03:43

03:59

COREY: Gotcha, absolutely. Can we give everybody like an example here. So you talked about movement patterns and then adding complexity as we go. Let’s give them an example like if we’re working with say, a hinge or a deadlift.

JOSH: Okay, so I’ll give you two different examples. So we work with a hip hinge. For example, when we do our ultimate sandbag, everyone goes, oh you know the bag is going to go 150, I can deadlift 400. So they stack multiple bags on top of each other. I’m like, No, no, no, no, no. One is that we can start changing your stance. I try to remind people and it’s hard that, adeadlift is an exercise and hip hinge is a movement pattern. So a hip hinge doesn’t have to be a deadlift but deadlift is always a hip hinge.

So what we try to do is change how we stand whether it’s a very small change, maybe going to our staggered stance, where the toe of one foot is in line with the heel of front foot. Just that little change in stability we can actually see people start to rotate their pelvis which they shouldn’t. They laterally bend, they shouldn’t. So just that little bit destabilization in the body position allows us to really sort of examine how well they’re able to maintain those connections within the body and how they’re able to produce the movement pattern under some complexity because when you’re doing something so dynamic like MMA, you should be able to maintain these patterns under some very drastic conditions, then if you can’t go from heel to toe and keep a good deadlift pattern, we definitely have some issues and how really “strong you are”. Because obviously should we destabilize you just a tidbit, you start to fall apart and what you’re able to produce strength because people think strength is purely what you produce in force but it’s not. Strength is also what you resist. So we need to be able to produce great force while we resist other forces acting upon our body. And that’s what those different patterns and destabilizations do.

05:51

We can also just change the holding position and we get in that front hold that we do what we call front hold good morningwhich is just another hip hinge, but now we have stress coming through more of the trunk area. Again, guys collapse and their feet trying to collapse and their core, these guys say they can hold on a plank forever but can’t do a 50 pound Good morning because their [incomprehensible] isn’t strong because they’re not used to actually stabilizing a one segment moving dynamically in another segment. And that’s the type of stuff we want.

06:16

Another great example and I’m sure the MMA guys will know is squat pattern. So we’ll do abear hug squatto add load in the pattern squat, it allows them to get the foundational moon patternbut just having the weight on the shoulder, people usually do this mindlessly. Now putting the weight upon the shoulder, the whole goal on that is to add instability to the squat.

07:02

COREY: That’s awesome stuff. So basically just to refresh what you’re talking about, obviously, there’s movement patterns, right? squat lines, push, pull, bend, twist all these different things. And I think that’s a really cool point because just by adding complexity either by changing the body position or where the load is placed, can have a dramatic impact on how that movement pattern is done and how it affects our bodies. Right?

JOSH: Oh, absolutely. There’s times that we change planes of motion, we go laterally in a hip hinge and people that have dead lifted for years look like they’ve never done the movement pattern before. So they’ve grooved something very specific. And that’s why I’m not such a big fan of athlete playing in this rigid Olympic or power lifting type of routines, is because I understand some of the general philosophy building this foundation, it’s great but the sport of power lifting, Olympic lifting was meant to be done in a very stable environment on a platform and most other sports are anything but predictable.

08:34

09:35

COREY: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I know that at our gym using the sandbags, using kettlebells, using ropes, using chains and different odd implements I guess, that just aren’t very conventional. I have a lot of people that come through and then I hear or overhear them talking about going to the gym so that they can squat and lift weight.

JOSH: Yeah.

COREY: I think that’s a pretty common misconception with a lot of — I don’t know if you want to always call it unconventional training because I think for the average Joe, it probably is because they’re all still used to weight rooms.

JOSH: Oh, it’s [incomprehensible] and because I’ve been to the same thing as what you’re describing. Well, we have this contradiction going on, because as I said, we believe we have this philosophy that guys from the farms are really strong, right? We have this whole farm boy strength concept, the romantic idea, right?

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: And those guys can never lift traditional weights, but we think that they’re really strong. Well, okay, they did so by lifting these odd objects, not granted they did volume over time but — so we know it’s possible to get really strong but we fight with this idea that we need to see big numbers and we get really consumed with big numbers but big numbers are so misleading because it’s really — if I took the guy that you’re talking about training in your gym, he could adapt to the typical gym environment really fast. Right? Conversely, the guy from the gym could not convert to your environment nearly as quickly.

COREY: Yeah, I see that always.

JOSH: And that’s what people miss.

11:18

COREY: Yeah, very good. I like that idea of action and reaction that you were talking about before. With any sport, like you were talking about rugby, football, MMA, whatever it may be, wrestling, there is absolutely an action and reaction and I think there’s a lot of common weak links in the chain, so to speak. Even with guys, I think because when you talk about big numbers versus people like farm boy strength and one of the farm boys being able to adapt very quickly in the weight room, but a lot of guys that are just from 24 Hour Fitness or LA Fitness or whatever, just big box gym, when they try to transition back to the other direction and try to do odd implements, they’re not able to adapt. And I would think that’s because they have certain weak links in their chain or just from a coordination standpoint, what do you think is the cause of one not being able to adapt as easily?

JOSH: Well, I think odd objects, if you do — and I think we have to put this in the big bold print as we’re talking, if you do them well, because people don’t think that there’s a right way to do odd objects. And you and I both know, listen, you’ll get trashed if you don’t do them well. In fact, I just read an article which had a breakdown of common lifting sports and strongman had the highest risk of injury or highest incidents of injury. But the counter of that is well those guys are doing extreme loads and stuff and obviously, and so forth. But my point is that just because of the tire, just because it’s an ultimate sandbag, just because it’s this and that, doesn’t mean there’s no technique to it. There’s probably more technique to these odd objects because they aren’t moving in predictable manner.

13:05

So assuming we’re doing it well I think what’s happening is your body has to start to learn how to constantly turn on one area and turn off another area. The athletic movement like you’re talking about MMA guys, you can’t throw a punch or kick and just have high tension the entire time, right? You punch like I do. You have to have this very quick amount of tension relaxationand through different areas of your body. Well inherently you’re sort of dealing that same element when you’re doing odd objects. When people deadlift, like I’m not the heavy deadlifter guy for MMA guys because it’s just super high tension the whole time. Well we can get your hips strong in a logical way. When in a fight, are you going to see super high tension unless you’re just in a bad position, but we can simulate that in probably more productive ways than the deadlift.

14:36

15:24

COREY: Right. Absolutely. Josh, when people are wanting to mix these things up, they’re wanting to adjust body position and load and planes of motion and they want to start implementing some of these things into their workouts. Obviously, it’s something new. What would you recommend on the best place to start for them?

JOSH: Our general rule of thumb is when you’re looking at upper body dominant lifts, changing how you stand is easier than changing the position of the load. And lower body dominant lift, it’s easier to change the position of load than how you stand.

So I’ll give an example. If we’re doing a press overhead, it’s a lot easier for me to adjust whether I’m in a staggered stance, the military stance, a half kneeling stanceor tall kneelingand then trying to adjust the position of the load or the trajectory of the load.

Conversely, if I’m in a squat pattern, it’s a lot easier for me to go from a bear hug, up front hold or clean or shoulder position than it is to go staggered or something more unstable body position squat. So in general, upper body dominant lift, we change body position first and the lower body we change holding position. Now, whenever you change one you have to understand that the load is going to have to adjust too because you’re changing the exercise and people go, what weight should I use?And unfortunately, I can’t give them a definitive number. It’s whatever weight allows you to do the movement pattern well once you’ve added that layer of complexity.

16:53

17:42

18:53

COREY: Yeah absolutely. Josh, when you’re starting out with someone, what type of assessment or testing do you do before getting started even to know like, okay, here’s the first couple of exercises I’m going to do with this person.

JOSH: It has really changed over the years. Basically, over the years I’ve gone through a very complex to very simple assessment, just because a couple of things: One is, if I’m going to assess something, that’s going to change the way I’m going to program. And then there’s people that are [distortion] they’re working and they find all these problems, but it doesn’t change what they’re doing at the end of the day. Does that make sense?

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: So if we’re going to assess something, it means that we’re going to do something and if I find something to be not optimal, it’s going to change the way I’m going to program. And so what we do is a really quick postural test. So I will just see how you stand, how you go with your arms overhead and see how high you’re able to do that. Everything else, outside of doing just a quick questionnaire like, have you had any injuries, because that’s an important thing.

20:04

My legendary stories that I tell everyone and probably this not that exciting but I had a client years ago, an older gentleman and I had him do a health questionnaire and one of the questions was, have you ever had a surgery?He said, No.I said, are you sure you never had surgery?He’s like, No, I’ve never had surgery. Like never, ever, ever. He’s like no, I never had surgery. I was like, what’s that giant scar going down your chest?He said, oh that’s years ago.

21:13

22:23

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. So if you build in, obviously, step one here is, there’s some basic things we can do to assess and make sure the person’s healthy and get an idea of their exercise history and stuff. Once we have that and we’re building that foundation, your system has very well thought out progressions for each movement pattern. Right?

JOSH: Exactly, I was sort of telling our programs the story of like, when I first got in the industry and I [inaudible] I know but by day, no one overhead, it was bad on your shoulders, right? And then it went to it’s okay, as long as you got the magical 90 degree line, I’m sure you remember that one.

COREY: Yeah.

JOSH: And now, we press everything overhead. And so like, well, were we wrong then and we’re right now or we are wrong now and right then?

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. So Josh, as we’re going through this, obviously, there’s your DVRT system, you are using sandbags and kettlebells and other odd implementsto get people to build a strong foundation, add complexity to those lifts over time if it’s needed, or the right moves to do right for that person, trying to get them to move well, adding them being able to act and also react to the implement and the surroundings around them. What are some other things you do with your athletes to get them not only strong but coordinated and improve your balance and body awareness and control and speed and multi directional movement and all those types of different things that come into play with sport?

25:17

JOSH: Great question. I think you and I talked about before we got on the phone, which is to me, if you asked me to define functional training, to me, it’s simply just about making connections. So that’s a little bit vague. But what I mean by that is that you’re constantly learning how to connect yourself to your own body. So an example of that, I just give a hip hinge as example of that. People can develop, they can’t laterally develop. What happened there, they lost the ability to connect when we change the plane of motion.

26:11

27:26

29:21

COREY: Absolutely. I just had a client that I’ve been working with for a few years and she decompressed for eight weeks. Because her cortisol level of all her stuff was off the charts. She’s just obviously training too much. And I think that’s a very common problem that a lot of people have and they do think harder is better.

JOSH: It’s in the culture we live in, right?

COREY: Absolutely, I mean this is grinding themselves into the floor. So I think that’s a very good point for people to know just allowing their bodies to recover but then also fixing those energy leaks that they might have, just because of their body, their injuries in the past, their work ethic, whatever it may be that’s affecting that.

JOSH: Absolutely. And that’s a great point. People don’think injuries cause issues once they stop huring. And the whole problem is that they actually change the whole dynamics of your body’s movement. So no wonder the reasons we’re working on those connections is because we want to make sure that we want to identify it something cause something else to shut off or something else to work too hard, and now that’s causing a problem. And so I think that’s definitely true.

30:51

COREY: Yeah, absolutely. That’s killer stuff. Josh. Josh, if people are wanting to learn more about that system, your system DVRT, you have workshops, where can they go to get more education about what you’re doing?

JOSH: Yeah, they can check out our blog that we update, at least three, four days a week or the content that’s in the dvrtfitness.comand there we have a workshops, we have our certifications and we’re also just having our little bit programs about a brand new book, which I’m really happy with [distortion] put out great pictures of knowing what to do but what not to do, and allow movement patterns, our philosophy and how to progress it along with program. So people can check out we try to give a ton of content for free so that people can really understand where we’re coming from and how we can be very helpful to their training goal.

COREY: Awesome, awesome, good stuff. Guys, I’ll put that link up on the website when I post it. So it should be right underneath this audio piece. Josh, thanks again so much for your time, dude. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you got some killer stuff going on man.

JOSH: I appreciate Corey as always, thanks for having me.

COREY: I will talk to you soon and guys have a great day. We’ll see you soon.

Episode #7: This ain’t your uncle’s body building plan… an Interview with Josh Henkin

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Josh Henkin

Join Our Free Weekly Newsletter