Chris Bartl was one of the most successful participants in our Physique Clinic, losing over 60 pounds of fat.
Soon after he completed his Clinic, contributor Alwyn Cosgrove sent us a note that basically said, "That f***ing guy did f***ing great! Tell him to f***ing come by and see me and I'll f***ing show him how to take it to the next f***ing level!"
We passed on the f***ing note, Chris went to see Coach Cosgrove, and this is how it all went down.
Ever wonder what it's like to train with one of the world's foremost strength coaches? What about training with two of them?
Well, not only have I been blessed to have been coached by Christian Thibaudeau, but for one Saturday morning I got to experience what it would be like to work with another foreign dignitary: Alwyn Cosgrove.
After driving for over an hour I arrived at Results Fitness, the aptly named training facility owned and operated by one Alwyn Cosgrove. I brought my friend Courtney with me since she was in town visiting. She couldn't believe it when I told her who we'd be training with, but she had no clue what she was really in for.
Results Fitness isn't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill "gym." It's a place where you come to train and get exactly what the title entails: results. From the minute you walk in, you know you're in a special place. Every employee is friendly and there's a genuine sense of caring toward their clients and their needs for physical enlightenment.
The facility has pretty much everything a person would want in a place to train: a few pieces of cardio equipment, an area designated for core and "pre-hab" exercises, and of course a free-weight section that includes throwing stations for Olympic lifts like power cleans and snatches.
According to Alwyn, there's nothing that they don't or can't do in this facility. "One day it will look like a powerlifting meet is going on with all the football players in here, and the next it'll look like a yoga studio with all the people on Swiss balls."
Alwyn doesn't have one philosophy regarding training; he has hundreds. "There's just too much good information out there to ignore any of it," he tells me.
His goal is to provide the client with a customized program that'll not only achieve the results they're looking for, but will prevent injury and/or increase mobility. Before a client even hits the gym floor, they're put through a series of three different screening activities:
Step 1: Assess static posture
Step 2: Assess a range of motion passively
Step 3: Functional movement screen, using both static and dynamic movements
Alwyn explained, "The idea is that tight muscles and weak muscles will demonstrate their presence in different ways. Sometimes posture and range of motion are okay but a movement pattern is screwed up so that stability/mobility in a 'co-contraction' screws up the pattern." Once the client has been assessed, the training begins.
He started us off with five minutes on the treadmill to get the blood flowing. During this little jaunt, Alwyn described the training that each client receives, which consists of seven different areas of focus:
1. Mobility
2. Pre-hab
3. Core
4. Elasticity (a.k.a. plyometrics)
5. Resistance
6. Energy system development
7. Soft tissue regeneration
Hearing him talk about having equal balance in all aspects of training is like listening to an artist talk about a painting. You can hear the passion in his voice and you can tell he loves training people.
After the five minutes is up, we went over to a mini indoor track that's set up for mobility work. "People don't care about mobility until they're no longer mobile," he said as he described the first set of movements. The mobility portion was a down-and-back of the following exercises:
Long step lunge to hamstring stretch
Lateral lunge to drop-step lunge
Reverse lunge with a reach-around (that's going to get a response)
Band walks
While going through these there's nothing that escaped his eye. "A little longer step there, Chris, drop that leg deep. Courtney, get those hips loose," he encouraged from the side.
By the time we finished this phase I was breathing at a good clip and sweating pretty good, while Courtney was ready to charge onto the next portion: pre-hab.
Alwyn has written about this before and his theory is simple: why wait until it's broke to fix it? You should work to prevent injury, not work to recover from one.
For our pre-hab he had us focus on shoulders. "If I have a jiu jitsu client in here we focus more on neck and shoulders. If we have a football player or endurance athlete we focus more on knees. It all depends on the athlete."
He sets me up on a mini-incline bench going through a series of five motions while facing down on the bench. He calls it "Y-T-W-L-I" and it seems like memorizing that acronym is a requirement for training because every other trainee in the gym could recite it at a moment's notice.
The movements were designed to help increase mobility and function of the shoulders while ensuring that I checked my ego at the door. "These aren't ego exercises," he reminded me as he handed me 7.5 pound dumbbells, then with a chuckle hands me the 5 pounders. "You're going to need these too," he said with a wry Scottish smile.
For the Y movement, it's just like the letter Y looks. Start with your arms hanging in front and raise them up toward your head at a 45-degree angle, making sure to really focus on pinching the shoulder blades together.
Next was T, which is a lateral raise with your thumbs facing each other.
The W movement starts with your elbows bent at 90 degrees and arms in front of you. Do another lateral movement but make sure to really focus on pinching together your shoulder blades at the top of the movement. L is a rotator cuff movement. You end with the letter "I" which is a military press style movement.
Meanwhile, he had Courtney on the floor doing a version of hip thrusters, really focusing on squeezing with the glutes and not pushing with the quads. Once we both finished, he had us switch and I got the pleasure of the thrusters and Courtney got her shoulders going.
Up next was core work. Courtney got the privilege of doing two minutes of mountain climbers using a Swiss ball while I was doing push-up variations.
For some of the push-ups, I had my hands on these little padded sliders that allowed me to move my hands in any direction I wanted without taking pressure off my arms. The first movement was to move the right arm forward six inches, then back, and then do the left. Next was move the right hand out six inches and do a push-up, bringing the hand back to the beginning posture and repeating with left hand.
Finally, I had to move my right hand out as far as I could, bring my left knee up toward my left arm and do a push-up. Finally I returned to beginning posture and repeated on the other side. He called these "Spider Mans" because when you go into the push-up movement you look like, well, Spider Man.
This was to be completed in circuit fashion, going through all three movements as many times as I could in two minutes. If I couldn't do one, I was to do the easier ones.
Let's just say that by the end of the two minutes, I was only moving my arms in six-inch increments. Then we switched and it was Courtney's turn on the ground and I got the mountain climbers.
While all this was going on, Alwyn was right there giving us encouragement. He talked about the importance of making sure the entire body is properly warmed before you even get to resistance training. "You don't need to directly train your core to work your core," he reminded us.
After that lovely little introduction, I reached for the salvation of Surge Workout Fuel. "You've only been training for 17 minutes and you already need your drink? And here I thought you were tough!" Alwyn said.
Seventeen minutes that felt like an hour and 17 minutes! I looked at Courtney and she looked at me, and I believe I said something to the effect of "holy shit" in between gasps of air.
Nothing could have prepared me for what he had us going through. I'd tried working mobility into my sessions but apparently not enough. He was not only showing us the importance of making sure our bodies are properly prepared to train, but that by doing so you can make it circuit-style cardio training.
Next up was the elasticity and strength portion of our session, which consisted of two different circuits:
A1) Reverse lunge with kettlebell (back foot on a slider)
A2) Swiss ball push-ups with knee curl or pike curl
A3) Hanging rows
B1) Bulgarian split squats with resistance band
B2) Swiss ball hamstring curls
We did three passes of each circuit. A1 was designed to activate your core and obliques, and I felt it the first time I tried to lunge down. By using the slider, the body is forced to keep pressure on the back foot, which in turn throws your body into a little state of chaos. Trying to maintain balance while lunging on a slider is hard enough; throw a kettlebell in the mix and you have one challenging movement!
At one point, just to make it more challenging, he had us both stand on a foam pad to create an even greater unstable movement and put more focus on the movement, not just the parts.
By the time we finished the A circuit and had moved on to the B, I was starting to struggle. He knew about my knee issue and was concerned about it being a problem. I reassured him it was fine and the punishment, er, I mean pleasure, continued.
After we finished the circuit, I honestly wasn't sure I had anything left in the tank. "We got a three section superset to finish. Give me nine minutes of everything you got and you're done," he said with the most serious look I've ever been given.
While I was sloshing down some SWOF, he told Courtney to relax while I finished these last nine minutes because, "I have something special to torture you with to finish."
For the grand finale he finally puts a weight in my hand. The superset went like this:
A1) Overhead triceps extensions with 25-pound dumbbell
A2) Cable pushdowns
A3) Dips
B1) Lateral raise with 15 pound dumbbell – 21's
B2) Hanging lateral raise
B3) Military press with 15-pound dumbbell - 21's
B4) BW* military press x 6
* BW = body weight. Basically it was for Alwyn's amusement as I could barely move my arms at this point!
C1) Incline flies x 15 with 25 pound dumbbell
C2) Incline press with 25 pound dumbbell – 21's
C3) BW incline press
C4) Wide-arm BW push-ups w/ fingers out
Wow. By far the toughest nine minutes of my training career. I've never been so brought back to reality so quickly in my life. At the end of every section where he had me doing 21's, I had to rep out with no weight, just my arms.
The military press was especially tough because he was giving me resistance by pushing down on my hands. Not that it did much good. At that point I could barely move my arms in any motion whatsoever, let alone upward with external resistance.
This was the ultimate pre-fatigue section. "Most people are triceps dominant for chest and shoulders. By killing them first, then shoulders, you have no choice but to actually use your chest to work your chest," Alwyn said.
When I was done with the push-ups I collapsed to the floor, sucking for air. I felt like I was still a smoker and had just tried to run a marathon with a cig hanging in my mouth. My lungs were dying, my arms weren't moving, and I was a sweaty ball of crushed man.
With an evil chuckle he looks at Courtney and asks if she's ready. With the resolve of a stubborn Canadian she said, "Let's go."
"Good," Alwyn said, "You have 120 seconds to get 96 reps."
I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. He must've been joking. (He wasn't.)
"You're going to give me 24 squats, 24 lunges at 12 lunges per leg, 24 jumping lunges at 12 per leg, and finish with 24 jump squats. The gym record is twice through the circuit in under three minutes."
And she was off.
He wasn't so much concerned with form, but rather the complete destruction of her legs and central nervous system. She started off strong enough and got through the squats and lunges just fine. By the time she was halfway done with her jump lunges she was hurting, and as she went to finish with jump squats, the smile on her face turned into a grimace and the look of steel resolve was showing through: she wasn't going to let him win.
As she completes her 96th rep in 125 seconds, her legs turned to jelly and she fell to the floor and landed in the fetal position. Alwyn had come close to breaking her, but she did it.
"Oh, most people usually take a break," he said about the circuit.
Just like that, it was done. In just a little over an hour, he'd not only given us a complete body training session, but had shown us there's more to strength training than pushing heavy weights.
He showed us that you don't have to run on a treadmill or sit on a bike for hours on end to get a great cardio workout. He showed us that you can accomplish two things at once: strength/body composition training and a cardiovascular workout.
I wanted to sit in that gym for as long as I could just to listen to him talk. Not only is his accent legit, but the knowledge that he was spitting was priceless. I just wanted to soak it up like a sponge.
But all good things come to an end. Our session of training pain and pleasure was over. As we left that day, I'll never forget how completely drained I felt and how much knowledge had just been thrown my way. It made me happy to know that a resource like Alwyn Cosgrove is available on T-Nation.
Thanks to Alwyn and the staff of Results Fitness!
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