Nia Shanks is one of those girls that "gets it". She doesn't focus on the things that aren't important, she puts her energy and training into increased performance, and therefore, she looks amazing and is strong as hell. She is one of the few that I would like to train with, would trust to train me, and would even let her coach my unborn children. That might even be a challenge to see how much she could get a fetus to squat, but we will save that for another time. I have been intrigued by her training and philosophy for a long time, mostly because I see a lot of similarities in her and myself. I was really excited about this opportunity to speak with her for a few reasons: 1. she's awesome, and B. more and more women have been asking me about this strength & health shit, so I figured I would get some info straight from the horses mouth, even if Nia seems to be much more like a majestic Unicorn. No more nonsense from me, listen up...

Daniel Hahn is the owner and trainer of Trias Athletik in Germany and a member of The Consummate Athlete. I have long been impressed by his training prowess and recently asked him if he would do me the honor of hooking us up with a short video on kettlebell snatch technique. He didn't get us a short video. He did, however, hook us up with three badass videos encompassing basically all the details a beginner needs to know about learning to train the kettlebell snatch and kettlebell pulls in general. The kettlebell snatch is a great move because it trains power, speed, coordination, agility, endurance, grip strength, mental toughness, relaxation, and more. That might sound odd, training power and relaxation simultaneously, but if you watch the videos, you'll learn what good kettlebell athletes already know. 


After talking with Daniel online for quite some time, I finally had the opportunity to meet him when he traveled to Copenhagen to attend one of my seminars. Not only was Daniel able to perform most exercises better than I was able to demonstrate, but he did them while speaking German accented English, which is like thrice as extraordinary. Please stand up and give Daniel a well deserved round of applause and enjoy the learning experience. 

Speed is crucial for all sports performance. It’s often said that people are born fast and that little can be done to increase speed. However, although there are people who are born with a preponderance of speed and power producing fast twitch muscle fibers, which naturally make them fast and explosive, the majority of us will have a pretty even distribution between fast and slow twitch (aerobic, endurance orientated) muscle fibers. Thus what becomes crucial in the search for speed is the way in which we train our bodies and in particular our muscles’ fibers (and our neuromuscular and central nervous system) to boost our speed. This speed training program is designed to do just this. It combines specific speed (running) workouts with complimentary weights and plyometric (jumping exercises) conditioning routines.
This training program is primarily designed to improve out-and-out linear speed, ie 40m performance.