A Tsunami is a series of waves that carry large volumes of water and energy. Tsunami’s are know for the devastation they cause in coastal regions. A Tsunami is also a Battling Ropes exercise created by John Brookfield; also known for the devastation it unleashes on it’s victims.

If you’ve never experienced it, in the Tsunami, you take a 50 ft, 2 inch rope and your goal is to create a series of waves through the entire length of the rope, at first glance you might not think this would be too difficult. This is where looks can be deceiving. The Tsunami can not be truly appreciated until you actually try to perform the drill. In less than 10 seconds you will feel the wrath of the Tsunami and have a whole new respect for the awesome, effective simplicity of the Battling Ropes system. I can not think of a more demanding exercise.

The Tsunami requires an enormous amount of energy and power from it. It is a total body exercise; head to toe, heart and lungs. In order to get the rope to travel 50 feet, you have to explode your body upwards and then perform a powerful slam downwards.

To create a series of waves, you have to powerfully and efficiently transition from extension to flexion like a jack hammer. This is a phenomenal drill for developing and sustaining explosive power.

To implement the Tsunami into your training, keep it simple. Try to incorporate it into your routine twice a week. You can try to sustain the waves for intervals of time, or try to reach a certain number of waves for “sets.” However you choose to train the Tsunami, you can progressively increase your duration, or waves, a little each week. Once you can perform the Tsunami for a whole minute, you will have just survived a Class 3 hurricane!

A word of caution: Because the Tsunami is so demanding, if you are going to incorporate it into your strength training days, you may want to perform it last. The Tsunami may leave you too wiped out to safely perform strength training after you have weathered the storm.

For more ideas of how to infuse the Tsunami into your training check out John Brookfield’s new DVD: Hurricane Ingrid: The Workout.

Let’s talk about how our brains and bodies respond to change.
In order to understand how Change affects us we must define the concept of the SAID Principle — the body always gets better at exactly what it does. While we generally talk about this idea in relation to movement and performance, the brain works the same way with regards to everything we do (or don’t do).

Habits are easy. Our morning ritual is our morning ritual because we don’t have to think about it. We frequent the same stores, take the same routes, buy the same brands, and return to the same restaurants because it’s the path of least resistance. This is precisely why habits are so hard to break.

We are hard-wired for survival as opposed to performance, which means that we want to conserve energy as much as possible. And, making any sort of change requires additional energy — the brain literally burns more glucose when we have to do something out of the ordinary.

So, when you decide to “go for broke” and make several changes at the same time, any unplanned events in your life can easily derail the change you want to make. Your body literally runs out of energy to manage all of the changes, and falls back to what it already knows in order to make it through the day. While it may be frustrating to make changes gradually, it is a much more realistic approach for guaranteeing success because both emotionally and physically it requires less energy and won’t place unrealistic demands on the body.

Remember, success breeds success, so it is much better to have many small successes that add up, than to take on TOO much at once, fail and have to start all over at square one.Let’s look at a few examples of places where people often struggle to make changes, and some ways to ease in to change.

Get More Sleep
Americans are notoriously sleep-deprived. Accidents related to sleep deprivation have been estimated to have an annual economic impact of $43 to $56 billion, and recent studies even indicate a link between chronic sleep deprivation and obesity.
• Create a nighttime ritual. 30 minutes prior to bedtime, unplug.
• Work to standardize your hours of sleep to a consistent amount 7 days a week.
• Shift your schedule in 15-minute intervals to work up to 7-8 hours/night.

Eating Behaviors
Make just one change a week.
• Cut out a snack.
• Add one vegetable.
• Throw out one trigger food.
• If weight loss is your goal, count your calories for one week. The next week, reduce caloric intake by just 100 calories per day.

Fitness Training
85-90% of individuals who start a training program quit within the first 90 days, and 85% of that group quits due to injury. Given the large number of adults who claim to be on a training program, that is an awful lot of false starts. So, how do you start a training program you can stick with?

• If your problem is you just don’t feel like training, then my first recommendation is to choose something that you enjoy. Research shows your rate of success is much higher if you choose something you like.
• If time is a problem, realize you don’t have to spend an hour a day in the gym to get or stay in shape. Look for 10, 15, or 30 minutes to exercise.

• If you are one of those 85% who quit due to injury, a mobility warm-up will aid against future injuries. That, combined with starting the first week at no more than 50% of what you think you are capable of and remembering never to push into pain, will go a long way towards injury-free training.
To summarize,

1) Pick something you like to do, not something you feel like you have to do. 2) It doesn’t have to be an hour, make it short fast and realize it is effective. 3) Ensure that your body is prepped for success by being prepared for movement.