hey guys my name is Steven Lowe and I am the author of overcoming gravity so this book right here the so-called body weight training Bible basically I'm starting this series on overcoming gravity online in order to go through the book chapter by chapter and it's basically going to be a supplemental for those of you who have the book so there have been a lot of questions throughout the years on all the various science related in the book and understanding it and then also how to construct workout routines and programming since that is the probably number
one question that most people have with the book and if they're getting stuck with plateaus or they're unable to progress that is the the number one questions that come up with it if you're unfamiliar with my work you can follow along the series and hopefully you'll learn something as we're going through the book and all the fundamentals of learning how to construct your own workout routine and if this series interests you hopefully you can grab a book as well and follow along there's also going to be some minor discussion on potential science updates obviously there
has been some updates since this book has been out several years not a lot but we'll go through those as well so before we get started I just want to put out the disclaimer there mainly this series is going to be for educational purposes only I don't know your particular situation in terms of if you need to see a doctor a physical therapist or personal trainer in order to make sure that you're safe to begin exercise and other things like nutrition so make sure that you guys are safe and ready to do exercise and mainly
I'm going to be talking about all these different things from an education perspective and make sure that you consult the appropriate medical professionals before you begin an exercise routine so the goal of overcoming Gravity the first edition so this is the the first edition here it didn't accomplish what I wanted to accomplish compared to the second and obviously as you can tell from the book it has a lot of editing errors and lower quality illustrations and so I wanted to improve on that to the second edition and around that time when I published both a
lot of the information on bodyweight training was still in the heads of a lot of coaches at the time and so getting that all out there into a digestible format it was important obviously now with the the rise of social media and me being on here there has been a lot out there on the various progressions on how to work up to Advanced body weight strength movements like front lever back rubber clinch handstand push-ups and so on however there still isn't a lot out on good programming to get you there so that is the importance
of the series that I wanted to go through the main goal of the book has always been based on the proverb or adage give a man fish and feed him for a day and the goal of the book was to teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime so with the second edition I we have succeeded in that and we'll go from there and learn and I'll try to be teaching you guys about programming to learn more and make sure that you can continue producing your routines so there's five main sections of
overcoming gravity all right the first is your fundamental knowledge base and this section goes over Progressive overload the physiology of strength and hypertrophy the various progression charts that we'll use to progress exercises and set your goals and then also structural bounce of the shoulder mainly and then intro to programming and workout routines and various populations so understanding all these things can help us to put together a routine a lot better and safer part two is focused on constructing a workout routine and let's go over all the components of our workout routines so your warm up
your skill work and your strength work and how to progress that and then finally at the end you usually your isolation your prehab pull down and flexibility work and then also Mesa cycle planning which is basically looking at routines through the lens of several weeks to several months as opposed to just week to week part three is other factors that influence training so some people like to combine their workout routines in order for specific sports or goals so endurance cardio cross training how to plan and or avoid overreaching and over training Health Energy Management if
you start to get overuse injuries and then also lifestyle factors dialing in your sleep nutrition and how to make sure that you stay healthy if you get sick and are training during that part four is based on program implementation so I go through various examples of beginners trained beginner intermediate and advanced routines and I actually use some of the examples that people made themselves from the first edition of overcome gravity in the second one and then part five is on common bodyweight training injuries and how to avoid those injury and flexibility and Rehabilitation resources and
then finally the last basically half of the book is on the bodyweight strength progressions okay all right so my history with gymnastics if you don't know about me this is how I got into it and why the book was written so my dad was a part of the Gymkhana troupe which is an exhibitional troupe that goes that is based at the university around College Park since 1946 I believe and they go around to local area elementary middle and high schools promoting a drug and alcohol-free lifestyle he got into it in the 70s and the it's
basically a lot of people don't have any gymnastics experience so it's pretty cool in that respect where he didn't have any and so he was able to get into it about half the troop dozen half the troop doesn't and so he got into it and then he got me into it when I was a kid and I did it for several years but eventually ended up quitting I had a Simone biles like experience where I lost my aerial awareness and crashed on both floor and vaults and landing on my neck at least one time and
so that kind of freaked me out and I was like okay I'm pretty much done but eventually it started to interest me again and around 2002 2000 to 2002 I joined the drills and skills.com Forum which is one of the first bigger Forums on the web about gymnastics skills and learning how to train and so as I went to college in 2003 I started gaining back a lot of the skills that I had learned early on in gymnastics but the next year I really started to realize that I actually needed to have some dedicated strength
training in order to progress since I had gotten back a lot of my previous skills but it was hard to progress to harder skills from that so around that time I found mad cow's geocity site which was basically a lot on Russian periodization at that time from the 70s 60s and 60s and understanding that in terms of the fatigue and fitness models and then also understanding how to progress from like beginner to intermediate in terms of bar mail training so I started to apply those Concepts from barbell training over to my body weight training around
that time I also joined the CrossFit and performance menu slash Catalyst Athletics message boards and this was before CrossFit got big in about around like 2012 maybe 2013 but at that time when they were small scale there's actually a lot of coaches in various areas such as gymnastics track and field and a lot of other sports Olympic weightlifting powerlifting getting into the I guess those fields and we're actually learning a lot from each other based on how various sports did their strength and conditioning so whether you have a you know a good idea about CrossFit
or nuts a lot of coaches have been through and learned some from some of the concepts and from each other after that I started my own blog on blogspot and then eventually moved to eatmoveimprove.com and that was where I had published My article on how to construct a workout routine for body weight strength training called the the fundamentals of body weight strength training in 2010 and I realized that there was a big interest in that because I got over 50 000 hits in the first few months and so that led to me running the first
edition of the book which was pretty cool so after that in the ensuing about five years tons of questions were coming in I had started a message board on or subreddit read it at that time and was getting tons of questions and So eventually that led to the the second edition of the book that I have talked about a little bit for this so there's no plans on a third edition of the book but I want to continue to teach and so that's what this series is going to be based on so some of my
Feats of Strength I've done your full back lover front lever I gotten this four strict one arm chains Iron Cross there's a lot of them but I don't need to go through all of them but some of the ones I'm I'm pretty proud of are getting the the 10 second Iron Cross I'm getting my dips up to around 140 percent of my body weight for five reps so I around the time that I did the 190 pound dips I weighed about 140 maybe so I wanted to get the five plates but that is very difficult
so hopefully I'll strive for that in the future and then some other ones like eight freestanding handstand push-ups on rings that was a fun one to work on at my current I'm mainly climbing and so I don't do a lot of super dedicated strength training as it's hard to do two things at once so most of my training is geared towards getting stronger for rock climbing but I do eventually have some goals that I want to hit otherwise and finally some problems by book solve obviously I'm most well known for overcoming gravity but I've also
written a few other books if you're interested overcoming poor posture and overcoming tendonitis for those of you who are injured or have any issues with posture and then I also have an e-book out on overcoming gravity Advanced programming basically looking at programming from the perspective of intermediates advanced and Elite Training and how to mitigate fatigue and integrate workouts in terms and on progressing because normally as a beginner you're able to progress your workouts from week to week or work out to work out pretty easily but progress gets harder as you get more experienced and stronger
and so that's what overcoming gravity Advanced programming looks to solve and so if you're also interested in some of my other material I have a lot of articles on my website and on stevenlow.org and then follow me on social media as I'll hopefully be getting a lot more videos out on this series soon I'm aiming for three week so stay tuned for the first video on the first chapter
