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The One Hundred Rep Challenge is……..
A simple practice designed to establish an re-enforce positive, enduring habits.
Suitable for everyone, young & old, active & sedentary, everyone can benefit by using 100 reps to work on the areas of their mental & physical well being that require attention. We approach everything as scalable” – rather than one size fits all, the 100 Rep Challenge helps participants find the best route for themselves
www.100repchallenge.com
Rannoch Donald: writer, movement maverick, facilitator, dot joiner, beginner’s mind, beginner’s body…
Actively helping individuals and companies connect with health and well-being through movement.
Founder of the 100 Rep Challenge, promoting Every Day Activity, as featured in Mens Health and Mens Fitness. 100 Rep Challenge is a featured event at this years Scottish Fitness and Nutrition Expo in Glasgow (August 2014).
Co Founder of Earth Strength – Move the Body – Still the Mind.
Transcript:
Leszek: Hello, my name is Leszek Stelmachowski and this is Fitness Soul Podcast. Today I will chat with Rannoch Donald about his 100 Rep Challenge. Enjoy!
Leszek: Okay, 100 Rep Challenge. What’s that?
Rannoch: Okay, 100 Rep Challenge essentially comes in two pieces; this 100 Reps which is really about everyday activity, just about getting moving. We can make it prescriptive, we can make it about specific moves, or we can essentially say that this ongoing 100 Rep Challenge I’ve got which is about everyday activity. Today it might be that I’m going to take the stairs rather than take the lift. It could be simple things like one of my favorites is never using the shopping trolley; always using baskets. I think that’s a big thing.
The 100 Rep Challenge is finding different ways over the course of a day to increase the amount of movement that you do. The actual challenge itself, again, is a personal one. When I originally did workshops, I found that people would come along and learn a set of skills but would struggle as how to put these together effectively. For the average human being we don’t need convoluted periodization; we just need consistent practical effort. So what we did was we set a baseline of activity in terms of what the average person should be able to train for and do. The original challenge was 10 dead hang pull-ups, 30 push-ups and 60 body weight squats. So what we did was we had 100 Reps.
Leszek: Three exercises?
Rannoch: That was it. You could start to get into anything you want but just as a baseline if you’re talking about someone who’s starting training out they may already be doing weight training, they may be running. But the one set of core exercises that over a period of time will build a baseline of strength and conditioning, they’re the key ones. You can mix and match that as you go. The reason they’re done in that way is, obviously, it’s much harder to pull yourself up in terms of your own body weight than it is to do a squat.
Leszek: Is it for everyone? I can do maybe 10, but I think someone who’s coming through the door cannot do it.
Rannoch: Absolutely it is for everyone because it’s all scalable. That 100 Rep Challenge of 10, 30, 60 is something you work towards and then once you have it, you maintain it. That’s the idea. It’s just you’re always able to do this straight out of the bag. And maintaining it is much easier than getting to it. Once you’ve got it, we spoke of this before in fact, this idea of creating a fire and keeping it lit. It’s much easier to keep a fire lit than it is to have to start a new fire every day.
Leszek: What’s after this? Are you trying to make the time faster?
Rannoch: There’s a whole combination of things. The reps, interestingly enough, despite the fact it’s called the 100 Rep Challenge, the rep aspect kind of comes academic. It’s a baseline to get you going. 100 Rep Challenge is not the answer, it’s an answer; it’s an on ramp to other activity. So in terms of what’s next, you might do the 100 Rep Challenge over a period of weeks and months, become almost an expert in those three moves which, believe me, if you train them consistently the level of strength and ability that you’ve got will skyrocket. But again, people have a tendency to look for things that are novel. If we focus on those drills, at the end of it the baseline of strength we’ve got that we can tap into means it’s much easier to then say, “Well, actually I’m going to look at Olympic lifting.” Not saying that 100 Reps is going to allow you to Olympic lift, but if you have a baseline of functional strength, suddenly something like Olympic lifting is a lot less intimidating. If you can bang out 10 pull-ups, 30 push-ups, 60 body weight squats easily . . .
Leszek: How long does it take for the best guys?
Rannoch: Well, that’s where the challenge comes in. 100 Reps we have this idea of everyday activity which I said can be prescriptive, you’re gonna do X,Y, and Z, or can simply be the idea that you’re going to look for opportunities for everyday activity, which I keep repeating. Everyday activity, that’s the key. In terms of the challenge, when we host an actual challenge, we set 100 seconds on a stopwatch and we count down. You’ve got 100 seconds to do as many reps, good reps, as you can. We are very strict in terms of the competition . . . challenge level, if you like. I don’t want to say competition . . . the challenge level that people are moving effectively. So we’ll have a countdown, 100 seconds.
Leszek: So no kick pull-ups?
Rannoch: No kipping. For example, a push-up; we do push-ups the same way people push cars. Nobody pushes a car with their hands out here. We push here. And that’s a very protective structure.
Leszek: Chest to the ground?
Rannoch: More or less. We’re strict, but we’re not ruthless. Under pressure, people’s movement degrades quite quickly. When we talk about those three moves, the big gross movements, there’s no excuse for not doing them well if you practice properly. The pull-ups are from dead hang. You start in a dead hang, chin over bar, and back down again. Push-ups: elbows in, the entire body is connected and you often see people doing really short range push-ups with their elbows out or you see them only moving their upper body. And actually the body . . .
Leszek: Ends up staying in the same place.
Rannoch: All the time, and the easiest way to explain that to people is imagine your body’s a door and your feet are in the hinges. The whole door moves. It’s not like a barn door, for horses. The whole body moves.
Very often — again, something you and I have spoken about — when someone shows you the fix that can be incredibly simple but can drastically alter how you move. So it’s back to this idea of it all being skill based and it having just certain key principles that you can carry into whatever activity you do next. Essentially what you want is you want a strong, healthy — healthy being one of the key components — fit body that you can then take into your first 5k, 10k, cycling, krav maga, whatever it is you choose to do next. The basic fundamentals of this are to create an on ramp to other activities, but they always are there as the bedrock of what you do.
Leszek: Fantastic. All right, you’ve been doing this for how long now?
Rannoch: The 100 Rep Challenge? The first one started I think back in 2009 or ’10, and it was literally on the back of a couple of workshops. It was actually trainers who came and said, “We’ve got these tools and these skills now, but we’re not quite sure what to do with them.” And I said, “Okay, let’s make this as simple as it possibly can be.”
So if you’ve got somebody who can’t do 20 repetitions of a particular drill — and I’m thinking about kettlebells here — you start with a pyramid of one, two three, four five, four, three, two, one, or a ladder of one, two three, four, five and that’s it. You build volume incrementally. So rather than saying, “We’re doing three sets of 10,” or whatever it is, you start one rep, or you start with two and you just slowly add bit by bit.
On the back of those workshops, we created a really simple format. I started to create what I called one-tool workouts which were for people who were maybe training at home between gym sessions and they had a single kettlebell or sandbag or maybe a pair of dumbbells to create a workout that you would use just using that one tool start to finish and get it done. And again, working on different levels of intensity, working on speed, there are variables that you can play with, with bodyweight training. It’s how fast, it’s the range of the reps. We do things like stutter reps where we stagger reps back up and down. These are all just little tools and tricks which fool your body into moving. The kind of bottom line and baseline with this stuff is just straightforward functional movement: push, pull.
Leszek: So you’ve done this for six years. And I take it you saw so many different people with different . . . you saw athletes who are well trained and you see . . .
Rannoch: The funny thing with it is guys who . . . when we did this at Body Power, for example, there were lots of bodybuilders there. They gave us a wide berth because they’re big, big guys. The idea of them perhaps doing pull ups, it’s just not in their repertoire; I understand it. The second year that we were there and we were running the bodyweight training arena, they had a lot of gymnasts there. They couldn’t wait to come and do this stuff. You looked at these guys at high level and they just wiped the floor with people. We had a couple of guys who did parkour, some martial artists, but the most interesting thing was even guys who train at a high level would come along and say, “Whoa, this is really hard.” When somebody is standing beside you telling you that bodyweight squat doesn’t count, and you’re kinda training at a high level, that’s a bitter pill to swallow. That’s a tough one.
Leszek: So this is athletes, but average joe. How is it for this person? Have you seen a big transformation in them?
Rannoch: Huge, because again it’s back to this business of everyday activity and movement. We spend so much of our time sitting. We sit in cars going to work. We sit down at work. We get home and we sit down again. As I said earlier we have this culture of convenience that makes doing nothing very, very easy. The minute you set somebody in motion, they can very often maintain that motion and get better and better incrementally. Little by little, bit by bit. So to get someone who . . . nothing makes me happier than to have someone say, “I’d like to do the 100 Rep Challenge but I can’t do a push-up.” Fantastic. Let’s get you doing a push-up. Because you can, it’s a skill. It’s not down to how strong you are; it’s a combination of things. Of course strength matters, of course your overall bodyweight matters, but whatever you’ve got going on we can get you started. And once you’re started, the great thing about this as a skill base is you can then go and do it and get better.
Leszek: So let’s say I cannot . . . I know you cannot do this way, but let’s try it. I cannot do a pull-up. I can hang there. There’s no way I can pull-up. How long do you think it will take me to do my first pull-up?
Rannoch: Your first pull-up? It depends on a matter of things. Like you say, everybody is individual; everybody is different. Some people will get it within the first session.
Leszek: Really?
Rannoch: Yeah. Because they’ve not been shown how to connect their body in a way that they can actually lift themselves up. I know you as a coach are capable of getting somebody to do something they can’t do because I saw it with Pete. He had not done a muscle up. And he tried but you showed him one thing. Within two minutes, the guy did his first muscle-up. And muscle-up for many people is kind of the gold standard for bodyweight movement.
Leszek: If you look at the gymnast, it’s normal for them.
Rannoch: Exactly, but you look at Pete. He’s fit, does lots of bodyweight training so he has already got his 100 Rep baseline, if you like. If you look at somebody who their activity is consistent of walking maybe on a treadmill or cycling or whatever it might be, and they’re new to bodyweight training, the transformation’s transition is incredibly fast. They’re learning bodyweight drills and they’re learning it as a skill and they get good very, very quickly. They will go from 2 or 3 push-ups to 10 very quickly.
The pull-up is a hard one. Depending on where they are in the scheme of things, if there’s no movement going on there at all, we’ll start with reverse rows. If somebody can’t do reverse rows, then we’ll do something called Let-Me-In’s. It’s a drill I got from Mark Lauren who does You Are Your Own Gym, a fantastic bodyweight book. It’s just standing at a door and pulling yourself forward. Once you get that mechanism going, you understand what’s happening here in terms of this pulling and where the shoulders need to be and that you are actually shifting your own bodyweight and from there to reverse rows.
Leszek: Progressions for everyone then?
Rannoch: Yeah, and that applies to every drill. The biggest one that we see the quickest change with are bodyweight squats. And again, it could be a whole combination of things. It could be people turning up in training shoes with huge heels on them who pitch forward. It could be people with ankle issues, with hip issues. The squat is such an equalizer, particularly for people who spend huge amounts of their day sitting, to get them to do bodyweight squats. I’m not gonna go down this route of “It’s the answer to all our problems in Western civilization” because it’s not. Sitting is not this horrible disease. We’ve done it for hundreds of years now, but there are antidotes to the things that we do that are deleterious to our overall wellbeing. Push, pull, squat are three of those things. If you get someone who can’t squat, it’s not that they can’t squat; it’s just they haven’t done it. Their body has forgotten that skill. There’s motor amnesia there.
Leszek: Maybe someone’s shown them the wrong way of doing it.
Rannoch: Yeah. The funny thing is all movement is natural. It just so happens some natural movement isn’t very good for you. If we’re doing it, it’s natural. There’s no escaping that. But when somebody takes time to look at how you move and how you squat, there are drills that we do. Again, if you have somebody lie on their back and somebody else take their feet, and bend their knees they will invariably get into full squat position lying on their back. Try to stand them up, they will either fall backwards or fall forwards. Again it’s because of the disconnection between the ankle, the knee and the hip. So you just spend a bit of time working on that. Once people learn to squat bodyweight below parallel, naturally they will find very often that other issues that they’ve got physically start to disappear in a lot of respects. Lower back pain which often leads to shoulder pain, I mean that’s not my field but I’ve seen it time and time again with people who start to squat. The knock on effect is huge. And it also starts to promote confidence in movement.
Leszek: Coming back to what you said, so basically someone with a shoulder problem or a hip problem, squatting is good for you.
Rannoch: Movement is good.
Leszek: Many times you go to a doctor and people are coming down here and saying, “I’ve seen my doctor. I have problems with my hip. I cannot do anything. I’ve been told to stay home.” Why? Is it protective?
Rannoch: Yeah, it is protective. I think it’s really tough because I’m not a clinician. I don’t deal with people on that level. If I come across somebody who’s really struggling and in pain, I’m fortunate enough to have other people I can refer them to. But very often it’s a fear of movement. That fear translates into a matter of things. When you see people start to become protective about how they move, then all movement becomes an issue. When you see people start to blossom with confidence in terms of how they move, everything starts to change.
I do lots of floor drills, standing up drills and falling over drills. Sometimes I look at that stuff and think, “What’s the value of that?” And then I realize the value of it is as we get older, part of that protective business . . . if you look at people 65 plus who slip, trip, and fall, hip breakages, these things become huge and potentially lethal for a lot of people.
Leszek: And you can train to prevent it.
Rannoch: Absolutely. It’s the confidence to actually negotiate with your body in space and time. The heart of proprioception is knowing where your body is in space and time.
Leszek: Broken wrist, people dropping this way.
Rannoch: Precisely. I’ve seen people with skilled movement for example with a martial arts background, who’ve done kind of break falls and stuff, but actually falling on hard surface is actually a very particular set of movements. The only way you can learn it is if you do it. So you just get up and do it, but most people find it dangerous. Not being able to do it is dangerous. Learning the simple skill of rolling and moving and standing, these are the life skills, but because we’re not called upon to use because we’re not walking through the forest, finding the food and getting the water and chopping the wood, we’ve become increasingly dysfunctional.
Leszek: I’m a doctor at this moment and I’ve got this patient with shoulder injury. I’ve been to many classes and I know these guys. Many of them try to teach me crazy stuff. So I say to my patient, “You better do nothing because you might injure yourself more.” If I had a doctor like you I would send all my patients to you because I know they are in good hands.
Rannoch: It’s tricky because having an issue that impacts how you move is not a disease. You’ve dislocated a shoulder twice and for years was incredibly protective. My background was marital arts based and this became a real issue for me. I was always worried about this and damaging it. My own story, I got back into the idea of being healthy and fit again because I broke my leg. I didn’t do that in a dramatic way. I did it wearing flip flops on wet grass chasing a dog. But the upshot of that was . . .
Leszek: You should have had a better story than that.
Rannoch: I’ve tried it before like rocking climbing in the Pyrenees or something, but no, literally over on the ankle.
Leszek: This is the title for this Podcast, yeah? Rannoch Donald injured himself while climbing. My transformation happens there. When I was falling, I had this dream.
Rannoch: When I had the cast on, I thought the minute this cast comes off, that’s it. I had three young-ish children at that point. They’re all older now. At that time I gave myself all kinds of excuses that parents do — I’m busy doing this and doing that and I’ll get back to training. You get to your mid 40s and your mindset is not that of the 25-year-old who used to do this, that and the next thing. That was literally a lifetime ago. You’ve not kept those skills up and as a consequence it’s easier to think about your glory days than it is where you’ve wound up now. So I got the cast off and that was worse because suddenly I had this withered leg. This is terrible. What am I gonna do? So I went to physio and they gave me a couple of exercises to go and do with a band. I really thought, is that it? That’s the extent of this after-care?
So I went full circle back to how I used to train when I was in my teens. Bodyweight training, a little bit of weight training, and I came across [inaudible 00:20:03], and I came across a kettlebell. I didn’t have a kettlebell, so I made one out of a Lenore container, filled it with sand and used that. And then purely as a personal thing, decided I would go to Denmark and do the RKC, which I did. And all of that was my journey; there was no end goal in site with that. I just wanted to reinvigorate how I moved and those skills.
So thinking about this person who’s got this physical issue, whatever it might be, if there’s a will there to do something about it, it can start with the smallest thing. When we teach mobility drills, if you have somebody who can’t move their shoulder, and struggles at the elbow, and has problems with their wrist, then you start here. And if you can move your fingers you’ll find the rest will start to come along and the rest of the body comes in to play.
Leszek: I saw you many times moving, and you move very, very well. I didn’t know you had the broken leg and dislocated shoulder.
Rannoch: The interesting thing is that leg break was 10 years ago. It’s done and dusted.
Leszek: But you could stay there and be one of these people who say, “Listen, I used to run marathons but I’d broken my leg and this is it.”
Rannoch: Absolutely. It’s back to this protective thing that we have going on that suddenly we are defined by the issues or the injuries that we’ve got, and if you go down the traditional route the answer will be ibuprofen, the answer will be rest, the answer will be not moving, the answer will be ice packs, the answer will be everything except the thing that I think has the potential to have the biggest impact which is move. There’s been a lot of debate recently about the benefits of walking. As far as I’m concerned, for the average person, that’s the fundamental start of everything. Walk, turning into the occasional run.
Leszek: So if you want to go to the gym, walk to the gym first. Even don’t go to the gym but walk there and come back.
Rannoch: I think these things are hugely important but we kind of downgrade them. We go back to what we were talking about earlier, it’s not novel. If I’m gonna train and I have a limited amount of time during the week, then I’m going to go and do something that just absolutely smashes me. I just think, why, why, why. If you’re not getting medals and making money out of beating yourself up then you really want to have a think about . . .
Leszek: You shouldn’t train to failure.
Rannoch: No. Perform to failure. One of the keys within 100 Reps and one of the things we try to get across all the time is there is a continuum of movement and it starts with practice. And practice is the fundamental basis of everything. You have a skill and you practice it. There’s a lot of nonsense spoken about, “It takes 10,000 hours to become a master at this, that and the next thing.” It doesn’t take 10,000 hours to master swinging a kettlebell, but daily practice, you’ll get good at it. And the transfer of that into doing a snatch for example leads to another skill set. So practice no matter what. You can have bad practice days, you can have good practice days but occasionally you’ll have progress.
Every so often we’re on the plateau and suddenly there’s a bit of progress. Sometimes we go three steps forward, but we take two steps back. But it’s still progress so we keep going. Now, every so often there is an opportunity for performance and we only go there occasionally. And that’s for example the challenge part of the 100 Rep Challenge. So if you and I start the 100 Rep Challenge today we check each other out, see how we’re doing with our reps, coach each other through the movement and say, “Okay. We’re gonna train this over the next month. We’ll practice, we’ll see incremental progress, and then in a month’s time, we’ll go.”
Leszek: We’ll try.
Rannoch: Exactly, and that’s the performance.
Leszek: Is it important to set the performance? I think from what I notice, a lot of people just start doing something and they say, “I want to run marathon under 3 hours.” And this breaks everything because many times they’ve got this in mind and they’re pushing too hard by doing things they shouldn’t do.
Rannoch: It’s almost like they’re trying to play catch up with everything they’ve not done. When you’re inactive, it’s easy to kind of imagine the consequences of that inactivity are going to happen in some distant future. And they’re not, they’ll happen every day. Slowly, slowly, there’s this little creep that takes place that eventually gets to a stage where you turn and go, “Whoa, how did that happen?” The positive aspect of effective habits does exactly the same thing. It just so happens you turn around one day and go, “Whoa. How did that happen?” You make your choice.
All of this is about lifestyle; and not lifestyle as in lifestyle magazines but lifestyle as in the conscious choices that you make in terms of what’s important for you. When people take on a challenge that is way beyond what they can currently do, they’re ability and they’re capability are out of sync. You’ve got to get ability closer to capability, you’ve got to marry those two things. The only way that you can do that is by being sensitive to how you feel.
Again, it’s one of those things within 100 Reps, over the period of a month when we set the challenge at the end of it we time it. We basically say you’ve got 100 seconds in which to do your best and that is tough. It’s only 100 seconds. No one’s gonna get messed up. So it sets a very accessible, doable benchmark. Whatever you score on that, it’s your score, you did it. Over that period of the month you have opportunities to test yourself. Every time you test yourself, you’re doing it in a proactive and sympathetic way. It’s not that you are just constantly jumping into the shark tank and letting yourself get beat up.
I think this is really important because I see it time and time again. Yesterday was legs day, I can’t walk today. If somebody somewhere is going to give you some money and a prize for legs day then that’s really cool. But if you’ve just blown out a day because you’re in bits, where are you going with this? Whatever activity you choose to do passionately — fantastic. Do it. You’re talking about the idea of doing an Iron Man or something along those lines. Hugely, hugely challenging. But you set that as a personal challenge over a period of time to work towards, not to the exclusion of all of the other aspects of your life. That’s where this stuff becomes really unhealthy. We all known middle aged guys who suddenly throw everything that they’ve got against an activity and it suddenly becomes them.
Leszek: For me, it’s so easy. When I do something, when I finish what I’m doing, whatever, I go for cycling. At this moment cycling and running is my thing, to come back home and I want to feel better than before. And if I do feel better, I know I’ve done a good job. If I feel like crap and I want to lay down and sleep for five hours, it’s probably I overdo it.
Rannoch: And that’s absolutely the key with this. It’s about being mission ready all the time. You want to be effective. If you want to be able to contribute, ongoing, then you have to be healthy and well and fit. And those are a combination of things. Fitness often happens to the exclusion of health. People choose to go and beat themselves up. They need this supplement and that supplement; it’s all kind of an illusion really. The fundamentals of health and well-being are really simple. It’s how you eat, how you move, and how you recover. How you eat, you should start first and foremost with do you cook your own food from natural raw ingredients? And if you’re not doing that, then the first thing you should do before you start worrying about this shake and this weight loss program and this and that is you should learn to cook.
Leszek: Yeah.
Rannoch: That’s it. It’s really simple. Learn to cook scrambled eggs. Learn to cook a steak. These are fundamental things. Most people can’t cook scrambled eggs! They can make rubber out of eggs but actually to cook a meal that is palatable not just for you, but for somebody else. When you cook your own food you’ll eat any old crap. But can you make food for other people that they’d actually want to sit down and eat? Again, really simple things. People hate the word hydrate, but drinking enough water, that’s a really fundamental basic thing. For people who elect to actually do it, they suddenly go, “Wow. How did I not know about this before?” Suddenly it has this profound effect. And all you did was . . .
Leszek: Your friend in here, a few weeks ago. Andrew, is it Andy? Sorry.
Rannoch: Yeah, McArthur.
Leszek: He was saying exactly the same thing that you taught him how to cook.
Rannoch: Yeah, he cooked but I think cooking for him was a chore. Whereas if you show somebody how to roast vegetables or pan fry asparagus . . . Here’s a tip for you. Simplest thing in the world: avocado, smoked salt, sherry vinegar. Those three ingredients make the perfect meal. It’s amazing. And it’s literally just smoked salt, take some . . . everybody seems to want to make avocados and chocolate mousse at the moment. I don’t understand why.
Leszek: It’s quite good. You have to admit.
Rannoch: I can’t go there. The thing is making simple food is really, really easy.
Leszek: Okay, you’ve got the avocado, just finish.
Rannoch: The avocado, you scoop it out. You just add smoked salt . . .
Leszek: Does it have to be smoked?
Rannoch: It doesn’t have to be smoked, but Maldon. Finishing salt.
Leszek: Yeah.
Rannoch: Again, people use Maldon and they chuck it in water for pasta for example. It’s pointless, just use regular salt. Maldon salt is a finishing salt. So that’s me being a pretentious cookie, but the fact is knowing simple things that bring out the best in foods, knowing how to use lemon juice and vinegar and just these simple things, they have a profound effect. We are so used to piercing the film, sticking it in a microwave. The supermarkets are really good at making us feel that these meals are healthy because they’ve got . . .
Leszek: No things added.
Rannoch: Yes, no things added or they count calories, or they have a lot of protein in them which is obviously great as we all now know. But the problem with that stuff is it’s made in containers, isn’t made in a kitchen. It’s made in a laboratory or a factory.
Leszek: And it stays there for three months.
Rannoch: Yes. Exactly. And even the freshest of the fresh stuff has arrived at that. That’s something that you don’t have any active participation in preparing. That in itself is bad enough. We then take our ready meal or whatever it is that we’ve heated. Then we sit down, we watch cooking shows on TV that make us feel incapable because these people are doing these amazing dishes, and it’s nuts. We are in danger of becoming a culture of observers who just want the book and the T-shirt and the TV program.
Leszek: And we don’t apply it.
Rannoch: You can see it across the board. I had some friends who did Ninja Warrior recently. And I love it, it’s fantastic. It’s fun and exciting for most people. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do Ninja Warrior. I would love to try and if that gets people out running around in a park then that’s fantastic. But the majority of people will watch Ninja Warrior just as a spectator sport.
Leszek: With a beer in hand.
Rannoch: Yes, and that’s unfortunate because take any person out to an open environment and encourage them to run around and they will invariably say, “That was brilliant. I don’t know why I don’t do this more often.” So eating, moving . . .
Leszek: We’ve got the recipe for eating and moving. Rannoch: Very simple, and that is get out — one foot in front of the other. I’m not talking here about people who have huge clinical issues with obesity, etc. That’s not my bag, but we need to stand the flow of people who are heading in that direction. And the easiest way to do that is to find a friend and go for a walk. There are walking groups being set up all over the country now. Michael Moore, the filmmaker, is an unusual character. He’s a guy who’s overweight and who tweeted that he was going out for a walk one night. Suddenly his news feed blew up with all these people over the US saying, “Well, I’m gonna go out for a walk.” And now 18 months later and he goes out and walks daily and all these people on his Twitter feed talk about their various walks. And he’s lost a ton of weight. And it’s just purely from that process.
Leszek: What’s his name again?
Rannoch: Michael Moore. Check it out because he has the most fantastic post about deciding to go out one day for a walk and he has literally created a movement in the States of people who have just decided to go out for a walk.
Leszek: Was that the guy behind some documentary movies?
Rannoch: Bowling for Columbine, a whole bunch of stuff. And he’s a controversial character and he upsets a lot of people but there he’s done something that is just so incredibly practical. He’s just encouraged everybody.
Leszek: And easy.
Rannoch: And I guarantee you that there will be a number of people who will have taken those first steps and as a consequence will have decided to go for a hike over the weekend. And then on the back of that might have decided that they want to go camping and cycling.
Leszek: Fantastic.
Rannoch: Back into activities and skills, rather than 3 sets of 10. Three sets of 10 is great but it’s such a small part of the overall picture, which is back to this activity.
Leszek: I need to stop you for a second. I know you can talk forever but it’s almost an hour now. Just a quick one, how can someone get involved with 100 Rep Challenge?
Rannoch: 100RepChallenge.com is the website. We’re in the process of reinvigorating that, putting a lot most effective information in there. And on Facebook it’s 100 Rep Challenge group, there are about 4,600 people on there now, which is great. We have different workouts that we put up there and basically it’s a community. If as an individual you want to participate, come to the 100 Rep Challenge Facebook page and say hi. Tell us about yourself and we will help you make those first steps. If you are Jim and you want to run it, again just get in touch. Those are the key ways. We’re going to be at the fitness festival in Edinburgh, and that’s in June. And we are gonna be at the Scottish Fitness Expo which is in Glasgow at the end of August.
Those will be events where people can come and participate in the challenge itself. We’re gonna have some interesting people turn out for that because this starts with one pull-up or one push-up. By the time we get to August, I think we’re going to have some people who are pretty serious about making their mark within those 100 seconds, but it’s doable for everybody. And if you turn up at those events, come and see us, introduce yourself. If you can’t do a push-up, can’t do a pull-up, can’t do a squat, you are exactly the person that we want to meet. If you can’t do that, then let us know where you are because we’ve got friends and family all over the place. There’s somebody out there in the same situation as you who wants to train with you, or a coach out there who will want to help. It starts with the basics and the fundamentals. That’s it.
Leszek: That’s fantastic. That is it. Thank you very much.
Rannoch: Thank you very much.
