As a travel writer specializing in expedition-type adventures, Ryan Murdock has walked across vast grizzly-infested stretches of Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. He’s led jeep expeditions through central Mongolia and its south Gobi regions. He’s ventured by camel into the sandy wastes of the Taklamakan Desert, a place whose name means “those who go in don’t come out.”
Like those spec ops guys, Ryan relies on TACFIT because he’s bet his life on it more than once. But he also loves the side effects…
Thanks to the “5 Secret Weapons” that TACFIT aims at the enemies of fat loss and muscle gain, Ryan comes back from his travels looking like a shredded Doc Savage without ever setting foot in a gym.
1. Portability
The benefit of this secret weapon is obvious for a guy like Ryan. But it has also proven key for thousands of our clients from every walk of life. If you can train anywhere and at any time, you’re more likely to follow through with your plan. Simple as that!
It doesn’t matter how you accomplish this. If you have a well-stocked gym both at home and at your office, you have access to a gym on all your travels, and you don’t mind training inside when the weather is beautiful, then you can follow an equipment-based program with full “portability.” This obviously isn’t practical for most people. We’ve tested a lot of relatively portable tools — kettlebells, bands, rings, Clubbells, etc — with our spec ops clients. And we’ve consistently gotten the highest stick-to-it rates with bodyweight-only programs.
2. Incremental Sophistication
We talked yesterday about the importance of neural sophistication in your exercise program. It’s one of the keys to accelerated fat loss, as well as optimal strength and muscle gain. It’s also what keeps you excited and coming back for more. But adding “sophistication” to your training in the wrong way can be disastrous. Skipping steps or randomly throwing in complex skills can cause poor technique, injury, and completely random results.
Jumping too quickly into sophisticated movement patterns will also “freeze” your nervous system, bringing your body transformation efforts to a grinding halt. Do you remember the last time you tried a new sport — maybe rollerblading or skiing? And did you feel like Frankenstein’s monster learning to walk? That was your nervous system shutting down “pieces” of the movement so it could focus on learning manageable chunks. It’s tough to train at high intensity when you’re riding that kind of parking brake! But by adding sophistication gradually, you can have the best of both worlds. With TACFIT, you fly under the radar of your body’s protective mechanisms, hitting those high intensity workouts while providing a constant supply of new stimulation to keep your fat burning furnace stoked and your muscle building machine working overtime.
3. The 6 Degrees Of Freedom
Most conventional exercise programs would have you believe that humans move robotically through one plane at a time. We know this isn’t true, so why do we accept it in an exercise program? Human movement is a complex weave through different planes and on different axes. If you take the three axes of conventional movement descriptions (front/back, up/down, left/right) and add rotation, you immediately see that we move both along and around those axes to take advantage of our full movement potential:
- Heaving: Moving up and down the vertical axis
- Surging: Moving along the front-to-back axis
- Swaying: Moving along the side-to-side axis
- Yawing: Moving around the vertical axis
- Rolling: Moving around the front-to-back axis
- Pitching: Moving around the side-to-side axis
You can access all 6 Degrees of Freedom quite readily through bodyweight training.
But that’s not all! Training in 6-Degrees of Freedom will kick your butt faster than any other method. That means you’re finished training sooner. You can spend more time doing the important things in life — playing with the kids, hanging with friends, pursuing your interests — rather than burning away monotonous hours in the gym because you feel you have to.
Training in 6-Degrees also ensures that your body remains balanced. You won’t waste time dealing with overuse injuries or overcompensations created by doing the same repetitive movements in the same planes day after day. TACFIT balances your workouts across all 6-Degrees of human movement , so you can feel confident that your training isn’t adding further imbalances to your life. Instead, each workout builds health, shreds fat, and opens entirely new realms of movement potential. If you train the TACFIT way, it’ll be easier than you think.
4. Tactical Joint Mobility And Fascial Stretching
Many programs play lip service to “stretching,” but few provide the elements of active recovery that are so necessary to achieving rapid and lasting changes in your physique and performance. During his years in Russia, Scott learned a set of recovery methods that he calls “aggressively therapeutic.” These techniques are a pivotal element of the “waving intensity” approach that makes TACFIT so effective. But active recovery methods aren’t just some sort of retroactive therapy. They’re proactive performance enhancement! Their effects on performance and body composition are seen on two fronts. The first is joint mobility. If you don’t move your joints systematically through their full range of motion on a regular basis, they will become compressed. In the short term this means you can push less weight through a shorter range of motion at that joint. And that means less fat burned and reduced potential for muscle growth.
The answer is to target each joint — head to toe, center outward — with progressively more complex movements that are designed specifically to maximize the movement potential of THAT joint. Each joint has a unique structure and function, and your joint mobility program must respect that if you want optimal results. The other essential component of active recovery is myofascial stretching. The myofascia is the sheath of connective tissue that surrounds your muscles. It’s a continuous web that interconnects the entire body. And it actually changes shape in response to physical stimuli you undergo repeatedly. So if you sit in a chair all day, your body gradually becomes chair-shaped. This makes you more efficient at sitting in a chair all day, but it isn’t great for your overall health or your body composition.
When parts of your myofascial net become shortened and leathery and others become long and loose, you end up with an imbalance. Putting your body under intense physical stress with such an imbalance can cause injury. Thankfully, your nervous system is smart. It shuts you down before you can blow a fuse. The downside is that it also stops you from creating the intensity you need to burn loads of fat and pack on lean muscle! The solution is to compensate for your training and occupational adaptations by “strengthening in the opposite direction.” This isn’t just “stretching.” We’re not trying to lengthen muscle tissue. We are deliberately releasing tension in the tight facia to bring your entire system back into balance. By actively using muscular effort to move into specific postures, we can provide focused facial release in as little as 20 seconds. This makes it easy to stick to the program. Let’s face it, the first thing to go when time is tight is that 15 minute stretching routine…
5. Tactical Intensity Burst (TIB)
You’ve probably heard of Interval Training. It’s an approach that uses timed bursts of “work” followed by intermittent periods of “rest.” And it’s been proven time and again to outperform other forms of exercise for both conditioning and fat loss. But what about muscle? Our spec ops clients can go months without access to a gym, or even a dumbbell. But they need to keep developing muscle mass. The answer is the Tactical Intensity Burst (TIB). TIBs adapt the most popular interval training approach — the 20:10 cycle of the Tabata protocol — to the practical realities of spec ops and law enforcement guys and gals. Their performance shoots through the roof. But that ain’t all…
These elite warriors — already ripped by anyone’s standards — have their skin shrink wrapped over muscle!
The secret of TIBs is in applying the 20/10 protocol to exercises designed SPECIFICALLY to encourage FULL body muscle stimulation. Short bursts of intense movement allow you to perform an incredible amount of work in a very short period of time, providing serious stimulus for muscle growth. But there’s more going on here. We’re also hijacking some cool hormonal effects. The short rest periods mean you end up generating a lot of lactic acid. And that means increased release of growth hormone. GH is one of the most important triggers for both fat loss and muscle gain. You’re also avoiding the nasty effects of cortisol: fat storage and muscle breakdown. By keeping your workouts short and using intense bursts instead of slow steady-state exercise, you avoid the “cortisol dump” caused by many other exercise programs.
And perhaps the coolest benefit TIBs have to offer is HOURS of FREE fat burning. Your body will spend up to two days in a heightened fat burning state after your workout. So even sitting at your desk you’ll be burning more fat! You’ll ALWAYS be in this turbo-charged fat burning state when you’re following TACFIT Commando. Those “5 Secret Weapons” are just a few of the reasons an international adventurer like Ryan relies on TACFIT to stay fit while traveling alone into the world’s forgotten corners.
We can’t promise TACFIT will make you as cool as Ryan, and it certainly won’t make you as grouchy. But it WILL prepare you to tackle any and every adventure life throws your way — even if your adventures mostly take place on the beach…
Tactical Fitness 
