Dylan Thomas is one of the first full-time professional Kettlebell Trainers in the US. He's trained numerous Kettlebell instructors, a variety of athletes and martial artists, military/emergency responders, as well as everyday people wanting to break out of the conventional fitness mode and into something more in line with a more austere past.
Dylan is a progressive trainer and knows how to effectively combine kettlebells with conventional weight training and martial arts into an effective fitness system. He's been doing this for years with his clients and now you get to learn what they have been benefiting from.
In addition to being a professional KB Trainer, Dylan is a 4th Dan Black Belt Combat/Aiki-Jujutsu Instructor and also trains in Filipino/Indonesian Martial Arts. What does this mean? It means Dylan is one tough dude and brings that energy to his training system to make you tougher in training...and in life in general.
Dylan is a presenter at the Collision Course workshop in October I guarantee you the attendees will be raving about his presentations.
MM: How did you get into fitness personally and professionally as an instructor?
DT: It's a long story but I'll try to be brief: My mother was in the fitness industry since I was a child. She worked at gyms as an "Instructress" (Yeah, that's what they called them then!) basically a trainer who also taught aerobic classes. Eventually, she owned her own gym for women and as a kid I was there a lot so I grew up around training. I was a fairly weak little kid, with asthma and a crossed eye, so I got messed with a lot. Thus I gravitated towards martial arts. My step father, who was a martial artist,wouldn't train me until I built myself up, so I started with the basic push-up, sit-up, dumbbell curl, and running type of workout and progressed to weights around puberty.
When I got older, I worked in construction but even then there was a period of three years where I was lifting and running a lot, but at that point I was moving away from training for toughness and started to train more for looks, since I was in a band, and Henry Rollins, Glenn Danzig and other guys showed it was cool to be in shape, not just some skinny, body-by-heroin and Jack Daniels body.
When I left Florida for Virginia, I stopped lifting all together and threw myself into my job. I was a foreman, then a project manager for a commercial construction company. Over time, I got out of shape. I was getting a gut at 25 since all I did was work, eat the wrong stuff and sit on my ass in order to relax at all.
Well, I got the itch to get back into martial arts again, and it took finding the dojo where I am still that everything changed around.
MM: I saw one of your instructor's classes and it was hardcore. Certainly not an aerobics-disguised-as-martial-arts class!
DT: No doubt! In our classes, we don't spend any real time on pure physical fitness. We stretch and what-not, but other than the physical stresses of drilling, training techniques and sparring, physical fitness is on you. The dojo back then was 80% military, with the rest being police and "Get Action!" types. I knew that to be able to hang with these guys I needed to hit the weights and PT again. I mean, one of our alumni was Col. George Bristol, the founder of the Marine's martial arts program, our #2 Instructor was an SF Officer--you really didn't want to be a marshmallow in their midst.
MM: What did you do to learn more about training to customize it to your martial arts training?
DT: Besides the training I had as a youth, I threw myself into reading anything on fitness that could be applied to MA, most of it being military-type stuff, I really got into ruck marching and weight lifting. I drifted into reading Pavel Tsatsouline's articles in Muscle Media and made some great gains in a short time. I was interested in kettlebells, but I thought the price was nuts. Then, one day after a belt test,my sempai, the late Col. Jim Tirey, informed me he'd signed me and my training partner up for a Kettlebell workshop in McLean VA, with some dude named Mike Mahler. As you remember, it was a good, small group that day and you went right to it. I was impressed that as I was swinging the kettlebell, how much stress it put on my breathing and muscles, to be blunt, it felt like fighting. I looked at my buddy and said, "Screw what they cost, tomorrow I'm buying a set and so are you!"
MM: I well remember that workshop and also how you and Jim helped me out with my early VA workshops back in 2002-2004. Those workshops were a great time and the best part was hanging out with you, Warren, and Jim, having a few cold beers after a hard day of training. I miss Jim and those good times.
DT: It was a great time and I remember at one of those post-workshop gatherings you said I should be a kettlebell instructor. I was burnt out with construction anyways (the environment constantly reactivated my asthma) so I took you up on your offer to help me get started, went to the RKC cert, and I've been training ever since.
MM: You've been a trainer for some time now and have worked with a wide variety of people. What are some of the common mistakes people make with training?
DT: We can go on forever there, but the biggest thing is information. People believe a lot of misconceptions about fitness. I hear things like, "I'm only going to docardio, because I want to lose weight, then I'll lift weights." or "What exercises should I do to lose the fat ?"all the time. People still believe cardio is the best way to lose weight and they think you can actually spot reduce body fat. Infomercials have brain washed people! LOL!
MM: No lie, the ubiquitous ten-minute workouts on fitness infomercials are particularly irritating!
DT: Ha ha! Then there are martial artist, athletes and G.I.s training with bodybuilding programs that do more harm than good to their performance. I'm not saying there aren't good points to that type of training nor elements that are useful to the above-mentioned people, but it's not efficient, it's not looking at "What is it that I do or will be doing?" How many guys in the gym live for bench presses and curls, with very little leg work other than leg extensions and leg curls? I wish every opponent trained like that! LOL! Lastly, something you touch on a lot is people spending too much time in the gym and breaking themselves down.
For more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at boosting testosterone naturally, boosting testosterone, testosterone booster, Natural testosterone boosters