Training and Illness

Since it's that time of the year when a wave of respiratory and intestinal illnesses overtakes us, I thought I'd address being sick, its effects on training, and how best to proceed during and following it.

Before we get to illness and its impact on the person, you need to understand how the body responds to stimuli of all kinds. In fact, no other concept (that of stimulus and response, alongwith adaptation to stress) is as useful when it comes to understanding how to measure and apply stress, or to understanding a host of human problems, training-related and otherwise.

Human experience can be considered--as a whole or in part, over days or over many years--as a stimulus to which human beings are called upon to adapt. Oviously, a stimulus that is too great for someone can result in physical or mental distress, or--depending on the magnitude of the stressor--in disorder, perhaps even in death, (as in the case of severe illnesses). When stress is applied gradually and at regular, tolerable intervals, however, body systems change in order to respond better to that specific type of stress.

Regardless of the stimulus, or stressor, the body undergoes a short-term decrease in performance capacity while collective metabolic recovery processes are under way. During this time, cortisol, a stress hormone, increases, at the same time that levels of testosterone decrease. If the stressor is of a sufficient magnitude, and adequate recovery takes place afterward, an adaptation will occur, and behind the scenes testosterone will peak once more, readying you for the next bout of stress (be it a heavier set of squats or a more difficult mountain climb), which will start the whole process anew.

Getting sick means that you must assess the magnitude of the stress; determining that will shape your decision to train or not, and training is, afterall, another kind of stress. So while it may not be a good idea to train during and immediately after, say, a 48hr. bout of vomitting and diahrea, which dehydrates you and deprives you of necessary vitamins, minerals and nutrients to perform well, training with a mild headcold is a possibility. In fact, if you're the sort of person who's made excuses your whole life not to train--i.e. if making excuses has been a lifestyle--then perhaps training while somewhat under-the-weather is just what the doctor ordered. After all, rigorous training should toughen you up, bolster your resolve and make you more useful in general, and if it hasn't, then you should ask yourself what the fuck you've been doing all this time.

Happy Turkey day, beotches!

No, you're wrong, and besides, you're funny-looking.

Where to begin…?

The recent election furor got me thinking about the American people a little bit, and started me wondering whether all people everywhere share the same faults as us. I’ve come to the conclusion that, no, only Americans are this backward, despite all of the advantages of money, leisure and power that we enjoy. One thing I know for certain, now: the American people have a fear of--nay, an outright hatred for--rational thought.

Go ahead, try this experiment if you don’t believe me: start a discussion with someone regarding some contentious point or other, then start using “sophisticated,” intelligent language to make your point, and (voila!) watch how quickly his or her temper doth flare. This is particularly true if you live in the South, which is populated by he-man woman-haters sinisterly clutching onto their cornbread values (I should know, I come from a long line of the aforementioned Neanderthals). There’s no quicker way to get branded a “know-it-all” or a liberal pinko commie than to communicate with anything other than grunts and farts (don’t get me wrong, grunts and farts are lovely, but even chimps and some carnies can rein in their animals instincts when the situation calls for it). It’s as if they believe that you’re trying to dupe them into agreeing with you because you’ve acted on anything other than stubborn passion for your beliefs.

Let me say again: intellectuals and in fact anyone exhibiting rational thought are feared and hated automatically in this country. Go ahead, prove me wrong, I DARE YOU. Let’s examine how some of my Republican friends reacted to the persona of Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential “debates.” (Before you label me a “liberal,” I should go on record saying that I am in fact more libertarian than either liberal or conservative). It wasn’t uncommon for them to revel in how thoroughly Palin had kicked Joe Biden’s ass the previous night during the debates. If kicking Biden’s ass meant using emotionally-charged rhetoric to the exclusion of even a single reasoned, thoughtfully-presented argument, then they’re right. I’m not claiming that Biden’s arguments, or even the “facts” used to make them, were especially accurate, sound or compelling, but at least the Democratic camp put forward an effort to appear thoughtful.

“What in all Hell does this have to do with fitness?” you may be thinking. I find that most people approach their “training” inside the gym the same way they do their viewpoints outside of it: gut feeling, passion. Most gym-goers operate on whim, relying on their instincts, if you will, which consist of impressions about fitness that they’ve gathered from the media, fitness magazines (fed by ad revenue), infomercials, or fellow gym-goers. They do a thing, knowing only that it feels right for them at that moment, never stopping to consider whether they should do that thing, and if they should, then how they should about doing it. To prove this, observe gym members as they go about their “training,“ note the way most wander from machine to machine, or room to room, thinking about what to do next.

Now, should you try to show them the error of their ways, presenting the facts and using that cool, rational, no-nonsense manner of yours, prepare to be told to fuck off. Even worse than these folks are the ex-football players.

Because their coach--who, let’s face it, probably coached his athletes to lift the way that he was taught, which is to say imperfectly--taught them to train a certain way, they will swear by his methods as if they were the Gospel. Most coaches aren’t students of physics nor do they understand biomechanics as well as they should, and the majority only landed their jobs because they were once decent football players themselves, not consummate lifters, and they new someone who new someone who got them hired to that position in the first place. But, no, ex-football players are expert lifters--just ask them if you don‘t believe me. Or just have one of them tell you to fuck off.

Look, we have to do better, BE better. Let’s find reasons, good reasons, INFORMED reasons, for the way we behave as we do. Let’s adopt a pact of open, rational inquiry and develop a discerning gaze to be directed at everything that we find worthy of attention. And let’s not allow ourselves to become driven by fear. Open, rational inquiry is the antidote to fear, because it shows us the how and the why of our little universes, gives us the peace of mind that, pass or fail, we have made the best choices based on the information available to us at this time, and grants us a bit of distance from our problems so that we may then decide how best to avoid making the same or similar mistakes again.

-S.

Don't be stupid.

Just for the record: group fitness classes are for jobless middle-aged housewives with too much time on their hands and no ambitions, or metrosexuals who are more concerned about whether their workout clothes get wrinkled or their hair gel maintains maximum hold through a workout than getting and staying strong and functional. If you’re investing even half of your time at the gym in these classes, then you need to ask yourself what the hell you think you’re doing. I shouldn’t have to elaborate on these points, but I’m going to anyway because it brings me no end of pleasure to rip on those classes.

Just the other day, it was brought to my attention that the gym is offering a “strength training” class. I’ve never considered myself a violent person, but right then I felt like I could shoot white-hot light from my eyes, disintegrating everyone and everything in the vicinity because, well, false advertising of this nature is, to my mind, about as bad as waiting, poised with club in hand, for the last surviving female gorilla to give birth then clubbing the newborn to death (both involve high repetitions and little resistance, unless you end up having to fight the mother gorilla off, in which case I would have to bow down to you, after all). Both are abominations in God’s eyes, I assure you.

Look, you don’t design a class around low weight and high repetitions using classic strength training exercises and get to call it “strength training” just because it sort of resembles something you saw on ESPN2’s latest strongman broadcast. Strength is trained when you perform movements with a weight heavy enough that you can only do 1-5 repetitions, END OF STORY; anything more and you’re only stimulating relatively transient gains in muscle size and endurance. This is not even a subtle point that I’m addressing, here. While it’s true that strength, hypertrophy and endurance all fall on a sliding scale, once you travel far enough away from the strength end of the spectrum, your strength gains are going to be minimal to nonexistent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never said that these classes aren’t challenging: 100 unweighted squats, performed at whatever half-assed depth you choose, does cause immense pain and discomfort after a while, but the argument I’ve been making all along is that you’ve only got so much time and energy on your hands each week, so you might as well spend it in the most beneficial way possible; and since I’m not aware of any big prizes being handed out for the most unweighted squats performed in a row, let’s just stop this silly bullshit right now, okay?

My detractors will say that lifting heavy weights is dangerous. Perhaps under certain circumstances, like those found in competitive circles, where practitioners perform “limit” lifts on a regular basis, it is. You and I aren’t concerned with winning prizes, just getting reasonably strong. Driving a car is more dangerous, I’d wager. Having said that, I can’t guarantee that you won’t ever experience an “injury,” but granted that you lift weights with correct form, applying appropriate increases in weight as tolerated, you should only experience minor tweaks and strains and sore muscles every now and then, some of which might very well linger an aggravating while, but never anything of a catastrophic nature such as what one risks when lifting competitively (i.e. disc ruptures, broken bones, torn muscle bellies and tendons).

Stop wasting time. Given time and leisure enough to rationalize, you could come up with hundreds of reasons why not to lift heavy, but they all issue from the same insecure mental space where fear and doubt, those twin ogres, live.

Come to think of it, while I’m at it, why don’t I address some other common excuses:

I just want to lose weight, isn’t cardio all that I need? Okay, you’re first mistake is wanting only to lose weight. Ladies, and some of you gentlemen out there, the opposite sex doesn’t like it when you transform yourselves into walking, talking skeletons whose skin sags like taffy. Anyone past the age of adolescence actually enjoys someone with a little meat on his or her bones. So you’ll probably want to spend some time strength training since performing heavy sets of 5 on whole body movements like the squat has exhibited a muscle-sparing effect under conditions of weight loss. But that’s not all: building and/or maintaining lean muscle mass means increased energy expenditure because more muscle burns more calories at rest. Oh, and let’s not forget how important strength becomes as one gets older. Your late-life independence rests not just on your stamina but on your ability to manipulate your environment, and there’s no better way to prepare for that than to become STRONGER. Strength is the one adaptation that makes all other values possible: being stronger means that you don’t have to work as hard to accomplish the same tasks, which means that your stamina rises because you don’t become as tired as quickly as you once might; AND you become faster because your ability to overcome inertia has increased in proportion to your strength as well. Overall, being stronger makes you sharper.

But I’m afraid I’ll develop unsightly man-muscles! Wrong. Ladies, you don’t have the same hormonal profile as men, so while you will get stronger if you train heavy, your muscles will not have the same appearance as a man’s, which is not to say they won’t look more sculpted--they will. Chances are, if you see a woman with muscles the size of a man’s, she has gotten a boost from an illegal source, or else she was just born with elevated testosterone levels, which isn’t very often the case. I know some very strong women who nevertheless are very petite--my wife is one of them.

Wait, my trainer says I don’t need to worry about training heavy. He or she says as long as I keep moving, I’m doing fine. You’re trainer is either lazy or misinformed. It is very likely that he is both. A trainer who believes that low weight, high repetition exercises are as good or superior to their high weight, low rep cousins isn’t aware of the incontrovertible science behind the body’s varying adaptations to differing kinds of stress. If you’ve not been doing heavy full-depth squats or deadlifts with your trainer, then you’re trainer is too lazy to teach you any differently and you should seek out another trainer immediately. Now, it could also be the case that your trainer is under time constraints, and suffers constraints on resources, etc., which could preclude his training you in a superior manner, but that trainer also has a moral obligation to seek out a better training environment for you. And YOU have an obligation to see out a good trainer who can train you under these optimal training conditions. You deserve nothing less.

You'd better see with your heart's eyes and hear with your heart's ears.

.

Roll the Dice
by Charles Bukowski

if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the
way. this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight

"You can lead a horse to water..." (part 3)

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed the importance of strength training and the mental and physical advantages conferred upon those who practice getting strong. In this post, I’d like to address why more popular fitness modalities pale by comparison, particularly the long slow distance method (or L.S.D.) of aerobic training.

It’s an unfortunate fact of getting older that we lose lean muscle tissue as well as diminish in our capacity to build it: our strength level’s therefore decrease, speed diminishes, and our movements becomes less sharp. Often, we compound the problem as we begin to shy away from tasks that remind us of how much weaker we have become, thereby removing any stimulus for our bodies to preserve the muscle and what strength we may have left. A vicious cycle has begun.

Futher, organ function worsens because the very pipelines that fuel muscle and central nervous system performance also feed organ tissues, such that as the comprehensive processes that support increased muscle, strength, cardio-respiratory and central nervous system function spiral downward, the organ tissues themselves weaken, and work capacity diminishes; decreased work capacity means that we cannot work as hard to generate stress nor recover from or adapt to it as well as we once might have.

And yet people stubbornly and stupidly accumulate loads of LSD work with hours spent on bikes, treadmills and elliptical trainers. The net effect is one of increased endurance capacity and decreased or stagnant strength capacity and stress response. To understand this, you need to know how various kinds of work effect your body’s cellular machinery. Muscle cells are comprised of primarily two kinds of cells: fast twitch (for sprint and strength performance) and slow twitch (for endurance work of the long slow distance variety).

Slow twitch fibers are most active with sub-maximal efforts performed for a long time or over great distances; slow twitch fibers do not have the capacity to generate much force. Activation of these fibers depends on the presence of oxygen, and the oxygen is used to break down fatty acids and a little glycogen (sugars stored in muscle cells) for fuel. Activities that stimulate this kind of activity will produce somewhat labored breathing because oxygen is in much-needed supply. Therefore, moderately intense, sub maximal efforts like jogging primarily enhance the body’s ability to utilize oxygen and, as one might imagine, do little to enhance strength or quickness, as these qualities depend upon different muscle fiber types and a different energy pathway than the mere oxidative.

On the other hand, maximal or near maximal efforts like, for instance, sprinting or a heavy set of 5 repetitions of the squat activate the fast twitch fibers whose function depends on stored ATP (a high-energy molecule) and glycogen (muscle glucose). Training like this enhances the body’s ability to store ATP and to utilize and store glycogen more efficiently. One becomes bigger, stronger, faster than ever before.

The world’s insane (there, I said it) obsession with cardiovascular training of the LSD variety makes me sad because people believe they need to log all those mindless hours and hours in the gym or on the streets by jogging or biking to stay fit, but neglect probably the most important facet of their health, particularly where the aged are concerned: strength, speed and the sharpness of our movements, all of which are in sharp decline from about our forties on. An argument could be made that we become slower and weaker the more exclusively we train with LSD, as we promote the conversion of still a third type of muscle fiber, the transitional muscle fiber type to behave more like its slow twitch companions. For my time and money, I would much rather insure myself against feebleness with a steady and studied approach to weight training than fritter away my strength potential and, therefore, my future quality of life, with an abundance of long slow distance training.

Just a thought...

If I'm weak and slow and poor in build, yet I still squat, deadlift and do other exercises that are extremely hard, but you don't, then what does that make you?

-Stacey

You've been lied to (by yet another crusty old white dude)

Excerpt from Tierney's article over at_The New York Times_:

"Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.

In the case of fatty foods, that confident voice belonged to Ancel Keys, a prominent diet researcher a half-century ago (the K-rations in World War II were said to be named after him). He became convinced in the 1950s that Americans were suffering from a new epidemic of heart disease because they were eating more fat than their ancestors.

There were two glaring problems with this theory, as Mr. Taubes, a correspondent for Science magazine, explains in his book. First, it wasn’t clear that traditional diets were especially lean. Nineteenth-century Americans consumed huge amounts of meat; the percentage of fat in the diet of ancient hunter-gatherers, according to the best estimate today, was as high or higher than the ratio in the modern Western diet.

Second, there wasn’t really a new epidemic of heart disease. Yes, more cases were being reported, but not because people were in worse health. It was mainly because they were living longer and were more likely to see a doctor who diagnosed the symptoms.

To bolster his theory, Dr. Keys in 1953 compared diets and heart disease rates in the United States, Japan and four other countries. Sure enough, more fat correlated with more disease (America topped the list). But critics at the time noted that if Dr. Keys had analyzed all 22 countries for which data were available, he would not have found a correlation. (And, as Mr. Taubes notes, no one would have puzzled over the so-called French Paradox of foie-gras connoisseurs with healthy hearts.)

The evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease “does not stand up to critical examination,” the American Heart Association concluded in 1957. But three years later the association changed position — not because of new data, Mr. Taubes writes, but because Dr. Keys and an ally were on the committee issuing the new report. It asserted that “the best scientific evidence of the time” warranted a lower-fat diet for people at high risk of heart disease.

The association’s report was big news and put Dr. Keys, who died in 2004, on the cover of Time magazine. The magazine devoted four pages to the topic — and just one paragraph noting that Dr. Keys’s diet advice was “still questioned by some researchers.” That set the tone for decades of news media coverage. Journalists and their audiences were looking for clear guidance, not scientific ambiguity.

After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee’s report was written by a nonscientist “relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted.”

See full article here:
nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?pagewanted=print

(Unofficial) gym rules for meatheads

1. No sleeves. Make sure you wear your favorite “No Fear,” “Tapout” or “Affliction” shirts to the gym. Also, wear cut-off shorts, but not too cut-off because that could mean you‘re gay.

2. Keep a stoic face, the less friendly you are with the recreational lifters and cardio-nerds the better. Make at least one smartass comment to a regular about the size of his biceps. Snort, huff and puff a lot as you walk around selecting weights to pile on.

3. It’s important that you err on the side of too much weight (you don’t want to look like a pussy). Then, contort your body painfully on every rep trying to get the g**damn weight up.

4. When selecting training partners, make sure they don’t mind yelling at you when it‘s your turn to lift (adequate yelling has been achieved once the veins in their necks and foreheads bulge out).

5. At least once every workout, single out a woman and comment that you’d like to “seriously tap that ass.” Go into vivid detail and don’t stop until everyone goes uncomfortably quiet, then turn, look at the weight rack and say, “Alright, this weight ain’t gonna lift itself!”

6. Curse. Often. Drop frequent “F” bombs, then look around to see who’s listening. If you catch someone looking, openly and loudly berate them for not minding their own business.

7. Never, EVER do an actual squat because setting up for the exercise wastes time better spent bicep curling, flexing in front of the mirror, or playing one hell of an air guitar for the ladies.

8. Preach to others about the virtues of clean eating and hard work, then go home, wait until the hooker has passed out and you‘ve drank all the Milwaukee‘s Best, and gorge yourself on pizza and Funyuns, remembering, of course, to inject the last of your steroids into your nut sack before turning in.

9. Shave your entire body. Go ahead, it’s not gay. Really. Also, you should probably oil up before lifting, as it reveals the contours of your muscles for all to see. Seriously, not at all gay. Homo.

10. Go home to the darkness of a bedroom closet, the one with the moldering cardboard cut-out of the Governator himself, and cry like a little girl who’s skinned her knee. Look forward to the rest of your life.

You're not doing it right

For the moment, I’m going to put all professionalism aside, so you’ll have to forgive me.

My clients have noticed that my approach to training has changed. Most of you have gotten onboard with this new approach, and I thank you for your trust and the level of focus that you have demonstrated. You’re a damn good bunch. I have discussed my reasons for changing with you, and I believe most of you can appreciate the value in what I am doing.

One of you didn’t, and that’s why I’m writing this post. In case I have not made my point clear to everyone (and circumstances have led me to believe that I have not), I’m going to discuss my thought process at length with you here.

On personal training: the industry standard no longer employs weight training to get people stronger but to condition them cardiovascularly. The typical training session will involve keeping a person moving with light weights and high repetitions, getting his or her heart rate up, and opening up the old sweat valves. Sound like something else? This is precisely what you do when you run, walk or pedal away mindlessly on your exercise bike. Clients are usually told to finish up their session with a bout of long slow distance on the treadmill or bike, essentially extending the cardiovascular training session begun in the first half hour to an hour or more. THIS IS A F***ING WASTE OF YOUR TIME.

I know, I know: this is what people expect training to look like. If they’re not sweating like a Tennessee moonshiner being chased by the law, OR on the verge of puking, OR so sore the next day that they have to fall down on the toilet like my grandmother trying to take a shit, then they don’t feel as if they’ve been trained properly. Real training doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, incapacitate you for days on end, and if it does, then you’ve missed valuable time better spent practicing your basic lifts, like the squat, military press, and deadlift, which will get you really strong and really lean.

I am not going to do your cardiovascular training for you anymore. IT IS A WASTE OF MY TIME. It is your responsibility to perform whatever cardio you might feel that you need on your own time. I’ll even brainstorm it with you. Weights are for improving strength. If you need someone to design cute little movement patterns involving light weights for you, then you need to find another trainer. I am not a choreographer, and I am not a glorified repetition counter.

So I’m preaching to the choir, I know. Just humor me a little. Let’s say that maybe you think strength training is not for you? Then maybe life is not for you because last time I checked strength is what defines one’s quality of life inside and outside of the gym, especially the older we get. Dammit, someone tell me how exactly strength is not supposed to be important!

It’s a biomechanical fact of every individual’s makeup that heavy sets of (roughly) five repetitions involving the “big” lifts supply the precise metabolic and structural stressors to elicit strength gains and build lean muscle tissue. You cannot argue this point, and no matter how much you want to believe differently, you cannot change what nature or God or what-have-you has set in stone. Sorry.

By now, you might be wondering what I think about cardiovascular training of the long slow variety. If you don’t own a car and you have to walk to the gym so that you can meet with me for a strength session, then I think it’s fine. If you’ve ever done heavy sets of five with me, however, you know what happens to your heart and lungs as a result of those heavy sets of five, the exhaustion you experience and the amount of stress this places on your entire system, consequently. The stress of a heavy set of five does in fact mimic the stress which you experience, say, when you’re under the gun at work trying to meet a deadline or trying to avoid a fistfight with an asshole coworker. So while you won’t be able to run marathons, you’ll likely be able to make the sprint over to your desk where you can dial up that medic for the guy whose ass you just whooped, all without breaking much of a sweat, of course. Nevermind that heavy sets of five do in fact improve endurance somewhat, but that running or biking or walking improves only, well, running or biking or walking.

Lastly, I would like to address the circumstances that sparked this little tirade of mine. This week marks the first time in my training career that I have lost a longtime client to another trainer. It shouldn’t have shocked me, given her history, but I let my guard down. The fact of the matter is this: if you book three appointments a week with me, only making--on average--one appointment a week; if you ask me for advice on nutrition and I give it to you, but you don’t follow through with it; and further, if you lie to me and make excuses about why you haven’t been following through, then whose fault is it that you haven’t made any progress? Is it the fault of the trainer or, perhaps, the program that he has you on? Attributing your failure to anyone but yourself at that point is the most abject kind of sick, irresponsible horseshit that will doom you to failure time and time again because the common denominator in all your problems is--guess what?--YOU, not some unseen boogeyman of your perpetual undoing. Go find your next fad diet, go find your next excuse, please. Just don’t waste anymore of my time, capiche?

Now back to your regularly scheduled program…

"You can lead a horse to water...", part 2

The Squat

The absolute best thing that you can do for your knees is to squat deep. By deep I mean to a depth where the femur, the thighbone, lies parallel to the floor. Merely getting the top of your thigh parallel to the floor is insufficient because most people have at least some muscle and and quite a bit of flesh around the thighbone. Proper depth can be achieved by making sure that the crease in your shorts near the hip is level with your kneecap. This is not only a safe depth but a healthy and functional depth at which to train the muscles about the knee.

In order to eliminate shearing force on the knee joint surfaces, muscular forces around the knee must be balanced. This means that all the muscles that attach at the knee should be contributing about equally all the way around, and the only way to make this happen is to squat deep. When you squat at or slightly below parallel, a funny thing happens that most instructors of group fitness--and most so-called personal trainers, in general--don't know about: the gluteus muscles and the hamstrings kick in to counteract the powerful quadracep muscles found at the front of the thigh. It also helps if you position your feet right at or slightly wider than shoulder width and you turn your feet out about thirty to fourty-five degrees.

There are several varieties of squats to choose from, but the most effective at making you strong and functional are the barbell back and front squats (the front squat is pictured above). Which squat you choose will determine the relative postitions of all of your levers--the arms, legs, spine, etc. However, whether you use the low-bar back squat or the front squat, you will always make sure that the barbell is kept over the midfoot as you squat because this is the most efficient way to move the weight, one in which the bar path remains vertical. You will find that, when front squatting, the back will stay close to vertical and the knees will travel a couple of inches forward of the toes, and that, when back squatting, the torso will be leaned forward about fourty-five degrees and the knees will travel a mere inch or so past the toes. Otherwise, just remember to keep the barbell over the midfoot.

Lastly, it is important that the spine keeps its lumbar (lower back) arch or, at a minimum, stays flat throughout because this keeps stress from passing on to the discs, the little cushions between the vertabrae. Also, a flat or slightly arched back more efficiently transmits force up the spine to the load being lifted, and with increased efficiency and safety, more weight can be lifted each workout as well as over time. And this has the potential to make you quite strong.

Having spent this much time and space discussing the safety and function of the correct squat, I suspect that I have also illustrated that exercise instruction takes (or should take) specialized knowledge and that not just anyone should be in charge of carrying you through or designing a workout. But alarmingly, a weekend seminar is most often all that it takes for some of these knuckleheads to get a job teaching at a gym near you, where "ineffective" or downright "unsafe" are the status quo. Take the squat again, for example. The half or quarter squat, which is the favorite of group exercise intructors, personal trainers and high school football coaches everywhere, actually increases the amount of shearing force on the knee joint. When squat depth is shallow, the hams and glutes don't engage to counteract the powerful quadraceps, which are trying like hell to slide the top surface of the tibia (shinbone) forward away from distal surface of the femur. Ouch! As the weight on the bar increases, so does the shearing force. Be afraid, gym-goers, be very afraid!

* * *

While I'm on the subject of effective training, I should direct your attention to the pictures above this post. I hope that I've made my point rather obvious. In addition to being an a$$hole, I'm implying that you might want to invest a little more time in your strength training. Since about the seventies, when the running phenomenon first swept the nation, the general population has come to regard running as the pinnacle of physical fitness. First of all, running is relatively easy to do compared to lifting because it requires no special skill at the recreational level, and because folks like to run outdoors, it is also the most visible form of exercise, two facts which explain, in large part, running's continuing popularity. Doctors will recommend running due to the ease with which it can be taken up by the general population and because they themselves know very little about actual weightlifting, not enough to prescribe it with any specificity, anyway.

And due to its popularity, running (and biking and swimming, too) has garnered much of the attention from researchers on fitness in the past three or more decades. What this means is that doctors and trainers will more often than not try to stretch what has been uncovered about endurance-type activities like running and apply it to strength training and weightlifting as if these are all the same things. But what if I told you that, in their furor to get people up and moving, these people have sentenced you to a set of practices that, while better than nothing, could actually cause you to age faster, get weaker and move more slowly?

More to come...

Eat more fat, improve your health

The following information comes from an article on animal fat over at Crossfit...

http://www.crossfit.com/journal/library/15_03_Nutrition_Full_Issue

"Everyone knows by now that the consumption of animal fats and cholesterol causes heart disease. There is, though, one simple problem with this knowledge: it is absolutely, positively, dead wrong, and no one can make this point more convincingly than Dr. Uffe Ravnskov in his wonderful book The Cholesterol Myths.

Dr. Ravnskov armed with a brilliant mind, a PhD in chemistry, an M.D., and an unassailable record of published medical research is the medical counterpart to science journalist Gary Taubes in loudly yelling “The Emperor has no Clothes!!”
Here, thanks to Dr. Ravnskov, are some important cholesterol facts and their scientific support. There is more research available through this portal than could be studied in a year. Enjoy!

Here is an excerpt from an excellent review of Cholesterol Myths off of the Weston A Price Foundations website by Stephen Byrnes, N.D., RCNP:

'Would you buy a book that was literally set on fire by its critics on a television show about it in Finland? I would and so should you. The longawaited English version of debunker extraordinaire Dr. Uffe Ravnskov’s notorious book is now available from NewTrends Publishing.

Ravnskov, a medical doctor with a PhD in chemistry, has had over 40 papers and letters published in peer-reviewed journals criticizing what Dr. George Mann, formerly of Vanderbuilt University, once called “the greatest scam in the history of medicine,” namely the Lipid Hypothesis—the belief that dietary saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause atherosclerosis and heart disease.
Equipped with a razor-sharp mind and an impressive command of the literature, Ravnskov methodically slaughters the most famous sacred cow of modern medicine and the most profitable cash cow for assorted pharmaceutical companies. Sparing no one, Ravnskov again and again presents the tenets of the Lipid Hypothesis and the studies which supposedly prove them, and shows how the studies are flawed or based on manipulated statistics that actually prove nothing.'

Cholesterol Facts
1 Cholesterol is not a deadly poison, but a substance vital to the cells of all mammals. There are no such things as “good” or “bad” cholesterol only density. Mental stress, physical activity and change of body weight may influence the level of blood cholesterol. A high cholesterol is not dangerous by itself, but may reflect an unhealthy condition, or it may be totally innocent.
2 A high blood cholesterol is said to promote atherosclerosis and thus also coronary heart disease. But many studies have shown that people whose blood cholesterol is low become just as atherosclerotic as people whose cholesterol is high.
3 Your body produces three to four times more cholesterol than you eat. The production of cholesterol increases when you eat little cholesterol and decreases when you eat much. This explains why the ”prudent” diet cannot lower cholesterol more than on average a few per cent.
4 There is no evidence that too much animal fat and cholesterol in the diet promotes atherosclerosis or heart attacks. For instance, more than twenty studies have shown that people who have had a heart attack haven’t eaten more fat of any kind than other people, and degree of atherosclerosis at autopsy is unrelated with the diet.
5 The only effective way to lower cholesterol is with drugs, but neither heart mortality or total mortality have been improved with drugs, the effect of which is cholesterollowering only. On the contrary, these drugs are dangerous to your health and may shorten your life.
6 The new cholesterol-lowering drugs, the Statins, do prevent cardio-vascular disease, but this is due to other mechanisms than cholesterol-lowering. Unfortunately, they also stimulate cancer in rodents.
7 Many of these facts have been presented in scientific journals and books for decades but are rarely told to the public by the proponents of the diet-heart idea.
8 The reason why laymen, doctors and most scientists have been misled is because opposing and disagreeing results are systematically ignored or misquoted in the scientific press."

Correct low-bar squat

You can lead a horse to water...

When trying to address the sorry state of affairs in the fitness industry, it's difficult to know where to begin. Do I start with the trainers, most of whom know frighteningly little about basic function and even less about how to get results? Do I point fingers at gym owners or certifying bodies, or those damned infomercials that claim to have discovered the best new apparatus, program or supplement that's going to revolutionize fitness? I think I'd better start with consumers--including the fitness instructors, coaches and trainers, and their clients--who often are just too lazy to question the information that's being presented (YOU know who YOU are, and YOU'RE not as fit as you'd like to be, are you?) because they could all stop this nonsense at once if they just refused to pay premium for an inferior product.

For the sake of ease, I'm going to start with the most recognizable training scenario, the group fitness setting (I'll get to you trainers and coaches soon enough). The problem isn't just that group fitness--and group weight training in particular--must necessarily impose limits on the kinds and the intensity of the exercises performed out of concern for the group's safety, it's that the form of exercise being taught is piss-poor. And the instructors and participants either don't care or can't bring themselves to consider whether someone might have taught them an inferior form of, say, the squat, or the bench press. Nevermind the fact that, in their attempt to make certain exercises safer, they have actually made some of them more harmful.

Let's consider the squat. Sometimes I think that if I see one more quarter or half squat done in a fitness class with little ten-pound pink or green weights, I'm going to start screaming my head off. First of all, people, your legs are the strongest part of your body, and if you think those twenty pounds that you're feverishly quarter-squatting is going to stress your body enough to elicit change, then you're pitifully mistaken. Secondly, it's not functional, and if you ever have to fetch something really heavy off of the ground and squat low enough to get there, you'll see why.

But I know what you're thinking: "Well, my group fitness instructor told me that squatting that deep is bad for my knees!" Folks, right there is the problem with most of the "weekend" fitness certifications that supposedly qualify folks to teach you, the consumer, how to exercise optimally and safely; for the people who teach the certifications and the people who take them know absolutely nothing about the fundamental mechanics of human movement and how it's all kept in balance, truly in balance. Because if they did, they'd recognize claims like the one above for the complete and utter bullshit that they are. It's a myth that I'd like to do away with once and for all, one that's keeping you from getting as strong and as functional as you might be, but as long as everyone involved continues to sell him or herself short, nothing will change.

Teaching others about the optimal form that exercise should take can go a long way, but I've found, more often that not, that people resist change even when there's proof that a better way exists. On that note, and by popular demand, in my next post I'm going to be tackling the safest and most effective method of squatting. Stay tuned...

A little less talk, a lot more training...

I'll begin this post with an anecdote:

My aunt, God bless her, has never been particularly active, not that I can recall, anyway. She was never an athlete, never one for risk-taking, either. Nevertheless, in her fifties she began to experience shoulder pain, which lead to surgery and even more crippling shoulder pain. A woman who never stressed or strained her body too much, except maybe to clean house here and there, my aunt enjoys even less mobility and function than before.

How is all that possible? Friends, I'm going to share something with you that might come as a shock: our bodies are meant to MOVE and to undergo the stresses and strains of a routine workload, because these are the conditions under which our bodies have evolved, the one's that ensure that they will continue to function well even into our twilight years. They've gotten pretty damn good at it, by the way.

Now, let's consider the case of my great-uncle, by contrast. He's in his eighties now and still remains vital and active. All of his life, he has routinely engaged in mentally and physically demanding work, which has ranged from maintaining a small farm to trapping furs in the wooded areas that surround his house. Recently, he survived a stroke with only some short term memory loss, having regained all motor function in the time since hospitalization. He's strong because his lifestyle demands it.

What I hope you gain from all of this is that, contrary to the hype, stress is good for you. What we have is a culture of pain avoidance made worse by the fact that, for most of us, working entails little to no physical labor. And while my great-uncle now suffers from many aches and pains due to his work, that work has made his late-life independence possible. As I see it, the choice to remain active is a simple one: either we grow old and suffer, never having exercised regularly, or grow old, experience pain, but enjoy more mobility and exhibit a higher late-life work capacity, the fruits of active living.

Diet & Nutrition

Much of what I'll cover in this post can be found over at Lyle McDonald's website, Body Recomposition. Lyle has spent a great deal of time combing through research on diet and nutrition so that you and I don't have to.

Research indicates that diets identical in calories will initially result in the same amount of weight loss irrespective of the ratio of fats to carbs to proteins, provided that there is a calorie deficit. However, in the long run those who consume a diet high in protein (for instance, 9 grams for every 20 lbs. of bodyweight) lose more. Likely, this is the case because protein curbs the appetite. Those who don't consume enough protein stay hungrier and begin to make up for the deficit by eating more. In short, more protein is better regardless of the diet that you're on. Now, whether or not you should eat a diet slightly higher in fats or carbs is specific to the individual, and in order to determine which is best, one needs to experiment to decide which percentages of fats vs. carbs make him or her feel the best.

Provided that protein intake is sufficient, one should then address what his or her energy demands are. A deficit of 500 calories daily will result in a pound of weight loss weekly ("deficit" means more calories out than calories in), which translates into 3500 calories a week. Conversely, a surplus of 500 calories daily will result in a pound of weight gain weekly.

In addition, feedings should be spread out across a minimum of six meals a day to ensure that energy levels remain high. Gorging oneself leads to feelings of sluggishness and foggy-headedness because blood is diverted to the stomach and intestines to aid in digestion, not to mention that the corresponding spike in blood sugar leads to the inevitable "crash." Lastly, the collective wisdom of the health and fitness community holds that smaller meals eaten more frequently keep one's metabolism running higher. When the body is nourished in this way, it tends to burn more calories, having been conditioned to expect a steady stream of energy, rather than horde calories in the event of starvation.

Injury

Although we strive to remain injury-free, sometimes injuries do happen, despite proper programming and proper lifting technique. Thankfully, most injuries turn out to be minor and self-limiting, provided that we have programmed and executed our lifts correctly along the way.

In the event of an injury, it is important that you do not cease to train; instead, find exercises that provide a tolerable amount of stress to the affected area without exceeding the rate of healing. When treated this way, an injury, provided that it isn't serious, will heal faster because you provided the stimulus for it to do so. This is the way that your body is meant to function.

Remember, this applies only to minor injuries, the sort that feel okay once you've warmed them up and can comfortably be trained through. Injuries inside or near joints that manifest with sharp and stabbing or even crippling pains, and which may be accompanied by swelling, should never be trained through.

Strength

As we grow older, our levels of strength and mobility define our quality of life (whether we like it or not). There is no excuse for not developing or maintaining strength--neither age, nor sex, nor race, nor injury, NOR displeasure or discomfort stemming from the thought or practice of training.

When I train my clients, I remain sensitive to the limitations each brings with him or her. Understand that I will never ask any of you to perform exercises that are unsound. Having said this, everyone must accept that training can be unpleasant, life doesn't care that you don't like certain exercises, and that you must, therefore, train in ways that are uncomfortable in order to meet life's demands, or else risk sustaining a truly devastating injury outside of the gym.

If you experience sharp, stabbing pains--the kind which threaten to throw you off kilter--then you should never continue with a given exercise. However, the fact that you are uncomfortable, or that you just don't "like" an exercise, does not fly with me. If you're having difficulty performing an exercise, then you should probably invest time in discovering why this is the case--with my help, of course--so that we can make adjustments and continue to move forward. Always come prepared to do your best and work hard, no excuses.