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!

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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...