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.