Smart Ass's Guide to Fitness

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2010-04-14T08:32:00.001-07:00

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Lyle McDonald on Dietary Cholesterol and Fat and their Impact on Blood Cholesterol

2009-11-25T08:12:00.000-08:00

"1. Cholesterol intake per se tends to have a minor effect on total blood
cholesterol. first and foremost, your liver makes more cholesterol on a
daily basis (anywhere from 1.5-2 grams/day) than you would generally eat
(well, 2 grams per day of cholesterol would be 7 whole eggs). On top of
that, liver cholesterol production adapts to your intake. So when you
eat more cholesterol, the liver typipocally downgrades its own
cholesterol production ; when you eat less cholesterol, the liver
upregulates its own cholesterol. This is all basic physiology, in any
decent textbook.

1a. However, there is a wide range of difference in how people respond
to dietary cholesterol per se. There are both hypo and hyperresponders
meaning that some people are sensitive (in terms of total cholesterol
levels) to dietary cholesterol intake. But certainly not all.

2. The bigger issue in blood cholesterol intake has to do with fatty
acid intake NOT cholesterol intake. For example, most saturated acids
tend to raise blood cholesterol levels by affecting liver metabolism
(differently than dietary cholesterol intake does). There are
exceptions, such as stearic acid which is saturated but doesn't affect
blood cholesterol intake. Monounsaturated fats (olive oil, which is
oleic acid, being the primary one) has a neutral effect on blood
cholesterol levels. Polyunsaturated fats (w-6 and w-3) have cholesterol
lowering effects, in general.

3. Now, *in general* foods high in cholesterol are also high in
saturated fats but this is not always the case. Even lowfat foods such
as chicken and lowfat fish contain cholesterol because it is part of the
cell membrane. Eggs contain both cholesterol and saturated fat
(although there are more polyunsaturated fats in eggs than most people
realize, you can check the USDA database to check that). Same with
fatty cuts of red meat: both cholesterol and saturated fats are present
(note that red meat actually contains mostly oleic acid, and a good bit
of the saturated fat is stearic which I already mentioned doesn't affect
blood cholesterol negatively). At the other extreme, there are foods
like coconut and palm kernel oil which are highly saturated but contain
no cholesterol. So while the two are generally associated food wise,
it's not an absolute case.

4.Chronically high insulin levels (which can occur when you tell peope
to replace fats with carbohydrates, depending on their carb choices)
also affect blood lipid levels (insulin stimulates HMG-CoA reductase
which is the rate limiting enzyme for cholesterol synthesis in the liver
; high insulin also raises blood triglyceride levels which is an
independent risk factor for heart disease).

Ok, so what about eggs. The original backlash against eggs had to do
with their cholesterol content, because at the time cholesterol intake
was being blamed for high blood cholesterol levels, which we now know
has only a minor effect. That's part of why you'll hear the 'bull****'
on 'eggs raise blood cholesterol'.

But, you ask what about the fat content. Looking at the USDA database, a
whole egg is listed as having

Total lipid (fat) Gms : 10.020 10.4% 13.7%
OF which the following major fatty acids appear (there are trace amounts
of some others but I'm leaving them out).

Palmitic acid (16:0) Gms : 2.226
Stearic acid (18:0) Gms : 0.784
Oleic acid (18:1) Gms : 3.473
Linoleic acid (18:2/n6) Gms : 1.148 17.9% 23.4%

Ok, 2.2 grams of palmitic, which is a cholesterol raising saturated fat.
0.7 g of stearic acid, a neutral saturated fat.
3.4 g of oleic acid whith is neutral
1.1 g of w-6 which is a cholesterol lower polyunsaturated fat.

So of the 10 total grams of fat, 2.2 grams are negative in terms of
cholesterol, 4.1 are neutral, and 1.2 is positive.

Hardly the death in a white shell that they are made out to be.

So that's the basic gist of it.
Yes, excessive saturated fat has a negative impact on cholesterol.
For some people, excessive cholesterol can have an additional minor effect.
Yes, saturated fat and cholesterol tend to accompany one another but not always.
The rest of the diet (fiber, w-3/w-6 intake from other foods) has to be
taken into effect.

And that doesn't even bring the effect of exercise into the equation."

Brooks Kubik on the Press and Treating Lifts as "Skills"

2009-11-24T05:14:00.000-08:00

Increasing the Press
by Brooks Kubik

In the old days, most men who lifted weights in a serious fashion practiced the standing press – and most of them were reasonably good at the lift. Let’s work together to bring that aspect of training back to the Iron Game. Make it a belated New Year’s resolution: “This year, I WILL get serious about my standing press numbers.”

Having said that, let’s discuss some basic points about getting started on the standing press and increasing your poundage in the lift. Here are twelve tips for lifters who are starting to re-discover the standing press:

1.) Practice Makes Perfect

There is a very precise pressing groove. You learn “the groove” through practice. To become a better presser, you need to press way more often than once a week or once every 10-14 days of heavy pressing. In the old days, Olympic lifters trained the exercise three, four or even five times a week. Personally, I think that four or five times a week would be excessive. But there’s nothing at all wrong with doing standing presses two or three times per week. In fact, many will find that it’s the best way to improve the lift.]

2.) Train Heavy

If you do high or medium rep sets in the standing press, you probably are not going to develop exactly the right groove for heavy presses. With light and medium reps, you use light weights, and with light weights, you can easily push “close” to the right groove, but not “in” the groove. Close only counts in horseshoes, folks. In lifting, your goal should be to make an absolutely perfect lift on every rep you do.

As noted above, the standing press requires you to develop a very precise pressing groove. In this sense, it is both a “skill” lift and a “strength” lift. You MUST train the lift with heavy weights and low reps in order to learn how to do it properly.

Think about how lifters train cleans and snatches. Do they do high reps? No. They do singles, doubles and triples. If you do higher reps in a “skill” lift your form breaks down and you actually teach yourself the WRONG groove.

3.) Select the Proper Rep Scheme

To use heavy weights, you MUST use relatively low reps. Anything over five reps is too many. Doubles, triples and singles are great. The 5/4/3/2/1 system is excellent. And remember, you don’t need to do 50 presses in every workout. a total of 7 to 15 presses is fine. (5/4/3/2/1 equals a total of 15 reps, which Bob Hoffman considered to be ideal.)

4.) Train the Lower Back

Always remember, the standing press builds works, trains and conditions the lower back. That’s one of the most important aspects of the exercise – indeed, it may be the MOST important aspect of the exercise.

But the other side of the coin is this: if you have not been doing serious work for your lower back, you are NOT ready to train hard and heavy on standing presses.

Unless your lower back is strong and well conditioned, the FIRST thing to do is to go on a specialization program for the low back. After six to ten weeks of concentrated lower back work, you will be ready for standing presses.

This is especially important for anyone who has been avoiding squats and training his legs with leg presses, hack machine squats, dumbell squats, wall squats or any other exercise that takes the lower back and hips out of the picture.

Ditto for anyone who does trap bar deadlifts as his exclusive lower back exercise. The trap bar deadlift is not as effective a low back builder as are deadlifts performed with a regular bar. It’s more of a hip and thigh exercise. Many lifters injured themselves by using trap bar deadlifts as their exclusive low back exercise, not realizing that it really does not work the low back as effectively as other movements. Then they hurt the low back doing squats, rows or curls, and wonder what happened.

Anyone who has been training with bench and incline presses (or dips), back supported overhead presses (or machine presses), leg presses and trap bar deads -- a schedule I mention because it is highly popular and similar to that used by many modern lifters – should devote serious attention to training his lower back before he tackles standing presses. Such a lifter may have fairly strong shoulders and triceps, and may THINK that he can go out and start doing standing presses with BIG weights. He can’t. His lower back will not be anywhere strong enough and well conditioned for serious work on the standing press.

Let me also note that one of the very best exercises for building STABILITY throughout the lower back and the middle of the body is the wrestler’s bridge. Try 3 sets of 30 seconds per set (with no weight) and work up slowly and steadily until you can do 3 sets of 3 minutes each. You won’t believe how much stronger and more stable you are when doing your barbell exercises. In this regard, don’t forget that I started to do bridging in the Spring of 2000, and by the Fall I had worked up to 12 reps with 202 lbs. in the “supine press in wrestler’s bridge position.” At about the same time, I hit a personal best of 270 in the standing press. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

If you ask someone to list a few good “assistance exercises” for the press, they’ll usually say, “dumbell presses, side presses, incline presses, push presses, jerks, upright rowing, etc.” – in other words they’ll think of “shoulder exercises” and different types of pushing movements. That’s lazy thinking. The shoulder, triceps, traps and “pressing muscles” get plenty or work from pressing. The most beneficial “assistance exercises” for the press are those that strengthen the middle of the body.

5.)

All of the foregoing points apply to training the waist and sides. Unless you already have been doing this, work hard on these areas for six to ten weeks BEFORE starting to specialize on the standing press.

With regard to the waist and sides, the big problem is the crunch. The exercise gurus who have promoted the crunch for so many years have done nothing but develop a generation of lifters who lack any reasonable degree of strength and stability in the middle of their bodies. Scrap the crunches. Replace them with bent-legged situps (with weight, 3x8-12), lying or hanging leg raises, heavy sidebends and the overhead squat.

The overhead squat?
Kubik, have you lost your mind?
No, not at all. The overhead squat builds tremendous strength and stability all through the middle of the body. It hits the inner abdominal muscles that lie BENEATH the “abs.” When it comes to strength and stability, these are the muscles that count.

And while we’re talking about core strength, let’s talk about the power wheel. Paul Anderson used a simple cart type of this apparatus, described in an earlier press article in IronMan.

6.) Start Your Day With Presses

Many lifters train their presses after doing heavy squats or heavy back work. That doesn’t work very well, because your lower back is tired and you are less stable. Do the presses first. That’s the way Olympic lifters did their training in the old days, and remember, those guys were all specialists in the standing press.

7.) Be Aggressive

Every single one of you can develop the ability to do a standing press in perfect form with bodyweight. I mean that. Dead serious. Every single one of you . . . bodyweight . . . in perfect form.
That should be your long-term goal.

For the younger guys, and for the stronger, more experienced lifters, bodyweight is just the beginning. Once you hit bodyweight, set your sights on 110% of bodyweight. When you can do that, shoot for 120% . . .

Anyone who can handle bodyweight in the standing press is STRONG!
Anyone who gets up to 130% is handling weights equal to some of the very best Olympic lifters in the world back in the pre-steroid days.

Norb Schemansky, in the 198-lb. class, handled 281 pounds. If you do the math you’ll see that Schemansky was pressing 142% of his bodyweight. These numbers show what a strong, determined man can achieve with years of proper, hard training.

8.) Try Cleaning for your Presses

Many lifters find they can press more if they clean the weight than if they take it off racks or squat stands, because the bar is better positioned for a heavy press. So learn how to clean, and try cleaning the bar before pressing it. You might find it adds a little more zip to your pressing.

9.) Dumbell Pressing

From Saxon to Grimek, from the beer halls of Austria to Davis, Hepburn and Anderson, many, many old-timers specialized in heavy dumbell pressing. And guess what? The best dumbell pressers usually turned out to be the best barbell pressers! You see, heavy dumbells are very hard to balance. To improve your overhead pressing, you need to do plenty of overhead pressing. Heavy dumbell exercises, however, are a tremendous assistance exercise for the standing press. Keep them in mind, and when your progress slows down, work them into your schedule. Harry Paschall used to swear by them; heavy dumbell pressing is one of the “secrets” in his 1951 classic, “Development of Strength”.

10.) Handstand Pressing

Another excellent assistance exercise for the standing press is the handstand press. Grimek used to do plenty of handstand presses and gymnastics work, and he became one of the best overhead pressers of his generation. Sig Klein used to specialize in handstand presses and tiger bends, and he managed an amazing record in the military press – a heels together, letter perfect military with 150% bodyweight. Paschall, who was good buddies with both Grimek and Klein, swore by the movement. Give them a try!

11.) Keep the Back, Abs and Hips Tight

For proper pressing, you need to “lock” your low back, abs and hips. Most lifters will do best if they also tense the thighs. The entire body must be tight and solid. Pretend you are doing a standing incline press without the incline bench. Your body must support the pressing muscles and the weight of the bar exactly the same as would an incline bench. (This is NOT to say that you lean back and try to press from a 60 degree angle or any similar foolishness. I don’t want you to lean back as if you were ON an incline bench, I want you to understand that your back, hips and abs have to give you that same level of support that a solid bench would provide.)

12.) Specialize for a While

The standing press is an exercise that responds very well to specialization programs. Try a schedule devoted to very little other than heavy back work, squats or front squats and standing presses. Remember, the great Olympic lifters of 30’s, 40’s and 50’s devoted almost all of their time to cleans, snatches, presses, squats and jerks, with a significant amount of their training being devoted to the press. They built enormous pressing power and tremendous all-round strength and power. You cannot do better than follow their example.

The foregoing tips will help anyone become not just a good, but an EXCELLENT presser. And remember one more thing – pressing is LIFTING. The standing barbell press is one of the most basic tests of strength ever devised. It has been a standard measure of a man’s physical power since the invention of the barbell. When you become a good presser, you can rightfully claim your place among the lifters of the past and present. Do it!

The Why and the How, the Safety and Efficacy of Strength Training

2009-11-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

Part One: Why Strength Train?

Often, physicians and medical professionals cite the benefits of regular, moderate physical activity, particularly the cardiovascular varieties (walking, jogging, biking and swimming, to name a few), but few emphasize the need to strength train. The reasons for this are many, the most likely of which are that cardiovascular training isn’t complicated, doesn’t require special equipment, and isn’t technique-dependent. Medical professionals likely feel that doing something is better than nothing when it comes to physical activity, and less hassle means, odds are, that patients will adhere to a given workout routine for the long term.

But consider that, as we grow older, our ability to carry out everyday physical tasks, such as climbing stairs or lifting heavy objects up and placing them overhead, decreases. Our quality of life depends on the presence of adequate levels of skeletal muscle, the muscle that attaches to our bones and transmits force along them to whatever is being lifted or pushed against, and the ability to recruit these muscles in an efficient, coordinated manner. Cardiovascular training (or “cardio”) does not significantly enhance the size or the quality of the muscles responsible for carrying out everyday tasks. Cardio can improve heart health, but so can strength training, which also greatly improves balance, coordination, strength, and flexibility, when programmed and executed properly.

But what is strength? Put simply, strength is the ability to generate force. Both increased neuromuscular efficiency (which has to do with the way the nervous system “talks” to the muscle) and an increase in size contribute to strength. Strength also depends on the ability of the body to store and quickly replenish energy for the muscles to do their work. When following a properly designed and executed strength training program, you enhance all of these abilities at once.

Part Two: How Do We Strength Train?

The general public regards any training that involves the use of free weights or some other means of external resistance as “strength training.” But while any resistance training program, by definition, must involve some means of applying resistance, strength and conditioning professionals mean something more specific when they use the label “strength training.” Here, it is being used to describe a systematic use of weights to enhance the muscles’ ability to produce force. Using a light weight to perform a large number of repetitions in the range of fifteen or more, for example, does not significantly improve strength because the muscles responsible for the movement are not being made to contract at or near their current maximum force potential. Heavier weights and fewer repetitions are needed in order to make that happen.

For a better understanding, we should conceptualize training in terms of stress and adaptation. When subjected to an unusual stress, our bodies adapt by becoming better at dealing with that stress. If we require our muscles to produce near maximal force by applying resistance to them, then they will respond with an increased force capacity the next time. Provided that we set aside adequate time and energy for recovery between training bouts, strength will increase in an uninterrupted, linear fashion for many weeks and months, if we continue to change the stress—i.e. use progressively heavier loads.

By contrast, using a light weight for a large number of repetitions will primarily enhance muscular endurance, which is a result of an increased ability by the muscle to handle waste products and to store energy, among other things. This is wonderful, but heavier loads utilized across fewer reps can provide a boost to muscular endurance as well (albeit through different mechanisms); and if either a lack of or a decline in strength is limiting you, then much of your time should be spent training in the heavier range anyway. And really, most of us aren’t as strong as we’d like to think we are.

On that note, loads that fall within the range of 75-85% of a person’s current ability to lift will achieve the desired effect. This will mean being able to perform between four and eight repetitions of an exercise before form begins to suffer. As far as exercise selection, we should opt for movements that recruit as much muscle as possible around as many joints as we can, so that a good deal of weight can be used. This should be done over a full range of motion, so that flexibility can be improved and maximum tension is placed on the muscles. Tension is what we’re after. Tension provides mechanical stress, and mechanical stress is what signals the muscle fibers to grow.

Furthermore, the closer these movements correspond to activities that we’ll be performing in the outside world, the more beneficial they’ll be to us. For this reason, and for those stated above, the barbell back squat, overhead press, deadlift and bench press will form the “backbone” of any effective strength training routine. Now, before anyone—man or woman—should balk at the idea of using barbells, I should explain why barbells are the ideal training implement versus dumbbells, resistance bands or cable machines, to name a few of the alternatives.

Compared to dumbbells, barbells accommodate our need to lift “heavy” weights better because they’re less cumbersome to wield and can be loaded using increments small enough to ensure continual, lengthy progress: whether positioned on our backs or in our hands, barbells are “easier” to handle and allow the trainee to utilize loads nearer to maximum, yet demand a tremendous amount of focus, coordination and stability. This is amply demonstrated by the effort it takes to move a barbell the distance covered by a full-depth back squat, for example. And while machines, cables and resistance bands are less cumbersome even than barbells, they do not require the same level of focus, coordination, stabilization and overall commitment that the barbell does, when supported by the muscles and all of the other skeletal components over the broadest range of motion that still permits good form.
Every workout should include some version of the squat, a pressing exercise and a pulling exercise, so that all of the musculature gets worked in a balanced fashion. For a novice, a full-body barbell routine performed three times a week will make the best use of the trainee’s recovery abilities and optimize his or her growth.

Safety and Efficacy of Barbell Training

Barbell movements, when performed under the watchful eye of an experienced coach, are absolutely safe. Heavy lifting in and of itself is no more injurious than any other rigorous physical activity, and given proper instruction and skillful coaching, heavy barbell training is, in fact, safer. Consider the fact that most folks who train do so without the benefit of an experienced coach or were coached by someone who may or may not have known the proper (i.e. safe) way to execute the movements. If care is taken by the trainee and coach to select loads that are within the current ability of the lifter, and if proper form is utilized, then the risk of serious injury is minimal to non-existent.

Young and old, male and female, dog and cat can safely train in the ways that I’m describing. Both groups will respond to training in much the same fashion, except that older trainees may need more recovery time between training sessions, making a twice-weekly training program more appropriate for some. Male and female trainees will adapt at comparable rates and for roughly the same amount of time on a linearly progressed training regimen.

The general public looks on fearfully at the use of heavy weights. Most believe that training of this kind is harmful to the back and joints. If the load selected matches the trainee’s current ability to lift it, then the muscles around the joints will be handling the load, not the joint surfaces or the ligaments. This is very important to understand. Muscles form a natural “organic brace” around each of the various joints, similar in principle to the orthopedic braces that doctors prescribe for use on patients with knee, ankle or elbow problems. Training these muscles in a balanced fashion around the joints and with the joints held in their mechanically sound anatomical positions makes for healthier joints, if anything. Again, proper weight training leads to healthier joints, not injured joints.

On the subject of youth and adolescent strength training, the National Strength and Conditioning Association (N.S.C.A) recently published an updated position statement that favors vigorous lifting practices, including but not limited to pure strength training of the type outlined above. The paper, entitled “Youth Resistance Training: Updated Position Statement Paper from the National Strength and Conditioning Association,” states:

In general, the risk of injury associated with resistance training is similar for youth and adults. There are no justifiable safety reasons that preclude children or adolescents from participating in such a resistance training program.

To elaborate, the authors note that several studies have found football, wrestling, and gymnastics to be substantially more injurious than resistance training, with the latter comprising only 0.7 percent of 1,576 injuries reported according to one prospective study. Further, the 2005-2006 High School Sports-related Injury Surveillance Study looked at 1.4 million injuries and determined that football had the highest rate of injury, scoring 4.36 injuries per 1,000 “athlete exposures,” as compared to only 0.0013 for resistance training and weightlifting (an Olympic sport). In fact, according to the N.S.C.A., the forces that young athletes encounter on the field or court are “likely to be greater in both exposure time and magnitude” as compared to those encountered while lifting properly.

Within the medical community, fear once existed that resistance training in general could stunt a young athlete’s growth or damage his or her growth cartilage, but to the contrary, the authors of this paper note that “there is no evidence to suggest that resistance training will negatively impact growth” and that “injury to the growth cartilage has not been reported in any prospective youth resistance training research study.”

The authors provide a ringing endorsement for the inclusion of resistance training in youth and adolescent training programs:

Youth resistance training can improve one’s cardiovascular risk profile, facilitate weight control, strengthen bone, enhance psychosocial well-being, improve motor performance skills, and increase ayoung athlete’s resistance to sports-related injuries.

Words of Wisdom from Jim Wendler

2009-10-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

(pic of Jim generally being awesome)

Here I’m paraphrasing comments that Jim Wendler made in his “Big” seminar, footage of which can be found on Youtube. He discusses the commonalities between all the programs followed by all the really strong, successful lifters:

1. They all bench, squat and deadlift
2. They all have the right attitude
3. They’ve all trained hard and consistently for a very long time

Otherwise, he says there is no “magic” program to follow. Foremost, have a plan and have a goal. Pick a sets and rep scheme that’s appropriate to meet your goals and that allows you to make progress from day to day and week to week.

He goes on to say that, when it comes to training, there is nothing new under the sun, so to speak. To illustrate his point, he talks about Georg Hackenschmidt’s The Way To Live In Health and Physical Fitness, published in 1941. In it Georg writes: before you begin a workout session, perform a general warm-up including full mobility work; always eat moderately and drink plenty of water; that bodyweight exercises are good but they won’t get you strong; always use full range of movement when exercising; and rarely go to failure on any set. These recommendations haven’t changed since Hackenschmidt’s time, Wendler points out, and training need not be as complicated as most popular exercise programs make it out to be.

Next, Wendler states that the best motivation is to lead by example. If you fucking practice what you preach, then others will fall in line and do as you do. End. Of. Fucking. Story.

Training should be balanced, front and back, posterior and anterior. In other words, we don’t—or shouldn’t—have favorite muscles when we train.

His final word of advice is to read a little book written by one Mark Rippetoe and one Lon Kilgore: Starting Strength (Wendler says he was “blown away” by it). And since Jim Wendler said you should read it, then you’d better fucking read it. I’ve been recommending it for a while, but, goddamnit, no one listens to the shit that I say. It’s harder to ignore someone with traps the size of Wendler’s, I guess.

I highly recommend that you visit elitefts.com and buy some cool swag and shit from Dave Tate, Wendler and their crew.

I caN Haz Cheezburger now?

2009-09-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

As I’ve learned a bit more about the “total picture” regarding weight loss and diet, I’ve refined my recommendations a bit.

During a calorie deficit (in order to experience weight loss, you have to expend more calories than you’re putting in, duh!!), it’s important that protein intake be kept high if for no other reason than that protein has a high satiety vs. carbs, which take longer to create that full feeling we’re after and rapidly lead to feelings of hunger again due to the dramatic spike in insulin and subsequent drop in blood sugar you get from consuming them alone or in large quantities. Protein will also help stave off muscle loss when coupled with (relatively) heavy resistance training in the vicinity of 75-85% of your 1 RM for your lifts. Many sources recommend as much as 1-2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, but I think this might be extreme. A gram of protein per pound of bodyweight should do for most people, just to be safe.

To estimate maintenance calories, multiply bodyweight times 14-16 calories. Only use sixteen if you’re highly active, fourteen if you’re less so. In order to generate weight loss, subtract no more than 500 calories daily from this number. As little as 200 to 300 calories will probably be enough. I would rather see a slow and steady weight loss of 1 lb.-1 lb. ½ a week than three-five pounds, due to the tendency for folks who lose weight rapidly to gain it back rapidly.

I say no more than 500 calories less daily because any dramatic change that you subject you’re body to will be perceived by it as a stress. Stress generally is bad when it’s high and unrelenting, and stress leads to a catabolic state (state of breakdown rather than build-up) in which cortisol levels remain high. Elevated cortisol means an increased likelihood for the storage of fat and a stunted ability to enhance and/or maintain muscular bodyweight. That’s why I say no more than a 500-calorie deficit daily.

That last point is important and bears repeating since people tend to think more is better when it comes to calorie restriction. There are several important reasons that this just isn’t the case, one of which I’ve already described. Probably the most important is a little thing called basal calories. Your basal calorie limit is the amount of energy that must be consumed in order for your body to carry on its basic functioning even at rest. If those calories aren’t covered, your body will become even stingier with its fat stores, saving them up for a potential crisis. Since we WANT to lose fat, it is important that we reduce calories ENOUGH while still maintaining calories ABOVE that basal limit.

A second but still important reason to keep calorie restriction moderate is that the psychological toll that too few calories takes is too much for some people. The idea of keeping calories dramatically restricted for an indefinite period is overwhelming. Not to mention there are physiological things that happen within the body separate from the psychology involved that can literally make or break your ability to adhere to a diet for the long-term. Extreme calorie restriction coupled with the wrong attitude can and probably will lead to ravenous, overwhelming hunger at some point. This isn’t just a matter of “willpower” only: the body itself sends out impulses that are difficult to deny in cases like these.

A related but different issue is whether to take a diet break every so often. In light of what I’ve said, you should see why taking a break is recommended if you’re going to adhere to your diet for the long-haul. You can experience “burn-out” from extreme dieting, or from dieting too long without breaks, much as you can when exercising at intensities and/or frequencies too high to sustain for periods long enough to see substantial improvement. In fact, if you want to succeed at reaching your weight-loss goals, I’d recommend taking a one-week break from your diet every couple of months.

This last piece of advice may fall on deaf ears since folks who’ve been overweight forever will fear that a diet break may lead to their adopting old habits again. But I’d encourage everyone to allow reason to be the more powerful voice here over fear. Clear, rational thinking coupled with education about the how and why of diet and nutrition should be encouraged in place of self-doubt. Easier said than done, I know.

On a final note, its common practice for diet and nutrition “gurus” to demonize one macronutrient or the other depending on which sort of diet happens to be en vogue among the self-appointed priests of fitness at the moment. Neither the low-fat/high-carb or the low-or-no-carb/high fat camps have it exactly right as they’d have you believe. Suffice it to say, a moderate approach that includes a balance of fat and carbohydrates will suit the majority of people; putting aside variations between individuals for the moment, a diet with enough fat to help keep you satiated (most of it coming from non-saturated sources) and your cells and intestinal tract healthy and happy on the one hand, and with enough carbs to cover the demands of your daily activities on the other, is key. For the sake of ease, a diet that equally divides the fat and carbohydrate calories left over after protein requirements have been met down the middle will work. This is an oversimplification, since variations between individuals could mean that you feel better on a slightly lower or higher carb diet, depending. Also, individuals who engage in regular, prolonged endurance exercise will need more carbohydrates, with the rest of us needing considerably less.

Finally, let’s consider fiber intake for a moment. Fiber is a carbohydrate, but it functions differently than other carbohydrates and has special ramifications for dieters. One type of fiber when consumed becomes like gel in your stomach, slowing gastric emptying. Slowed gastric emptying means you’ll feel fuller longer. Also, fiber is a high-bulk food: it stretches the stomach with the amount of room that it takes up, signaling to you that you’re full. And like protein and fat, fiber slows the rate at which refined carbs are digested and absorbed and how fast they enter the bloodstream, thus preventing that dreaded insulin spike that grabs the sugar from your blood and leaves you feeling sluggish and hungry again. The upshot of all of this is that when you eat fiber, you eat less of other stuff, get fuller sooner and stay fuller longer. And if you’re trying to lose weight, that’s a good thing.

In short keep protein intake high, take in the correct number of calories (neither too many nor too few), don’t be a fat or carb nazi, and eat lots of fiber-containing ruffage, a.k.a. veggies.

"Teach a man to fish..."

2009-09-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

The following is quoted from Matthew Perryman's ebook Maximum Muscle: the Science Of Intelligent Physique Training. Also, please visit Matthew's website at ampedtraining.com.

“Most research into exercise deals with either aerobic exercise or with rehabilitation. As you might gather, this isn't terribly useful for generalizing into strength-training concepts, let alone something specialized like bodybuilding. Although the West is starting to catch up, a lot of what you read about is actually taken from older Soviet-era information, which, while not bad necessarily, can be hard to corroborate.

Once we start to look at the Western research into actual strength exercise, we start to see a common theme: 'untrained subjects'. Now, in some ways this is good because at least it's done in humans. However we run into some potentially major issues because we've seen it demonstrated repeatedly that an untrained person just doesn't respond the same way as someone with years of experience. Lots of strength-training studies will
demonstrate amazing results in untrained subjects, but comparatively few of them account for this so-called 'newbie effect'. Beginners can get away with lots of things; often they will still improve in spite of what they do, not because of it. When we're trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship, this can throw a huge wrench into things.

It gets worse. The bulk of the research into the actual biochemistry and physiology is done in rats. While there's a lot of similarities in humans and rats, there's a lot of differences too. There's plenty of examples where things that happened in rats didn't pan out in humans; that's a big weakness.

This is a favorite tactic of the supplement industry, actually. They love taking some rat research or weakly applicable research in humans and then claiming it supports their new magic product. They conveniently ignore the fact that not only is that data not applicable, but they also have exactly nothing showing their claimed results in humans. Besides the claims of the product users, of course - but that's not placebo effect or anything. See also my earlier point about controlling for variables; when you don't perform research in controlled conditions, you can't be sure that your attributed cause is creating the effect. Since giving out free supplements to bodybuilders is almost the definition of 'bias' and 'placebo effect', these testimonials have to be considered highly suspect.

And of course all of these objections can apply just as easily to any workout routine, or any study that looks at strength training.”

What I know now, part eleventy-four...

2009-08-27T08:48:00.001-07:00

There is a better way to get strong and conditioned than CrossFit; Justin Lascek's Wichita Falls Strength and Conditioning program:

Monday — Squat 5x3, Press 5x3, Power Clean 3x5
Tuesday — Chin-ups 3 sets to failure, 10 min. metabolic conditioning routine
Wednesday — OFF
Thursday — Squat 5x3, Bench 5x3, Deadlift 5x1
Friday — 10 min. metabolic conditioning routine

What I know now, part 4 (or what Lyle McDonald knows, and now, I'm passing along to you)

2009-06-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, what do you know?! The bodybuilders done gone and got things wrong again!

Turns out that low weight, high rep resistance programs are inferior for maintaining lean mass while on a diet.

Go to Lyle's website and ch-ch-check it out:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/category/training/weight-training

Click on "Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1." Enjoy!

What I know now, part 3

2009-04-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

What I know: AGE IS NO EXCUSE. Too old, too young--doesn't matter.

It's a fact of human existence that people will choose the path of least resistance--i.e. the least fruitful path--if given the opportunity, ALWAYS. I've found that out first hand training folks of all ages and all backgrounds at the gym these last three years. I see it in myself, too, but I try everyday to combat this human trait, and for the most part, I'm winning, I think.

There's always an excuse: "I'm too fat," "I'm too tired," "He or she's too young to be doing that," or "I just don't have the time." And here's my favorite: "I'm too old to be doing that." Bullshit. Absolute fucking bullshit, all of it.

I submit the following videos for your consideration. These are men and women who are well past their primes in lifting. If you see these, and you're not ashamed of yourselves, well, there's no fucking hope for you...

Mark Rippetoe, age 52 (315 lb. back squat x 10):

Phil Anderson, nine months after a double knee replacement:

60 year-old Larry Wallen's 705 lb. deadlift:

60 year-old female powerlifter, with a personal-best squat of 440 lbs. (relevant part starts at about the 0:40 second mark):

I think I've made my point. Happy lifting!

"What I know now," part two

2009-02-22T16:46:00.000-08:00

2. Losing weight is easy. Gaining strength is hard. I intend no disrespect to anyone whose ever had trouble losing weight when I say this. But I’ve attempted to do both, and while I‘ve had mild success with strength and muscle-building, losing weight, on the other hand, just became so damned easy once I’d been at it for a while.

Flashback to the year 1999. I weighed in at a sloppy 200 lbs. And I felt like shit. I’d spend sometimes two to three days at a time hardly moving except to stand up, walk to the refrigerator, grab some food or drink and sit back down. Other times, I’d get up only to walk to the car in order to make my twice weekly pilgrimage to Burger King. At the time, a brisk walk up a hill would leave me exhausted, the blood vessels in my legs throbbing and aching for an at least an hour afterward.

Ahh, poor me, right? The truth was that I didn’t give a damn about myself or others, and every decision that I made revolved around stealing a little pleasure here and there, one bite of food at a time. But the pleasure never lasted.

Really, this lifestyle was just a symptom of a larger problem: I’d had nothing better to do at the time, and no real sense of purpose, or of self-worth. Because if I had, I’d have realized that service to a higher good, whatever your area of expertise or interest, requires one be in the best shape that he can be in, mentally and physically (there‘s no separating them, really). But that’s not what I was thinking at the time. At the time, all I knew was that I looked and felt like shit, and I was pretty sure everyone else around me could see that, too. Around this time, I also went through a pretty traumatic break-up, but instead of resorting to further eating and lying about, I began to exercise in order to deal with the stress. I’d had enough.

I started to lose weight. It was a no-brainer, even for this sack-of-shit. This was before the days of Jared the Subway spokesman, but I’d already come to the conclusion that ordering from a (relatively speaking) “healthy” set of menu items would make portion control and calorie counting easy. It did. And I started to jog a little. At first, I only ran twice a week, and started including some basketball on my days off. Two times a week became three times a week, and the pounds melted off.

Losing weight is easy, especially if you don’t care where the weight comes from. If, for instance, you don’t give a shit if you lose lots of lean muscle tissue along with all the fat, then literally running yourself in circles is about all that you need to do. And cutting your caloric intake helps, also. But the pounds would come off, even if you did nothing else.

Don’t let shows like the Biggest Loser fool you. While the contestants on that show perform exercises that look a little like strength training, because they involve the use of weights and weight machines, the intensity and duration of their workouts (Biggest Loser “workouts” involve high repetitions performed with relatively light weight over several hours a day) will yield a very specific set of physiological responses, resembling what we might expect to see from frequent, prolonged bouts of running, as was my case. In other words, what we have is aerobic exercise (and the worst, most physically abusive kind, at that) masquerading as strength training.

Yes, in the beginning contestants can expect to see some lean muscle gain because they are so tremendously overweight, but after the first month or so, their terrible training practices can only result in one thing: catabolism. When a trainee enters a catabolic state, he or she begins to break down lipids (fats), but if the process continues long enough, muscle protein is then sacrificed as well. Unless the body recovers adequately (and the contestants on the Biggest Loser are NEVER adequately recovered--they can’t be), this process will only continue.

If the body is in a state of catabolism, it CANNOT build lean muscle tissue. But anyway, it wouldn’t really matter if the contestants on Loser were allowed more recovery, because the style of training employed by trainer Gillian is so atrocious, so fundamentally at odds with the proper methods for strength-building--and, therefore, the optimal production of lean body mass (a point I’ve tackled here previously).

Why is lean body mass so important? God, if I only had the time to name all the ways in which enhance strength and muscle mass are important! A physically stronger individual is a better individual. It’s not just the end result--heightened physical strength--that makes this true, but also the way disciplined, rigorous training prepares you mentally for the stresses that you are likely to face everywhere. A heavy set of squats is just hard in a way that walking or running on a treadmill for an hour is not. I’ve never gotten a case of the butterflies from before running, but I have before a heavy set of squats.

And that’s why strength training, true strength training, will never become extremely popular. People will continue to try to find shortcuts to better health and healthier living. They’ll continue to opt for strength training’s less effective and less intimidating cousin, cardiovascular exercise.

Of course, I couldn’t have appreciated all of this back in 1999, if you’d told me. In fact, exercise just became another form of pleasure-seeking, no less pathological than my terrible eating and laziness had been before. I shirked college and work-related responsibilities for the sake of exercise, even neglected loved ones, and I exercised myself to the point of emaciation. I thought I was fit, but I wasn’t. I thought I was happy, but I wasn’t that either. You see, happiness and pleasure have taken on different meanings, as has fitness. Happiness and pleasure on the one hand, like an improved physical appearance on the other, shouldn’t become ends in themselves because these qualities only come around once you’ve plotted a journey and chosen your destination. They’re byproducts, and anyway, they’re only meaningful in the context of this higher purpose: to be a stronger, therefore better, individual, more useful to yourself and to others in general.

"What I know now," part one

2009-02-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve been waiting for my thoughts on training to organize themselves around a central theme or two, so that I can write them down and post them here, but, since that’s not apparently going to happen anytime soon, I guess a scattershot approach will have to do.

What I know now:

1. Joe Weider is a crackpot. He is an ass-hat. His magazines and training principles are at the top of the dogshit pile of magazines and misinformation out there that characterizes the majority of information that counts as “knowledge” these days. The Weider Empire, as one might call it, does what it does purely to generate money. Few people realize this, but at the time that Joe Weider first began styling himself “fitness guru extraordinaire,” putting out magazines whose sole purpose was to hock fitness supplements and other merchandise, Weider was busy also hatching a another series of “fitness”-related magazines that catered to gay men with their gay fit-man fantasies. The now extinct League of Decency found out about this and put a stop to Weider’s line of gay mags (see the cover of the magazine, “Adonis,” below), but the external trappings of that cultural time and place in history persist to this day—just look at any bodybuilding competition or any of the dozens of muscle magazines on the shelves currently, where oily, hairless men in bikini underwear pose for (Who else?) other damned men.

Joe Weider and men like him make my job a living hell. The first three months that I spend with any client usually involves disabusing them of all their bullshit notions about training, many of which can be traced to damned Muscle and Fitness Magazine. Let’s take the Weider principle of “muscle confusion,” for example. A search of the Sportdiscus database (an online database containing research papers and articles relating to sports and fitness) yields a number of results on “muscle confusion.” Not coincidentally, those results link to articles taken from none other than Muscle and Fitness magazine. What I’m getting at here is that very little actual research has been conducted on “muscle confusion.” Maybe that’s because the very concept is not easily quantified and measured. I mean, how do you quantify and measure “confusion?” Somebody f**kin’ tell me, okay, because I’m at my wit’s end. Sure, you can observe the results of your “muscle confusion” routine on a person and record that, but how do you know which if any of the variables of the routine made the real difference? How do you know whether some other approach might not have given you the same if not better results? How do you know whether it will work well for all populations or just some, or if it only works on lifters who take steroids or other performance enhancing drugs, since most if not all of your subjects take them?

F**k Joe Weider!

Long before Joe Weider came along there were serious, hardworking men (some women, too, I suppose) who began with a few basic lifts, to which they added weight every workout and saw serious results. These lifters were doing this for many years before Joe Weider came along, and it worked for them. The work was hard and sometimes monotonous, but the rewards were huge. You could find them at York Barbell and in modest little gyms all over the country. They ate good whole food and lots of it, squatted, deadlifted and pressed themselves to incredible size and strength. The problem is, nobody wants to work hard, no one has the focus to stay the course when the lifting program gets tough. If they did, then everybody would be living and dying in the squat rack and everybody would be f**kin’ huge! People still want to believe that a “snake oil” supplement can help them bypass the hard work that a serious, systematic, rigorously applied, and linearly progressed program entails.

Instead, folks would rather subscribe to Muscle and Fitness Magazine and the like, which serves up a buffet of workout routines (routines of the bodybuilding stars, people!) designed to help sell whatever worthless supplement appears on the opposite side pages. What’s more, if magazines were to actually publish would DOES work, then they’d very quickly run out of things to write about in subsequent issues. The truth is that hard work, focus and dedication to a few basic exercises, along with correct eating, will always yield the best results in the beginning. Got it?

Oh yeah, f**k Joe Weider.

Training and Illness

2008-12-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-11-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-23T15:44:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-09-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

.

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)

2008-09-25T13:00:00.001-07:00

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...

2008-09-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-09-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

(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

2008-08-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-28T11:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

You can lead a horse to water...

2008-06-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-05-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

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.