Every so often I’ll get in a client who was a jock of some sort in a former life.  Either they played ball in high school or college, or they had some experience on a professional or semi-professional level.  But the story is nearly the same in every case: Through accumulated or acute injury or life circumstance, they stopped playing and gained a ton of weight.

Being a former fit person, they attack the weights with unusual vigor.  The second workout finds them considerably more gun-shy than the first, due to crippling soreness.  “What happened?”, they ask.  “I used to lift twice as much as this.  I used to work out 20 times harder and still made every late-night party on campus.”

My typical advice:  Forget “used to.”  But this doesn’t just follow for former athletes.  This applies to trainees across the board.

It applies to you if you obsess about the size of jeans you wore back in high school (that, sadly, you’ll never fit in again).

It applies to you if you stubbornly chase a poundage you used to lift last year, back before you sustained injuries to both your shoulders and left wrist.

It applies to you if you complain that every time you used to get a little too fat all you needed to do was run a couple of times a week without changing your diet.

Maybe that’s the way things used to be.  But they aren’t that way now.

“Used to” is self-limiting because it keeps you from the difficult but necessary work of addressing reality.  Maybe things aren’t as they used to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that right now you’re not where you want to be.  Worse, getting stuck in “used to” blinds you to the actions that you need to take right now, when the rules of the game have changed.

Forget “used to.”  Focus on “need to”, right now.

I recently sustained injuries to both my shoulders, probably as a result of overuse and chronic trauma (apparently, throwing someone on top of you instead of over you via Morote Seoi hurts your shoulders).  Over the past couple of months, I’ve managed to nurse at least one shoulder back to health, with the other well on the way.

Some of my classmates and clients are amazed that I’ve been able to do this without going to physical therapy.  But it’s really not a mystery.  What did I do?  Liberal application of ice, heat, and meaningful (read: heavy enough to challenge) exercise for the support muscles of the shoulder.

When you sustain an injury, the first impulse you have is to rest it.  You’d avoid movements that hurt in attempts to give the injury enough time to get better, hoping that things will work out at some point.  Well, while it’s important to manage pain, decrease swelling, and allow enough time for your body to repair itself, the reality is that you can’t avoid usage of your joints (at least, not unless you plan on consigning yourself to complete bed rest).

Problem #1: By avoiding usage of the joint, you impair the joint’s function.

Problem #2: By impairing the joint’s function, you allow the joint to get weaker.

Problem #3:  A weaker joint is less capable.  So you end up either using it less (see problem #1) or continuing on as if nothing happened and risking further damage to the joint (see problem #2).

In physical therapy literature, this sequence is referred to as “the downward spiral of pain” – by limiting function as a response to pain, a patient gets worse and worse until he’s virtually non-functionally.  Interestingly enough, the only way to interrupt this cycle is to perform corrective exercise to strengthen the muscles surrounding the injury site.

The true role of PT in rehab is to strengthen the muscles that support the damaged joint. All the bells and whistles that are done to you as a patient (modalities) serve to decrease inflammation and pain, either pre-emptively (so you can exercise) or post-emptively (so as to control additional pain and swelling resulting from exercising the injured area).  You can see the sense in this – without icing a swollen joint, for example, you’d have very little active motion in the joint (not to mention tons of pain when you do try to move it).  Bring down the swelling, turn the volume down on the pain, and you can meaningfully exercise.

Unfortunately, this isn’t what most people go to PT for.  They’re in it for the modalities: A little stim to ease lower back pain; an ice massage for patellofemoral syndrome; some wet heat for a sore neck.  There’s nothing wrong in seeking relief from pain.  What ultimately matters, however, is obtaining pain relief for the long-term, and that’s only going to happen if you progressively improve strength.

Am I saying to eschew the services of a professional when you’re hurt?  To take matters into your own hands and treat yourself?  No.  But what I hope to point out (to those of you who are engaged in some sort of rehab program, anyway) is that the yardstick for improvement is still the same – if you’re not getting stronger, you’re not improving.  Do what’s necessary to make it possible for you to strengthen the injured area via corrective exercise, but remember that the corrective exercise is the keystone your recovery hinges upon.

One prominent  and controversial question in strength training circles: Is training strength and demonstrating strength the same thing or different things?  In other words, what’s the best way to build strength – by “demonstrating” it through heavy maximal lifts, explosive movements, and plain-ol’ ‘lifting stuff‘, or by ‘training it’ through more measured and precise means?

This is a huge waste of mental energy (better directed towards actually exercising).

To clarify what I mean, take a look at my foster kids’ handstand form:

For my convenience’s sake (l.-r.): Max, Shirley, Santa

Who would you say is the strongest?  Why?

Note the following observations:

• Santa has near perfect form (it’s only imperfect because she’d been holding the handstand for a minute waiting for her siblings to get into their handstands).  It’s safe to say she’s not only well-practiced at handstands, she’s strong for her size.
• Upper body wise, Shirley is the weakest in the upper body – you can see her arms beginning to give way to the weight of her torso and legs (alas, her leg falling forward makes this obvious).
• Max fell over a split second after this picture was taken.  And yet, he’d be the first one of the three I’d enlist to help me carry a Murphy bed up three flights of stairs.

Of course, it’s a trick question.  You can probably see what I’m getting at here.  Strength can be demonstrated.  But in order to be demonstrated:

1) You have to be able to demonstrate it (skill).

2) You need to have strength to demonstrate.

Pick a different skill (say, carrying a Murphy bed up three flights of stairs with a partner) and the evaluation changes.  Now, it’s clear who’s “strongest” – the only one capable of performing the task at all.

All this is mental piffle.  For actual exercise purposes, here’s what it boils down to:

The muscular/joint system has one global job: To move your body through space.  There is a near-infinite number of potential movements in which your body can be propelled (an infinite number of “skills”).  To effect the greatest change, choose those movements that are most global in scope (that effectively work the most muscle) and most applicable to your goals (after all,  a ballet dancer and your bocce ball-playing grandfather probably have markedly differing fitness goals) and apply measured, precise doses of exercise to improve the capacity of that muscle.

So it doesn’t matter if you lift a sandbag or a chrome-plated machine handle.  Work hard at increasing your ability; make it so that you can do more today than you could yesterday or yesteryear.  You’ll never master every skill known to man.  But you can make yourself a better version of yourself by mastering a few skills.  You even get to choose which skills they are.

Last night my foster son picked my brain regarding diabetes (his birth father is a Type 2 diabetic). While the entire car-ride conversation was ripe fodder for a blog post, what I’m going to recount here is our discussion on fatty liver, fructose, and diabetes.

What is fatty liver?

Fatty liver is an excess buildup of fat cells in your liver. When the liver becomes too fatty, inflammation occurs and liver function is compromised.

What does fatty liver have to do with diabetes?

They both are diseases of sugar metabolism. In Type 2 diabetes, your cells are insulin-resistant – they no longer respond to insulin’s attempts to pull sugar out of your bloodstream. In development of fatty liver, chronic high intake of fructose causes fatty deposits to develop in the liver.

Fructose?

Fructose is a type of sugar found in fruit (and in high fructose corn syrup, but we’ll get to this later). Chemically, it’s a simple sugar just like glucose but is metabolized differently. Glucose (and other sugars) are metabolized like this (courtesy University of Miami):

Fructose, however, follows a much shorter route:

Fructose—->Liver—->Fatty Acids

Ok, I’m dramatically oversimplifying the fructose pathway, but I want you to understand the “big picture” concept here. What happens with excess consumption of all carbohydrates is that they get repackaged as fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis.   However, there’s a limit to how much and how quickly sugar gets repackaged as fat – a rate-limiting step.

An analogy:  Imagine a FedEx shipping plant with a huge fleet of trucks and piles and piles of boxes to be shipped.  How quickly can you ship the packages?  The number of workers packing the trucks would be your rate-limiting step.  The boxes can only be delivered as quickly as the trucks are filled.  It doesn’t matter how large a fleet you have to deliver boxes with, without workers to pack them, the packages can only drip-drip-drip out of the plant.

The rate of sugar metabolism (see above complicated diagram) is bottlenecked by the regulatory enzyme phosphofructokinase.  Consume a ton of glucose, and what will eventually happen is that insulin rates rise, causing levels of leptin to rise, which limits your appetite.  No appetite = you stop flooding the system with sugar (but not before the damage is done).

Not so with fructose.  Fructose, that lucky dog, gets to skip that step.  Instead of having to be shuttled via the insulin pathway, fructose directly enters the liver and gets metabolized without this rate-limiting step.  So if you consume a lot of excess fructose, your liver synthesizes a lot of triglyceride (fat).  In fact, there’s practically no limit since insulin isn’t involved and thus your appetite won’t be blunted (recent research indicates that fructose effectively “shuts off” your appetite regulation).  So what happens?  Fatty deposits begin to show up in the liver (undelivered “packages” sitting around in the plant warehouse) – and over time, inflammation and liver cell damage occurs.  Continue this over time, and you’ve got the fertile breeding grounds for obesity and diabetes.

So does that mean if I eat fruit I’ll get diabetes?

It’s unlikely.  Remember, we’re talking about excess consumption of fructose.  Eat a bunch of fresh fruit, and you’re likely to consume 15-20 grams of fructose, tops.  But with industrialization of food and the addition of high fructose corn syrup as the primary sweetener used in food manufacturing, daily intake of fructose is nearly 4 times higher.  Think about all the possible sources of fructose – it’s in just about every sweetened drink you can think of: soda; fruit juices, iced tea, etc.  Moreover, sucrose (table sugar) is 50% fructose.  All that adds up to a considerable intake.

What it boils down to is that it’s easy to develop fatty liver (and diabetes) if you’re indiscriminate about what you eat and drink.  Avoid sweetened drinks high in high fructose corn syrup, stay away from sugar, and you’ll likely be fine.

Let’s offer a Cliffs Notes version of the above:

This great diagram from the American Liver Foundation (via msnbc.com) says it all:

As a general rule, sugar is bad for you.  But fructose is particularly bad.  So disregard what the food companies tell you and stay away.

Chris points us to an interesting study involving circadian rhythm and weight gain (to be fair, Melissa sent it to me first, but she doesn’t have a blog).  In the study, nocturnal rats fed during what would have been their sleeping hours gained more weight than rats fed during their waking hours, despite the same overall intake and energy expenditure.

(BTW, if any of you have the full text of the study, might I request a copy?  Pretty please?)

What’s interesting to me is not just the physiological implications of the study (that there might be some unique mechanism that causes animals to store fat more effectively during their snoozing hours), but the statements the obesity experts were quoted as saying:

“How or why a person gains weight is very complicated, but it is clearly not just calories in and calories out,” said Fred Turek, from the Northwestern’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology, where the research took place.  “Better timing of meals could be a critical element in slowing the ever-increasing incidence of obesity.”

and

Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum, agreed. He said: “It is groundbreaking. It really gets you thinking why this has not been done before.  It could be very dramatic if it affects whether you are going to get fat or not.”

Are you kidding me?

“Better timing of meals?”

“Groundbreaking?”

“Affects whether you are going to get fat or not?”

The study looked at rats that were eating during their sleeping hours.  While I don’t doubt there are some overfat folks eating during the hours they should be sleeping, I highly doubt that 64% of Americans are waking up in the middle of the night and chowing down.  Or perhaps they’re suggesting we’re all operating on schedules that run counter to our normal Circadian rhythms? And these guys are supposed to be experts?

What these folks do is what clients and trainees often do – they lose the forest for the trees.  It’s all too easy to get bogged down in the myriad details of the (admittedly) complex picture of fat loss and lose sight of the one or two most important things which, if done consistently, would yield you 80% or more of the results you’re looking for.  Believe me, if you’re having trouble losing weight, it isn’t because you should be on vampire hours.

There’s nothing wrong with seeking new information or looking to add to your understanding.  But figure out how it falls into the larger picture.

The surest way to lose focus during an exercise is to judge yourself on that exercise.   Instead, get “mechanistic.”  Focus on what you can actually do, as opposed to your emotional reactions to the exercise.

Don’t think, “Damn, this weight feels heavy.”  Instead, think, “Drive your heels through the floor; be patient; make it happen.”

Don’t think, “I’m not doing this exercise well.”  Think, “Tight on this next rep; go!”

Don’t think, “Boy, that was a tough rep.”  Think, “Breathe.  Stabilize your core.  Get ready.”

Ignore what you feel.  Think about what you can do.

Focus on the movement and not your emotions.  Remember, progress isn’t linear and you’re bound to have some bad days.  That doesn’t give you a bye.  In fact, it’s slogging through that crappy workout and getting it done that will ultimately lead to your best performances.

I’m not implying that you shouldn’t adjust your pace if you feel you’re plowing through a conditioning circuit more slowly than last time or that you should ignore all feedback from your body.  But to allow yourself to self-criticize when you’re still in the game (i.e., still exercising) is to enter into a spiral that will eventually lead to the thought, “Who am I kidding?  I can’t do this.“  And, lo and behold, you won’t.  Not motivating, not results-producing, not effective.

Stay focused.  Exercise impeccable technique.  Get your numbers down.

It’s probably old news to you by now, but Time Magazine recently ran an article that ruffled the feathers of most of my fitness industry brethren.

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.

Of course, with a title like that, it’s understandable why fitness folks would be up in arms.  It’s akin to saying, “Why Bankers Steal Your Money” or some similar pejorative.  That there was a huge backlash from the fitness community is unsurprising.  What I find unexpected, however, is the willful ignorance of those so-called fitness “professionals.”  From ad homenim to straw man arguments to overwhelming stupidity, the reaction to Mr. Cloud’s article is flat out embarrassing.  And yet, I’ve read some rebuttals that are sensible and well-presented (wrong, but sensible and well-written nonetheless).

I even had one of my colleagues say, “Thanks, TIME Magazine, for making the job of the fitness professional even more difficult.”  Give me a break.

Look, the honest truth is Cloud is a terrible journalist who makes amateurish mistakes (turning fat into muscle?) and weak arguments, but that doesn’t make his central theme – that exercise does next to nothing for fat loss if you don’t modify your eating – wrong.

By avoiding discussion of this central theme, most fitness professionals are making themselves look shady and evasive.  After all, if exercise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for weight loss, then why tell clients to jump on a treadmill for 30 minutes “to burn fat”?  If exercising for fat loss doesn’t work, and your livelihood is dependent on prescribing exercise for just that purpose, what does that make you look like?

Here is the brutal reality: Exercise for fat loss without dietary modification is an exercise in futility.  Working out feverishly, only to end up losing no weight is so cliche, it’s part of our cultural consciousness.

Americans are fatter than ever, despite exercising more than ever.  WHY?  If you make your living telling people to hop on a treadmill every day or teaching jumps in a Spinning class, I think you have an obligation to answer.

One good thing about the rise in popularity of bodybuilding in the 60s and 70s was that it got people interested in lifting weights.

One bad thing (”One bad thing?”, the peanut gallery asks) about bodybuilding going mainstream was that it made “bodypart mentality” a part of the training consciousness – bodypart mentality being the idea that you build your muscles by working specific muscle groups with specific exercises, i.e., Curls for biceps, flyes for chest, leg curl for hamstrings, etc.

Of course, this is utter horse sh-t.

In my formative years as an exercise physiologist, I fell hook, line, and sinker into bodypart thinking as well.  Then, while I was doing a set of ball squats one of my co-workers noted , “Hey, you’ve got a nice teardrop in your quad! You do leg extensions a lot?”

At that time, I hadn’t touched a leg extension machine in about 7 years or so.  Yet somehow I’d managed to grow that specific muscle (which is primarily grown via leg extensions as per conventional wisdom) using other means.  It was the first chink in the armor of a theory that really has no basis in reality.

Bill DeSimone said: “Take someone who’s been training his whole body for 10 years.  Do you think you’ll be able to tell whether or not he did preacher curls vs. hammer curls by the shape of his biceps?  Or if his triceps will look any different if he did rope pushdowns vs. french presses?”

The point:  Bodypart mentality is poisonous because it tricks you into thinking you have to work every single muscle with a different exercise.  Or, rather, that it makes you forget that on the main multi-joint movements, multiple muscle groups work – and develop.  In other words, it distracts you from the real work.

I’m not trying to imply Tommy Kono or Eugen Sandow never did a lateral raise or a hammer curl (although they probably didn’t).  But Kono didn’t sculpt his chest with endless sets of cable crossovers, nor did Sandow “cut up” his midsection by doing a 25-minute death circuit of abs.  They earned their muscle by getting darned strong on the basic, multi-joint (read: most productive) exercises.

The moral of the story is: Don’t waste time on detail exercises when you’ve not built enough “material” to detail.  Build muscle using the most productive exercises, and eat to lose enough bodyfat to show the results of your hard work.  A corollary example: You don’t need to do 20 sets of biceps curls for your arms to grow.  Cultivate the ability to do a weighted chinup and your biceps will be big enough (and you’ll have built a nice set of lats and abs, to boot).

A fellow trainer (name withheld) asks me how I can be so nice to my clients all the time, even when it’s clear they aren’t even trying.

The answer’s simple:  To them, they are trying.  They don’t know how far they are from fulfilling their potential.  In fact, their actual “potential” is as inconceivable to them as beating Deep Blue with a couple of pawns is to me (BTW, I’m horrible at chess).

There are two truisms for novice trainees I’d like to invoke here:

Truism #1:  You’re probably not exercising as hard as you think you are.

Truism#2 (the more important one, IMHO):  Not only are you not exercising as hard as you think you are, you’re not even working hard enough to produce meaningful results.  So there.

But that’s ok, because the initial beginner period isn’t about working hard or “losing 26 1/2 pounds in 2 weeks” or whatever.  It’s about obtaining technical proficiency in the exercises you’re doing, and about learning to care.

Daniel Coyle describes a young girl learning a new piece of music.  He writes:

It sounds pretty bad.  It’s not music; it’s a broken-up, fitful, slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses.  Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing.  But in this case common sense would be dead wrong.

He argues:

…experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them…end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

What this implies for a novice trainee is:

1) Their ability to exercise safely with effort is a skill that needs to be practiced.  Over and over and over again, if necessary (and it usually is).

2) Prepare for a long period of “suck” at the beginning.

Most normal people (”normal” meaning not unhealthly obsessed with the intermittent lifting of heavy things) don’t see the value in grinding out an arduous set of say, squats, for a “meager gain” of an extra pound or two (or five).  Luckily, this is as trainable as the ability to actually grind out an arduous yet technically proficient set of squats.  Whether it’s because you tie the exercise to your goals (”Press that weight up – it’s short-sleeves weather!”) or because you become a fitness savant, familiarity in this case breeds self-motivation.  People naturally want to be effective (even if the outcome isn’t necessarily so).

But the rub is that long period of “suck.”  Almost always accompanied by much whining, complaining, cajoling, and gnashing and wailing.  Change – particularly important change – is hard.  And so it’s nice to have a pleasant guide doling out the beatings.

So if you or someone you know is just starting out in their exercise and nutrition odyssey, be patient.  Some people just have to wade through more “suck”  than others.

(The irony – I’ve been deadlifting for years and am still wading through my deadlift “suck.”)

Most people believe that operating an SUV with the windows open is more fuel efficient than running it with the A/C cranked.  But if you run tests and gather actual data, you’ll find the opposite to be true (legions of sweaty passengers thank you, Savage and Hyneman).

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a field more built on mythology than exercise.  I doubt you’d be able to come up a similar industry that so often takes hearsay for gospel.  Perhaps this is why trainers and customers alike so readily fall for the latest fitness fads.

Back to the point:  Take what you hear as “fitness and nutrition gospel” with a grain of salt (for example, the admonition that salt raises blood pressure).  Am I saying that you should throw away your running shoes, junk your weights set, or eschew fruits and veggies for fried Coke and potato wedges?  No – well, maybe you could stand to stop running – but what I am saying is that you are responsible for your own health and well being.  Don’t blindly trust news outlets with overhyped headlines (really just press releases from labs hawking their latest wares).  Read the studies yourself.  Probe deeper than the surface.  And do yourself a favor and don’t stop at the written word – put it into practice.  Keith Norris’ blog (good blog, BTW) puts it perfectly – Theory Into Practice.

Your life is really just one big experiment with a subject population of n=1.  So go gather some data.  Test yourself.