Shon Grosse recently posted up an article on the single leg romanian deadlift.  It’s one of my favorite exercises for a number of reasons.  But, as Shon points out in the article, very few people have the requisite performance attributes required to complete the movement with appropriate form.  In the article Shon shows a 3 stage progression into the full blown movement.  It happens to be very similar to the progression that I use with my clients.  Some of the article is a big technical for the lay person, but the value will come from the videos.

Matt Perryman and I were discussing some things on facebook about exercise, stress, and recovery the other day.  I highlighted the conversation on my blog here.  That conversation joggled my memory about an article Matt wrote a while back about fat loss and running.  Some of his views have changed slightly, which is evidenced in our recent conversation, but I still think this is a phenomenal article that many people I’m encountering need to read.

Nick Tumminello is always delivering quality exercise videos on his blog.  In his recent post he highlights an underutilized exercise that I really like throwing into the mix every now and again.  We’re so hung up on bench pressing that we often forget about other horizontal pressing exercises.  Hell, the closed chain push-up is a phenomenal exercise that people write off.  I haven’t done true bench pressing for months as I’ve been primarily weighted dips.  Point is, don’t get sucked into the bench press or die mentality.

JC Deen responds to a question I receive time and time again… “Can you draft me up a meal plan?”  I couldn’t have responded better myself.  People asking for meal plans are missing the forest for the trees.  Back in the day I used to write up meal plans for my clients.  I took them a step further by providing “swaps” for every single food listed in the plan.  That way there was some variability and latitude.  But even there, I never felt like my clients were learning anything.  They weren’t learning how to eat.  Though the meal plans provided opportunities to learn… people weren’t using them as such.  Instead, they would be lazy and take the meal plan as something that allows them not to think about their nutrition.  Which is silly.  So check out JC’s article titled Fitness Meal Plans – Why I Don’t Make Them.

Listening to an old strengthcoach podcast over the weekend, I was reminded of an article Patrick Ward wrote titled Stress and the Female Athlete.  The majority of women I work with are not athletes.  I suppose we could call them recreational athletes as they’re mostly into lifting weights and running.  Be that as it may, Patrick’s article applies to this population.  I encounter so many women who are obsessive about their training and eating.  To a point they’re stressing constantly.  Piling this sort of stress on top of low calories, poor nutrition, negative body image, and social/family stress and you’ve got a system that’s out of whack after a while.

I’m not even sure if I want to post this since I’m thinking a lot of you will be missing too much context.  If you haven’t read a lot of Matt’s stuff in the past, you’ll probably be left scratching your head.  And it’s late, so I’m not going to go into the whole back story.  However, there was a great conversation on his facebook page earlier tonight and I wanted to share some of what I consider to be the important posts.

If anyone has any questions, I’ll do my best to explain a bit deeper and I’m sure I could get Matt to chime in as well.

Keep in mind that I’m cherrypicking the important posts from a long conversation.

Enjoy!

Matt said:

People seriously just have no clue what goes on in their bodies.  They read some nonsense on woo-woo blogs and that becomes the truth.

Pubmed tells a different story but you’d have to branch out of your comfort zone and see what other fields are doing to understand that, no, glands don’t get fatigued and CNSs don’t “burn out”. (CNS = central nervous system)  There’s some freaky mess going on which I think is worth understanding but the majority of anything ever posted about “CNS anything” on the internet is just voodoo.

Someone than asked Matt for the cliff notes on the central nervous system, and in response to that, he said:

It’s kinda hard to give cliffs but to make it easy there are two different things happening:

1. feeling bad after a workout via soreness but also that “man I feel burned out” sensation — this is a specific response of the immune system acting on the brain and triggering “I feel bad” feelings.

2. loss of fine motor control (strength and power performance) within a workout session due to a specific pattern of activity in parts the brain controlling mental effort and motor control — this expresses itself as fatigue but neurologically speaking it’s more like a safety device

“CNS fatigue” as an internet concept wraps up both of them into one package, and they are related weakly, but one doesn’t lead to the other, and neither of them has anything to do with long-term recovery (and recovery itself is a misleading idea)

I then asked:

Are you saying that recovery itself is a misleading idea from the standpoint that we are not locked into some fixed stress/recovery/supercompensation curve that’s the same for everyone irrespective of individual circumstances? Or what?

Matt replied with:

Mostly I think supercompensation is a poor model of what actually happens.

We don’t have hitpoints.

Muscles recover and rebuild themselves but for most people “recovered” means “I’m not sore anymore” and that’s really got no impact on the real question of “can I train again?”

JC Deen says:

so you don’t necessarily look at it from a standpoint of having “x” amount of recovery units in a period of time and once we run out, we die? kinda like a video game. or something.

and

so do you feel there is an optimal recovery period? or that it’s highly individual when it comes to work load, stress, sexcapades, etc?

Matt replies with:

depends on workloads, life stress, individual biology-psychology and past training experience mainly

After a few more questions, Matt cuts to the meat of his point, which is what I thought was too good not to share:

see what I’ve been seeing as a consistent thing is that stress does most of its work *through* the psychological response

so the actual physical stress of a workout might be nothing, or at least minimal, but if you’re all wound up over it, that magnifies the negative symptoms

and not just that, but folks prone to getting mentally wound up do it for *everything else* in their lives too, so not only do workouts beat you up extra bad but you’ll take any other life-stress extra bad too

Sapolsky wrote about these folks and they’re actually measurably stressed out, and there’s prolly a heritable cause as it runs in families

hence my interest in mindfulness and relaxation techniques; if you learn to dial back your own emotional reactions to squats (or anything else) then you rob it of much of its power to cause “recovery problems”

in my thinking the physical stress of a workout can be laregely adapted to, hence why daily squatting works *if you wrap your head around it and stick with it* (and don’t get too wacky with the workloads until you adjust to each new level)

but the emotional response, when you get in there and dump all your energy into your work sets and spend 16 hours stressing over it before and after, that’s what will floor you

Just to make sure I was reading Matt correctly, I asked:

Yeah, that’s the best I’ve seen you explain it, Matt. Even factoring in all the talk of stress/recovery and HFT you’ve had on your site over the last while. Good stuff.

Says a lot about the batshit crazy dieters too, who flip the hell out about fractions of a calorie, endless workouts, and body image. How they’re perceiving the importance of what, for the most part, amounts to trivial things is causing greater “disturbances” than said “things” themselves… if that makes any sense.

Going back to an old analogy you used to explain the concept of stress/recovery… and this goes back well before you’re newer line of thinking… but I believe you used the sink full of water to represent our recovery capacities. The drain represented the application of stress – training, dieting, life, or whatever. Each variable sucking out a portion of the available recovery capacity. And the faucet represented our ability to replace said capacity.

This older line of thinking was limited in that, more or less, we were viewing the capacity and recovery as fixed variables locked into the patterns of the theoretical model of the day (single factor or dual factor curves of recovery/supcomp).

Therefore we were constantly balancing our “drains” in accordance to these fixed variables, which always netted to our basic full body training, upper/lower splits, or even body part training as long as there was adequate rest between training each muscle/movement/or whatever.

But now we’re saying not only is the size of the sink and the volume of the water pouring out the faucet more adaptable than originally assumed, but also that the drain is going to open up more in response to our perception of training rather than it is to the actual dosage of training.

Am I thinking about this correctly?

Matt’s final reply for completeness:

ya that’s a good way to look at it

this is why I’ve been so big on the belief aspect as well, I mean if you start from the premise that “squatting again tomorrow will overtrain me” then you’re going to react to that as such and, physical damage to tissues aside, you’ve started a cascade of events that is potentially more harmful to your physical condition than the workout itself

Just some food for thought… sorry if the disjointed copy and paste job doesn’t make a lot of sense to some of you.  Matt is one of those guys who’s always making me think, which is a very good thing.  I need more people in my fitness network who make me question my beliefs and ideas.  You can check out more of Matt’s stuff here.

I really loved this article from my boy JC.  I sound like a broken record, but people really need to do a better job at managing their expectations.  It seems as if most believe they’re some sort of machine that can handle any and everything.  A shortage of calories means I’ll lose fat?  Great, I’ll eat like a bird.  Oh, exercise will give me a hot body?  Fantastic… I’ll go in balls to the wall.  Each. And. Every. Day…. while still eating like a bird mind you.  And oh yeah, I’ll do sprints afterwords until I’m ready to pass out.  Sort of off topic to JC’s post, but the point he’s making, and the one I’m trying to make is that people need to realize that it’s not about going 100% each and every day.  Some times less is more.

Neghar Fonooni is no stranger to my Good Reads lists.  I think she’s pumping some of the most sensible information out to the female fitness community. She recently make a guest post on Mike Boyle’s blog that she titled, Nutrition Advice for Females.  I liked the article simply because it highlighted Neghar’s objectivity while also slaying some dogma that won’t die off about meal frequency.  Bottom line… all these different ways of eating or nothing more than methods – different plays using the same underlying principles.  It’s the principles that need to remain intact.  As for methods, there are hundreds… it’s just a matter of figuring out what works for you and your body at this point in time.

Borge Fagerli recently posted some of his ideas about the religion of low carbotology in addition to the cultural aspects of acceptable physiques… I think it’s worth a read.

I always enjoy reading Mike Robertson’s blog.  He pumps out a ton of practical stuff.  His most recent article dealt with knee pain, and since I’ve had 3 people contact me this week alone regarding knee pain, I figured it’d be worthwhile throwing this article in here.  I also suggest reading the older articles Mike posted at the beginning of this article.

I think Matt Perryman was targeting fitness professionals when he wrote A Systems View of Exercise but in reality, this is an important read for everyone involved.  Chalk it up to how we’re taught in school, the soundbite science we’re slammed with every which way in the media, the alarmists and crooks who cherry pick research in order to sell you something you don’t need, or whatever.  But across the board in the fitness industry, people are hung up on reductionism and Matt’s article does an excellent job at trying to shift that focus.  Or better yet, zoom that focus out a little bit so people stop missing the forest for the trees.

Thought I’d share a recent email exchange with one of my readers:

Hi Steve,

I’m not sure if you’ve covered this in a post before – feel free to point me to the post if you have – but I was wondering what your thoughts are on a regime that gives overall fitness and strength? Bit of a background from my point of view – I play netball and touch rugby, have recently (in the last 8 months) taken up running and can now run for 5k non stop. I used to love doing weights in the gym ahead of cardio but I can no longer afford a gym membership so am using 30DS as my ‘weights’. What I ideally would like to do is a combo of cardio and weights that will give me endurance as well as sprint speed, plus a good body shape – I am not a fan of the marathon runner look! I would also like to compete in a sprint distance triathlon this year so would like ‘all-round’ fitness. I have a full time job and also in summer I go out hill walking every other weekend so quads strength and endurance is paramount in those months. I am trying to do too much? Is it humanly possible to achieve all these things at once or should I just focus on what is to hand (eg netball and rugby seasons are separate and the triathlon would be before mot of the hill walking would be done for the season.). I’m 5’6″, 29yo and weighing in as of this morning at 76kg. I’m not too bothered about how much weight I lose but I know to perform better I need to drop some weight and so have my goal weight at the high end of healthy BMI (for what it’s worth). My food and exercise diary is open if you wish to see what I currently do, although I have been on a bit of a break for Christmas
and New Year.

Anyway, what I thought would be a quick question has become quick long winded so I’ll leave it for now.

Thanks for your time,
XXX

Yes, only the very lucky can excel at everything at once… get strong, have optimal endurance, have an ideal body composition, etc. All these goals require different modes of training if they’re to be optimized. So if you optimize one, you’re, by default, taking away from the other.

That’s not to say you can’t improve everything at once, depending on where you’re currently at in terms of your training career.  In theory, the further you are from your genetic potential, and thus the more room for improvement you have, the easier it is to bring the various qualities up. It’s just that you can’t dial everything in perfectly simultaneously.

I train a lot of women and most have goals of primarily looking better (chasing that athletic, toned look) while improving general fitness. And for these things to be accomplished, training needs to be spread across progressive heavy strength training and various forms of conditioning work.

The conditioning work is sort of the wild card, as the type and dose is going to depend on the goal. If they just want to improve generally, they can pretty much do anything that keeps them moving for any sort of duration. But if they’re training for a specific endurance event or whatever, it’s going to require more
deliberate training in order to dial it in.

Put simply, there isn’t one best program out there. It’s going to depend on the person, where he or she currently is, where they’d like to go, etc.

Thanks for your reply – I did think I was asking a lot when I looked at how much I want to be fit for.

Is twice per week of each training block enough to see moderate improvements? Eg if I did endurance cardio 2 days, sprint cardio 2 days and weights 2 days is that enough in your opinion for anyone of what would probably actually be low fitness if I were to take my VO2max.

I think I am always going to be aiming for good overall fitness rather be a specialist in one area as I don’t want to feel like exercise is a chore or that I’m working on one area and then going on to focus on another area and losing all the gains made in the first place.

It’s hard to say. We know that you need to stress your body above a certain threshold in any given capacity (strength, endurance, etc) if it’s going to improve. And that threshold changes with training/experience. Which is to say that for the novice, they can get better across the board pretty much doing whatever. For this reason, I think it’s important for novices to sort of do what they want and figure things out as they go. There’s no need for being crazy specialized or regimented unless that’s something they want.  Just take a balanced approach doing some strength oriented stuff and some conditioning oriented stuff… focus on quality effort and consistency.

As that training theshold adapts/increases though, it takes more deliberate work to squeeze out the adaptations/improvements we’re looking for. In these cases, I’m much more inclined to specialize. But it’s not an on/off switch as you’re suggesting. It takes less work to maintain an attribute than it does to build an attribute. So I’d simply cycle through blocks where I’m building up one or two capacities while maintaining the rest, and then change this emphasis with each successive block based on needs, goals, etc. And when those changes occur, things that were being focused on will now be moved to maintenance, and thus, less attention will be dedicated to them.

This is all theoretical, but it is how I manage my clients’ programs who have goals that transcend looks. There’s always some strength training and always some conditioning work. But the mix, dose, and specific type varies based on current needs.

This may have opened up more questions, which is totally fine. Just let me know.

Well I definitely think despite having played sports and exercised for most of my life I could class myself as a novice to proper training of any sort, especially when it comes to pushing myself cardiovascularly. I think therefore I can hope for improvements in all areas for a while yet.

So once I think I’m ready to focus on specific areas I cycle through the focus areas and do one or two at a time? Then switch them to maintenance and focus on what had been on the backburner of maintenance? I guess then once I am trying to get more serious my macros will matter more in my nutrition? And that would open a whole other can of worms…

I think it’s such a shame that so many people have looks as their goal with P/T – either the men that want to bulk up or the women that want to be slim and toned. I guess that would make up the majority of your clients? Not that I’d complain if I had a body like Jessica Biel or similar!!

Out of curiosity, do you provide P/T via Skype/emails?

Yup, you’ve got the idea. Start out as a generalist and then as you progress, you’ll learn that eventually more planning and specialization are in order. And maybe not.  Some people stay generalists forever.  They’re able to do all the things they like to do and they’re happy with how they look.  How will you know if you need to graduate from being a generalist? Well as everything progresses and you focus on everything at once, eventually you’ll become spread too thin. At that point, you’ll sort of feel like a big pile of poo and your performance across the board will start to lag.

In the novice stages, you can’t muster up enough intensity to justify such planning. Granted, that doesn’t mean you can’t work your ass off. Or that you can’t over do it. It’s just that the hit on the body increases as your abilities increase.

Nutrition doesn’t change that much throughout the process. I mean obviously it needs to change based on whether you’re trying to gain or lose weight. And it should change in response to your exercise load… which a lot of people overlook. Doing stuff, like exercise, requires fuel/nutrition. Do more exercise, need more fuel. Without it, people tend to run themselves into a hole…. especially the neurotic dieters and exercises we see in our culture today.

Regarding your comment about it being a shame that most people’s primary goal revolves around looks…. that’s a HUGE can of works. I can’t blame people for training for looks. Let’s face it, we don’t exactly live in a society that’s very deep. We’re very shallow and view pretty much everything on the surface. With such an intense focus on weight and appearance, a lot of people are brainwashed into living and dying by the numbers.

But here’s what a lot of people have trouble grasping. If they focused on performance and consistency more than numbers, they’d arrive at the same destination eventually. They’re too hung up on the immediate feedback the scale provides, regardless of how irrational it is at times. Taking an extended viewpoint just doesn’t jive with how their mindsets have been molded by our fitness culture.

I say it time and time again, but form follows function. If you get somebody strong and they pair that with sensible nutrition, more often than not their physique is going to be optimized within their genetic limits. The body that most men are shooting for is nothing more than a strong body with low levels of body fat. The body that most women are shooting for is nothing more than a strong body with low levels of body fat. The difference is men have the hormonal dispositions to support a larger base of muscle mass.

As far as my client base goes, it’s pretty mixed, thankfully. Of course I have those people who hire me who are solely interested in the scale and their appearance. But I also have a large base of clients who are merely interested in maintaining functionality and health. If they wind up looking better, they’re happy, but it’s not the prerogative. I also work with a lot of athletes. I’m a strength coach too, so I deal with individual athletes as well as a few teams.

And in terms of web-based services, you can read about them here:

http://body-improvements.com/services/online-training/

No, I didn’t jump on the bandwagon with a New Years post.  Just not my style… so business as usual.  Speaking of which, business in my gym comes first.  This website is mostly just a hobby… one that I love very much.  But I do want to apologize for not updating the site nearly enough.  Are we still friends?

Onto this week’s list:

Holy shit this is an epic article.  Seriously.  You want a kick in the pants?  Read this.  Now.  I don’t care if your goals pertain to fitness, business, or whatever.

I’ve been reading more of Dewey Nielsen’s stuff and he recently wrote what I consider to be an excellent article about Crossfit.  I agree with it wholeheartedly. Favorite line from the article… “Crossfit is not a thought-out progressive exercise system, it is an extreme sport done with strength training tools.”  So true… at least true in the context of how I’m seeing most CF “professionals” handle their training.

Nia Shanks has been on a roll.  She recently wrote a beginner’s strength training article for women that I think many of you will enjoy.

This is a great rant on the Science of Running blog about Crossfit and in particular the Crossfit Endruance methodologies. Decent follow-up discussion under the article too.

That’s it for today.

We’re inundated with technical articles dealing with the intricacies of diet and exercise.  This leads to a lot of people missing the big picture… missing the fundamentals that truly do drive the most mileage in terms of success.  That’s why I really liked Alan Aragon’s responses to Anoop Balachandran’s (who operates www.exercisebiology.com) questions during an interview.  They were full of the simple truths that many people need reminding of.  Check it out.

Matt Perryman is the one fitness writer who continually improves.  I swear, I’ve been reading him for what feels like a decade on various forums, articles, and blogs and it becomes clearer and clearer that he’s not afraid to revise his thinking.  He’s not hung up on being Right.  He’s just concerned with helping people learn to think better.  And he’s real good at it.  His recent article titled Knowing Stuff: How to Learn a New Subject proves my point perfectly.

It’s no secret that I believe most of today’s dieters have truly awful relationships with food.  It seems to me that many people, especially women, have borderline eating disorders.  I think we need to start focusing on this over what exercise program is best, what foods are good and which are bad, etc.  Nia Shanks recently posted a blog titled Food Struggles and Victories.  In it, a number of women shared their experiences with overcoming unhealthy relationships with food.  Definitely worth a read.

Borge Fagerli doesn’t get enough exposure in my opinion – he has some fantastic ideas about training and he doesn’t sling bullshit.  Check out his recent article titled Taking a Big Dump.  He spits all kinds of common sense across many facets of training and diet.

I couldn’t be happier.  It’s rare I meet someone impressive in the fitness community on a local level, but I did just that recently when I came across Shon Gross, a physical therapist in Colmar, PA.  This guy knows his stuff, no joke.  Shon has really been cranking out great material for his new website.  Most recently he wrote an article titled Video Tutorial-Scapular Depression with Shoulder Extension.  I figured I’d share it since a large majority of my clientele has poor thoracic extensibility and scapular dyskinesia.

Joel Jamieson recently wrote an excellent article about the big picture of injury prevention.  I think a lot of people skip articles like these since they’re currently healthy and believe, misguidedly, that they’ll never get hurt from their training.  But in today’s fitness culture where more and harder is always better, I think a lot of lessons are learned the hard way.  Training and the application of stress needs to be individualized, timed properly, and dosed appropriately.  This article is a must read as far as I’m concerned.  Check it out!

Lastly, but certainly not least, my boy JC spits some truth about Turning Your Fitness Struggles Into Strengths.  JC’s always good for putting things into realistic terms.

Ok, i know weight lifting isn’t going to make me huge but the one thing I don’t want to get bigger are my legs since they’re already too big….and in the last couple of weeks….I have a pair of boots I can’t zip up anymore, another pair is tight that wasn’t and a pair of jeans is so tight on my thighs that I can’t wear them?  I know as I lose I’ll lose more body fat in my legs but I don’t really want my legs getting any bigger.

Let me start with some objective, random thoughts.

1.  In the beginning, even while dieting, strength training can invoke muscle growth.  It’s just the way it is with beginners, and you’ve never trained like this before in your life.  The bottom line is, though, that it’s not going to continue.  You’re legs are not going to get hulking huge, nor is any other part of you.  If it worked like that, your everyday male who’s lifting weights and eating in a surplus would become enormous.  You’re at the polar opposite end of the spectrum being female and dieting.  Your level of hormones wouldn’t support large muscle gains even if you were eating in a surplus.  This said, it’s something I wouldn’t sweat if I were you.  There’s a reason why you see women deadlifting 2 and 3 times their body weights without having tree-trunks for legs.

2.  Related to number 1, females wear form fitting clothing.  When clothes are tight, and there’s a minor change in circumference, said change is going to be greatly magnified due to the kinesthetic reminder from the form fitting clothing. Put differently, the tight wardrobe of females in our culture leaves no room for change unless change means smaller circumferences.

3.  You’re probably thinking, “Well smaller circumferences is what I’m interested in.”  And that’s completely understandable.  But I assure you that if you get the fat heading in the right direction, the small increase in muscle mass stemming from your “novice gains” will not matter in terms of circumference.  Well it’ll matter, but only to the extent that you’ll have defined shape to your legs once the fat’s reduced.

4.  Let’s, for a moment, pretend that your legs became exponentially larger and more muscular over time even though you’re female with low levels of anabolic hormones (relative to man) and even though you’re dieting.  For whatever reason… chalk it up to genetics or whatever… but your body is such that you can build freaky levels of muscle mass in your legs regardless of circumstance.  Let me ask you something… what happens when someone breaks their leg and is placed in a full-leg cast for a couple of months?  Hint:  The simple loss of mobility and load baring leads to substantial atrophy of the muscles of the injured leg. The point is, even if you did build levels of muscle that you weren’t comfortable with, it wouldn’t be any more permanent than your current program.  Said muscle would only exist due to your body’s homeostatic drive to adapt to its environment.  Right now your environment contains progressively heavier strength training.  Change, reduce, or remove this stressor and the body’s “desire” to maintain this supposed muscle mass will also be changed, reduced, or removed.
Put simply… adaptations are reversible.

5.  This is all the more reason to really focus on dietary compliance.  You mentioned that the scale is finally starting to trend downward, but for a number of weeks that hasn’t been the case.  Which implies that you’ve been strength training while eating in at least maintenance and possibly even a surplus.  Novice gains aside, when you’re introduced to this sort of training while eating maintenance or a surplus, there’s much more “incentive” for your body to add muscle.  We’re strength training the way we are in order to preserve as much muscle as possible while eating in a deficit. Granted, I’ve encountered many women who wind up losing their fat, exposing their shape and muscle, and at that point in time, still wanting more muscle… and we’re not talking a desire to be bulky at all.  In that case, we are progressively getting stronger while eating in a surplus.  But that’s not where we’re at in your case… so let’s prioritize nutrition, get your calories dialed in, and let our strength training serve its intended purpose.

That’s just some food for thought.  We can discuss this further of course at our session tomorrow, but before we change anything with your programming, I’d
consider being a bit more patient.  Give your body some time to adjust to this sort of training while being paired with a dialed in diet. If, after that, you still find that things aren’t heading in a direction you’re okay with, we can do some overhauling.  It’s my job to pair the type and dose of training to your goals, and that’s something I’ll certainly do as I’m not married to any one approach.  But I’m not sure we’re at a true crossroad yet.

If we did wind up making some changes, here are some thoughts…

Muscle growth requires sufficient tension in the muscle, which correlates very closely with the load you’re lifting.  Which simply means that you need to lift a sufficiently heavy weight and thus cause a sufficient amount of tension in the muscle in order to force growth and or strength gains.  Concurrently though, you also need to do enough work with said load.  Simply lifting a sufficiently heavy weight a couple of times each day isn’t going to cut the mustard. There’s a “fatigue” component to muscular growth.  So if it winds up that we do have to make some change, it’s likely going to be in the volume department in certain lifts which should “dampen” the growth stimulus.

Given that I get the sense that you like the new found strength, I don’t see a point in sacrificing it unnecessarily… especially given all of the the benefits associated with health and functionality.

Best,

Steve

Joel Jamieson gives a great primer to the autonomic nervous system and heart rate variability and how these things relate to stress and recovery.

My buddy JC dropped some awesome insight on the everyday struggles we all face pertaining to fitness, progress, and consistency.  He always has great perspective.

Many of the women who contact me need to be reading stuff like this.  Nia Shanks does a wonderful job at bringing things down to a sensible baseline when it comes to exercise choices.

I’ve been reading a lot of Stephan Guyenet’s stuff.  He’s a smart guy and doesn’t bullshit… two things I admire in this field.  Earlier this year he wrote a series of articles titled, ‘Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity.”  In the 7th installment, he laid out a list of “food rules” if you will.  The entire series is great, but this segment in particular should be worth your while.  If you’ve read anything from me, you know I’m not a fan of rigid dieting.  But I think bits and pieces of Stephan’s rules can be tailored to your individual circumstances.

Tony Gentilcore cracks me up.  He has a great sense of humor and since this is paired with a good style of teaching fitness information… well, he’s worth paying attention to.  In his latest blog post he posted a video highlighting how he teaches the deadlift.  Good stuff!

Granted, I know some deadlifters who pull with high hips and even rounded backs and they don’t break.  Check out this article from my buddy, Matt Perryman, titled, “A Defense of Round-backed Deadlifting.“  Keep in mind, I’m more likely to setup one of my novice client’s deadlifts with a conventional, neutral spine alignment similar to what Tony covers in his video.  I don’t think Matt would argue with that.  Just some alternative food for thought – things aren’t always black or white.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve updated the blog.  Since I’m past due, I promise to deliver something that’s worth your time.  James Krieger, one of my favorite fitness/weight loss bloggers, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions about obesity.  That’s his primary area of interest and study.

While nothing earth shatteringly new came out of the discussion, which should be obvious as there’s nothing earth shatteringly new out there, he shared a lot of simple truths that many people tend to gloss over.

You can check the recent interview out here.

Dr. Arya Sharma discusses an interesting concept pertaining to core body temperature and its relationship to metabolic rate.  It’ll be interesting to see what new research arises from the line of thinking that obese people may very well have lower core temperatures.  Be that as it may though, the current body of evidence seems to suggest that, if anything, obese folks have higher energy expenditures, which throws a wrench into the body temperature assumption.

Nia Shanks recently had a guest article on JC Deen’s website titled Listen Up, Ladies: Minimum Training for Maximum Results.  I was hesitant to post this article since it won’t mesh with a certain faction of my female readers.  I know there are many women who read BI who have a considerable amount of fat to lose.  And minimalist training isn’t exactly how I’d structure their programs.  But the message in Nia’s article definitely fits with another faction of female readers here – namely those who aren’t carrying lots of fat who are neurotic about the quantity of exercise they do.

I receive a lot of emails where people ask for a list of recommended books.  For the trainers and coaches who email me, Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning is always on my list.  Not that it’s a new concept or anything, but there has been a lot of chatter in the industry regarding energy system development.   Rightfully so, too, as it’s an integral component of performance preparation and Joel’s book dives into the whys and hows better than any resource I’ve seen.  He has enlisted a fine group of coaches and authors on his website and the most recent article titled Research Review: Energy Systems, Interval Training, & RSA written by Eric Oetter is worth the read.  Especially for any athetes or coaches out there who are involved in sports that require the maintenance of repeated-sprint ability.

Here’s another of my weekly reminders to the women out there that they need to be lifting heavy things.  Well, actually the reminder comes from Sally Moss of Gubernatrix in her female friendly guide to strength training.