Male Pattern Fitness

In Defense of Treadmills with TV's

2010-03-12T21:45:46Z

Had two phone-conversations recently with higher-ups at two of the leading fitness equipment manufacturers in the country (they have me on speed-dial, you know, because i'm so cool and all). My main question for them both was, "what's new? What's hot? What's the latest trend that's really going to sweep the health-club world in the next few years?"

The two different responses were fascinating...

One of them--let's call them the Phunctional Pharm--went off on user-powered treadmills, Spinning-class bikes that use magnetic force for resistance and provide objective level indicators to the users, zero-impact cable-column machines for injury recovery and performance enhancement. The other gentleman hailed from a company we'll call Don't Be Aphraid of Phitness, and spoke of cardio equipment with built-in customizable personalized entertainment systems, strength-training machines designed to be maximally comfortable and minimally intimidating, systems and programs that allowed you to do "the exact same workout every time you go to the gym."

Of course, my knee-jerk reaction is to sing the praises of the Phunctional Pharm and to hold up Don't Be Aphraid... as the sign of everything that's wrong with this whole phitness industry. After all, PP is trying to bring proven athletic-style training methods to the masses. They're trying to educate the public about new methods that are fun, safe, and truly effective for building strength, health, and phit..., er, fitness, while DBA is simply trying to coax people into using tired, outmoded, and ineffective fitness methods, simply because they're comfortable and easy and manageable.

But I'm not going to do that, because the fact is that there's a place for Don't Be Aphraid of Phitness: they're the "gateway" company. They're the folks who--hopefully--help to hook the people who otherwise wouldn't dream of going to the gym, much less into the weight room. By supplying "entertainment space" to the user of cardio equipment, they're showing the user that exercising (or, at least, a form of exercising, or, at least, something closer to exercising than they're used to) can be...not all that much different from something they're probably pretty good at, namely, channel-surfing. I never asked the VP I spoke with what the company mission statement was, but it clearly had something to do with casting as broad a net as possible: they want to make fitness as easy and unintimidating as they can for everyone.

The fact is that I'm as happy as a clam in a junkyard with a handful of heavy things. I consider it a personal challenge to figure out how to work out with whatever random objects and in whatever random space I can find, be it a hotel room, a stairwell, or a park with a jungle gym. So I really don't need all that much. If you're reading this, I imagine you're similarly inclined. Sure, cool toys are a bonus, but they aren't necessary, and sometimes they're a hindrance.

But as I processed my knee-jerk response to the reps from these two companies, I realized that both of them are, in their way, fighting the good fight. At last count, 126% of Americans are morbidly obese (or something like that), and all the railing in the world about max effort incline bench presses and sprint intervals isn't going to do much to change that. But what might change that--or at least start to make a dent in that--is, unfortunately, a recumbent bike with a DVD player and internet access.

Have a great weekend--

Cool Equipment Alert!

2010-03-08T21:45:54Z

Recently I was given a writing assignment to cover fitness technology. And not just 'stuff', meaning kettlebells and resistance bands and cool items that enhance an already-functional workout. No: I'm supposed to write about beeping, blinking, plug-in devices of the sort I often rail about in this space.

Interesting challenge, because the second you have to plug a piece of fitness equipment in, my hackles go up. I mean, it's bad enough that we can't capture all the energy being burned in gyms and use it to light and power our cities (though that may be coming!), but that we actually burn up MORE energy giving ourselves a workout? Well, you can't tell me that's right.

Laying that personal objection aside, I've been on the hunt for fitness devices--machines, even, as I'm not allowed to cheat and just use athletic watches with heart rate monitors and GPS tracking--which at the very least don't fly in the face of the basic idea that Exercise Should Make Your Body Function Better. That fitness programs and equipment should accommodate the body's natural functions--rather than vice versa.

To that end I discovered a very cool treadmill called "The Force". Essentially, YOU power it. Get on it, run, and it goes. Run slower, and it goes slower. It's a resisted-running device, and it's very cool. Haven't been on one--the closest I've gotten was getting on one of these last year--but I'm thinking this is where treadmills are going. You know, to the extent that treadmills can "go" anywhere.

Again, I'm not in the business of prognostication, but if you're into the single-joint machine exercises and the bodybuilding-only based training, I'd stockpile that equipment because it's going away.

(I'd say "Use the Force," but I'm pretty sure I'd be inundated with "Unsubscribe" notes.)

Off-Topic Hilarity

2010-03-05T18:00:28Z

Does this have anything to do with fitness? Don't think so, but I've got a shoulder injury, it's making me mad, and I desperately needed this laugh. Make sure to stick around for the 'toy steering wheel' bit.

Trust Thy Trainer

2010-03-04T17:54:28Z

So I recently acquired a client who wanted to work out three days a week.

Wonderful, I thought: three days a week is a good amount of time to get something done. True, you might not be able to do everything you'd like in three hours a week, but it's a good base from which to work, and if people are watching their diet and staying off the couch most other days, they're going to see some good progress pretty quickly.

A couple of weeks into our work together, I asked this client--let's call her "Emily"--what she'd done since I saw her last. I know she has a very active dog, and that she had recently started jazz-dance classes, but she responded, "No, I've done nothing since I saw you last."

Now, Emily is a friend of my wife's, and the reason I'd asked is that my wife had told me that Emily was actually hiring two trainers--myself and another guy--as well as the private dance coach. Her plan was to work out five days a week and on two of those days, do a dance class two other days as well.

Oddly, she had decided to withhold from either trainer the fact that she was working with someone else. So for about three weeks, this other trainer and I had been working with Emily under the assumption that she wasn't doing any strength training outside of our sessions with her.

So for awhile there, I was baffled why Emily was experiencing knee pain and seemed so fatigued during our relatively mild workouts.

Once she came clean as to what was going on--something she found agonizing to do, as she felt she was double-timing me and this other trainer--I adjusted her program accordingly. Hopefully the other trainer did too.

I don't imagine anyone reading this will have this problem, but just in case: share with your trainer openly about what you're doing outside the gym. If he/she is worth a lick, he/she will work with whatever those activities are. If you don't, there's a possibility--perhaps even in probability--that you'll get injured.

Newsflash: Diets (Alone) Don't Work, Either

2010-03-03T21:10:14Z

A few months ago we read--and mostly conceded--that exercise alone doesn't work for effective weight loss.

Now a study has emerged suggesting that dieting doesn't either.

As if we needed a reminder that diets mostly fail, The New England Journal of Medicine has published a new report on an intense, tightly controlled experiment involving more than 300 moderately obese people. After two years of effort the dieters lost, on average, 6 to 10 pounds. The study, funded in part by the Atkins Research Foundation, seemed designed to prove that low-carb diets trump low-fat diets. But in the end, all it really showed is that dieters can put forth tremendous effort and reap very little benefit.

This is interesting, in a way: the nutrition folks had themselves a nice little party at the expense of the gym rats when the now-infamous TIME article came out back in August; now the workout folks get a little payback.

But isn't it time we all conceded that in order to lose a significant amount of weight, you've got to marshal all your resources? Throw everything at the problem? Diet, exercise, less time in front of screens of various kinds, more NEPA (non-exercise physical activity, like taking the stairs?).

I've never been obese, but when I was growing up I had a friend whose mother struggled with her weight. She had a magnet on the refrigerator which said "The Price of Fitness--like liberty--is Eternal Vigilance!" I remember thinking it was cringe-worthy. Even then, I believed that it was possible, maybe even advisable, to compartmentalize one's life into "exercise time" and "the rest of the time." I mean, shouldn't you exercise so you can enjoy the rest of your life? I'm still a huge parking-lot circler (but maybe that's due in part to the fact that my son is pushing 35 pounds of squirmy sinew).

I still believe in the life-enjoyment thing, but I also believe that life enjoyment can and should include activities which require movement. Not necessarily full-on exercise, but some kind of movement. I'm a huge fan of walks, for instance, and of going to the park with my kids. If I'm on parent-detail, believe me, we're out the door.

As another article in the Times suggests, "little changes"--like skipping the usual cookie or having diet sodas instead of 100-proof industrial solvents--aren't enough to make big differences in weight or health, but they may be "gateway" behaviors to bigger changes. You drink diet soda one month, and then wonder if maybe you could grow to like green ice tea. You try getting a salad with that instead of fries one day a week and then start doing it every day. You take the stairs instead of the elevator one day and then find yourself taking walks on your lunch break. And on and on.

The idea is to develop an awareness and start a trend rather than think you can kill a water buffalo with a push pin.

That's the hope, anyway.

JACKED (Based on the Novel 'Pump' by Veiny)

2010-03-03T05:28:40Z

I was recently sent a couple of fitness books to review; photos and links are below.

I'll try to say this without being horribly un-gallant: neither book represents what I would consider a high standard of fitness writing or exercise science. There is decent information in both books; however, if you're looking for up-to-date, attractively presented and engagingly written information with its own spin on things--I urge you to look elsewhere.

Moving on to speak more generally: I'm an optimist and believe that all trainers have something to contribute to this field; sure, there are people who have been in it too long; people who have gotten themselves into decent shape but truly haven't the slightest idea how to impart that information to others; there are people who are great people-people and terrible with the written word and/or with exercise science or current training practices. But I even believe that these people have something to offer someone.

The fact is, however, that no trainer can be all things to all people. Throwing myself under the bus, I think I'm good with general fitness; with helping people look better and feel good in their bodies in equal measure, and with coming up with an interesting variety of ways to get people there. But if you're going to enter a bodybuilding or figure-modelling competition and need all kinds of exacting information on dieting grams of protein and carbs and posing trunks--I'm not your man. I know a few local people who could do a bang-up job with you--my friend Karen Williams, for example, who's fared well in a number of physique contests herself, can make it happen for you--but I freely admit to not being one of them. I also think I'm decent with the written word and with public speaking, but I'd hate to go toe-to-toe with a Todd Durkin in a contest over who can get a room full of people psyched about working out. That dude could motivate a stone.

I know that many trainers want to write books or make DVD's or sell supplements or create an online coaching program, but not everyone's cut out for that. They may be great at motivating housewives to pump iron, but they might lack the writing and science chops to create a great, innovative program and present it in a captivating way. And with guys like Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove and Ian King and Eric Cressey and Chad Waterbury out there as your competition, you darn well better have your ducks in a row if you're going to throw your hat in that particular ring.

Buy this book here....

....and this one here.

Testing My Mettle at Aikido

2010-03-01T19:04:04Z

Yesterday I officially tested for my 5th-kyu in aikido. Before you get too excited, realize that a "5th kyu" is something like "Private, First Class" in the military: the bottom rung on the ladder. Graduation from boot camp. The point at which the drill sergeant stops calling you a maggot and an abortion. 'Kyu' designation descends until you reach "shodan", or first-degree black belt, at which point the numbers begin ascending: second degree, third degree, and on up until one dies or gives up the art.

One major benefit of this unnervingly difficult martial art is that it doesn't rely on strength: I've worked with high-ranking 90-pound girls and 80-year old men who were able to toss me about quite easily. The downside, for a guy with almost 20 years of strength-training behind me, is that...it doesn't rely on strength, meaning that technique is everything, and if they spot you leaning on your hard-earned muscle, they dock ya.

I fully appreciate this idea that strength shouldn't be the focus of a martial art; after all, there's always going to be someone bigger and stronger than you are, and those are the people who are liable to pick on you on the mean streets of Malibu. But in aikido, that means that your techniquehas got to be spot on.

Which mine isn't.

It's all well and good to use virtually no strength when working with someone your own size or smaller--but working with someone who outweighs you is tough, especially as a beginner.

In a testing situation, your opponents--the people on whom you demonstrate the required techniques--are selected at random; you can't choose them beforehand. So It's the luck of the draw whether you get a 5-foot, 110-pound first-year student or a six-foot-four, 220-pound guy who's studied for 15 years. Naturally enough, performing a wrist lock on the former is quite a different matter from performing the same thing on the latter.

My first opponent (you might get two in a short exam like the one I was taking) was a 200-plus pounder who was about five inches shorter than me. His center of gravity was practically below the level of the floor. And I was expected to chuck the guy around like a rag doll without using a whiff of strength.

Er, good luck.It was a cross between wrestling an oak tree and a fire hydrant.

Needless to say, the little technique I have went out the window, and I wound up muscling the guy all over the floor for all I was worth. Though he very easily could have resisted my efforts, he went along with it all so as not to sabotage me too horribly. The upshot, though, was that my test was very un-aikido-like.

When my next opponent emerged--blessedly, a tiny wisp of a thing--I breathed a sigh of relief. The second half of the unarmed portion of my test went much better.

Then came a few weapons techniques, and but for a moment when my mind completely fried when I forgot a basic movement, I aquitted myself reasonably well and wound up with a passing grade.

Up to this point in my life I've managed to perform reasonably well in most athletic endeavors I've tried, simply because I work at maintaining some semblance of strength and conditioning. As a result, I can typically fake it till I make it.

But there's no faking it in aikido.Which is what makes it fascinating and god-awfully frustrating at the same time.
(Some guys who are way, way better than I am at aikido.)

High-Fives Beget Success

2010-02-25T18:39:48Z

Forgive the blog-lapse; my family has been passing around a wicked stomach virus. I was patient zero; now everyone else has it and I'm spending my free time washing barfy bed linens and shopping for herbal remedies. Parenthood!

I was tooling about for a blog topic this morning and when I found it--this article on the influence of touch in team-building, success, and life in general--I was reminded of a piece of dating advice I must have heard a hundred times growing up: "If she ever touches you--anywhere--on the arm, on the hand, on your face--for any reason, even to brush a fly away, you're in, baby!" I took this advice to heart, and must have contrived a dozen ways to trick girls into brushing into me, even by accident, just to sooth my dateless ego: I'd walk around with toy houseflies taped to my arms; I'd spend as much time as possible in the cafeteria, trying to predict which Italian Ice Sorbet the cute sophomore was going to go for and shoot for the same one just as she extended her arm. Alas, no dates came of any of it.

More story after the "jump" below...

But, miracle of miracles, all those dating books from the stone age that tell you that touch is significant weren't lying. In fact, they may have understated the case:

The evidence that [social touching, such as high-fiving and the like] can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. ...

"We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions," Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be "a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined."

To see whether a rich vocabulary of supportive touch is in fact related to performance, scientists at Berkeley recently analyzed interactions in one of the most physically expressive arenas on earth: professional basketball. Michael W. Kraus led a research team that coded every bump, hug and high five in a single game played by each team in the National Basketball Association early last season.

In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors... report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

When I started out as a personal trainer, I was very touch-conscious: I rarely clients at all. I'm still highly aware of touching clients but now I do it with a clear intention. In my field, of course, touching has practical benefits: if I want to call a client's attention to his lower back--if he needs to extend it more in a given exercise, for instance--touching is immediately helpful. The touch brings his awareness immediately into the correct area and makes him instantly aware of the position he's in.

Massage, of course, is useful and helpful for all kinds of reasons (my clients typically don't foam-roll on their own, and I'm starting to think that having a client foam-roll on the clock is as much of a poor use of their time and money as having them walk on a treadmill on the clock, so I'll generally work them over with the roller myself before a workout).

And of course, touch is fundamental to the Feldenkrais method, and, in a different but related way, in aikido, my two new-ish obsessions on the health-and-fitness axis. In addition to the emotional content of touch which the article discusses, it's clear that a bounty of very tangible information is conveyed through touch as well: a good Feldenkrais practitioner can completely change the way you move with thirty minutes of precise manipulation of your body; a master aikidoist can "read" a vast amount of information about the direction, speed, weight, and intention behind an attack simply by bringing himself into contact with the attacker's body.

That touch also seems to help build community, teamwork, and strengthen social and emotional bonds isn't terribly surprising--but it's interesting to see the success-building value of social touch so clearly and scientifically validated.

If You Get a Pig Spine of Your Own

2010-02-22T21:30:01Z

Nick Tumminello dug up some cool videos showing Mark Young taking us on a guided tour through a pig's spine. Good stuff! Literally pointing out--with he surgical tool--how the spine works, Mark makes a strong case for emphasizing some of the more popular fitness techniques du jour: thoracic mobility and unilateral lower-body training while minimizing lumbar rotation and excessive spinal flexion and extension.

What that means to you and me is to foam-roll the thoracic spine and find additional ways to twist and mobilize the upper spine; to work with lunges, step-ups and other single-limb lower-body movements in lieu of a lot of compressive movements like heavy squats (unless they are an essential part of your athletic program), and to remove crunches and broomstick rotations from your program at all costs. if you're still doing those things after all my ranting and raving anyway, I don't know what to do with you.

When it comes to heavy bilateral squats, Mark suggests to rotate them in and out of your program so as to avoid damage inflicted by repetitive movement.

But the most interesting thing is watching Mark poking away at the pig's spine, and hearing him suggest, at the end of the video, that we get "a pig spine of our own," which he says we can get at our local butcher's for next to nothing. What are you waiting for? And why am I sitting here blogging away when I could be at the Ralph's picking one up? I'm outta here!

A Fitness Frankenstein!

2010-02-18T22:03:40Z

Trainer-stud Bret Contreras, aka "The Glute Guy" has published a couple of interesting articles recently detailing some mini exercise-physiology experiments he performed on himself over the last months. This one, which details the results of his extensive work on glute exercises; this one, which addresses shoulder and trapezius movements, and the one below, in which he talks about general lower-body exercises, and details his methodology:

As you can see if you watch the video, Contreras' methods are almost ridiculously simple. In short, he tapes EKG electrodes to the muscles whose activity he is trying to monitor, performs various strength-training movements, and reports which exercises result in the greatest activation--and, presumably, growth stimulus--in the muscles he's monitoring. His sample size is exactly one--himself--but, he argues, fairly persuasively, that although there might be some subject-to-subject variation in muscle activity throughout these exercises, it won't be terribly significant.

He's seeking to answer a question which bodybuilders have sought to answer since the dawn of the barbell: which exercises are the absolute best for the (shoulders, glutes, quads, hamstrings, etc?), and, through his Brundlefly-like self-experimentation, comes up with some answers that are pretty interesting and, to this 'no-fancy-book-learnin' amateur exercise physiologist, persuasive.

I do have a thought--inevitably--about some of the implications of Conteras' work, however. I get that, for someone seeking to build muscle mass, maximum stimulation of a particular muscle group is important, if not, indeed, paramount. And therefore it makes sense to create a kind of hierarchy of exercises based on these results, as Contreras does in the articles and videos linked above. I would add, though, that generating maximum effort in the muscles is really only one factor--and perhaps a less significant one-- in an athletic-training model, and indeed, in a general-fitness model of the kind that the average gym-goer is typically interested in following.

Lemmie splain you.

As I've mentioned so many times in this space my very computer monitor will probably vomit when I write it again, the body works optimally when everything works together as a whole. This isn't metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, it's fact. Bodybuilding movements--such as barbell curls--thrive on controlled inefficiency in which one particular area of the body is 'isolated' from the rest of the body in order to make it grow. If asked to lift a medium-heavy load from waist level to shoulder height, no one in their right mind would curl it; they'd "clean" it, generating some momentum using the hips, legs, and core, and swinging the load up. No particular area of the body is overtaxed performing such a movement: effort is spread out throughout much of the entire body. Athletic movement--a power clean, throwing a punch, swinging a bat, swimming the butterfly--is maximally efficient: performed with the intention of using as little energy as possible to achieve the maximum effect.

It's a gross generalization, but probably true, that many injuries result from inefficient movement--movement that overtaxes a particular joint or muscle or scrap of connective tissue, as opposed to globalizing, or generalizing the effort throughout the body.

Circling back around to Contreras' work, then, the exercises which are optimal for bodybuilding purposes--those that maximally tax one particular muscle group--are, arguably, less effective at fostering full-body coordination than athletes, and most average folks, are seeking. An athlete or dancer's movements appear effortless because they're firing lots of different muscles at a low-level in a controlled and regulated sequence; a less trained or skilled mover appears to be straining in part because they're working fewer muscles at a higher level than the professional.

The point being that simply because an exercise provides less of a stimulus for a given muscle group than another exercise, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an inferior movement--it just depends on the goal of the person using it. All decent strength-training exercises will provide some challenge to strength, coordination, and athleticism; whichever exercises one chooses will depend on which particular aspects of fitness one is trying to emphasize.

Sports...or Exercise?

2010-02-17T22:14:21Z

According to this, playing sports is good for girls and women: a long-term study reported in the New York Times suggests that girls who play sports (many of whom benefited from Title IX, which stated that girls and boys must have equal opportunities to play on teams at institutions which receive federal funding) get better grades, have fewer unwanted pregnancies, and get better jobs upon graduation, and that sports themselves--rather than other, possibly related factors like socioeconomic class and parental support--seem to be responsible for the boost.

I'm not surprised, of course. Recorded history is full of men who credit their football/basketball/baseball coach for making men out of them; barely fifteen minutes go by whenever comedian Adam Carolla is on the mic that he doesn't wax nostalgic about his days playing Pop Warner football. Surely the benefits of focus and drive and determination conferred by sports aren't gender-specific.

What I'm curious about is whether there are measurable differences in the kinds of benefits derived from different sports, or whether all sports are more or less equal in the intangible benefits they deliver. This is, of course, the kind of question that an exercise-science freak like myself would salivate over: I'm particularly interested in the life-lessons and psychological effects of various kinds of exercise.

I've written before of getting a tremendous boost in confidence (and academic performance) after I began working out during my sophomore year of High School--and I was nowhere near a team or a coach. Some team 'sports'--like track and swimming--are "personal best" sports, which lack some of the feeling of working together as a team that you get on a basketball court or football field. Yet I can't imagine that being on a track team provides any less of a grades-and-confidence boost than playing more conventional sports.

There also was no distinction made between the value of being on a losing team or a winning team, even though, one would think, a winning team is comprised of athletes who are stronger, more enduring, more technically proficient, and more successful team players than their less successful competitors.

So perhaps what we're seeing are less the effects of team sports than the effects of regular vigorous exercise.

Still Sweatin' After All These Years

2010-02-16T17:36:14Z

I don't care what you say, I'll take an ounce of Richard Simmons over a pound of those Biggest-Loser Nazis any day.

Simmons might not have been ripped, and he might have been easy to make fun of--Eddie Murphy certainly got mileage out of his Simmons routine for a good 10 years--but that guy was supportive and empathetic as hell. He understood that, for a hefty portion of the population, exercise was a terrifying proposition, fraught with shame, and that such people needed coaxing, encouragement, and the occasional shoulder to cry on more than they needed berating and belittling.

According to the New York Times piece linked above, despite ample wealth and a relatively advanced age for a fitness guru (61), Simmons is still at it, not only releasing DVDs, but teaching regularly at "Slimmons," his LA studio.

Mr. Simmons, who says he is deeply religious, has an almost spiritual connection with his followers. "I don’t have to teach anymore, I don’t have to work anymore, God has been really good to me," Mr. Simmons said. "But I can’t forget these people — where would they go? Where would these men and women who don’t feel accepted in other places, where would they find a place to work out where they could laugh and feel good about themselves?"

Okay, I believe him. God love him, he still at it. Richard Simmons, one of the good guys.

(white-guy Afro, lip gloss, sequined tank top. Check, check, and....big-time check.)

Injured? Don't Stretch

2010-02-10T21:54:06Z

There's a concept in Feldenkrais that has a nice application across the board to people who are injured and/or in pain. The idea is always to approach the body as one cohesive unit. In my research on Feldenkrais, and in talking with various practitioners, it's common that working with a client on one part of their body will facilitate healing or a reduction of pain in a more global sense: one practitioner spoke of reducing pain in a particular client's wrist by working on her opposite foot!

I think this goes beyond the idea of 'referred' pain--that is, of a bad ankle leading to knee pain, or a bad hip causing lower-back pain; rather, this suggests that the entire body learns from each part, so if you learn to move an ankle joint more freely and comfortably, that ankle might "teach" the opposite wrist, even if the opposite wrist doesn't move at all. Feldenkrais work has a systemic effect that extends far beyond the area being handled or 'treated' by the practitioner.

If you have, say, a painful lower back, it's common to try to stretch or torque out the pain with a lot of aggressive pulling and twisting movement. Instead, it's probably wiser to stretch, foam-roll, and release everything else around it, so as to remind the body of the comfortable ranges of motion you still have instead of reminding yourself over and over again of the limitation. Vigorously stretching an injured area, though it seems like the right thing to do intuitively, rarely helps much and often causes more harm than good.

(Not an MPF reader.)

Fitness, Circa 2010

2010-02-09T23:00:41Z

One thing you'll notice spilling forth from the brains of some of the smarter and more outspoken trainers around is a recommendation to do more 'hybrid' training: fast-paced lifting with little rest, combination workouts involving sprinting, sled drags, climbing, and so on. I'm seeing this kind of thing recommended so often, and recommending it myself, that I'd even venture to guess that it's sort of the Next Big Thing. It think gyms are going to start to spring up around this kind of training (CrossFit, anyone?); and that people will be doing more and more of it over the next decade or so.

This trend follows an emphasis in fitness writing on what the body was "intended" to do, or "designed" to do, or, in some cases, what we "evolved" to do, with a nod towards our ancient ancestors and the presumed ruggedness of their hunting, gathering, big-game confronting lifestyles. Workout routines seem to seek, on some level, to duplicate the circumstances in which we evolved for all those millions of years.

"Barefoot" training is part of this same trend: back to nature, back to our roots, back to something organic and connected to our roots.

Someday I'll write a book about fitness trends and how they reflect the values of the moment. I'm seeing this current trend, in Malcolm Gladwell fashion, as tied into our concerns about environmentalism, a resistance to over-technologization (if that's a word) and to corporate culture, and a desire to get back in touch with something elemental about ourselves as homo sapiens.

This kind of fitness is also cheap--all you need, really, is a little space--so it also dovetails well with the current economic climate.

If the '70's were all about long-distance running and its attendant skinniness, the '80's were all about excessive wealth and excessive muscle, we seem to be entering a phase of the body as animal, in touch with its surroundings and capable of taking on any reasonable challenge that might come up.

Tale of Two P-T's (Personal Training and Physical Therapy)

2010-02-08T19:32:38Z

Nick Tumminello makes an interesting point about the practice of personal training here:

I’m afraid our industry (the Fitness Industry) maybe getting overly caught up thinking we need to "fix" everyone’s problems because I regularly see fitness clients being treated like a re-hab patients and not nearly enough actual Strength & Conditioning is getting done.

This is a compelling point: shouldn't a Strength and Conditioning Coach be focusing primarily on, well, strength and conditioning? Shouldn't a client of such a person wind up stronger and more enduring? And if so, what's with all the concern about postural imbalances, glute activation, length-tension relationships, and the like, among personal trainers and the people who certify and train them? Shouldn't we personal training types largely concern ourselves with building muscle, burning fat, and building a tougher, healthier, more enduring cardiovascular system?

I'm a big fan of Tumminello--and of J.C. Santana, whom Tumminello quotes at some length in his blog entry on assessments. And I agree with his point that you can fall down an assessment wormhole in which the trainer never gets around to really giving his client a workout because he's too concerned with creating 100% crystalline perfect posture and movement mechanics first. I also believe that learning to move a load effectively can be a pretty good way of learning to move well. If you can squat with good mechanics, for instance, it's a good sign that your lower body mobility is pretty spot-on.

However, I also think that the line between personal training and physical therapy can be razor-thin. You can't, after all, affect the muscles without also affecting the nervous system, and vice-versa. Improve movement efficiency and mechanics and you DO improve strength. I used to believe--primitively--that muscular strength and size was the key to all things athletic and strength-related. But it just ain't. That's the bodybuiding model, which of course has its merits but is actually quite limited in its perspective. The muscles are the final link in the kinetic chain, but they're supported and controlled by the nervous system, which needs tuning and training every bit as much as the muscles themselves--probably more so. Great athletes, after all, are way more than big, strong muscles--otherwise powerlifters would be the best all-around athletes in the world. And, due respect, they're not.

Any good trainer will actually spend time training the nervous system whether he knows it or not: anything plyometric, power-based, or strength-based in the 90% 1RM zone is going to impact the nervous system to a large extent. The average trainer would call these 'personal training' or 'athletic training' modalities, but they have a therapeutic benefit as well: the body is learning how to move better.

This is getting away from Nick's point about overdoing it on assessments, but my point is that therapy and training actually have a lot in common and that it may be short-sighted to draw too hard a line between them.

Another Plug for Foam Rolling

2010-02-05T22:01:11Z

There are a hanful of things that everyone knows are good for them, that even feel good, don't take much time, and pretty much guarantee better health, that still no one does. Flossing is one of them. Foam rolling is another.

Why don't more people foam roll? For one thing, it isn't very 'cool' or 'tough'. Foam rolling can make you look like a moron, it's true. But flossing is the same way. And let's face it, working out in general is a pretty ridiculous practice when it comes right down to it. I was watching "Mad Men" recently--my new favorite time-waster--which takes place in the early '60's, and was amused by a scene in which a clan of neighborhood housewives henpeck the new (divorced) woman in town for that face that she walks because she just "likes to walk." In some ways, they have a point. Why walk when you have no place to go?

Anyway. Foam rolling. Because my knees have been acting up for the first time in my life, I've wound up foam rolling more than usual. And I have to say, the changes--in the way I feel and move--have been substantial. I'm starting to think it may be the best warm-up tool around, perhaps even more effective and useful than functional stretching (though that's good stuff too).

Speaking of which: my new and totally unsubstantiated theory on static stretching is that movement is preferable. Even if you are doing a forward bend, for instance, I think the body responds better if you move the hands around the feet a bit, stretching down and to the side, as well as simply straight to the front. More on this to come, but for now, if you're a static stretcher, see what happens if you add some subtle movement in and out of the deepest part of the stretch as you work.

Have a good weekend.

Running Keeps You Young?

2010-02-02T23:58:04Z

I find it funny sometimes how people are so up-front about their biases. Do a quick search in strength-training oriented sites and you'll find all kinds of studies and theories denouncing the value of steady-state training, as if there were a conspiracy afoot (by Nike? by the National Society of Orthopedic Surgeons?) to force us all to run, get fat, and get injured. For Pete's sake, if you hate running, don't do it. If you hate anything steady-state, skip it. But don't let your bias run amok and insist that because you don't happen to like strapping on the running shoes and hitting the pavement that NO ONE ELSE SHOULD.

End of rant. I was recently forwarded this article, in the New York TImes, and I have to say I find it refreshing to see a little balance for all the anti-running sentiment running amok in our little world of fitness-related media. Essentially it says that running--lots of it--appears to keep your cells young:

Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells’ life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national track-and-field team, training about 45 miles per week. The last were serious, middle-aged longtime runners, with an average age of 51 and a typical training regimen of 50 miles per week, putting those young 45-mile-per-week sluggards to shame.

From the first, the scientists noted one aspect of their older runners. It ‘‘was striking,’’ recalls Dr. Christian Werner, an internal-medicine resident at Saarland University Clinic in Homburg, ‘‘to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.’’

Even more striking was what was going on beneath those deceptively youthful surfaces. When the scientists examined white blood cells from each of their subjects, they found that the cells in both the active and slothful young adults had similar-size telomeres.

Here the article gets a little geek-techie, basically describing how telomere-length is like tree-rings: a good indication of a cell's age. The shorter the telomere, the closer the cell is to dying. In the words of the authors, "In general, the shorter the telomere, the functionally older and more tired the cell."

Onward:

It’s not surprising...that the young subjects’ telomeres were about the same length, whether they ran exhaustively or sat around all day. None of them had been on earth long enough for multiple cell divisions to have snipped away at their telomeres...

When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect."

Now, the question is, would something similar have been found had they studied lifelong strength-training types? Or is this anti-aging effect unique to oodles of long-distance running?

Don't know--and neither do the researchers--but you can bet that the musclehead sites will soon be lighting up with some good pet theories on this. As will the slow-twitch ones.

The Body is One Thing

2010-02-02T02:11:31Z

One of my new favorite online fitness guys, Elliot Hulse, makes this point about training for strength, leanness, and cardiovascular fitness:

...fat loss, muscle building and all fitness results are the expression of a SYSTEMIC change in their bodies… not just the manipulation of a single muscle or energy system...

We evolve as a whole. All systems… muscular, nervous, cardiovascular and hormonal systems work synergistically to move us in the direction that’s most consistent with our behaviors. Even when we aim to isolate systems, we unexpectedly receive the benefits of advancement in others...

If we agree that the human body / mind is a single unit, then why do we still approach our exercise and training programs in a segmented fashion? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work WITH our bodies and prepare for the advancement of ALL strength and fitness qualities at the same time?

This passage sums up why I like Hulse so much: he gets it.

Part of the reason for Hulse's broader perspective is that he's a strongman competitor, which may look to the untrained eye like a circus-sideshow act, but is in fact a hybrid sport requiring a high degree of "strength endurance," or the ability to express strength over an extended period. It's fun, and, okay, a little funny to watch, but man, oh, man is it taxing: tire flipping, car dragging, farmer's walks with ridiculous poundages, all on the clock. Unlike Olympic lifting or powerlifting, a high degree of cardio conditioning, in addition to the obvious demands on strength and power, is a prerequisite for even the most basic events.

Strongman competition is a truer test of all-around fitness than these other sports, rather than just a measure of explosive or absolute strength.

So Hulse sees the advantage--and the fun--of treating all systems as part of a single unit.

Now I'm just a lowly sub-200 pound fitness nerd, but this strongman is speaking my language. Add Hulse's perspective with Robert Dos Remedios' thoughts on Cardio Strength Training and Alwyn Cosgrove on metabolic strength training, not to mention the ever-kooky but highly influential CrossFit crowd, and I'm sensing something of a miniature groundswell in our strength-training and general-fitness protocols: that for maximum leanness, athleticism, and all around fitness, the goal is improving work capacity, or the ability to do lots of work in a short period of time. That just ain't possible with 4-6 minute between-set rest periods. Heck, it's not possible with ONE minute rest periods.

Instead of thinking of cardio vs. strength training, working your arms vs. working your back, training for strength vs. training for leanness, it may be better to just go gorilla: assuming you're warmed up, not injured, and know good form form a hole in the ground, think work hard and fast at all times and rest assured knowing you've pretty much taken care of everything.

Simple concept. Tough to execute.

I Can't Reach Your Muscles

2010-01-29T16:34:23Z

Sometimes you can't reach your muscles.

What the Sam Hill does that mean, you might ask? Why am I cluttering up your Friday morning with such poppycock?

By this I mean that sometimes it's not possible to exhaust--or really "work" your muscles simply because the brakes are on (Due credit, this is an Alwyn Cosgrove notion, but it's something I've also become increasingly aware of lately).

The most common brakes I've encountered--and hang on a couple of sentences, clarity is coming--are core activation and central nervous system (CNS) fatigue.

Consider: Joe lifter has lousy core strength. So when he squats, his core dies before his legs really get 'worked.' His legs never get sore from squatting.

Hypothetical #2: Olivia never gets enough sleep, and she's always stressed and exhausted. Nevertheless, she dutifully hits the gym several days a week, but it seems like no matter how hard she works, it's rare that her muscles really get a workout, and she's almost never sore. She can't really ever power through a tough set because her muscles just seem to 'turn off' at a certain point.

She also finds that she can sometimes lift a certain weight for rep after rep, but if she increases the weight by just a few pounds, suddenly it's impossible to lift even once. She can't mobilize her nervous system to activate the fibers necessary for the heavier lift.

Do either of these scenarios sound familiar?

The core strength/squatting thing has gotten some air time lately, most notably in Mike Boyle's line-in-the-sand declaration that back squatting is BAD. Boyle contends that the core (in particular the lower back) ALWAYS exhausts prior to the legs. I'm not sure that's always true, as I've seen some "Born to Squat" types with fire-hydrant physiques and huge legs who never seem to drift forward more than a few degrees when they squat, but it may be true more often than not, especially with people who are over, oh, five-foot-two.

But there are other exercises for which a lack of core strength can be a brake as well: deadlifting, bent-over rows, some types of lunges, perhaps overhead pressing and power movements.

When I'm fresh, I can usually eke out an extra rep or two past the point at which my muscles are burning. Typically I don't go to absolute failure, as I have a life to lead and a one-year-old to chase, but I'll certainly approach my pain threshold. When I'm tired and cranky, however, it seems like there's a CNS governor on my muscles that doesn't allow me to approach real intensity, so I don't get much of a muscular workout. I notice this in my hard-driving clients too, who sometimes don't really understand that that whole "eight hours a night" thing ain't just an arbitrary number.

The solutions are pretty cut and dried: work your core--but do so at the end of your workouts, so that you're not sapping your limited core strength before you hit your big movements; and, of course, get sleep. I don't see much benefit in trying to power through an intense workout when a person is already frayed; it seems more useful to stick to easier movements, stretching exercises, and Feldenkrais drills, all of which can help clear the CNS "static" rather than adding to it.

Have a good weekend!

Andrew

It Fell on the Floor...Should I Eat It?

2010-01-26T20:26:27Z

Last week my daughter spent a couple of hours with her babysitter putting together some chicken enchiladas that turned out astoundingly well. I wolfed down a few for lunch, and was looking forward to several more after I got home from training my evening clients.

After I returned, Kate reached for the serving dish of enchiladas, which sat on top of the oven...and they all came crashing down on the floor.

Upon first seeing the pile of food and the broken casserole dish, I thought it might be possible to separate the food from the shards of glass. I mean, these enchiladas were seriously great. Besides, how bad can swallowing a few pieces of broken glass really be, after all? Is it really all that dangerous to have a handful of bits of razor-sharp, undigestible building material work its way through your intestines?

But I thought better of it, swept up, and sent out for a pizza.

Short of having to sort through an indiscriminate pile of Tex-Mex and shattered glass, many of us face the dilemma of having to decide whether to eat or discard something that's fallen on the floor. Fortunately, some folks have come up with only a slightly tongue-in-cheek flow chart to help you decide:

According to the LA TIMES, where I found this chart, the 5-second rule should safely be renamed the 30-seconds rule; that's the time threshold after which it's likely your food will accrue dangerous levels of bacteria. Personally, I want to know what's so great about pumas that they can eat raw steak and I can't.