I for one am pleased to see that the military is prepared for a Planet of the Apes contingency. 

But was the chimp even trying that hard?  He seems way too smart to take this 'random exercise for no reward' thing all that seriously.  And more concerned with hanging it all out at the finish line--so to speak. 

Have a good weekend--

Andrew

Here in Southern California, it's always swimming weather, but for some reason, people respect the change of 'seasons' (such as they are) and swarm to swimming holes largely during the summer months.  I suppose it's for the same reason that when Santa visits the outdoor mall in early December and it's a balmy 68 degrees out, he's still dressed as if the Cold-Miser is nipping at his heels.  L.A.:  Even Our Seasons are Fake.®

So, now that the dog days of summer are upon us, a lot of people will be hitting the pools, I'm going to offer a few words about swimming.

Swimming, it must be said, isn't typically seen as a tough-guy activity, and I'm trying to figure out why that is.  The Navy SEALS are certainly tough guys, and it takes at least a certain sang-froid to be able to happily exist in an element that can kill you...I'm reminded of a Haiku written by a precocious 11-year-old whose name escapes me:

Water:  It gives life,
But it can kill just the same.
This is water's game.

(With practice, you too can be a beast in the water.)

Nevertheless, I get the feeling that the macho guys don't go in much for swimming.  One reason might be that guys with big muscles aren't natural swimmers.  They tend to sink, for one, and they tend to try to muscle their way through the water, for another, neither of which makes for great swimming efficiency.  Swimming efficiency is all about being one with the water, and big guys aren't much into being one with much of anything except their monster trucks (I kid, big guys, come on back...)  I think that may be part of why you don't see a lot about swimming on websites dedicated to getting big and buff.  I remember seeing some reality TV show a few years ago in which one team had to choose an athletic event for each member of the opposing team.  The big, buff guys, who would have smoked everyone at tests of raw strength and short-distance speed, sank like rocks.

But knowing how to swim well--not just stay afloat--is a great skill to have, regardless of your body comp.  Think of all the times James Bond has had to swim his way to safety over the year, typically onto a yacht with a gorgeous--and unaccountably, single--blonde on board.  James Bond movies are, of course, precise mirrors of our everyday reality, and therefore, everyone who fancies him- or herself fit should know how to swim reasonably well.  As I've said before, half of the motivation for fitness is getting prepped for every possible apocalyptic emergency; these days, it seems as likely that we'll be drowning in the remnants of the Polar Ice Caps as anything else. 

So:  learn to swim.

I went over some of the basics in my old blog; here I just want to correct a misconception about swimming training that I keep seeing popping up everywhere. 

Swimming often gets lumped in with running, cycling, stairmastercising and the like as a kind of run-of-the-treadmill cardio workout.  Meaning, you can do it for long, slow, distance or you can do it for short intervals, and that you can program these workouts just as you would a long run or a sprint workout, respectively.

To some extent, that's true:  you COULD get in the pool and swim 45 minutes worth of laps; you COULD do 30 second sprint intervals with a 90 second rest period up and down the pool.  You'd derive some fitness benefit from both types of training.

But in the water there are better ways of going about it.

In swimming, mechanics are most of the battle.  Guessing wildly, if nailing your cycling or running mechanics can make you 15% faster, nailing your swimming mechanics can make you 50% faster.  Bad swimming mechanics, conversely, can make you 200% slower.*

The reason is that water is way denser than air, so drag in the water is far more detrimental to your speed than drag on dry land.  You've got to learn to be hydrodynamic.

Plenty of books, seminars, webisodes, and prayer meetings are dedicated to this very thing.  What I'm here to tell you is that form starts to go out the window when you get tired.  After a few laps, even the best swimmers become less efficient.  So it's far better to drill swimming in relatively short distances than in one long, slow effort. 

Working up to the occasional long swim isn't a bad idea--it's essential if you're gearing up to compete in a long swim, of course--but the bulk of your workouts should consist of shorter efforts that allow you to optimize your form on each lap. 

But interval training in swimming is different from interval training on land.  I don't quite know why, but you can recover much faster from an all-out swimming effort than you can from an all-out sprint.  If I sprint all-out on land for a minute straight, for example, I'm not really able to catch my breath for a good two minutes or so.  If I do 100 meters in the pool at top speed, which takes me well over a minute to complete (don't snicker too loud, all you fish out there), I can go again in 30 seconds without too much trouble.

So instead of going with a 1:1 or a 1:2 work/rest ratio in your intervals, as you might on land, try about a 3:1:  swim for 45 seconds, rest for 15.  You'll be surprised how fast your heart rate drops (I suspect this has something to do with the heart not having to work as hard to circulate the blood when you're more or less weightless underwater, but I'm no fancy cardiologist or nothin.'

Finally, because you don't want to be stuck treading water in the middle of the pool while you're interval training, you'll probably want to go for distance rather than time in your intervals:  that is, sprint 50 meters, rest, repeat.  A typical pattern is to do 50 meters on the 1:00, 100 meters on the 2:00, 150 meters on the 3:00, and so on--which means that, if you're doing 50-meter repeats, you have one minute to complete the interval AND rest before you start the next one.  Keep your eye on the clock and try to complete each successive interval effort slightly faster than the previous one. 
 
*all statistics completely made up.

*********************************

Odd fact:  cyclists have unusually low bone-density. 

Eric Cressey has a very clear couple of articles, here and here, on how and why sports injuries happen.  The basis of of the articles is this cool formula called the Law of Repetitive Motion.  I imagine it's something you learn on Day One of exercise physiology class, but it was all brand-new to me:

INSULT = NUMBER (of reps) X FORCE  /  AMPLITUDE X RELAXATION

So:  the more reps you perform with more force (resistance), the more likely you are to get hurt (insulted); the larger a range of motion you use (amplitude) and the more rest you take, the less likely. 

Just makes a guy feel smart to know stuff like this!  Like the quadratic equation, it's one of those simple formulas that makes a lot of intuitive sense.  The piece that struck me, however, was the "amplitude" factor:  the bigger range of motion, the smaller the chance of injury.  I suppose that's because, with a full range of motion, no one area in the joint (or muscle or tendon) gets particularly overstressed; the force of the repetition is instead spread out over the joint's entire range. 

Cressey mentions sitting, and the formula suggests that the stiller you are--the less you squiggle about like my seven-month-old as you sit--the more likely you are to get hurt:  your range of motion is small, you're doing thousands of 'repetitions' (in this case, of the more or less isometric exercise of sitting upright) over the course of a day, and, if you're like most people, you're rarely taking a break.  That's three of four factors--lots of reps, small range of motion, and little rest (only 'force' is low), that make continual sitting by itself an activity with a pretty high likelihood of causing injury. 

Another great lesson inherent in this formula are four practical steps you can take if a given activity hurts or has caused injury in the past: 

1)  Do fewer reps.

2)  Use less weight.

3)  Use a larger range of motion.

4)  Rest longer:  between reps, sets, and bouts of a given exercise.

Again, good horse sense, for the most part, but a good way of distilling it all down.

You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I've never been big on dancing.   

Dancing in middle school--the stiff, side-to-side shuffle, elbows at ribs, forearms at 90 degrees, fingers in the famous 'about-to-snap' mode--was a Night Of The Living Dead Hell for me, simply because I felt so...exposed.  With every step, I thought, my raging desire for my the out-of-my-league seventh-grade girl across the gym in the clogs and Chinos would be painfully evident to everyone around me. 

I think everyone feels exposed when they dance.  For some people, like my wife, that's liberating--she likes being allowed to say "look at me!" from time to time.  You're supposed to feel free and loose and spontaneous, on the dance floor, but most people just feel awkward.  They look like they'd rather be getting a tooth extracted. 

These days I seem to have entered a devil-may-care place with my dancing, and, much to the chagrin of my family, I bust moves in grocery stores, libraries, funeral parlors...wherever the impulse hits me, whether there's music playing or it's just the voices in my head, which sometimes sing.  I haven't learned anything about dancing, in particular, in the intervening years since middle school, except that worrying about whether you look cool or not is pretty much the kiss of death.  Having now given up completely on being cool (having a 6-month-old will do that to you), I actually fancy myself an okay dancer. 

What a shame, then, that, according to this, dancing itself just ain't cool anymore.  No one seems to be doing it.  Dance floors across the country are empty.  And some people believe that's a real loss:

...dancing helps foster a kind of social harmony. Daniel J. Levitin, the neuroscientist and author of "This Is Your Brain on Music" (Dutton, 2006), points out that over the course of evolutionary history dancing has always been participatory, not spectatorial.

"I think evolution selected music and dance as ways that people could come together and defuse any interpersonal tensions that arise from large groups," he said. "One suggestion is that music and dance helps humans to get along. We see that there is the release of soothing brain chemicals when people sing and dance together." So if we don't dance, we're that much closer to savagery.

Back in the day, the article suggests, everyone danced.  It was a social lubricant.  You moved your body, you came into socially-acceptable contact with people, you worked up a little sweat, maybe, dropped some inhibitions, warmed up, and pretty soon you were talking and laughing and making new friends.  It was like an amusement park ride you could jump on any time music was playing.

But now, it would appear, no one wants to embarrass themselves.  People are afraid of pulling an "Elaine" in "Seinfeld"--looking so ridiculous on the dance floor that you get shunned for it.  We're more likely to laugh at someone who's willing to get up on a dance floor and move than we are to join in.  Like singing in public, it's more of a test of guts and mettle than a group free-for-all:  who's going to risk the humiliation?

I think that's too bad; dancing awfully, so you look like a disemboweled monkey, is a universal right.  I think it's even in the Constitution, and no one should take that away from us.  The Fear Of Dancing epidemic is symptomatic of a more widespread Fear Of Looking Like a Dumbass that's really shutting people down, big-time.

This weekend I attended a birthday party for my friend Stephen, who lives in one of those one-story bungalow-apartments that are ubiquitous in LA.  Snaking amongst dozen or so buildings is a labyrinth of footpaths along which a person deprived of a compass and/or breadcrumbs is inclined to get lost. 

I was sent out of the apartment at one point to fetch a pacifier from our car, and made my way along the footpaths in what I thought was the right direction. 

I must have taken a wrong turn, however, because I found myself at a dead-end, staring into the eyes of a man who identified himself only as "Frank": 

Frank was in the middle of a workout.  Undeterred by lack of space, privacy, or equipment, Frank was putting in some serious work.  It was unclear whether he was in fact a resident of the magic bungalows or if he just availed himself of this enclosed, secret spot for his impromptu gym setup.  While I was standing there, he whipped through a set of water-filled-bleach-bottle overhead presses, triceps extensions, and squat-and-presses that would do any Gold's-member proud:

i spoke with Frank for a moment about his gym:  along with the bleach bottles, he also had some random dumbbells strewn about, a couple of mats and benches made from dairy crates, as well as an improvised ab wheel made from a 10-pound weight plate and a steel rod, and a "heavy bag":

Frank told me a bit about his workouts:  basically it sounds like he does everything he can think of, all day, every day.  After a bit he told me how to get to the parking lot and then back to Stephen's apartment.

I told Frank he looked like he had everything he needed in his little gym, but he disagreed:  "What I could really use," he said, "is a couple of those big five-gallon water jugs.  Those weigh up to fifty pounds when you fill 'em up all the way.  You can get a great workout with those." 

I know them well.  In fact, I've got a half-dozen of them in my own little gym setup.  They're great for Farmer's Walks, overhead presses, sprint carries...a very versatile piece of pain-in-the-butt, real-world training equipment. 

Next time I drop by Stephen's place I think I'll drop a couple of them off at Frank's gym.  Assuming I can find my way back.

I'm as guilty as any fitness freak in romanticizing the times of yore when exercise was a necessary part of getting through your day.  Pull up any random blog, or pick up any fitness book, and you're as likely as not to read something like this:

Our ancestors spent their days in robust,  virile tests of athleticism, courage, and skill.  Running swiftly on legs whose power and speed would rival that of today's best Olympians, ancient man would run down the noble elk, wrestle it to the ground with his bare hands, effortlessly applying a death-lock grip around its neck that would strike fear in the hearts of our most highly-skilled martial artists.  The elk would die peacefully, knowing it had been bested by a superior being--a faster, stronger, more skilled denizen of the wild.

He would then carry his kill over hundreds of miles of rugged, mountainous jungle, eluding predators and outwitting scavengers, stopping only to drink and bathe in crystalline springs, where he would outswim the swiftest alligators.  Presently he would arrive at the village, where the men would be practicing hand-to-hand combat and the women perfecting their erotic dancing, and present his kill to the women and elders of the village, who would gaze adoringly on his glistening musculature, which Ronnie Coleman would envy.  It was a fine, fine life indeed, and these strapping specimens were just 9 years old. 

It gets a little ridiculous, but it's effective; I do think that many of us are inspired by a primitive fantasy in which the modern infrastructure collapses and we must survive by our wits and, of course, by our muscles.  Half of today's action movies are about this very kind of apocalyptic societal collapse.

So, even if the back-to-nature thing is about as fresh as last week's toe socks, I just discovered a guy whose 'primitive' fitness model is pretty elegant:  Mark Sisson's Daily Apple.  Mark's a former high-level long-distance runner, triathlete, and biologist who has ten very simple rules to healthy living.  He calls them "The Primal Top Ten:"

1) Eat a lot of animals, insects, and plants.
2) Move around a lot at a slow pace.
3)  Lift heavy things.
4)  Run really fast once in a while.
5)  Get lots of sleep.
6)  Play.
7)  Get some sunlight every day.
8)  Avoid Trauma.
9)  Avoid poisonous things.
10)  Use your mind.

I'm not sure how many insects I'm up for eating, but other than that, this strikes me as a pretty good and attainable list.  Sisson's top ten are based on activities that the old guys did--you know, the forefathers:  they hunted, migrated, slept when it was dark, goofed off and told stories with their sloping-foreheaded brethren, avoided the drive-thru at Mickey-D's most of the time. 

To me, even if we've heard iterations of this before, the back-to-nature approach to health and fitness holds a lot of appeal:  the question always being asked by fitness pros, on some level, is "What should we do, and what should we eat, for optimal fitness?"  And time after time, it appears that extremism in virtually any form--too much long-distance running and not enough strength training, too many carbs and not enough protein, all work and no play--is detrimental. 

So maybe it makes sense to harken back to the times when marauding chimps were lurking around every corner, preparing to club us, snap our jaws and then tear our genitals off so we were no longer a threat.  Ah, it was a happier, simpler life!

The upshot is a kind of Western-Eastern approach rooted in balance, and I like it.  Lots of great, sensible advice in the blog.

Have a great weekend!

Andrew 

With his usual eloquence, Alwyn Cosgrove makes an interesting point here about treadmill running: 

...steady-state cardio on the treadmill is just fucking stupid....the treadmill switches your hamstring and glutes off — your foot hits the belt and the belt pulls you through —[so] it's mainly a quad exercise.

 

Think of it this way: if you did 400,000 reps of triceps extensions with 100 pounds you'd get four million pounds of volume. If you didn't balance that out with biceps curls you'd expect the elbow joint to hurt, right? You're damn straight it would!

So long term walking or running on the treadmill is almost guaranteeing knee pain.

When I read this I was reminded of research that Cosgrove and others have cited about knee injuries and female athletes.  The upshot is that everyone's quadriceps start out stronger than their hamstrings; over time, however, a male athlete will become less quad-dominant (disproportionately stronger in the quadriceps than the glutes and hamstrings), whereas, unless they are given specific exercises to address the imbalance, women tend to become even more quad-dominant with training.  This accounts, at least in part, for the large number of ACL tears among female athletes. 

Smart coaches and trainers, then, are careful to include lots of lower-body pulling exercises to address this naturally-occurring imbalance in women.

Given that treadmill-running is almost all knee extension--quadriceps work--as Cosgrove indicates, it seems like women, in particular, would be particularly well-advised to stay off the ever-popular Human Hamster Wheel, or at least make sure to balance it with exercises emphasizing hip extension:  deadlift variations, step-ups and Swiss-ball leg curls; stair and hill climbing or running.  Even regular-old running around outside--pick your pace--emphasizes hip-extension more than treadmill running.

(They won't look so happy when they get the arthroscopic surgeon's bill). 

Cosgrove makes another point in the article that's worth underscoring:

...one mile on the treadmill would be 1500 reps and burn around 100 calories. If you did a circuit of kettlebell swings, undulating ropes, inverted rows, sled pushes, and burpees for four rounds with 10 to 15 reps each, you'd burn 100 calories in less time with less load, and the reps would be spread over the entire body instead of on the ankles, knees, and hips. It's just a superior model.

There's no reason why you have to stick with the same movement--such as running, rowing, or cycling, which are, in essence, low-level resistance exercises--for the duration of your conditioning session:  in fact, it doesn't make a lot of sense.  If your intention is to burn calories, it seems much smarter to do as Cosgrove suggests, mixing it up with several difference exercises, loading different parts of the body, creating a balanced workout and avoiding excessive strain on any one area. 

In my experience, both as an athlete and trainer, exercises which train the upper body and lower body together (thrusters, clean and jerks, burpees, step-up-and-presses, lunge and curl) are, metabolically speaking, about as tough as you can get. The body seems to go into high alert, as oxygen demand skyrockets from virtually every muscle, head to toe.  Only slightly less demanding are compound sets of movements for the upper and lower body--something like the circuit described by Cosgrove above. 

It takes some time to work up to training with this kind of intensity, but once you're capable of it, it seems like about the most efficient option for fat loss--not to mention safer and more fun. 

•Interval training just got another boost from the New York Times:

[Researcher] Gibala...had a group of college students...ride a stationary bike at a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the students pedaled hard again for another 20 to 30 seconds, repeating the cycle four to six times (depending on how much each person could stand), "for a total of two to three minutes of very intense exercise per training session," Gibala says.

Each of the two groups exercised three times a week. After two weeks, both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as measured in a stationary bicycle time trial), even though the one group had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other about five hours. Additionally, molecular changes that signal increased fitness were evident equally in both groups. ... In other words, six minutes or so a week of hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as multiple hours of working out for achieving fitness.

So, as fitness geeks have been saying for a few years now, high-intensity training confers many of the benefits of long-distance work without requiring hours and hours of plodding and pounding.  This is great news for people who find long-distance work boring, and/or are short on time generally, and/or don't mind a little pain and suffering in their pursuit of fitness. 

To my eye, there's something slightly amiss here, though:  'fitness' here is defined as leanness, exceptional endurance, and some adaptations in the mitochondria of muscle cells (check out the whole article).  To my mind, these don't cover the entire spectrum of what constitutes good health and exceptional fitness:  there's nothing about flexibility, strength, joint health, posture, agility, power, balance, athleticism, or any other of the myriad markers of fitness in this study.  

Moreover, there's nothing about which system--if any--is truly sustainable.  Does interval training cause injury?  Does steady-state work cause repetitive-stress fractures?

As always, in measuring fitness, one has to ask, fit for what?  As long as the idea of 'fitness' is reduced to one or two markers, there will always be something missing from the picture.

•Here's another thought-provoker:  that obesity may have allowed us to fight off TB back in the day:

A provocative new hypothesis suggests that in some people, fat not only stores energy but also revs up the body’s immune system. This subgroup may have enjoyed a survival advantage in the 1800s, when people were plagued by a disease that decimated Europe: tuberculosis.


But the heightened immune response that helped some overweight adults survive tuberculosis is now an "evolutionary anachronism" that has outlived its usefulness, said Dr. Jesse Roth...

"Fat is not simply a collection of calories, it is acting like a part of the innate immune system," said Dr. Roth, an investigator at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y. "But this immune system has a downside."

...Yet the question Dr. Roth tries to answer has baffled scientists. The "thrifty gene" hypothesis suggests that evolution favored those who could store fat reserves that helped them withstand lean times, like periodic famines and food shortages.

But that does not explain why body fat carries so many drawbacks, setting off inflammation and metabolic disorders like insulin resistance, high cholesterol and atherosclerosis.

I'm no fancy evolutionary biologist, but I imagine that real obesity such as is epidemic today is probably a fairly modern phenomenon, simply because at no time else in history has such a large portion of the population been so sedentary AND had such easy access to calorie-dense food. 

There was a time, after all, when feeding oneself cost calories.  It wasn't just a matter of wheeling your SUV through the drive-thru:  you had to track down an animal or plant a crop.  The food you consumed was a reward for the physical labor of finding or hunting or growing that food (could this be part of why a post-workout meal tastes so good?).

Perhaps the gene for obesity was indeed effective in fighting off certain diseases and for keeping one alive during lean periods.  But back in the caveman days when these genes were evolving, I imagine that food was scarce enough that even Joe Caveman with the "fat" gene never really got fat.  He would have had to be exceptionally active by today's standards just to stay alive, after all:  running down prey and avoiding predators, migrating to fertile areas during winter months, and later, planting crops and tending fields.  Sitting around on the couch--or the comfy rock, perhaps--just wasn't an option. 

So back then we might have had a bunch of hairy strong guys carrying the fat gene who weren't fat.  They got all the disease-fighting, life-sparing benefits of having a 'thrifty' metabolism but weren't saddled with all the downsides of actuelly being fat which are so prevalent today.  So they lived long enough to reproduce, and eventually, their genes spawned our current generation of couch-dwelling, fast-food snarfing denizens.  

Anyone else have a theory?