Once again I'm down here in San Diego, learning more about the famous Feldenkrais Method, which I've written about quite a few times before in this space. Since "The Method" as it's sometimes called, is all about rewiring your nervous system and giving you new options for movement and general use of the body, we are encouraged to do things non-habitually while we're here for out training weeks, including, yes, exercise.

Which of course presents something of a problem for an exercise freak like me. Still, I tend to shake things up while I'm down here, not only because of the directive from our instructors but because my body tends to feel different anyway; I get into an experimental mode and just start playing around with different things.

To that end, I went to the gym and just whipped off the following workout:

• Foam rolling on a med-ball, full body, 5 minutes.
• Dynamic stretching and warm-up, including bear crawls, overhead lunges, twisting lunges, walking SLDL, etc., 10 min
• incline Reverse crunch, 25
• Med Ball Mountain Climbers, 25
• Swiss Ball Plank w/leg lift, 25
• Incline Sit-Up, 15
• Giant set, Continuous:
• Freemotion Standing Chest Press 3 x 15
• Double-squat to Reverse Lunge to Overhead Med-Ball Press, 3 x 15
• Freemotion Standing Row 3 x 15
• Med-Ball Burpee 3 x 15
• Superset:
• One-Arm Overhead Dumbbell Push Press 2 x 5
• Jumping Step-Ups, 2 x 10
• StepMill, 7.5 minutes alternating 40 seconds slow, 40 seconds fast.
• Full-body stretch, relax, Feldenkrais movement

Everything was done with as little rest as possible. I even rationed my trips to the water fountain. I always was under time pressure.

Now, a stodgy fitness pro--maybe me!--might look at this workout and wonder what were the goals of the exerciser who did this wily and unconventional workout: some plyometric drills. Some strength-training drills. Some calesthenics. Some Olympic-lift variations. Some interval training. Some--yikes!--core exercises based on flexion, for Pete's sake! What kind of nonsense is this? They'd wonder what the hell I was up to, what my GOALS were, for heaven's sake, and how could I expect to reach them on such a hodge-podge style of training? Does this insane person want to gain muscle, lose fat, build power, get stronger, get faster, get more enduring, get more functional?

The answer is, essentially, yes. I want all those things. But not to the exclusion of the others. I'm a fitness glutton, hungry for every and any aspect of fitness, and I'm not really willing to sacrifice any of them for any of the others.

Sure: I've gone through periods of focusing on one or two aspects of fitness. But that's not where I am now. I like the hodge-podge thing. Yes, there's progression over time and I'm monitoring to make sure I'm never hurting myself. But I like combining lots of different stuff. The body just seems to respond to it.

On top of everything else, it's also more fun than being too overly focused on one method, style, or goal.

Here's someone who seems to agree with me.

Remember "muscle isolation"? The idea that the best way to get in shape was to segment your body into any number of tiny pieces, work each one (usually to failure), and then, presto, you'd get big and strong?

I say "remember" as if this concept is dead, but of course it's not; it's still the way most people strength-train. Today I was at a 24-Hour Fitness in San Diego, and they have a color-code which tells you what body part each machine works: biceps, shoulders, triceps, etc. As much as I used to buy into that way of working, I'm so far down the road of thinking about muscle synergies and movement patterns that that particular model almost doesn't compute any more.

I mention muscle isolation because it's a seductive concept--the body as machine composed of distinct parts. Make the parts work right and the whole will work as well. People who have pain or injury focus on and treat the injured area itself rather than seeing an injury as indicative of a more systemic problem. They exercise for a few hours a week, and utterly forget about their bodies the rest of the time. 

But the body, of course, is involved in everything we do, not just exercise. How we spend our time outside of the gym is, naturally, going to have a greater cumulative effect on your health and fitness than your time in it--simply because, all told, it's way, way more time than our exercise time.

This is why I wasn't surprised much when I read the CBS report on the American Journal of Epidemiology study suggesting that exercise--the way most people currently do it--doesn't prolong life or stave off heart disease in people who sit for three or more hours a day. It's always seemed odd to me that someone who sits for four or more hours a day, and then goes to the gym for three hours a week, isn't, technically "sedentary." Stack up the time you spend sitting and the time you spend exercising against one another and sitting is going to win in just about all of us. It does for me on many, maybe most, days--and I don't even have a full-time sit-down job!

So--what to do? I have a few thoughts on how to combat the ravages of all this sitting:

1) Do less of it. Yup, stand up as often as you can. Stretch, walk down the hall, pace around your office. Break up your sitting time as much as you can. Think you're going to get less productive? I'd argue not: a shift of literal perspective very often spurs a shift in inner perspective as well. So a brief stretch can often lead to an insight you missed.

2) Shift around in your chair. We're just not supposed to do the same thing over and over again. So move around a lot.

3) Take walk-meetings. Instead of meeting friends or co-workers for coffee, how about meeting them for a walk? It's not like you're going to get sweaty and exhausted; you're just going to walk and talk instead of sitting and talking. 

4) Cultivate awareness. Take your eyes off the screen for a few seconds--SECONDS! Come on, that's nothing!--every minute or so. When you're thinking, shirt your focus to a distant object instead of remaining glued to the screen. Surprisingly effective.

5) Extend yourself. Sitting is basically an exercise in global flexion--no, not the contraction of the world economy, rather a full-body folding in that resembles the fetal position. To work against that, you need to go the other way now and then: stretch the arms out and up, lean the head back, extend the spine up and back. It's the opposite of what you spend your day doing, and you need to do it for a few minutes every hour--the yoga cobra pose or camel pose are great examples, but just the standard "morning stretch" is a great one, too.

6) Don't not exercise hard. The latest study suggests that exercise as most people do it doesn't provide much of a buffer against heart disease. So you have to exercise in a way that's DIFFERENT from what most people do. Meaning--hard. Now, your hard might be harder or easier than my hard, but it's got to be hard for you. I think that the upshot of many of these studies--and where exercise science is going to be nudging people in the next few years--is towards greater intensity and less duration. Interval training, circuit strength training, strongman-type stuff, outdoor-crazy stuff.

What other ideas do people have? Sitting is, in all likelihood, an unfortunate reality in our lives--how else can we counteract its ill effects?

Couple of interesting, though seemingly contradictory stories out there in the inter-ether which bear some consideration. First, this one over at TMuscle, provocatively called "Interval Training Doesn't Work," in which author Mark Young contends that interval training, as currently conceived, is a questionable way of burning fat, whereas steady-state cardio has been used by bodybuilders to great effect since the dawn of the speedo; and then this one, in which Eric Cressey once again contends that steady-state cardio just ain't all that great an idea, and that instead, you should do--well, intervals.

I'm pretty much convinced at this point that steady-state cardio, especially on machines, isn't much good as a strength-and-conditioning tool: it's too specialized and repetitive a movement and therefore doesn't challenge the nervous system to learn anything new, while also--potentially--threatening joint health and posing an injury risk. I'm all for a lot of variety in a general fitness program--different speeds, different types of movements, different environments, and for including and cultivating learning in exercise as well.

Still, it's hard to ignore an article called "Interval Training Doesn't Work," especially as nearly every smart fitness person I know has migrated over to recommending short-duration, high-intensity exercise (aka interval training) to stimulate and protect the cardiovascular system in the last ten years or so. I mean, where does he get off?

Young's article is well-researched, I'll give him that, and he does land the point that maybe we've gone too far towards selling interval training as the be-all-end-all exercise modality for those pursuing fat loss. For example, there is very little research supporting the idea that interval training burns enormous amounts of fat, as we've sometimes read. He also does a great job clarifying what the actual Tabata protocol was, as originally designed, as opposed to the way it's often done in practice.

The bottom line of Young's piece is that, so far, research on the fat-loss benefits of interval training ONLY supports a pretty insane protocol: an eight-seconds on, twelve-seconds off work-to-rest ratio, kept up for 20 minutes. That's a lot of intervals, Brewster McCloud, and faced with that particular vomitatious workout or a light twenty minute jog, I just might choose the latter.

Still, I'm not willing to hop back on the steady-state bandwagon just yet. There are a lot of reasons to to intervals that have nothing to do with fat loss: cardiovascular health, for one, and performance enhancement, for another, which Young concedes interval training accomplishes quite well. Add to that that intervals are more fun, offer more variety, and, I'm convinced, are less likely to lead to injury than steady state work, despite their higher intensity, and you've got a very compelling argument to keep intervals in the fitness arsenal.

They're also less time-consuming, and, let me say again, more fun, which can't be undervalued as a reason for keeping them around. After all, the reasons people give for not exercising are because it's a) boring and b) too time consuming.

Is EXERCISE too boring and time-consuming or is STEADY-STATE CARDIO too boring and time consuming? Discuss.

It must be pointed out that Young, writing for TMuscle, is addressing a group of male bodybuilding enthusiasts; Cressey is addressing the strength-and-conditioning performance, and general fitness community (in the article he says "It's not rocket science because we're not building rockets; we just need to move more."). So Young is primarily concerned with seeking out exercise modalities which make a young guy big and ripped, fun, time-commitment, performance, and cardio health be damned. Fat loss is priority #1. Cressey has a bigger picture in mind, which looks more like my picture.

Interestingly, the lesson that may have emerged most strongly from reading Young's piece is, again, that exercise is NOT the best way to lose fat--diet is. Exercise helps, and will promote general health, and, in my experience, tend to foster better eating habits in people who exercise regularly and intensely. But you can undo the fat-burning benefits of even the best workouts with a few deft but ill-chosen swipes of a fork.

A reader named hinduplaya left me this note this weekend:

Question: I’ve been doing a lot of cardio lately after my workouts, and I was wondering, does that burn off muscle that I’ve developed after my workout? I’m naturally a skinny guy so I don’t have much muscle to begin with, but its just been something I’ve been concerned with recently. If anyone could help, it’d be much appreciated :)

Well, hindu, what you're talking about here is called The Interference Effect, which suggests that if you do different types of exercise concurrently (the old "strength training Mon-Wed-Friday, running "Tues-Thurs-Saturday" routine), you won't progress as fast in either than if you ONLY did the strength training or the running. There's research that suggests, for instance, that lots of "cardio" (I'll explain why I put that in quotes in a moment) can interfere with muscle-building efforts over time.

There's a reason for that: if you're doing lots of pure endurance exercise (long-distance running, cycling, etc.), the muscles tend NOT to hypertrophy because extra muscle size and density is an obstacle to fast and efficient oxygen delivery, which is essential for long, slow efforts.

If your main goal is to become a faster long-distance runner, strength training will enhance those efforts. The opposite isn't true, however: if your main goal is to become bigger and stronger, a lot of "cardio" will indeed probably hamper those efforts. So, hindu, yes: ease up on the "cardio" if you're trying to build muscle.

The larger question for me, however, is WHY anyone does what is maddeningly referred to as "cardio" at all, unless they are long-distance athletes. It makes no sense to me. Time after time, we've seen that long distance cardio is NOT as effective as, say, short, intense bursts of exercise--like hill sprints, for instance--at burning fat and improving cardiovascular functioning. Moreover, it leaves you prone to repetitive-use injury in a way that high-intensity training (done properly) does not. So why do it unless you like it, or are a competitive athlete in such a sport?

For some reason no one believes that strength training affects the heart and lungs. Or that basketball or raquetball do. Or that sprinting does. They think that the only way to give their heart and lungs a workout is to get on one of those god-awful treadmills, or even-worse Elliptical trainers, or space-wasting stationary bikes, slap on some headphones or crane their necks to look at the TV and run themselves into a totally-bored, glazed-out, zombified stupor. 

I'm trying to be objective about this.

I think that the layout of commercial gyms--with the weights in one area and the 'cardio machines' in another--has further confused people into thinking that the muscles and the heart and lungs aren't connected, and that they need to be worked out separately: now I work my biceps. Now I work my traps. Now I work my heart and lungs. (still waiting for "Work Your Spleen" classes and "Super Pancreas Burn" DVDs with Jillian Michaels!)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS CARDIO. Move yourself from place to place with some effort and force and presto, your heart and lungs are working. It's a 'cardio' workout. This thing about keeping the heart rate elevated over a certain percentage of your incredibly inaccurate estimated max rate is SO BLOODY PLAYED OUT it makes me almost lightheaded that people are still falling for it. It's unnecessary, boring, and potentially injurious. Go out and do something you like doing that takes some effort. Do it hard and fast and with some conviction, and make sure you get good and panting and sweating several times throughout your workout. Ideally, you're working hard enough so that you HAVE to take a break. Remember to choose something you LIKE so that putting this kind of effort in isn't annoying but FUN.

So if you like long-distance running, fine. If you like hours and hours of cycling, fine. But if all you're after is general fitness and you love lifting and hate running--then just lift FASTER. Fewer breaks between sets. Move around the gym like a madman, shooting your heart rate through the roof with one exercise after another. Choose large-muscle exercises that use the upper and lower body at once, and believe me, you'll have all the cardio you need. Your heart and lungs and muscles are all connected. Work one and you work the other.

There's more to this argument, tying in to something about between-set rest periods that I'll get into soon as well.

Reading a very interesting book right now called Anatomy Trains by Thomas Myers. In a nutshell, Myers, a bodyworker, has developed a system of body therapy based around long chains of fascia in the body, many of which span the entire body, head to toe. These long "anatomy trains" are not energetic or even functional in nature, but structural: they are actual long chains of connective tissue that run through the entire body.

I first read of Myers' work in the Schuler/Cosgrove opus New Rules of Lifting for Women and was--initially--confused: wasn't this just a variation on the old "ankle bone connected to the shin bone" song we all learned in nursery school?

Continue reading this post »

Friday again.

Here's something to think about for people who strength-train, which, I imagine, makes up most of this crowd: which exercises are you including in your workout and why?

Simple question but worth giving some thought to. If you look at it, most people are going to have some combination of "exercises I like" and "exercises I don't like but think I'm supposed to do" and then a handful of "exercises I neither like nor understand nor think I'm supposed to do but keep doing anyway."

There's not a lot of "exercises I'm supposed to do AND like" on that list. One of my goals as a trainer is to get everyone on THAT plan, which means that I have to do a lot of tweaking for each client.

Now, some fellow-trainers will accuse me of being too soft--that as the trainer it's my job to get a person to do what's good for them, enjoyment be damned. Everyone needs to squat. Everyone needs to deadlift. Everyone needs to sprint.

I used to think this way; now I don't. My list of things 'everyone' needs to do is actually pretty small: yes, if you're strength training, you've got to work your whole body, at some point, somehow. And you've got to do some kind of row, probably; some kind of push, probably, a couple of closed-chain lower-body movements, and then some core exercises.

There are so many ways to put those elements together, based on the goals--and the tastes--of a client that to say, "Everyone needs to _______," ever, is, in my estimation, just pretty darn unimaginative.

For instance: on pushing exercises. Sure, you can bench press. And if you're a guy who likes that move, I'll throw it in. If the guy REALLY wants to feel his pecs searing that day, I'll even have him do them bodybuilding style once in awhile, with the elbows out. Is that 100% grade-A safe all the time? Nope. Is it fun? Does the client LIKE it? If so, doing it once every couple of weeks isn't going to kill him. 

Then you can do any of the zillion bench press variations out there: incline, decline, dumbbell, barbell, alternating dumbbell, single-arm dumbbell. Add grip and tempo variations (for all intents and purposes I say there are three tempos) and you've got easily a couple of dozen moves there. And if for some reason you're partial to machines (Christian Thibaudeau has an interesting article here that, among other things, actually vindicates the use of machines for muscle growth, so--never say never.), you can do all those crazy variations as well. Now and then I'll even--gasp!--use a fly machine (though not unless we've done another compound version first).

Pushups, another push-variation, are the same way--only if anything you may have even more variations. Incline, decline, flat. Weighted. On a Swiss Ball. On a medicine-ball. Travelling. Explosive. Renegade-style.

Then you can do hybrid push variations that also involve the lower body: standing double-or-single arm cable presses, partner pushes, car or prowler pushes. You can do med-ball push-passes into a wall or with a partner. In our gym, there's a massive heavy bag which I'll sometimes have my clients push explosively as if they were doing linebacker drills. People love that one.

And I haven't even mentioned vertical--or overhead---pressing variations. So really these are just half the possibilities.

So, violating my never say never rule, you NEVER have to bench press. Of all those variations, just about everyone will find a few that they find fun, doesn't cause them pain, and does the job of working a horizontal-pushing motion. And most people will be able to do just about all of them. Unless someone is REALLY focused on a particular goal--powerlifting, for instance--I see no need for any particular version of the horizontal press. I'm just not that attached to it.

When a client complains about a given movement, I almost always listen. Again, enjoyment is, if not paramount, at least as important as my somewhat arbitrary attachment to a given movement.

Recently my mother-in-law said she was tired of lifting weights. She didn't look forward to it. She wasn't seeing progress. And her gym membership was expiring soon anyway. I asked her if there was any form of exercise she was interested in trying, and off she went on a rhapsody about a local fencing club with a cool trainer and the nifty outfits and the swords and the fun. I said, go for it. It's fast-twitch. It's a new skill. It sounds like she'd have a lot of fun doing it, which she's clearly NOT having at her current gym. And if she's having fun, she'll play/work hard, and she'll make progress.

Regardless of what any fitness expert says, this one included, life's too short to spend it doing something you hate--and in your precious spare time, too! Too many options not of be having fun.

Just spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Juan Carlos Santana, who I've been wanting to interview for awhile. For people who don't know, Santana is a big gun in the fitness world: he runs a gym called the Institute for Human Performance in Boca Raton, FL, where he trains everyone from grandmothers to high-level athletes. I first saw him speak at a Perform Better conference back in '07. Like the best fitness coaches, he really knows his stuff, and can talk science to you all day long, but at the same time he knows that, fundamentally, it's all about hard work and common sense.

Anyway, we were talking about treadmills for an article I'm writing: what they're good for, what they're terrible for, how they can be applied well, how they're misused (there are some pretty great YouTube videos demonstrating the latter...check this one where the guy and his shoes go flying everywhere, like Charlie Brown getting hit with the baseball.) In passing, Santana made an interesting caveat emptor point about the fitness world.

In essence, what he said was that there are lots of programs, products, and services out there that exist not because they're truly worthwhile or useful but solely to make money for the creator. This is a huge no-brainer, of course, but it means that you and I, as consumers of fitness products and services, need to especially careful with our fitness bucks. I've been told more than once that I need to get some products out there in the marketplace. This is, I suppose, good counsel, and the people who have suggested I do that have only my financial welfare in mind when they suggest it.

At the same time, I'm not going to publish an ebook simply to publish and ebook. When I have what I believe is something truly innovative to add to the fitness conversation, I'll say it. Till then--here's my blog, which you can read for free, and the article archive at left, also free if you're willing to wait a few months after the articles are published to get them online. 

The other day I was having a conversation like this with one of my clients illustrating this exact point. For some reason--nostalgia, I hope--there's an actual ThighMaster at one of the gyms where I train. I pulled it out and showed it to her, explaining that Suzanne Somers made some truly SICK amount of money peddling these things (according to Wikipedia, the heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco company fortune was the real guy behind this, which is a bit like making money in cotton candy and having a side-business as a dentist). 

I then put all my expertise to use in trying to figure out how to make the thing work: squeeze it between your thighs, between your knees, put the hinge forward, put it back, shift it up and down. It didn't make a difference: in practice, the Thighmaster was a bust.

But guess what? It didn't matter. Suzanne Somers, who, as far as I know knows about as much about fitness as my one-year-old, is a ka-zillionaire because of this thing, as are R.J. Reynolds' kids and whoever built and marketed it who had a slice of the profits.

So what does that say about us, the buyers of fitness stuff? We're suckers. It doesn't matter if something is effective, or useful, or true. We'll buy it anyway.

It being friday, I thought it would be a good day to suggest an interesting rep/set lifting mechanism I recently kind-of, sort-of dreamed up. I suspect someone else has gone before me on this, but I like this formula and think it's worth a try.

Some time ago I wrote this article on how and why tempo training is still worthwhile even though many strength coaches have started to dismiss the idea, having settled on "as fast as possible" as the only tempo worth exploring. After speaking with a handful of smart guys and drawing from my own experience with myself and other clients, I concluded that, though it's probably most beneficial to LIFT a weight as fast as possible (even if that winds up being pretty slow), the speed of LOWERING a weight, and the length of the PAUSE at the bottom of a lift--when the muscles are stretched--makes a HUGE difference in how the whole system is affected.

Essentially I argue in the piece (you don't have to go read it, seriously) that the speed of your eccentric (lowering) contraction determines the involvement of the stretch-shortening cycle: lower a weight fast and explode immediately up as fast as possible and you maximize the involvement of that particular reflex; lower a weight slowly, pause, and THEN push a weight up as fast as possible, and you minimize it. The former technique develops explosive strength, power, and athleticism; the latter develops raw muscular strength. Because techniques rely heavily on high-threshold motor units, they both can lead to hypertrophy. 

Now, some people will be naturally slower lifters; others will naturally gravitate towards a faster lifting clip. Whichever you naturally do will probably be your strong suit: if you're naturally more brutishly strong, you'll tend to lift slow and under control. If you're more of an athletic, firecrackery sort, you'll tend to lift faster. So if you're after complete development--or just a new challenge---it makes sense to train in whatever way is contrary to your natural inclination--for the lumbery guys to get some explosive force behind their lifts and the spindly Bruce-Lee types to build some actual muscle strength by lifting slow. So you can play with changing things up from explosive lifting to slow lifting and back again, either for long periods in your training or for different sets doing the same exercise. 

Recently, this article appeared in TMuscle making the same point, so I m inclined to believe that the pendulum is swinging back towards accepting some form of tempo training as Actually Beneficial.

(Random shot of muscle guys, back when they still looked like humans.)

All this is to say this: that next time you're in the gym--try this with your favorite compound exercise (or exercises!):

1) Do a warm-up set with a weight you can comfortably do for 10-12 reps. Rest a minute. 

2) Do a second set of fifteen reps with, say fifty percent of your one-rep max, but perform the reps explosively, and as fast as possible. I like working with body-weight on this set, say, by doing clap pushups, or explosive Bulgarian split squats, or squat jumps, or pull-ups with a release at the top. Rest for about two minutes.

3) Do a third set of about ten reps with, say 60-75% of your one-rep max, this time taking two or three seconds to lower the weight, a one or two-second pause at the bottom, and an explosive push back to the starting position.

That's it. You can also play with reversing the order of the set-up on the second and third sets--that is, doing the excruciating muscle-burning set second and the explosive-force one third, though I suspect your performance would suffer on the explosive set.

The idea here is to work the high-threshold motor units from two angles: the explosive, athletic angle and the muscle-burning angle, both in the same workout.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes for you: chances are you'll be very tired just from those two work sets, yet not so sore you  can't move the next day. 

Have fun, and happy 4th of July!

Andrew