A little while ago I had a very interesting conversation with Dr. Christopher Scott, an exercise physiologist and expert on metabolism. At present he's researching ways to measure anaerobic energy consumption--meaning, how many calories a person uses when exercising at high intensity. It's a surprisingly difficult question to solve, he says, because all standard measures of energy consumption are based on oxygen uptake. Anaerobic activity, by definition, doesn't use oxygen, so that method doesn't work very well. Scott has been trying to solve the problems that fitness nerds like me have been pondering for decades now--how and why does high intensity activity burn so many calories?

EPOC--the "afterburn" effect that supposedly burns boatloads of calories after you've stopped working out, doesn't really seem to account for the caloric burn in the way we used to think. But something is happening, of course, because sprinters, as we all know, are lean, mean, running machines--even more so than their long-distance running cousins. And even if you're no Usain Bolt, enough people have had success burning blubber off with anaerobic activity to make it clear as day that it's a great way to torch fat.

Ok. So here was the fascinating gem I got from Scott: treadmills and stationary bikes were designed to make it easy to study aerobic metabolism.

This is actually quite significant: when you realize that two of the most widely-used tools for burning fat and building fitness weren't designed for that purpose at all, you realize that many people have got their fitness programs backwards.

Think about it: scientists wanted to know how people responded to exercise. So they created these convenient things that could be used in a lab to roughly simulate exercise. Then they put people on these machines and measured their energy output and oxygen consumption and so on and so forth and got some sense of how peoples' bodies behaved under the stress of something resembling exercise.

No one ever said, "This is a great way to burn fat!" or "These machines are great for getting fit!" Nope. They were a machine that made measuring oxygen consumption convenient for guys in white coats.

In a sense, the definition of what constitutes sensible exercise came out what those white-coated guys could measure: lots about aerobic metabolism. Nada about anaerobic. Nada about flexibility or upper body strength or movement capacity. The ways of measuring and recording physiological response dictated the best ways to exercise.

The fact that to this day we don't have an accurate way of measuring anaerobic energy consumption--even though, anecdotally, anyway, it appears to thrash the aerobic pathway for burning calories, is just one example of how flawed and limited metrics and methods have thrown us off the trail of how best to exercise in our limited available time.

Get off the machines, go outside and move.

After I got back from the Memphis trip that I talked about last time, a strange thing has happened to my approach to training. I go longer, harder, faster. If I dream something up, I try it. I train at odd hours, often outside, sometimes in the dark. I make sure that, at least once a workout, if not several times, I'm seriously gasping and wondering if I can go on.

Ah, the life of the fitness-obsessed.

Essentially, the brakes are off. What I found, or theorized, working with Frank Matrisciano, is that I'd allowed myself to get too comfortable in my training. It had become casual. I was fooling myself: sure, three sets of five with the same old weight will be fine for today. Let's not kill it. I was telling myself I was taking it easy because anything more would be courting disastrous injury, what with my history of tweaks and pulls and scrapes.

And if I'd continued to lift heavy weights, that would have probably been true. But in the last few weeks I've actually dropped most heavy lifting from my roster, and instead am working largely with body weight and a few odd dumbbells or kettlebells. The TRX gets thrown into the mix. The fat jump rope. Some monkey bars at a local park. And a little place I call the Hill Of Doom, an impossibly steep hill that breaks me in about 30 seconds. I do everything in circuits, with almost no rest.

And it's hard as hell. This is probably the toughest month of workouts I've ever done. And my body is changing dramatically, frantically trying to keep up with all the weirdness I'm throwing at it.

I love all the toys that gyms offer (well, most of them). But I think that sometimes all the gear, all that shiny chrome and TV screens, even the iron and steel, just lulls us into thinking we're working hard, when in fact, we could work much harder if we jettisoned all that stuff, went outside, and threw ourselves seriously at some old-school pain-in-the-ass moves that no one wants to do.

Running up a hill at full tilt will gas anyone. If it doesn't, run faster. 60 seconds of real pushups will do the same thing. Too easy? Elevate your feet, do them with good form and get back to me. Pullups, ditto.

I find--with myself and clients--that if the focus is on looking a certain way, I get lost: well, if I go too hard today I'll lose the muscle mass I built yesterday, and I want this bigger but that smaller and yadda yadda. If the primary focus is on crushing it, on working until I just can't go on, I find I feel better, perform better, and--yes, ironically, look better.

I'll come back to the gym and the weights after a bit, I'm sure. It's hard to really reach the gasping levels of exhaustion indoors that you can--quite easily--by going outside and getting after it. I suspect that once I get back to the gym it will be with a newfound appreciation of how far it's possible to push yourself, and how much is really possible to get done in an hour.

On the way to Memphis to interview and train with a guy named Frank Matrisciano--a kind of mysterious Svengali type of strength coach (he doesn't even like that phrase--he prefers "Life-Changer") who currently works for the Memphis Tigers men's basketball team. From what I can tell, he's into outdoor training in different, seemingly random environments, using minimal equipment like med-balls, sandbags, and found objects (I read that a railroad tie figured prominently into one recent session).The sessions are brutal, intense, mentally as well as physically, and--it would seem--shockingly effective. The Memphis gig came up because he'd had great success giving NBA hopefuls the edge they needed to make the pros--but prior to the current gig he'd had equal success with average Joes and Janes training for weddings, reunions, photo shoots and the like.

Matriciano doesn't like publicity--he wears a mask when the media are around so as not to be photographed--so in a way I'm surprised I got the interview.

When Matrisciano was hired, the quote of the day--I'm paraphrasing--was that it would change the face of college basketball. Not being a big hoops fan, I'm more interested in the way that it may or may not change the face of big-time strength and conditioning, and of the fitness industry for average folks like you and me.

I've been a fan of guys like Erwan Le Corre, Frank Forencich and others since the moment I heard about them, and subsequently wrote about them (here and here): outdoorsy, back-to-nature types who believe that we function best when we train in a way that resembles our evolutionary history and environment. The gym--and its high-tech equipment--they contend, is artificial, and may not be optimal for improving actual performance.

All well and good for a weekend or weeklong retreat or workshop of the kind that Le Corre and Forencich teach. And, it would seem, all well and good for four to six week intense boot-camp style off-season retreats that Matrisciano has run up to this point. But good for a highly-ranked college basketball team over months and years? Good for guys whose health and functioning depends not just on intensity but on smart, injury-preventing training and programming? That's the real question.

The question--and the experiment of hiring a maverick-outsider-type like Matrisciano to strength/life-coach a franchise team like the Tigers--is whether unorthodox and intense trumps dispassionate and scientific when it comes to building strength, fitness, and general readiness for high-level performance. The military, for instance, infamous for throwing mindbendingly challenging physical tasks at recruits in order to build confidence, leadership and problem-solving, seems to think it does. But in recent history, strength and conditioning coaches have been drawn to the higher tech, the more scientifically proven. A bit more of the Ivan Drago, a bit less of the Rocky.

Matriciano is all Rocky. Does wild and crazy, brutal and intense, trump decades of research on undulating periodization and reverse-ladder pyramid loading? We shall see.

At the very least, it seems like a lot more fun.

Update: I've now returned from Memphis. A killer workout, and Frank M. has many interesting and novel methods that I will touch on here and cover in depth in an upcoming article for Men's Health. Stay tuned.

Below is a video that I'm in -- briefly -- about Parkour, that flippy, jumpy, climby outdoor gymnastic thing that everyone's doing these days. I'm no Victor Lopez (he's the very impressive traceur who hosts the vid), but I had a good time and surprised myself getting over the wall in the final reel below.

I don't think I'll ever really become a full-blown freerunner; for one thing, I'm not 5'6" and 22, but I think those guys are onto something: to get fit, move through space. To get really fit, expose yourself to challenging environments and move through them in creative, unusual ways. My nod to Parkour in my current workout program is that I'm working on learning to do a muscle-up, and I want learn to walk on my hands. I'm getting the jump on my 2012 fitness goals. I'll let you know how it goes.

It's been an eventful last several weeks: my first Men's Health article was published (in the October issue). In rapid succession I booked two more gigs with them and appear, thankfully to be on their go-to list of fitness scribes who can more or less string a series of words together and have them make some degree of sense.

The latest piece requires me to track down and speak with about 20 college-basketball strength and conditioning coaches, which is interesting and fun. It also requires me to learn phrases like "the hardwood" and "cutting down the net" and "rebound" and "dribble." I'm not a basketball guy. But it's fun pretending to be a sportswriter--those guys can spin a yarn. 

An article I wrote for Experience Life was also honored with a silver medal in the how-to category at the Minnesota Magazine and Publisher's Association banquet last week. Presumably they take into account the photography, editing, layout, et. el, (and the article does look great) as well as the writing, but I'm still very proud of it, and I'm looking forward to tacking the phrase "Award-Winning" in front of my name, regardless of context.  Like the actor Ben Affleck, who is referred to as "Academy Award Winner" even though he won the Oscar for co-writing a screenplay and not for acting, I'm not going to consider it lying to refer to myself as an "Award-Winning Olympic Lifter," or an "Award Winning Improvisational Comedian" because something I was involved did technically win an award, and since those are technically activities I've participated in. As you can see, I fully plan on milking this one for all it's worth. It may be my last chance.

Other than that, on a fitness front, I'm experimenting with a system called the 5/3/1 program, written by powerlifter Jim Wendler, a kind of idiot-proof way of building maximal strength in an exceedingly sensible manner. Look it up--it's a good one. You can accuse me of being lazy and not linking it, but who's the Award-Winning fitness writer, here, me or you? Google it yourself, lazy!

At the same time as I've been upping my strength to personal-record levels using Wendler's system, I've counterintuitively been rehabbing my knees with foam rolling, obsessive levels of glute and core work, and recommitting to doing Feldenkrais work daily, all of which I've come to believe are pretty much essential for everyone. Oddly, it's working, even as my strength is improving. 5/3/1 isn't a very high-volume program, so I'm able to spend more time in my workouts on things that improve the way I move and feel, and the results are encouraging. I may need less volume in my workouts than I once thought. 

Or perhaps it's just another example of the new and unusual thing working better than the thing I should have given up on after four weeks instead of four months. Happens to me all the time.

That's all for now. Back to my NCAA basketball phrase book.

As regular readers of this blog know, I've had some knee issues of late, resulting from eighteen months of fairly intensive aikido training that I did concluding rather abruptly late last year when I tweaked my left one rather severely. Ever since I've dealt with low level knee pain in both knees, off and on.

Anyway, for the last year or so, after being cleared by my doctor for all activities, I've read many articles on how to rehab knees. They all say "glute activation," and I've thought, okay, yeah yeah yeah, a few glute bridges here and there, but I don't really sit as much as most people, so I'm sure my glutes are fine, could this really apply to me, I'm special, after all, I mean, I'm a TRAINER for Pete's sake, sure I don't need glute activation?

And off I went, gritting my way through workouts that were, to a greater or lesser extent, painful on my knees, alternately thinking, "I'll be fine soon," "This will never get better, so I'll just have to suck it up," and "I'm officially ignoring this pain and pretending it's not there," and "Come on, what am I, a wuss?" Standard guy-speak when dealing with physical limitation.

But a few weeks ago I decided to actually give this glute activation stuff a real try. To put it to the test, really, to prove to myself and the world that it would do NOTHING to improve the state of my knees so I could happily return to my denial/resignation cycle.

It was a bit of a rampage: X band walks, glute bridging of various kinds, figure-4 lying knee raises, a few other moves. All told, I was doing about 100 reps per side per day.

And guess what? Knee pain preeeeeetty much gone.

As luck would have it, I ran into this article yesterday on T-Nation in which the author says this about powering up the glutes:

...crush – and I mean crush – your glutes with an absurd amount of joint-friendly volume...Aim for a minimum of 100 repetitions per day, topping out at 300 for those with the dedication.The big question is, "When can I start to reincorporate squats?" The answer is whenever your mind-muscle connection borders obsession. If you're not feeling your glutes when you walk up steps, get in and out of your car, and stand up from the toilet, you're not quite "there."

This is as good an explanation as I've heard of the amount of reconditioning movement you REALLY need to do to affect change in habitual movement/muscle activation patterns of ANY kind. It's got to border on obsession. Not forever--just for awhile, till the pattern gets worked out.

That seems to be what finally worked for me.

I don't think that PT's and trainers really emphasize this enough: that it's got to be a project, something you focus on and commit to for a length of time in order for the solution to take hold. Three sets of desultory hyperextensions once a week will NOT solve a glute activation problem. The solutions to our fitness problems are often not complicated.

But you do have to DO them.

Maybe you're one of the many people who think that the plank is a remedial exercise--something for grandmothers or people in traction.

The cool thing about the plank--and the reason I've become even more of a fan of this move in the last few years-- is that it can be that--a basic move that almost everyone can do in its easiest form (that would be on the elbows and knees--like you're doing a girl-style pushup, only resting on your forearms). But then you can progress it right through the roof, with loading and stability challenges and arms and legs moving this way and that. If you focus 100% on keeping your spine (and your head!) in a neutral alignment throughout the movement, the plank can be a powerful corrective movement for postural issues as well as a very strong core-builder.

One easy way to advance the plank just a tad--which I learned, credit where it's due, from Alwyn Cosgrove--is to shift your position just slightly so that your elbows are in front of your shoulders.

Usually when trainers teach the plank they say to position their elbows directly under the shoulders. This is manageable for most people, particularly if you've been training for awhile. But make the adjustment above, stretching yourself out just a hair so your elbows are a few inches forward of your shoulders, while keeping your back neutral--and suddenly it's a whole new, and humbling, ball game.

So here's something I was thinking about a propos of Dan John's lecture at the Perform Better conference a couple of weeks back.

Most peoples' fitness activities involve low skill, high effort activities.

Or perhaps I should say that the fitness industry has sold us on the notion that getting fit by necessity involves a lot of low skill, high effort activities.

Think about your average gym: treadmills, stationary bikes, ellipticals, weight machines, hell, I'll even toss many free-weight movements under the bus. What's the learning curve on those moves? How long does it take to MASTER most big-box gym activities?

About 30 seconds.

The philosophy behind most gym activities is this: "What can we have people do that NO ONE will find challenging to learn, but that we can make progressively more and more difficult?"

Answer? Dumbbell curls. Seated pec-deck flyes. Lat pulldowns. Riding a stationary bike.

For all intents and purposes, these moves take your brain out of the equation. You don't have to pay attention to them, so most people don't: they just space out, watch the TV, and wait for their 20 minutes in the fat-burning zone to elapse.

Congratulations: we've invented a way of getting fit that circumvents the brain--that pesky gray matter between our ears--so we can make our muscles bigger and stronger and our heart pump faster doing movements that have nothing to do with anything humans are supposed to do with their bodies.

Essentially, these fitness activities are a 'cheat': they allow us to exert ourselves BEFORE we know how to move with coordination and skill. They are, once again, low-skill, high-effort activities.

Running in running shoes? Same deal: high effort, low skill. Running barefoot? High effort...high skill. You've got to learn to do it reasonably well before you can do it with any effort.

Isn't it interesting that the addition of more technology (lat pulldown machines, running shoes) lowers the skill-bar while allowing us to raise the effort bar?

Dan John said that we all need to spend more time in doing high-skill, low-effort activities. I couldn't agree more.

Then and only then, I think, we should add effort.

I find it interesting that the activities most people rave about, and really enjoy, have a skill component: yoga. Boxing. Actual, outdoor cycling. MMA and other martial arts. Dance of all kinds.

If we get back to a skill-based fitness model I think we're all the more likely to enjoy ourselves and reach our fitness goals at the same time.