Tale of Two P-T's (Personal Training and Physical Therapy)
by Andrew Heffernan on Feb 8, 2010 2:32 PM EST
2 comments
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.
2 comments | 0 recs
Another Plug for Foam Rolling
by Andrew Heffernan on Feb 5, 2010 5:01 PM EST
1 comment
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.
1 comment | 0 recs
Running Keeps You Young?
by Andrew Heffernan on Feb 2, 2010 6:58 PM EST
11 comments
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.
11 comments | 0 recs
The Body is One Thing
by Andrew Heffernan on Feb 1, 2010 9:11 PM EST
0 comments
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.
0 comments | 0 recs |
I Can't Reach Your Muscles
by Andrew Heffernan on Jan 29, 2010 11:34 AM EST
6 comments
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
6 comments | 0 recs |
It Fell on the Floor...Should I Eat It?
by Andrew Heffernan on Jan 26, 2010 3:26 PM EST
7 comments
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.
7 comments | 0 recs
Lift Weights, Get Smarter.
by Andrew Heffernan on Jan 25, 2010 6:58 PM EST
0 comments
If there's one constant theme to this blog--and, come to think of it, there probably really isn't--it's that strength training is good. But lately you may have noticed that I've been on a kick about the subtler aspects of fitness: coordination, balance, subtle control, etc. Inevitably this has dovetailed with my own study of aikido and Feldenkrais, whose benefits I'm slowly becoming sold on.
So I was surprised somewhat by the results of a study which suggests that straight-up strength training beats "balance and toning" exercises for increasing cognitive functioning. Here I was starting to struggle my way up onto a hgih horse about strength training benefiting the muscles alone, and what about the brain, what about the nervous system, what about all those wonderful subtle details, and good ol' fashioned strength training beats all the mamby-pamby stuff by a healthy margin:
Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.
A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration — 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.
I find this surprising, as balance is of course a subtle skill, requiring focus and attention and control, and you would think there would be some carry-over to cognition. But apparently not.
Of course, who knows exactly what a "toning" exercise is; just about all the physiology I've read suggests that "muscle toning" and "muscle building" activities differ only in degree, not in kind. And almost anything could be construed as a "balance" exercise. Don't know if there was significant progression--which is one thing that the scientifically-administered strength-training programs tend to be long on.
But, assuming the study setup was good (and that's a pretty big assumption given the 1960's-era Exercise Phys knowledge that seems to underlie a lot of these big studies!), it points to a couple of intriguing possibilities: perhaps strength training fosters an environment that's particularly fertile for nerve growth; perhaps the body senses that there's work to be done of a hunting/gathering nature and so sharpens up the ancillary functions necessary for such activity; perhaps lifting heavy things just gives a nice psychological boost that creates feelings of self-efficacy which translate into the ability to make decisions.
I started lifting weights about 1987, when I was a freshman in high school, and got serious about it the following year--which coincided with a pretty radical jump in my grades, not to mention my general happiness and feelings of being "on track" in my life. So my experience is in line with the researchers' findings.
How it all works is quite another question.
0 comments | 0 recs |
The Experts on Fat Loss, Condensed
by Andrew Heffernan on Jan 22, 2010 3:39 PM EST
7 comments
I have reason to believe that a lot of my readers also read Tmuscle, but in case you haven't seen it, check out this article on fat loss: it's a summation of what a baker's dozen of the best strength and conditioning coaches currently out there have to say about the best workouts for slicing blubber off your body. And since fat loss is the hottest topic out there--always--and these guys (they're all guys) make their living from this stuff, it's worth a look.
If you're really short on time, however, you can just refer to the Cliffs Notes version I've created below. Listed are the name of the coach and the technique or techniques he suggests:
Mike Robertson: eat less
John Romaniello: Full-body strength training
Martin Rooney: Sprints and lifting in circuits
Bret Contreras: Full body strength training plus prowler/Airdyne (metabolic) work
Christian Thibaudeau: eat less, sprints and Olympic lifts in circuits
Chad Waterbury: Full-body lifting plus rope jumping/ burpee ladders (metabolic)
Tim Henriques: Fasted morning steady-state cardio, incline treadmill walking
Mike Boyle: Eat less, Strength Training, Airdyne Intervals; approx. 2:1 work ratio
Alwyn Cosgrove: Basically, it's higher rep, density based, short rest-period resistance training.
Jim Wendler: Prowler / Sled Push 4-7x/week; strength training 4x/week
Nick Tumminello: Strength training, 300 yard shuttle run
Erick Minor: Heavy, full-body workouts done in superset or triset fashion
Scott Abel: "Power Sequences" aka "Combination Lifts"--a form of lifting complexes.
For people keeping score, the winners are:
Combination of Strength Training w/Limited Rest and High-Intensity Interval Training: 7
Strength Training with Limited Rest Periods: 4
Eat Less: 3
Fasted Steady State Cardio: 1
Note that the people who answered "Eat Less" weren't really answering the question, which was about optimal fat loss workouts. They admitted that for the most part, asserting the primacy of diet in determining body composition. So the clear winner is strength training (with a preference for limiting the rest periods) plus some form of High-Intensity Interval Training--sprints, sled pushes, work on the Airdyne (surprising to see two mentions of this particular device!).
It's worth noting that Alwyn Cosgrove, perhaps the biggest authority on this topic, does NOT prioritize HIIT in his workouts. I can't speak for him, but at a certain point, a strength-training workout with little-to-no rest becomes a HIIT workout; you're moving from one thing to the next so fast that it's more or less the equivalent of sprinting, only with fewer reps per movement. My understanding is that he's been seeking ways to limit the number of repetitions of a given movement in his fat-loss workouts, presumably for injury-prevention purposes--so HIIT doesn't make the grade, as it's high-rep by nature.
So if you're trying to lose fat and you're not doing strength-training with limited rest and/or HIIT training...the question is...why not??
7 comments | 0 recs |
Secondary Sidebar
FanPosts
Community blog posts and discussion.
Certain photos copyright © 2010 by Associated Press or Getty Images. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of Associated Press and Getty Images is strictly prohibited.
