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Skip the Mirror
by Andrew Heffernan on Sep 3, 2010 11:50 AM EDT
0 comments
New thought about training: skip the mirror.
In gyms where mirrors are on almost every wall, in an environment where almost everyone is there to improve their looks...is that even possible??
Well, it's certainly tough, I grant you, but I think it's for the best.
Here are a few reasons I think that we'd all be better off skipping the mirror during exercise:
1) Your attention goes off of how you LOOK and more onto how you FEEL. That's totally essential for good form, because you can sense--or I should say, learn to sense--far more than you can see about what your body is doing. When there's visual information available it tends to trump all the other senses. When visual feedback isn't available, other senses kick in. So you're going to build better proprioception if you keep your eyes off the mirror.
2) You start focus on performance rather than appearance. A wise, very strong guy once said that the ugliest exercises are the best ones for you. I'm not sure I totally agree--I find something perversely beautiful about good form in even a guts-on-the-floor deadlift--but I get what he was driving at: you're not supposed to look great while you exercise. That's not the point. More mirrors, more self-consciousness. More self-consciousness, less performance. You want to be a doer in the gym, not a looker. If you're concerned about looking good outside the gym--and come on, who isn't?--then the more you focus on DOING in the gym, the better you'll look outside it.
3) You can keep your balance better. This goes under the heading of "sheer conjecture," but, hey, my blog, right? A client of mine was doing overhead lunges (that's where you lunge while holding a barbell isometrically overhead, as in the top position of a military press). I had her set up in front of the mirror and she had a hard time holding onto her balance. On her second set, she resituated herself so she couldn't see herself and presto--her balance was perfect. Mirrors, as ubiquitous as they are, are an illusion. They're disorienting. And they very well may screw up your balance subtly, as they mess with your sense of spacial relations in the room.
Perhaps that's why Narcissus lost his balance.
Certainly there are other reasons, among them, not looking like a tool who's obsessed with how great his arm veins look when he's doing curls.
Anyone else got some?
Have a good weekend!
A
Stop Looking for the "Gentleman's C" of Exercise
by Andrew Heffernan on Aug 31, 2010 2:41 PM EDT
2 comments
Interesting New York Times piece on a new interest in "sarcopenia" among the elderly and inactive:
With interest high among the aging, the market potential for maintaining and rebuilding muscle mass seems boundless. Drug companies already are trying to develop drugs that can build muscles or forestall their weakening without the notoriety of anabolic steroids. Food giants like Nestlé and Danone are exploring nutritional products with the same objective.
Let's just stop right there: who's to say that the solution has to be pharmaceutical? Sure, the pharmaceutical industry, and I'm not going to demonize them, that happens enough; instead I'll say good for them for looking for a way to address this problem, even if they do profit by it. But the rest of us don't have to take this lying down and assume that Big Pharma is going to solve our problems, do we? Why can't we, you know, EXERCISE and fix the problem ourselves?
Side note: steroids work. They do--sorry. And if you take them in controlled doses, there AREN'T serious side effects. This problem has been solved. Can't we just repackage 'roids under the "hormonal rebalancing" label like this guy and be done with it?
More:
In addition, geriatric specialists, in particular, are now trying to establish the age-related loss of muscles as a medical condition under the name sarcopenia, from the Greek for loss of flesh. Simply put, sarcopenia is to muscle what osteoporosis is to bone.
"In the future, sarcopenia will be known as much as osteoporosis is now," said Dr. Bruno Vellas, president of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
Researchers involved in the effort say doctors and patients need to be more aware that muscle deterioration is a major reason the elderly lose mobility and cannot live independently.
So the problem is muscle loss, say the experts, not bone loss. But isn't that one and the same thing? I mean, your bones lose density because the muscles (and the forces of gravity, of course) stop pulling on them with any appreciable force. In other words, because we stop exercising. If we kept exercising, we'd probably be less likely to atrophy.
The science community is always looking for "minimum standards"--ie, how little can we get away with and still hold onto muscle mass, bone mass, heart health? But it's probably more of a continuum, admittedly with a bit of a curve in it: some activity is WAY better than no activity, but more activity is probably still better than a small amount, and lots--in the manner of "lots of walking, lots of moving, bending, squatting, lifting," much like our ancestors used to do, is probably optimal. Eventually, of course, the benefits level off, maybe even decline a little. But all told, the healthiest people probably move the most and in the largest variety of ways.
Instead of looking always to squeak by on the minimum physical standards--looking for the "Gentleman's C" of physical activity, it seems like THAT should be the recommendation: do as much of you can of these types of activities.
No drug will be able to replicate that.
2 comments | 1 recs |
Complex Questions
by Andrew Heffernan on Aug 17, 2010 12:17 AM EDT
9 comments
Doing some research for an article at present on complexes, and as usual I'm getting really into them at the same time.
What's a complex? Two or more exercises, back to back (choose bang-for-your-buckers, no filler isolation moves!), done back to back for a set number of reps, sometimes timed, with the same resistance--bodyweight, barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, your dog. Then you have a timed rest period; then you repeat ad vomitissumus. If you're using a barbell, you never put it down. If you're using a dumbbell, you never put it down. If you're using a kettlebell, that's right, you never put it down. At this moment, I'm still holding the barbell, dumbbell, and kettlebell I was using this morning. Very tough.
To clarify: I mean you never put it down till the set is over.
Cool thing about complexes: they can be virtually as easy or hard as you wish. You can grab a 45-pound bar (or less!) and do a complex consisting of three sets of five deadlifts and push presses, resting two minutes between efforts. Not that tough for you if you're in decent shape. Or you can load an Olympic bar with 25-pound plates do a complex consisting of six sets of eight reps each of
deadlifts
Romanian deadlifts
bent rows
power cleans
front squats
push presses
back squats
good mornings
...resting 30 seconds between sets, and barf your fool head off before you pass out with a stupid grin on your face. Believe me, Chuckles, 95 pounds for eight reps--tough but manageable in isolation, an Everest of a fitness challenge done in sequence--never felt so heavy (thanks to Alwyn Cosgrove, true to his rep as the creator of hurlicious workouts, for the above sequence!).
Complexes are part of the "New Wave" of hybrid training--part cardio, part strength, all rock-n-roll--which I think is really the way to go when what you're looking for is a body that's both athletic and looks great. You won't get huge on complexes--but then again, few people WANT to get huge. Virtually across the board, some people want to gain a LITTLE musce--EVERYONE wants to lose fat. And EVERYONE, unless you're certifiable--wants to feel better and have a body that works better. Complexes are a great way to do that. Robert Dos Remedios, who I interviewed for this article, said that you could "throw a blanket over 95% of the population's fitness goals and complexes would be beneficial for all of them."
Benefits: they're fast, they're tough, they're scalable, they're convenient, they're functional, they're masochistically fun, they'll build your cardio while preserving--and, assuming you work on the heavier, faster side, actually BUILD--your muscle mass. This is truly working out at its finest. Nothing civilized or low-key about it.
Drawback: if complexes are easy or manageable or comfortable or fun...you're not doing them right. You've set the bar too low for yourself. I tried Cosgrove's complex with just 65 pounds and peacocked around for a few minutes thinking I was tough because I didn't find the workout that tough. Then I jumped to 95 pounds and the cursing began. I couldn't hold onto the bar.
Throw some in at the beginning--as a pick-you-up warmup--or the end--as a kill-your-children finisher--of your workout, or do them as a standalone--maybe three, or even four complexes back to back, with a break in between. Just make sure you don't plan on doing much the next day--and keep a bucket handy.
Keep Learning for Optimal Health
by Andrew Heffernan on Aug 10, 2010 1:51 PM EDT
3 comments
There are a ton of systems and methodologies out there that address how to build muscles. There are as many that deal with building cardiovascular fitness. And these days, there are almost as many that address issues with connective tissue.
We've got those bases covered quite thoroughly.
And yet: people who are muscular, fit, and flexible still get hurt. They still have movement dysfunction. They still have poor posture. Their joints still ache. I know, because I'm one of those guys (even if I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to STOP being one of them).
So what's going on here? I think the problem is that most people in the fitness industry leave out--or at least largely ignore--the most important part of the equation: the nervous system. After all, your body doesn't DO anything unless YOU TELL it to, consciously or unconsciously, via the nervous system. So if you've got pain that comes from poor movement, correcting the site of pain isn't going to help you much.
And getting stronger isn't going to help much either. It's just going to make you more able to do the thing you're already doing wrong.
If you're trying to get better at a sport, or some other type of physical, performance-based activity (like dance), then simply getting stronger or faster or more flexible is only going to take you so far. The Jordans and LeBrons and Tigers and Federers of the world aren't necessarily the strongest or the fastest in their sport--they're the most highly skilled. Sure, their fitness indicators are well above those of us mere mortals, but that's not what makes them better than their fellow pro athletes.
Add to that that improving the functioning of the nervous system is a great way to stave off the effects of aging, and you've got yourself a pretty darn good constellation of reasons not just to keep getting stronger, faster, and more flexible, because, let's face it, there's a limit to that stuff, but to keep learning, keep getting better.
So howdyadothat?
As everyone who reads MPF regularly knows, I'm now one year into a training program for certification in the Feldenkrais method--which is one way of addressing exactly these issues. It's a system of movement exercises which constantly presents you with new alternative ways to move and behave. All told, the work continually refines and improves your functioning, getting you closer and closer to optimal. The program is four years long, so I'm pretty much a freshman, but this seems to be where it's headed (here's a link to a two-day program on the 11th and 12th of September in the Southern California area. Looks like a good one!).
Still, Feldenkrais isn't the only path towards improved functioning of this kind. If all this "evils-of-sitting" data tells us nothing else, it says that doing the same thing over and over again in the same way isn't good for you.
So one way of incorporating some Feldenkrais-like principles in your life is to seek out habitual behavior in your life and...break it. Do things another way. Drive a new way to work. Do things at a different time of day. Move in a new way. Novelty in the way you move, more than perhaps almost anything, is a major key to health and longevity. Moving a new way means thinking a new way, which means behaving in a new way.
If nothing else, include an element of learning in your exercise program: something you're getting more skilled at, not simply stronger and faster.
Post ideas or practices in comments about how you keep your workouts from getting stale. Take classes? Switch your workouts up? Get involved in new activities?
3 comments | 1 recs |
More Thoughts on Sitting (Composed While Sitting)
by Andrew Heffernan on Aug 3, 2010 3:46 PM EDT
14 comments
A friend of mine sent me the original article summarizing the recent studies on the effects of sedentary behavior (pdf file here)--literally, time spent sitting--considered independently of the effects of time spent exercising. Essentially, it argues that your tuckus-time and your time spent exercising "moderately-to-vigorously" should be considered as separate health factors. Exercising is good for you, the authors acknowledge; but even if you exercise, sitting a lot is still bad for you--you can't make up for a lot of sitting with the occasional--even fairly frequent--workout.
Up to now, most people have thought, "Okay, I work out. So I don't have to take the stairs, take five-minute walks every couple of hours, stretch now and then, and so forth." But in fact, you do. We all do.
I think there's value in that. Sure, maybe it interrupts your day to throw in some walking now and then. Maybe you're in love with escalators and other labor-saving devices. But the idea that we can somehow "deal with" our bodies for three hours a week and then ignore them the rest of the time strikes me as quite self-evidently short-sighted.
ANYTHING we can do to connect with our bodies is useful and powerful antidote to the way many of us treat our bodies, namely, as brain-transport devices. So though I'm never happy to hear about people getting sick, or about a blind spot in the exercise physiology discipline, I'm actually pleased to hear the stats bear out the idea that sitting all day ain't all that good forya.
As I mentioned the other day, I think more physical activity--and we're talking the NEPA kind (non-exercise physical activity) now--will actually make people MORE productive, not less. Work time isn't zero-sum. You want to be maximally productive when you are working, then take breaks that allow you to refocus and recommit when you get back to it. And one fifteen-minute lunch break at midday won't cut it, Freckles.
As the study authors add, however, the new stats might prove a good incentive for people who don't exercise, yet haven't up to now believed that those occasional bouts of NEPA will do much for them. Now there's reason to believe that it will.
Final question, posed on other sites: we need a definition of "moderate to vigorous." If what I see in most gyms is any indication, the vast majority of us are on the low-moderate end of that scale when we exercise. Soon we need a study on the long-term effects of (safe) higher-intensity exercise.
(This entry composed entirely while walking at a treadmill desk. Not really.)
Oxygen in a Con...er, Can
by Andrew Heffernan on Aug 1, 2010 5:31 PM EDT
2 comments
So a friend sent me this link to a new product: oxygen in a spray-aerosol can.
Oh my word.
The website is even more absurd. It includes this gem:
Is using recreational oxygen safe?
Yes. All research indicates that oxygen toxicity only occurs after breathing virtually pure oxygen for hours at a time. Recreational canned oxygen typically has less than 2 minutes of continuous flow oxygen per can, is not delivered in pure form and is administered in short bursts. There is no research indicating that short bursts of oxygen can be detrimental to your health. In addition, our cans do not have airtight delivery systems, so even though their may be 90-95% oxygen in the cans, that's not even close to what you are getting in your lungs.
...so, hold the phone here, McGee: is pure oxygen a good thing or a bad thing? In one oxygena-rich breath you're bragging about how the can contains 95% oxygen, then carefully reassure us that, because you're taking in ambient air with each swig of oh-two, you're NOT getting anything close to that in your lungs? And if you're not getting anywhere close to that...what GOOD is it?
I also see no studies on the site indicating its effectiveness. I hear lots of intense music and see some guys working out...but no guarantees that it's worth zilch.
I'm starting to think that muscle-guy wanna-be's have surpassed skinny-girl wanna-be's as "World's Most Gullible Target Audience".
On the website, a peppy, bespectacled girls says,
Although many people scoff at it, we believe that canned oxygen will be all over the place soon--just like bottled water!
Do they WANT to be associated with the polluting, estrogen-laden, total-ripoff that is bottled water? Are they at ALL aware of the PR nightmare that bottled water has become in the last year or two?
Who ARE these people? I'm betting RJ Reynolds is behind this, just like Coke and Pepsi are behind bottled water.
Absurd.
Hodge-Podge Fitness
by Andrew Heffernan on Jul 29, 2010 1:34 PM EDT
1 comment
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.
Exercise: No Good For You?
by Andrew Heffernan on Jul 27, 2010 11:57 PM EDT
3 comments
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?
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