2011 Perform Better Summit Rundown!

Just came home from the 2011 Perform Better Summit. Even for non-fitness nerds (any of those types reading this blog?), there's lots of great information: smart presenters and an audience of absurdly fit individuals. At one of the lectures I scanned the room and idly thought, "I wonder what the average body fat percentage is of all the people here?" My estimate was in the low double digits. Get those people in a room doing a workout together--as they do at some of the hands-on segments--and it's a thunderous herd of intensity. Unfortunately, it's rare to see that many FIT people all together in one space. I wonder if, as we like to think, that there was once a time when fitness was the norm or if it's always been bad, but now it's worse.

Regardless.

Here are some highlights and some brief notes about some gems I picked up. Primarily--and this is something that's impossible to sum up in a blog post--you get a sense of what others out there are doing--the ones who present and the ones in the audience with whom  you idly chat between lectures.

David Jack: Interesting and inspiring guy, huge heart. Clearly a master of the people-person thing, in a genuine way. I can't say I got a lot of concrete, usable information out of him that I didn't already know, but he modelled the personal touch very well. I will say this is the first Perform Better lecture that actually made me tear up at least twice. The dude is passionate, and he connects with people. You can tell he loves what he does and he loves his clients, and the importance of that for a trainer almost can't be overstated.

Alwyn Cosgrove: I go to his workouts every time at Perform Better and I love/hate them every time. He's on the cutting edge of fitness science, and he imparts this stuff in a hilarious, easygoing way. Cosgrove is one of the most successful fitness marketers in the world, bar none, and I'm proud to say he's a bit of a pal. I missed his lecture, but read the notes and it's a lot of the stuff that, thanks in large part to him, has been making its way into the mainstream in recent years--long slow cardio isn't helpful for fat loss; nutrition is the #1 (and, his estimation, the #2 as well) most important intervention for fat loss; our cultural lack of movement has caused serious problems and has changed the role of the trainer and of fitness in general.

Sue Falsone: Sue is an accomplished physical therapist and put together an interesting presentation on the head and shoulders and how they affect more or less everything. She had a wealth of information and diagnostics, all of which convincingly proved her point. For a non-PT like me, some of this was over my head, as it were, but there's usually at least one presentation a week that I walk out of thinking "Wow, I know nothing." This was that lecture for me. 

I was struck as well by the contrasts and the similarities between her approach and the Feldenkrais work I've been doing the last couple of years. That's a subject for a later post.

Brian Grasso, an expert in youth fitness, spoke about some of his experiences coaching and creating programs for kids. Grasso doesn't look like the typical fitness nerd: he's got some facial piercings and tats, and thank God for a little bit of flair and off-centeredness in this super-square, biceps and crewcuts industry.

A couple of the lessons: young kids need broad movement exposure. Lots of games, lots of different types of movement. He mentioned that kids probably shouldn't lift weights before after their early-puberty growth spurt (he called it the Maximum Growth Velocity), but should hit it hard shortly thereafter, as it's the period when you can gain strength the fastest. I started lifting weights when I was about 15, which (apparently) was right in the pocket, and I do remember gaining a hell of a lot of strength those first couple of years.

Grasso also made a point about over-coaching kids: that you shouldn't do it, in large part because the nervous system tends to auto-regulate--that is, it's naturally attracted to correct movement. I'm definitely an over-coacher.

Todd Wright did a cool hands-on about how successful athletic movement is about dominating a sphere of space. I wish I could have gotten more out of it, but I was so flattened from Cosgrove's workout that I could barely keep up. Interesting stuff though. He emphasized multiplanar movement with a variety of different types of reaching and extending.

John Berardi, who runs one of the most successful online nutrition coaching programs out there, may have had the most clear-minded thoughts about coaching that I heard all weekend. Useful for me, of course, but also for people trying to make changes in their lives. Some key points: you can't change your diet all at once. Learning to eat properly is similar to learning an advanced physical skill like an Olympic Lift. You've got to break it down into manageable parts. Berardi uses a method in which he proposes some manner of change: taking fish oil. Eating slower, etc. The client has to tell Berardi how confident he is in his ability to complete the task--on a scale of 1-10. If he doesn't get a 9 or a 10 answer, he makes the intervention easier.

Simple, clear, effective. He also said that coaches need to take 100% responsibility for the results AND the compliance of their clients. That means if you assign an intervention and the client doesn't complete it--it's your fault. Ouch. But true and effective. Berardi was a highlight.

The exceptionally personable and expert Charles Staley spoke about Olympic Lifting, how and why to incorporate it into your training program, and some of the finer points of actually doing it. I missed his hands-on lecture--it conflicted with another lecture I really wanted to see (universally this is a response that Perform Better gets to these conferences: you can't see everything, no matter how hard you try.). The number one reason to do Olympic lifting? Staley remarked that these lifts tend NOT to build strength and power very fast, because they're so technical that most of your learning is on a neural level--learning the new skill--rather than making your muscles actually stronger or more powerful. Moreover, he argued, why learn and try to master a whole separate sport, with all its challenges and intricacies, if you're trying to get better at, say, football or tennis? He also poked some gentle fun at weightlifting coaches, who often spend long months lifting nothing heavier than a broomstick. He believes you've got to get some weight into peoples' hands.

So: the number one reason people should do the O-lifts? They're fun. People enjoy doing it. And that turned out to be a theme of the weekend.

Dan John did a presentation called "The Four Quadrants of Lifting" in which he broke down performance and the act of training into four categories: Many Qualities / Low Effort; Many Qualities / High Effort; Few Qualities / High Effort; Many Qualities / High Effort. "Qualities" refers to skills or goals: so a standard PE class is Quadrant One: lots of skills at a low level of effort, and pro football is Quadrant Two: many skills required at a high level of effort. It's a cool model and helps you keep your programming on track if you're a trainer OR trainee: you have to ask, why am I training? What's the best way to get there? Fat loss, John argued, is a fairly simple task: few skills required at a fairly low level of effort (although some might argue that fat-loss programs can be very intense!).

I don't know Dan John's work that well, but he appears to be a concepts man with an extremely broad knowledge base (I think he's a professor of theology or some such when he's not strength-coaching--so he's kind of a Rennaissance man), and I like that. Plus, he's funny, and that helps a lot.

Todd Durkin After Cosgrove's workout, I was a little on the trepidacious side about getting involved in a Todd Durkin workout. He's cheesy as hell, but the guy is a supernova of energy and, I imagine, could motivate a snail to break 10.0 in the 100-meter dash. He had the room perform a workout which, warm-up aside (and he was one of many people there whose "warm-ups" were long and intense--part of a trend towards encouraging more diverse exposure to different movement patterns in different planes of motion) lasted all of five minutes. And it almost killed me. Here's what he had us do:

MAX REPS IN 60 SECONDS EACH OF:

1) Bosu Ball Pushups + Overhead Clap: You assume a pushup position holding the sides of the Bosu, lower your chest onto the disc, clap your hands overhead, return your hands to the disc, and push yourself back up again. here's a photo of me flailing away:

2) Med-Ball Slams: Take a 12-pound, sand-filled med ball slam it on the floor, pick it up, repeat.

3) Heavy Rope Jump Rope: Jump rope in any way you wish using a heavy rope. Killer.

4) Battling Rope. Slam the ropes; nothing to it but a heart attack...

5) TRX Row.

(thanks to my buddy Jen Sinkler, my editor at Experience Life, who took these photos).

You take literally 4 minutes between efforts, but those 60 seconds are all out. Of course Durkin added a competitive challenge to it as well, so that the person who completed the highest number of reps of everything won a prize. My score was 285, which appeared to be top 10 among the guys, but the winners of both the men and women scored well over 300. I think the top guy had about 350. Yikers.There's fit and then there's just sick.

So: for people who say they don't have time to exercise--here's 5 minutes of work inside about 25 minutes of time that flattened almost all of us. And we're fitness nerds.

But this probably wouldn't have been the workout it was without Durkin's INSANE motivational skills. I don't know what that dude eats but I want some of it.

Recurring themes: 1) FUN is essential in exercise. 2) Most people--kids and adults--need lots of many different types of movement. 2) Mindfulness is key. Doing an activity that forces you to pay attention to learn. 4) Fast and intense body-weight movements (and primitive-tool movements like ropes, med-balls, kettlebells) is where it's at.

This conference seems rife for a Feldenkrais presentation and I'm going to make it my personal mission to be lecturing about Feldy at Perform Better in the next five years. There, I said it. Feldenkrais fits absolutely right in the pocket of where fitness is going right now, and what people desperately need: something interesting, something instructive, some powerful way of getting in touch with their bodies that ANYONE can do.

Along those lines: one of the most popular trade-show items at the conference (fitness equipment folks use the PB Summits to sell their wares) was, essentially, a jungle gym: ropes, rings, horizontal bars, parallel bars and the like hanging from a climbable steel structure. The people at the conference couldn't stay off of it all three days. The playground is coming back.