Spoke yesterday with Phil Timmons, head of Group Training for Life Time Fitness, which publishes Experience Life, the magazine I've been writing for for the last year or so. Although we spoke briefly, he struck me as great guy, and certainly a fellow fitness freak (naturally enough). Phil heads up a race called the Minnesota Border to Border Triathlon, which you can read about here. It's a crazy--by which I mean extremely cool--sounding four-day race: over 200 miles of  biking on the first two days, fifty miles of running on day three and twenty miles of canoeing on day four. You and your fellow teammates (teams can have up to four people) travel from the southwest corner of the the state to near the Canadian border!

Another very cool aspect of the race is that it works like a relay race: you run just a couple of miles at a stretch, take a break and let someone else take over, then start again, over and over till the distance is complete for the day (presumably with the help of a support van or two). That means that the four days aren't really long, slow, distance races but more like interval training days--only you're doing a LOT of repeats.

If I lived in Minnesota, you can bet I'd be there. Again, check out Phil's website on the race for more information.

On a totally unrelated note: this blog is now part of the "ehealth forum" blog network (you can see their logo at left if you scroll down) -- a compendium of blogs with a health and wellness bent. Some of the bloggers are, like, doctors and stuff. Naturally I'm in the fitness pool, but you can get your medical questions looked at by smart folks over there as well.

Back in the saddle again.

These last weeks there have been so many pulls on my time and energy that I've felt like stretch-arm strong. I wonder if they still make stretch-arm strong. I imagine not--I think he was filled with plutonium anyway.

So yes, very busy. Here's a point that I'd like to make for people who get stressed and busy and decide to ditch their workouts. It's a bad idea, but if you miss a workout or two...just MISS A WORKOUT. It's like movie where Robin Williams tells the guy "You're either a smoker or a non-smoker. Decide what you are and be that." (what movie WAS that? Can't remember, post to comments...Insomnia, maybe?) If you need to miss a workout, miss it and move on.

I rarely hold myself up as an example of How To Do Things Right, especially because in this case I'm usually pretty bad at it. The poet Seamus Heaney gave what I think is the most brilliant commencement speech ever by refusing to offer Life Tips the the graduates ("...and that, my friends, is how I got to be a Nobel-prizewinning poet!"). He just said, You'll find your own way; nothing from my experience is really going to be applicable or helpful because my path, like yours, is totally unique. He then quoted a nursery rhyme about trying again and again in spite of failure and hardship (sort of an Irish version of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider"), and went on his way:

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again -- in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

Seamus Heaney rocks, and what he says here applies as much to exercise as it does to, well, life in general, success in the job market, and on and on. It's the 'getting started again' part that tends to trip people up; we tend to be very all-or-nothing. I got a call from an old friend not too long ago who had been away from exercise for awhile, who proclaimed that he wanted to start doing some intense running with a club twice a week, an adult gymnastics class once a week, a boot-camp style strength-and-cardio class another two times a week, and wanted my advice on what kind of strength training he should do to fill in the gaps. 

Er, gaps?? I told him to give his plan a try as it was with no ancillary work and see if he was even able to handle that.

Now, I don't know how my buddy is going to fare on this program, but the average person, jumping from zero to sixty in a workout program like that, will fall off the wagon in a couple of weeks, decide the whole enterprise isn't worth it, and go back to their formerly sedentary selves.

Much better to take on a realistic program, so you can CRUSH it when you're actually training, REST when you're resting, cut yourself a break when you miss workouts, and ease yourself back into the flow if you have to take some time off.

The AA approach--one slip and your dead--doesn't apply to working out. It only applies if you DECIDE it applies and decide to go on a month-long, no-exercise, pizza-and-doughnuts bender because you didn't make your traps and biceps day last Tuesday.

Missed workouts are gone. Let them go into the ether, and get back to your normal program at the soonest possible opportunity.

So what move is that quote from? It's going to drive me crazy.

I just spent a couple of days of rest in Colorado early this week, and surprise-visited a friend of mine who was turning 40. Good fun.

While there, I had occasion to visit the home of his brother, ultra-marathoner Adam Chase. I sometimes consider myself "obsessed" with exercise because if I don't get my full 6 hours of exercise a week, plus a healthy amount of additional time spent on my feet during a given week, I get surly and hard to be around. (I should say even more hard to be around.)

Chase puts me, and pretty much everyone else I know to shame: he does two workouts a day, lasting at LEAST an hour; he sleeps in an oxygen-deprivation tent; his front hallway is LITERALLY filled with hundreds of pairs of athletic shoes; his closet full of jerseys and sports gear; his dresser literally PILED with placing and finishing medals from various races.

Adam's a great guy, but man, is he over-the-top into working out.

Inevitably, however, I find something perversely admirable in this kind of dedication--he does what he does consummately, and indeed, as an ultra-marathoner, he's world-class. So an inkling occurs to me--shouldn't I be working out that hard? Shouldn't I spend more time pounding away?

But the answer quickly comes to me: no, I shouldn't. I shouldn't because for me, as obsessed with exercise as I am and as important as it is to me to be in shape, exercise still should be something to enhance the rest of my life; to make me better as a writer, actor, artist, businessman, father, husband, friend; it shouldn't pre-empt those other things. It should make my quality of life better.

Now, does that mean that now and then it can't take a central role for awhile, like when I'm pursuing a performance goal, like a better time in a triathlon or a heavier lift or a higher rank in the martial arts? Absolutely not; it's going to move in and out of sharp focus while always being a strong force for good in my life.

In a recent video, pro strongman Elliot Hulse spoke to this same tension--between the pursuit of excellence as an athlete and the many other pulls on one's focus and attention. I watched this video and felt a definite resonance.

Almost in answer, however, Mike Boyle wrote this nice post recently which makes the point that time spent exercising isn't correlated with longevity; only the ability to work hard:

The truth is that exercise needs to be smart and safe. but it also needs to be hard if possible. Very little in life was ever achieved without hard work. Fitness is clearly not the exception. Some doctors try to say gardening qualifies as exercise. Ask yourself this question. "How is kneeling in dirt exercise?" Others say walking is great exercise. The truth is that something is always better than nothing, but why aim so low? The reality is that we should be exercising as hard as we are physically able...The New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 346:852-854 March 14, 2002) published a study and an editorial titled "Survival of the Fittest" that said "...the peak estimated exercise capacity achieved during the test (graded exercise treadmill) was the strongest predictor of the risk of death among patients with cardiovascular disease and among patients without cardiovascular disease." The study went on to say, "Greater fitness results in longer survival."  The study said nothing about duration or frequency, it only mentioned performance. The people that lived the longest were not the ones that exercised the most frequently. They were the ones who lasted the longest on the treadmill test. The key variable that related to life expectancy was fitness, not total time or number of days per week. Those that were able to exercise the hardest lived the longest. Think about that next time you take a walk or work in the garden. If that is all you can do, fine. However, healthy people need hard work.

So unless you WANT to be an ultramarathoner, you don't need to work out for a long time, or even overly frequently. But when you do work out--assuming you're healthy--it needs to be HARD. Makes for a decent formula, though: shorter, less frequent workouts, long on intensity and hard work lead to better health, greater longevity, and, I might add, a richer life outside of the gym.

Hilarious that the last blog entry I made, on June 2, was titled "Relentless Consistency." Also the key to a good blog, I realize. But as ever, duty elsewhere calls.

I spent the last few weeks researching and writing about what I'm calling a trend towards "Primitive Fitness"--fitness programs based around the movements and activities of our evolutionary ancestors. Different folks out there have different takes on it--there are varying degrees of recognizable exercises and implements involved in different iterations of the trend, but the point is to insert lots of variety into exercise, change things up, stop thinking so linearly, if that's a word.

In a word, I love this trend. One of the main driving forces behind it is to make exercise more playful, joyful, and spontaneous. The number one way to do that, it would seem, is to have the vast majority of your exercises be about moving your entire body through space. Jon Hinds of Monkey Bar Gym bases his clients' workouts around climbing, crawling, running and jumping--all of which have analogs in standard strength-training (pulling, pushing, knee-dominant lower body, hip dominant lower body)--while at the same time being very intuitively understandable in a way that "hip-dominant lower-body" isn't to most people.

Another way to think of "primitive" fitness is to choose exercises which use as much muscle mass at once as possible, and to make a movement more complex and varied whenever possible. Not exactly a novel idea--people have been touting the value of deadlifts, squats and the like over curls and machine exercises for decades. However, there are creative ways of upping the ante even further. For deadlifts, an already complex movement, you could perform the exercise with kettlebells, walk a set distance, put down the bells, and repeat, combining a deadlift with a farmer's walk. Or you could perform squats with a 90- or 180-degree jump turn between each rep. If you've got a training partner or coach, they can call out random directions to jump and turn to on each rep.

If you absolutely must do curls of some kind--and I've fallen into that category at times--try doing them walking. You can do the same with overhead presses. That forces your torso stabilizers to fire up in all kinds of new and interesting ways. Thus you're making a single-joint movement into a full-body proprioceptive challenge.

The concept of 'cheating', as I wrote about here, comes into this category too: assuming you don't have shoulder problems, I think snatching, clean and pressing, and overhead jerking is far more functional and useful than overhead presses; I like kip-ups, jump-chins (I like to call them "Peeping Toms"--do the exercise and you'll figure out why), and jump-chins with a grip change more than regular chins.  Below is a guy doing a side-jump chin, which is a more advanced version of the grip-change chin...the idea on both is that you give yourself enough of an explosive pull so that you can do...something...at the top of the move, rather like the upper-body pull equivalent of a clap pushup:

The overall point: get creative. Think outside the box, while staying within the guidelines of good form, progression, overload, and balance (including something for all four uber-basic movement patterns is a great place to start). Throw in lots of big, locomotive movement that uses both upper and lower body, "complexify" your exercises, and in all likelihood, your workouts will start to get a lot more fun.

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Though of course I pay pretty careful attention to what I eat, I'm not hugely into the whole nutrition thing--the chemistry, the enzymes, the hows and wherefores. So I appreciate hearing from someone who IS incredibly well-versed in such things.

There's an interview up with diet guru Dr. John Berardi over at Tmuscle that's worth a look whether or not you're into getting huge. Berardi makes a lot of great horse-sense points, this one, I think, chief among them:

Knowing sucks...Now that may sound ironic coming from a guy who went to school for a long time and has a PhD and stuff, but what I mean is we all like to know stuff. In the training and nutrition world, we're fascinated with knowing NEW stuff. But its not knowing that's the limiting factor, it's the doing that's the problem.

Specifically, it's the doing of the key, basic things repeatedly with relentless consistency that gets people into wicked shape.

So that's why I say knowing sucks. No one ever got into shape just by knowing, so my best advice is to stop spending time and energy trying to learn new shit. Instead, spend time and energy doing what you already know works. If you can do that day in and day out, in 6 months time you'll have a remarkably different physique.

 

It's a strong point, and one that can't be reiterated often enough. We're all looking, it seems, for a magic bullet: how can I get in great shape easily, quickly, painlessly, with no sacrifice whatsoever? They say they want to get in shape, then build in a thousand qualifications--'without strength training,' 'without working out more than twice a week,' without giving up Oreos', and what do you know? It doesn't happen for them.

The answer, Berardi is suggesting here, and I second that, is that you can't. You can probably find ways to make it more pleasant for yourself, but the fact is that no one ever got into exceptional shape without what he's calling 'relentless consistency.'

I've trained a lot of people over the years. All of them get in better shape. But the ones who make exceptional progress are the ones who don't miss workouts. Who don't show up late. Who find ways to stay active on their off-days. And--most essentially--who keep their diets in check.

I'm not saying you can't make progress or enjoy training or being active in a casual way--personally, I think that's fine and great and I'm happy to work with those people as well. It's just not going to rocket you towards impressive fitness in the way that many people believe it will. You get out what you put in.

Shocker, right?

So here's something to consider.

Since the nascent days of the modern fitness industry, the exhortation to "use good form" when you lift weights (and run, and cycle and swim and so on) has been repeated so many times you barely hear it anymore. Doing a set a barbell curls? Stand rigid and move only at the elbow joints. Better still, do it against a wall. Minimize your postural sway and work the biceps. Doing a chin-up? Stretch the lats fully and work from a dead hang on each rep. Keep the body still throughout the movement. For the love of God, don't cheat!

The approach, of course, stems from the muscle-isolation idea that in order to "work our [pecs, lets, deltoids, etc]," we need to bend and twist and contort our bodies, performing weird, counter-intuitive movements in order to optimally stimulate the various body parts so that they grow.

All well and good. It's the ubiquitous bodybuilding model, with its laser-like focus on aesthetics at all costs. And in many cases, the "strict form" idea is useful and accurate. Barbell squatting or dead lifting with lousy form, of course, is just plain stupid. Learning to bench press in a shoulder-sparing way, and to do core exercises safely are basic skills that any beginning exerciser should acquire.

But think about cheating for a moment. When you try to curl too much weight, you sway your body and use momentum to swing the bar up--in a way that resembles a kind of rudimentary power clean movement. When you try to eke out more chin-ups, you swing your body back and forth and undulate the spine, again, turning to momentum to help with the movement. You're trying to recruit other muscle groups--larger, more powerful, usually the more centrally located muscle groups surrounding the pelvis--to help you perform the exercise.

And that makes perfect physiological sense, because your muscles are foot-soldiers, not all-knowing four-star generals. They only understand the assignment: if you're doing a barbell curl, for example, the body just knows "move bar from point A to point B." Why you'd want to call on this small, weak division of foot-soldiers (the biceps) and not that large, strong division of foot-soldiers (the hips and back) is utterly baffling to the nervous system, so it's everything you can do to stop yourself from doing the totally instinctive thing--using the biggest, strongest muscles to perform the task in the most efficient way possible. Same with the instinct to turn an overhead press into a push-jerk, or to turn a chin-up into a kip-up. You naturally drift towards using your biggest muscle groups whenever possible.

The point I'd like to make here is that's actually a good thing. That's you trying to turn a weird and unnatural movement into an athletic, integrated one.

Among the many other problems with doing too many single-joint isolation movements in a strength-training program, I believe that they encourage poor movement habits by deliberately cutting off the powerhouse portions of the kinetic chain from the rest of the body. Next time you're working out and have the urge to cheat, see if there's a way in which that "cheating" actually improves the movement--makes it more holistic and global in nature.

I'm not a kettlebell expert, but many of those movements--swings of all kinds, for instance--seem to solve this inherent problem with many standard barbell and dumbbell exercises.

Spoke briefly on the phone last week with Rich Goldsand, a Feldenkrais practitioner from Phoenix. Turned out to be one of those conversations where you suddenly discover you're speaking the same language as someone you've never met before (check out the movie PLANET 51 for a hilarious version of this scene).

Rich has a private Feldenkrais practice where he's worked with everyone from Olympic athletes to infants, and had some very cool things to say about using Feldenkrais to enhance athletic performance. He and his partner, the esteemed Donna Ray, who I've never met but have noticed that people in the Feldenkrais community practically cross themselves whenever she's mentioned, are conducting a workshop on "Feldenkrais Fitness" the first weekend in June; the video below talks a little about it; you can sign up at the link above.

What I like about Rich and Donna's approach is their probing of the simple question "What is fitness?" The two of them probe not just what you are pursuing but why and how--what do you ultimately hope to achieve, or expect to achieve, through exercise, why do you want those things (not as easy to answer as you might think!), what might be some faster, simpler ways to get there that might also have some powerful implications for your life as a whole.

I suppose what Rich and Donna are driving at is a more integrated approach to fitness--one that doesn't isolate the body from the rest of you, and doesn't separate "fitness" activities from the rest of your life. 

I think there's a lot to this way of thinking. Best of luck to Rich and Donna, and I'd encourage anyone to attend this workshop!

As luck would have it, I hurt my back last week.

'Wha--?'

I don't know if the wizards at Moji are psychic--or perhaps they have very effective voodoo dolls--but a while ago, they sent me their cold-compression knee wrap just a few days after I had hurt me knee. This time, they sent me their hot-cold back-pain treatment wrap, and I thought to myself, 'Well, I'll use this when my back gets painful.'

Whammo.

So: luck, but not for me--for Moji. It gives me the chance to try out their product--and write (again) about how cool I think they are.

So of course, I tried it. And again, I love it. I think Moji is on to something here. And I don't just think that because they've now sent me two cool items--I just plum think their products are terrific, and should be lying in wait in the freezer / closet of pretty much anyone who's remotely active.

Personally, I probably jack up my back about once or twice a year. I'm trying to change that, what with all the stretching, foam-rolling, Feldenkrais work, and mobility work I do. Sadly, though, it seems to be part of being active and over the age of 18, though I seem to recall jacking up my back not irregularly when I was a young stripling as well. Maybe it's just a function of being an active and not altogether temperate guy.

Anyway. Enter the Moji Back Compressor. The new, clever sucker consists of three parts: a 'cold' cell, a 'hot' cell, and a kind of magic cummerbund that keeps the cells in place and, at the same time, gives you some support for your back--not unlike what you get from one of those old-fashioned weight belts that I and everyone else used to wear around their High School Gyms before new iteration as something for the Home Depot set.

To use it, you either get the cold cell out of the freezer (where it needs to be stored for four hours), or nuke the hot cell in the microwave for about 80 seconds. Velcro the hot or cold cell to the inside of the magic cummerbund, strap it snugly on, and wait for the relief.

So I love this thing. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. It's comfortable, and feels like just the kind of support I need when my low-back is injured: flexible but firm. It feels great: the heat cell is, indeed, hot--like a hot water bottle or heating pad; the cold cell is, indeed, cold, like an ice back. But I don't have to lie down on a messy, squirty, uncomfortable thing to feel better. I can velcro it on, walk around, enjoy my now-less-painful life, and attend to whatever needs tending to, confident that Moji is helping me work my kinks out as I move. I'm no longer out of commission when my back gets hurt--I'm still in the game, healing and getting better even as I move through my life. 

One final thing: I like that all it does is heat you up or cool you down. You don't take medicine, you don't apply some weird chemical compound to your skin. You're healing the old-fashioned way--but now in a much more convenient package.

Go Moji!