At some point, I'd guess it was two years ago, I changed my workout philosophy in a subtle but important way: I stopped doing any strength exercises at a deliberate pace. Once I get past warm-up drills, I do almost every rep of every exercise as fast as I can.

The specific workouts I'm doing right now come from an upcoming book I did with Chad Waterbury, but the idea of working faster in the weight room is one that has long made sense to me. I first wrote about it in this article for Men's Health back in 2002 or 2003:

I bring this up because this morning's L.A. Times has a story on building power in the gym, making the same point about how it's a distinct quality from muscle strength. They quote Mark Verstegen, who explains the distinction with a much better analogy than I've seen before:

With apologies in advance to Mark, I'm going to have to borrow that description for my next book.

Convincing people to lift faster, though, won't be easy. First you have to undo decades of advice to lift slow, convincing people it's both safe and efficacious to lift things faster. Then you have to show that it's more fun and interesting than the alternative. Generally, when new gym trends catch on, they just give us goofier ways to lift slowly. (Here's a particularly egregious example -- call it "curls gone wild" -- from Tony Gentilcore's blog.)

The L.A. Times article isn't as useful as it might be in this area:

The solution's simple, right? Don't use machines. With a little practice, your body can figure out how to lift barbells and dumbbells faster without any more risk than they'd incur by lifting them slowly. Instead, though, the Times goes into a discussion of specialized machines that were designed for fast lifting (machines that Verstegen endorses and uses in his facilities), and then concludes with this:  

Boyle is absolutely right; "fast" lifting is always relative to the individual lifter. My fastest lift might be slower than an elite athlete's warm-up reps, but if I'm pushing or pulling as hard as I can, then I'm getting the desired effect.

As a bonus, I'm getting the effect with shorter and less fatiguing workouts. I'm not sure if that's a benefit the average health-club member would appreciate -- a lot of people seem to be trying to avoid fatigue altogether -- but speaking as someone who's worked out three or four times a week for the past 38 years, I'm happy to get the results I want with less time in the weight room. That leaves more time for everything else, which seems like a good deal to me.

Monday blog meat

• I'm calling bullshit on this new study and its conclusion that men "create" seven extra hours of housework a week for their spouses. People who're deeper into a marriage will tend to live in a bigger house than they did when they first got married. It's often farther from the primary earner's place of employment, increasing the time spent commuting. That primary earner will probably make more money but also have more pressure, requiring time and focus beyond the actual hours spent in the office. It doesn't matter if the primary earner is the man or woman in a marriage (I saw a recent report showing that men don't really mind if their wife earns more than they do); either way, someone is going to have to spend more time working to pay the bills for the bigger house, and someone is going to have to spend more time taking care of the bigger house. Like everything else, it's a tradeoff; both spouses are working longer hours at something, and I'd guess few married people would choose to return to the days when they did less housework but also made less money and as a consequence had less house to work on.
• Getting back to our main theme of doing things better and faster, here's some welcome news about a different type of house work.
• It has nothing to do with health, fitness, or domestic bliss, but I flagged this story because of a line we'll probably never again see in a news report: "The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested `for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog.'"