Resistance Training as the Mode of Choice for Health and Fitness
I was alerted to the following paper through James Steele via Twitter:
Uncomplicated resistance training and health-related outcomes: evidence for a public health mandate.
Abstract: Compared to aerobic training (AT), resistance training (RT) has received far less attention as a prescription for general health. However, RT is as effective as AT in lowering risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other diseases. There is a clear ability of RT, in contrast to AT, to promote gains, maintenance, or slow loss of skeletal muscle mass/strength. Thus, as an antisarcopenic exercise treatment, RT is of greater benefit than AT; given the aging of our population, this is of primary importance. In our view, a substantial barrier to greater adoption of RT is the incorrectly perceived importance of variables such as external load, intensity, and volume, leading to complex, difficult-to-follow regimes. We propose a more feasible and easier-to-adhere-to paradigm for RT that could affect how RT is viewed and adopted as a prescription for public health.
I find two things interesting about this paper: first is that Richard Winnett and Stuart Phillips are the authors and have long been champions of “uncomplicated resistance training.” The second item of interest is how much of their recommendations mirror what was tentatively put forth in “Biomarkers.” Now understand that I’m not suggesting that an aged population doesn’t come with its own unique set of circumstances and problems however it is important to note (as I’ll be showing in my series) that what works for people in the least responsive period of their lives, as far as health and training adaptations are concerned, will most certainly work for people when their biology is much faster on its feet.
What I find so interesting is how we’ve understood the value of this for decades and yet practitioners continue to recommend less-effective treatment, sometimes dangerously so. Some of this comes from strongly held beliefs rather than science and evidence-based outcomes. Some comes from the same reasons why selling only barbells isn’t the most profitable thing in the world: you only have a customer once. Get them to believe that drugs (or supplements) are required and you have a customer for much longer. Prescribing proper exercise brings home the bacon from a perspective of health for the user but it does not bring home the bacon for the prescriber on a monthly basis.
However in more rational societies, at least in this context, proper strength training is prescribed for total public health improvement. I can only hope we see something of that nature soon in America.
Biomarkers: An Introduction To An Exhaustive Review
Nearly 20 years ago, researchers William Evens, PhD & Irwin H. Rosenberg, M.D. wrote Biomarkers: The 10 Keys to Prolonging Vitality. Biomarkers tell you your “biological age”…how old you are, if you didn’t know how old you are. The negative changes to these biomarkers, the researchers argued, are what was responsible for the frailty that comes with aging. These biomarkers are:
1) Muscle Mass
2) Strength
3) Basal Metabolic Rate
4) Body Fat Percentage
5) Aerobic Capacity
6) Blood-sugar Tolerance
7) Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
8 ) Blood Pressure
9) Bone density
10) Ability to regulate Internal Temperature
From this list, the researchers coined the term “sarcopenia” to describe the inactivity-mediated muscle loss that comes when we start to voluntarily “slow down” due to age. As a result, the researchers showed in a landmark study that strength training had the largest impact, positively influencing all 10 biomarkers listed above.
And yet we still find ourselves looking for pharmaceutical interventions to problems that can be solved with a little elbow grease. That’s not to say that there aren’t pathological reasons for a pharmaceutical solution, after all we had a reason to move beyond herbs and other remedies. However if lack of strength feeds forward into a reduction of movement, which feeds forward into dementia or type-II diabetes…it seems to me that this should be job 1 of any healthcare intervention.
So what I’d like to do with this series is take a look at each biomarker and explore the literature that supports (and possibly refutes) the idea that these most directly link to area on the the curve longevity. There has been more studies than you can shake a stick at in the past 20 years on these topics and our aged population that a review is in order. Also I’d like to propose 2 new biomarkers that I feel should be included in the discussion for how to measure age, but also interventions to prevent the unnecessary ravages of age.
It should be a blast!
Client Results: Michelle
Well after a first mishap we will try again.
As a trainer, the most difficult aspect of our job (especially in when you’re a fit little spot in a big fat state) is letting people know that when you are looking to lose weight, it’s all about calories. When a client comes to you already tracking their calories, it might as well be shooting fish in a barrel.
This is Michelle. She’s in her 40′s with 3 kids. Understanding that I am not taking credit for her busting her ass; rather I’m showing you what smart programming does with intelligent dietary direction. What I take credit for was making sure she didn’t overtrain as calories got lower and lower, covered the salient points of carb cycling near contest, and maintained an appropriate level of intensity at such low calories. I’d say she did really well:
She finished 8th out of 20 competitors in her first ever show. The nifty bit about getting this lean is that, with way less effort, it’s easier to stay very year-round lean. Compared to contest prep, beach-lean is a piece of cake…not that you’d be eating cake. Great job Michelle!
Reader Q&A – Strength Without Size Plus More
Reader Jeff had a series of questions for me after viewing my 21 Convention talk. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share with you, my amazing readers, the answers as I think you’ll find it helpful. My response will be normal text while Jeff’s questions will be in italics:
…
Hey Skyler,
Awesome job. Puts things greatly into perspective for me, another tallish naturally lean guy. It is all too easy to get into the “I am not getting huge so I must not be doing it right”.
A couple of quick questions, if you don’t mind:
-How is it that I am consistently getting stronger without getting much bigger? What, physiologically, is happening to allow that? I always assumed that stronger = bigger, but I don’t see how that is the case anymore.
-To gain that ~1#/year do you have a feeling how much one needs to eat to achieve it? Is it required to go surplus to get it?
-What is your take on cycling intake ala leangains to get that measly 1# without gaining fat.
Great job again, thanks.
Jeff
…
Jeff,
I’ll cover your questions in order (and thanks for the kind words!):
1. Strength and size are correlative to a large degree. Generally, getting stronger means getting bigger and getting bigger means getting stronger. However the rate of each improvement holds not consistent rate in which it improves the other (e.g. gaining 100lbs on your bench will build lean muscle but how much is genetically mediated). Which brings us to our next topic: thrifty genes vs. spendthrift genes.
The perhaps stereotypical statement of “black men gain size while maintaining leanness” argument has some truth to it. If food supply is variable, seasonal, and frequently in question meant that those who could survive would thrive. A huge muscular body means a lot of fuel to be used; being between the tropics means that food is plentiful and consistent from a variety of sources. This leads to an increased possibility of developing a spendthrift metabolism, that is adapting to the environment in ways that can be considered inefficient in the face of stress or starvation. It should also be of no coincidence that the biggest, fastest, strongest land animals are also from this area of the world.
Juxtapose that with a thrifty metabolism, which would create adaptations that result in the lowest fuel cost to create the desired effect. If stress and famine might be around the corner (or just a harsh winter), the thrifty thing to do is increase neural drive, improve rate coding (how quickly the motor neuron fires), increase insulin sensitivity (so any substrate that adds up to a calorie surplus is stored), and likely reduce sympathetic nervous system output (responsible for neurotransmitter release like epinephrine/norepinephrine) which would lead to a reduced metabolism.
That explains the tall skinny-fat type to a T, doesn’t it? Even if you’re naturally lean and have a hard time putting on muscle in the face of strength improvements, there are other factors involved in gaining strength without size including:
Inter and intra muscular coordination
Motor learning
Motor unit/fiber recruitment efficiency
Golgi tendon inhibition
Heterochronicity
Fatigue resistance
Postural changes
Co-contraction
Connective tissue changes
Improvements in cadence and turnarounds
Motivation
Pain tolerance
Perception of difficulty
Confidence
Experience
However, so few of those are actionable enough to worry significantly about. Continue to get stronger and that threshold eventually breaks to more size, assuming nutrition is sufficient which leads me to…
2. You need more food but this is where things get tricky. There are plenty of times when there is an increase in lean mass which in turn follows with an increase in appetite/food intake. You can’t “force” muscle gain just by shoving endless food down your throat; rather training should be inducing the desired structural adaptations that create the requirement for more calories. But I also feel that you need a reasonable climate for muscle growth to take place. Nobody is getting jacked on 2000 kcals per day, in other words.
So without micromanaging a whole lot, if you’re hanging around your body fat set point and your set point isn’t 7% you’re likely eating enough. However…
3. You can optimize the process by feeding your body more on days when protein synthesis is higher…after your workouts! This is why Martin Berkhan and John Berardi both make training days “higher” carb days. If you keep them to safe starches plus a little more fruit and let your calories drift up a little bit, you’ve primed the environment to gain as fast as your genes will allow.
If you have any other questions please let me know!
…
Skyler,
Thanks for the response.
It seems that leangains makes a lot of sense for me then. Since I ain’t getting huge in a hurry, the best thing to do is get really lean(maybe a touch leaner than my current 9-10%) and work to add my 1#/year or so of muscle. To do that a cyclic pattern which is in line with evolutionary patterns of eating more post hunt(workout) while being a bit lighter in eating on non-hunt days seems to make perfect sense for a combo of muscle gains and leanness. That gets the synthesis where it is needed and avoids extra fat building when no workout is going on. That works out approximately 2x/week or so, which is in line with many recommendations of people I respect.
I am currently doing a brutal HIT/SS workout once a week or so( I miss a week from time to time) and in between I do 1, sometimes 2 reverse pyramid training. I am gaining on everything each session, so I don’t think I am overdoing it. What do you think of RPT? It seems interesting to me since it is a much stronger load stimulus than SS as the first set is done when fresh at highest weight. You ever tried that? Any thoughts on that training method? I like the idea of the sequential recruitment once a week along with a simultaneous recruitment at higher load. Injury is my main concern about RPT.
thanks again,
Jeff
BTW, the answer to the question on fat loss was classic. The 2 exercises of head shakes and table presses was awesome. I will be passing that one along.
…
Jeff,
I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to post this exchange as a post for everyone to read… a reader “Q&A” if you will.
1. Understand that 1#/year was an average and you might still have a little more in you if the variables are correct and you don’t routine jump too much. This is why some trainers are against variety under most circumstances: it mucks with knowing if you’re improving. That said a few marker exercises (e.g. the big compounds) being consistent allows for a little variety to be used to keep enthusiasm high. Use wisely, however, as one can quickly get focused on the superfluous exercises, not the big, big movements.
2. I like reverse pyramid, which isn’t outside the wheelhouse of old-school HIT. It’s basically an intelligent drop set that allows for maximum performance as opposed to blistering fatigue. If you have an appropriate rep range is allows for a bit more volume of contractions as compared to a TUL-based HIT routine, possibly creating more strain on the tissue as opposed to the SS routine which is going to create more metabolic byproducts (relatively speaking). Both are good for growth.
3. Understand that you’re still sequentially recruiting with the RPT routine, you’re just doing it faster. So while you might not be into the high threshold motor units on the first rep of a SS set (assuming a ~1:30 TUL) you’re likely into by the end of the second rep.
I hope this helps.
-Skyler
…
There is so much minutia to get caught up in with regards to training. Most of that minutia applies to a very select few at a very high level in order to continue seeing improvement. Most would be better served by focusing on the large, important, actionable items and everything else tends to get in line. Along a similar line, take a look at this map of obesity influences:
Click Me!
So how many of those items can you directly act upon? You can’t control if you mother breast fed you or not, nor can you control the cost of ingredients in the global food chain. So they’re important, very, but if you can’t act upon them why worry about them? Focus on what you can control, control them to the best of your ability, and everything else falls into place.
My Presentation at the 21 Convention
Recently Anthony posted my speech from this summer’s 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida. After my quasi-manifesto post, “The Six Year Itch,” Anthony contacted me to do a live version, expanding what I had been through and adding some wisdom about potential, training, and the hype that so many marketers like to put on strength training in general.
Some of the things I discuss include:
- My strength training history
- Aligning your efforts for a lifetime of productive training
- Understanding that this is a genetic ceiling for everyone and who to look to in order to determine that
- And much more!
I hope you gain something from this discussion; the gentleman at the 21 Convention really seemed to enjoy it as evidenced from the Q&A afterwards.
Exercise vs. Recreation Revisited
I found myself getting prepared for a client this morning, getting my points I wanted to make addressed, and I came across a post over at Steve’s “Diabetic Mediterranean Diet” blog that actually back-linked to an article posted at our website.
In this, Ken Hutchins talks about how exercise and recreation are not necessarily the same thing, which is then taken as semantics by a commenter. He believes a false dichotomy is being made…I beg to differ:
1. “Firstly – telling marathon runners, triathletes and the like that they are not exercising is a bit harsh.”
-This is not being said at all, however if they were attempting to exercise using these activities they’re being very inefficient. First, very few people pick up doing marathons or triathlons because they want to exercise: it’s the natural extension of something they enjoy doing to perform in events to see how one measures up against the competition. Games and play have built into them competition, from board games up to basketball. There is an exercise effect, make no mistake, but it is hugely inefficient. Here’s what I mean:
Suppose “A” represents effort toward an activity, “B” represents an exercise effect, so “C” would be the exercise effect that happens as a result of said activity. The above diagram would be accurate for a variety of sports, as much of what you’re doing in the activity has little to zero effect on exercise. For instance shooting a basketball is part of the sport but provides little in the way of exercise effect. The exercise happens to be a side effect, not the direct effect, of the activity being performed. If we were to put descriptive words in the bubbles for each “A” and “B”, the similarities listed under “C” would be few (golf) to many (triathlon).
Compare that to proper exercise, and the items listed under “A” would be identical (or nearly so) to the items listed under “B”, so “C” would take up the vast majority of the overlap of the Venn diagram. In other words, the activity is being done with the specific intent of maximizing the exercise effect with no wasted effort. It is not semantics but ensuring that everything you are doing is going to better the quality of the exercise effect. Everything you do in sport or play does not do this; it can’t nor should it.
I think this is where most athletes get hung up, taking an ego-driven bravado toward the statement. “How DARE they say I’m not exercising!” Well, you’re not: you’re playing football, basketball, running marathons etc. That is your primary focus, doing better at that. And doing better in that activity doesn’t necessarily improve your health or fitness but it might. For example my wife runs marathons and the last thing she’s thinking about while running the marathon is “Boy I’m getting a GREAT workout!” Her only goal and drive is to finish the marathon. To put it another way: how do you quantify an improved exercise stimulus from one game to the next of, say, basketball? More points? More rebounds? More time spent playing? The latter might also mean more standing around doing nothing while the former 2 are barely correlative.
To summarize, if you are doing something to exercise, every effort of that activity should be directed toward stimulating physiological outcomes of exercise. Sports by their very nature do not do this. Though they do have varying levels of exercise effect, the activity itself warrants skills and efforts toward a different outcome other than exercise.
2. “Mark Sisson he says you should “sprint” and “play” – but I would argue that both is exercise. Or rather – should be called ‘exercise’.”
- First let me note that Sisson himself in interviews conducted during the release of “The Primal Blueprint” discussed blowing out his knee playing Ultimate. Go ahead and ask Keith Norris how many soft tissue injuries he accrued during his years playing football at (what is now) Texas State University, or about the time he took a shot in the kidneys and his urine turned black. I can’t tell you how many bleeding wounds, twisted knees, shots to the balls, and sprained ankles I accrued during my years playing basketball. Take a look at the cover of every “Runner’s World” magazine and there’s an article about dealing with injuries.
I point this out because athletes, by the very nature of what you’re attempting to do, stops being health-promoting at some level of competition. I’ll use Keith’s health/performance curve here:
As you see, the more athletics you get toward a performance goal, the greater the health consequences. People like to look at pro athletes as a model of health but in reality they’re: A) genetic freaks able to handle that workload… B) who are on the teetering edge of blowing apart due to the demands of their activity… C) and are held together by a team of doctors, trainers, and soft-tissue specialists. This is in large part because sports and athletics are “function follows form” activities. For instance, pitching a baseball is one of the most violent activities you can perform and it is absolutely biomechanically incongruent with shoulder function. This is also why baseball pitchers need so many days between starts to recover while softball pitchers, whose pitching motion is much more natural compared to how the shoulder functions most smoothly, can pitch so many games with relatively little rest.
If you are doing an activity for the sake of exercise, the risk of injury should be as close to nonexistent that anyone from a 10 year old to an 80 year old can perform the activity. This means that exercise should be a “form follows function” activity, taking how our body evolved to move, how our muscles are built to function and picking movements that are congruent with that. Exercise is a health-promoting activity that should improve your ability to participate in activities of play/recreation/leisure, which themselves have a continuum of injury potential. While you willingly accept that your play has an enhanced risk of injury, if your exercise has a high risk for injury you’re doing it wrong.
This is why, I think, people feel that exercise should get “easier” as we age. The aged and elderly do not recover from injury quickly and by avoiding “exercise” they take themselves out of harms way. See my article on exercise and longevity to see the inverse of this: doctors do not prescribe real exercise because of injury potential of many “exercise” modalities and the liability that comes with it. If you’ve set your exercise up correctly, it should be as near joint-stress neutral as exercise can be and you should be able to maintain it until you croak. I have personal experience with this: my mother could perform a high intensity training workout to momentary muscular fatigue 4 months before she died. However,1 bout of “easy” yoga caused an injury in her back. I’ve done enough yoga to know that traditions set forth by old Indian wrestlers who didn’t have a clue about how the body works are much more likely to hurt you than recommendations from biomechanists regarding how to training in congruence with muscle and joint structure.
In summary: don’t injure yourself in the gym while trying to improve your health and resistance to injury. That way should you decide to take up an activity with an increased injury potential you’ll have enhanced resistance to injury and improved performance potential. And you can finally stop worrying about getting a good workout from something that should be fun.
3. “What did tick me off when reading their post though was the hubris and negativity…”
It is only negative if you are offended by what is being said. So far every athlete I’ve spoken to doesn’t disagree with the spectrum of recreation to exercise and will fully agree with me when I then said “Therefore recreation is not exercise.” To flip it on its head: exercise isn’t recreational, not exclusively. In spite of what you see most people doing in the social club…er…health club, there are much better things, much more enjoyable things, I would rather do in the name of recreation than exercise. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it, I do so much I’m getting a damned graduate degree on the subject and have only ever worked as an exercise clinician, but I’d really rather lay on the couch, play NBA 2k11, and get ripped.
Sometimes you cannot get a person’s attention without a negative tone. I hope the commenter calms down, gives this a read, and finds that the statement “Recreation is not exercise” is very accurate, even if his/her gut doesn’t like it at first.
Exercise And Longevity: Dan Buettner (Almost) Throws The Baby Out With The Bathwater
I’ve had this post in my “to be finished” list for some time now, mostly because I had a knee-jerk reaction and never revisited the article. I’m glad I didn’t shoot from the hip on this one.
Dan Buettner is a “longevity expert” by osmosis. There’s no degree in longevity or an industry requiring such a title (unless you make voodoo nutrition supplements). Mr. Buettner is the author of a book that I’ve referenced before called “Blue Zones” about some of the longest lived cultures in the world. He’s also the author of a book called “Thrive” about some of the happiest places in the world. I found this interview a while back in which an Australian newspaper gives him 10 questions. Here is the one that started this article:
Most us only want to live long lives if we can remain active and healthy. Does exercise really help stave off conditions like arthritis and osteoporosis?
Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world’s longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don’t use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden. Walking is the only way proven to stave off cognitive decline – it works.
My first response is, “This guy is a fucking idiot to blind too see his own bias.” Eventually I also realized that I was a fucking idiot for letting my own bias miss the point of his statement.
An “over-the-counter” solution?
What Mr. Buettner is onto here, and I didn’t pay attention to at first, is the fact that he is referring to exercise from a public health perspective. While I am buried in my world of self-motivated, self-informed people who actually can, with some degree of success, design their own training programs to help them reach new levels of health and fitness, we are an extreme minority. To be frank, the ‘average’ person is lacking the required knowledge (anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, etc) to safely and effectively exercise without instruction. One needs only visit your nearest globogym to see my point firsthand. Most people would be well served to treat their exercise program like the medicine that it is; it should be prescribed, dosed and supervised by a qualified professional.
Self-directed preventative care does not have the ability to appropriately affect the widespread, long-term health problems of our population. If you say “I’ve done just fine without instruction!” then what about the other millions of people in this country? The sample size of people who have successfully maintained their health without instruction is exceedingly small compared to the population at large. As long as exercise remains an over-the counter option or recreational intervention (“just for fun”), this medicine will not be used in the safest, most effective and efficient manner.
The hard-on for walking
Mr. Buettner then goes on about, in a fairly typically past 30 years fashion, about how these special pockets of super geezers walk, as if that is what we’ve been missing all these years. Really, the medical establishment’s obsession with walking as some sort of magic treatment for all things that burden ye is stemmed mostly in keeping them out of the courtroom. As Doug McGuff effectively summarized in his article “Why Doctors Don’t Understand Exercise,” when it is your balls on the chopping block you’ll recommend the activity that is nearly lawsuit-proof: walking.
Don’t misunderstand me: walking can do a lot of good things. Walking is related to the preservation of both gray matter and hippocampus size in the brain. The observation is then that the people who can walk the longest are also the strongest. Of course this MUST mean that walking a lot made them really good walkers, which keeps their brain sharp.
The problem is the confusion of correlation and causation. These people walk well because they’re stronger than anyone else as a consequence of something other than walking. Truth be told, people tend to lose weight as they age (which is related to total mortality, actually), which means they’re losing resistance. This is why walking never solved anyone’s osteoporosis or sarcopenia: if you are tiny to start, you aren’t loading your bones or muscles with anything more than they’re already used to moving.
What is related to walking as we age is strength. Study after study after study has shown that walking gait improved with strength training and gait is the main indicator of the likelihood that an elderly individual with suffer a fall. Taking a 90 year old Sardinian man who has been hiking hills during his sheep herding duties (huge strength requirement) since he was a teenager and using that as “proof” that a couple laps around the subdivision is all you need to stay strong and vital is hugely inaccurate.
Conclusion
So I’m glad I didn’t just jump all over this with reckless abandon. Keith and I discussed how drastically muscle mass falls as we age, how Type II fibers become connective tissue without training (and cannot be turned back) and how to correct these problems with properly supervised and dosed strength training. You can watch that discussion here. Get some strength, change your diet, and if you’re lucky you’ll live to be a super geezer.
Speaking of talks, Keith was interviewed on Latest In Paleo. If you’re not our wives, you might be interested in the discussion so go check it out!
Specificity, or, Systems Only Matter To A Point
Life is full of happy coincidences.
Last weekend I was commenting to my wife how America, land of the “best at anything at all costs” has a massive hard on for college football, which is absolutely not the highest level of competition in this country. To this she replied, “They’re kids prone to mistakes which means anything can happen.” Not 2 hours later we see aTexas come back against BYU and Michigan pulls off a silly come from behind victory against Notre Dame.
Not to put too fine a point on this but Chuck Klosterman (who looks like he sells insurance at a bank nearby) just wrote an article over at Grantland about how, the further down the college levels you go, the crazier the offenses become because it works at that level, or to put it another way:
A platitude endlessly parroted by broadcasters is that the NFL is “a copycat league,” but it’s one of those platitudes that’s true: Because the level of athleticism is so high, there are only certain things that work. (Emphasis mine) The smartest guys and the dumbest guys know all the same secrets, and it pushes the whole game toward a virtual singularity.
But move down one level, and things start to change.
This relates to a discussion I had in class just yesterday.
Systems
Brand new commenter Steve and I are in the same Exercise Physiology class and yesterday got to talking about my gym. After explaining what we do (“If it’s efficient, effective, and intense, we’ll use it. No dogma.”) he asked if it was like Crossfit (HQ hereafter). No, no it’s not and my general complaint about HQ is that the programming only serves to improve your ability to crossfit. And if you’re really good you can end up on ESPN2, competing in exercise…but I digress. While holding up a pro athlete doing your system is really great for a box selling memberships, read Klosterman again:
…The level of athleticism is so high there are only certain things that work.
Or to put it another way, what an athlete does in the off-season is not going to make them a better athlete, not by this level. If they perform smart in the off-season, they have prepared their body for the rigors of the season. If they aren’t smart, they set themselves up for injury. Once they can practice with the team and the strength coaches, they’re going to do whatever the strength coach demands of them because it is one of the few things that works when everyone is that athletic. None of it has an advantage of any other system.
And even then, the strength and conditioning coaches are all equally smart at finding ways to keep their guys strong throughout the season. Championships have been won on just about every type of system: from HIT to Westside variants and everything in between. If we were to make the claim that the system of strength and conditioning is responsible for team performance then the 1972 Dolphins, who went undefeated, prove that Nautilus-based HIT is the best system for training athletes. This is a foolish statement; a good strength training system is necessary but not sufficient.
Raw Materials
Here is a video of Knowshon Moreno doing Crossfit. He is a running back for the Denver Broncos.
Here is a video of Vincent Rey doing HIT. He is a linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals.
Neither of these systems are making them better athletes; in fact their athleticism is allowing them to perform these workouts at a much higher level than any layperson with such little experience. These systems are however improving their raw materials which, if properly integrated with their skills, will allow them to scrape the last bit of the barrel of their potential as football players. Neither system, however, is responsible for making them good football players, nor can either system hold up a single player doing well one season as “proof” of a system’s effectiveness. What if the season “Joe Running Back” happened to just kill it was the same season that the offensive line was the most dominant it had been in over a decade? Performance does not exist in a vacuum when we talk about team sports.
Mired in minutia
A general criticism of HQ programming is that it is too metcon/general physical preparedness focused. This is true: go back to my reference to the Crossfit games and the events are HQ workouts, which are often the programming used at gyms (or “boxes”) across America. So the system dictates competition by way of these workouts, which in turn makes the gyms train to improve athletes times in these workouts. So you get good at working out but if you want to be better at things other than doing HQ workouts, you’ll have to go somewhere else or find a way to match the metcon demands of many HQ workouts with your sport.
In fact, there are many former HQ box owners who splintered off to do their own things with a specific focus: Max Effort Black Box ( a strength-focus template), and Crossfit Football (a template geared toward the needs of football players) come to mind. Cross training alone, no matter how intense, isn’t going to cut it. This bears out in the research: if you want to get good at something you have to do that something. So often athlete try to do everything when that only makes you maybe average at all of those things, or if you’re really good, you become an Olympic Decathlon. Keep in mind that the decathlete is rarely as good in any even as an athlete who specializes in any one of those events. If you’re trying to improve your weighted chin up, improving your Fran time might not cut it. However increasing your weighted chin is likely to improve Fran. “Before you can have strength endurance you must first have strength with which to endure.”
A Final Note
Steve and I are in disagreement about a few things and that’s fine. However he did have one point that I think rings true:
“I find the people who get injured are trained by inexperienced coaches who had enough money to open a box.”
This isn’t just an HQ problem, but they’re so visible as to how true this statement is that you don’t have to look hard to find an example.
Ancestral Health Symposium 2011 Presentation
In all the posting I’ve done about yoked shins and motor learning, I failed to post the presentation that Keith and I had gone to California to perform live and uncut! We didn’t really practice, unless you call EE TV practice. In spite of this I think it went off well and we received great praise from Boyd Eaton and great questions from the audience. Next time I promise my shoulders will be wider so we can have the big stage, as it would be needed to hold us both!
Product Review: Tibia Dorsi Machine
It is often stated in strength training: get good at the big movements and you won’t have to worry so much about the small movements. This is due to the indirect effect of strength training: doing a barbell squat takes strong abs, arms, back, stomach…oh, and strong legs too! This is also why you might hear a coach say “Train movements, not muscles.”
However, when an athlete is weak in something, pathologically weak, we throw that recommendation out the window. Being in Austin, I get a lot of runners and dollars to donuts those runners have suffered shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and ankle issues. I also know that they’ve never, ever trained their shins. Enter the tibia dorsi flexion:
Or if you want to see it in action:
Or if you REALLY want to see it in action click here.
So while I love helping my clients there has to be something in it for me. These are toys for a trainer and I have one goal in mind:
Silly Yolked Shins
Pretty crazy, eh? I’m not blessed with the longest calf muscles bellies (neither was this guy) so the more 3 dimensional girth I can add, the bigger and better they’ll look. I can think of a lot of natural pro bodybuilders who might get their first pro win with a little more lower leg definition and dimension but you rarely to never see this in a gym. So how is it? Well it feels like training your calves only smaller and more hot. My calves are always on fire when I train them and training my shins is no different. I think that as time goes on and they move out of the “holy shit you’ve never worked me like this before” stage that they’ll feel less molten.
If you’re a runner and you can get your hands on one for a good price (I got mine here for a steal) I highly recommend it.
