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.
Motor Learning and Exercise Physiology
So this semester I’m taking 2 courses to fulfill my leveling requirements for entrance into my M.S. program. While I find motor learning and exercise physiology terribly fascinating, I’m even more fascinated by the the fact that so few trainers and fitness enthusiasts have anything beyond a mere clue when it comes to these subjects. So what I’m going to do is this:
Shit all of my notes from two 3000-level notes onto the internet!
Actually, I’m going to post information from these classes that I find most trainers to have little to know practical understanding of. This is of course selfish, as reexplaining my notes will help me better learn the material but I figured that if a PT told me in person that throughout his coursework that he only experienced “a little” motor learning material, laypersons and working trainers could stand to benefit from this stuff. Of course I’ll label the posts as either “motor learning” or “exercise physiology” so if you’re not interested you can go back through my extensive achieves and find something else entertaining and enlightening.
Review: Outer Limits Loops
So I recently was bit by my dog. Understand that she wasn’t trying to bite me but rather kill my other dog. The bite ruptured my tendon sheath and made extension of any sort mind-numbingly painful, never mind the medial epicondylitis that appeared in response to constantly having a certain degree of flexion at the wrist. I’ve been dealing with this injury basically all summer and it has really put a hamper of my training. Your hands are your interface with the equipment and if you can’t grip without pain you can’t lift sufficient weight.
After a nice fat shot of corticosteroid (thanks Doc Pyron!) I started exploring how to train the muscles in the back of my hand without any wrist flexion/extension, in part because I think such movements increased recovery time. I remember in the good ol’ “Beyond Brawn” that Stuart McRoberts liked to use rubber bands to train the finger extensors but they’re such a pain in the ass. They offer no way to improve other than wrapping more rubber bands and you need to use a sufficient amount to get any sort of real resistance going. So after a bit of perusing I picked up a pair of Outer Limits Loops from Ironmind. They look like this:
Do not adjust your computer screen, I am in control now.
While the image above shows the loops attached to loading pins, I attach them to a cable unit and do holds for time. You’re not going to need a lot of weight, I’m only using the lowest plate setting, but doing holds for 45 seconds a pop will light up the small muscles you never knew you had in your hand. In addition to the orthopedic possibilities (balancing the wrist, reducing/preventing carpal tunnel syndrome), there’s the knowledge of knowing that, after a year of using these, just about anywhere you go you’ll have the strongest finger extensors of any person there. Take the small victories where you can.
I highly recommend them.
Locomotive Breath
First, give a listen:
Now, this doesn’t have to do with rock or flutes or being a ham for the camera. Rather this is about a device I recently picked up: the Expand-a-Lung.
What this (rather simple) device allows me to do is increase the resistance against which I breath. Over time I increase the resistance and thus increase the power of my lungs (or the LOCOMOTION OF MY BREATH! HA! DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!?!)
If you dig around on google scholar you can find all sorts of studies showing increases in performance for endurance athletes. But I’m not an endurance athlete (though I have considered attempting to be the biggest guy at a stair climb races. Similar to where crazies race up the Sears [Willis] tower in as fast as 13:26) so why would I want to increase the strength of my respiratory muscles? Why to blow up a hot water bottle, of course:
If I was still single, that would get me all the chicks at 2am on 6th street in Austin, but since I’m married it nets me eye rolls from my wife with the best punctuating line: “You have strange life goals.”
I only have one life, so why the hell not?
There Are No Shortcuts
I hate traffic. Not that I think anyone in the world actually *likes* being traffic (which is the case, as opposed to being stuck “in” traffic), but I think some people handle it better than others. Traffic used to irritate me to the point of intense rage. I would quickly find myself in a very foul mood over something that I had no control of whatsoever. I also got quite good at diving off the freeway and taking side streets. Sure, I was moving, but here in Austin it took me just about the same amount of time to get where I was going on surface roads than to suffer as part of traffic. I had the illusion of being faster even if I wasn’t.
This mindset of wanting to find the fastest route, to find an unknown shortcut, seems ingrained culturally. It’s how bay area “productivity” gurus make their money, selling the idea of being able to take anything, no matter how complex, and break it down into bite-sized mastery. It’s how late night infomercials sell you on the idea of a 6 week total body transformation. And you know what, everything they say is true but it is low hanging fruit. Anything that can be “hacked” was never actually time-consuming in the first place. You can streamline your systems for increased efficiency, but you’ve in no way shape or form moved into a realm outside of the actual time something can take. In other words, if you are building a house, it is fastest to have all of your materials and workers on site ready to go but this merely lets you build the house as fast as it can be built, not faster. That’s not a shortcut, that’s being efficient.
This is the dilemma in my world, the world of physical fitness. Nobody is actually after mastery and they really do feel that they’ve moved to a new level, skirted the time it actually takes to get in great shape and obtain superior health, by going to a week long boot camp in the woods or starting a new fitness regimen. Excitement is contagious and new insights hold applicability but you still have to put in the work, you still have to incorporate what you’ve learned into the bigger system of your daily life. You still have to get stronger/faster/more efficient if you are going to improve. That doesn’t happen overnight, even with things like steroids, DNP, and pergolide.
How long something is going to take is how long it is going to take. You can’t shortcut it but you can streamline and remove inefficiencies and constraints. Eventually efforts to streamline come with increasing stress and reduced response but hopefully by the time you get there, you’ve reached a place where streamlining is unnecessary. At this point you’ve accepted the practice as a practice and attempting to “get there” misses the point entirely. Shortcuts are meaningless at that point. I hope you find it soon.
Ancestral Health Symposium 2011
There are approximately a gajillion posts about this event (hell, just crank through the twitter hashtag #ahs2011) but I thought I should throw my 2 cents in. First, I’d like to show you the greatest thing I’ve ever seen:
Right in the fat of the UCLA campus no less.
Keith and I presented with what we called “Physical Culture at the Spearhead of Healthcare Reform.” We gave a short taste of where the term came from, examples of physical cultures of the past, how the steroid era of bodybuilding buried the good of these integral systems under the weight of the strength training component, why dogmatism gets people nowhere in the long term, and finally how we changed a few lives with Project: Transformation, which required 30 minutes of workout a week. I know, it was a run on sentence.
I was also able to have dinner with Richard Nikoley at the restaurant Animal. Bea made the comment that we are “so much alike” while we yelled at each other over brains, livers, and pig ears. New friends made over wine and beer.
In a bit of geekery, Chris Owens and I discussed, among other things, the shocking fact that Starbucks is investing is quality coffee for use in the Clover and the fact that Barley Swine is probably better than previously mentioned Animal. That and how his new venture Handsome Coffee has a wicked, wicked logo.
It was a fantastic event, really special stuff. I’d like to present again in 2 years time. In fact I’ve already started working on the presentation. If you’ll have me Brent I’d love to come back.
So among the many adventures in bizarre fitness/health rituals I have embarked upon in my time is the idea of dousing. That is to say: get in your trunks first thing in the morning, take nearly freezing water and dumb it on your head. You have to (HAVE TO, so say the gurus) be standing on Terra Firma or the ghosts of Czars will haunt you for all eternity. Once you do this, go inside and take a shower. The shivering effect achieved is the body reminding you how tremendously stupid you are…but it is great for brown adipose tissue (BAT) activation.
I have also come to understand that a cold bath before bed is like “elephant tranquilizer.” I love a deep, decadent sleep so I thought it a good idea to try swimming in Barton Springs before bed last night. What is Barton Springs?
Right in Downtown Austin
Barton Springs naturally maintains a temperature of 68-71*F throughout the year and is a very popular spot when the surface of the sun has taken residence in our fair city. The fact that most people go there during the day is important and I’ll get to that in a minute.
So Barton Springs is ~10 miles from my house. After 9pm it is free admission so I get there around 9:10. I scale a fence, ninja-boulderer style to get in as I forgot that only one entrance is open after 9, and I proceed on my mission: dive in, swim back and forth across the width of the pool, go dive in at the gnarly diving board, swim back, get out, go home. After doing all of these things I realize that I am very dazed, my head hurt, tachypnea had set in, I felt obliquely pukey.
I head back to my car, get out on the road, realize that I’m extremely disoriented, pull over, get out and feel better (only later did I realize that the warm air was the reason). I get back in my car and start to make my way through downtown Austin via Barton Springs road. If you’re not from around here, Barton Springs road is a very busy street filled with nightlife, traffic, and Tex Mex. That is to say, having my window rolled down increased my disorientation but kept me distracted from how god-awful I was feeling. Somewhere along the way, a shirtless bearded man road his bike up next to my car and informed me that my towel was hanging off the back of my car. Amazing. I channeled my inner Hulk Hogan and told him “Thanks Brother.”
I get on IH-35 shortly afterward, a notorious cluster-fuck of trucks and terrible on/off ramps. Austin was once meant to be a holding pen for smelly dirty hippies and other weirdos; little did it know that NAFTA would bring a metric ton of truck traffic our way straight up the 35. At this point my entire body is tingling and the noxious fumes of truck traffic was great at distracting me from my own disorientation. Somewhere on the upper deck I call my wife and calmly ask her to draw me a warm bath. Her response is, “I’m kind of busy…can’t you do it yourself.” In hindsight my voice and demeanor must have been cool to the point of relaxing. I hang up and try not to crash into a Baby A’s tex-mex restaurant.
When I get home I half park my car up on the curb before getting it parked correctly. I’m amazed I didn’t take out the mailbox as I was only vaguely aware of my limbs at this point. My face and jaw had begun to tingle, as had my ribs. While “tingly ribs” might be something that can be sold at a BBQ joint, it wasn’t very tasty for me at that moment. So I stumble into the house and my wife explains that she was sorry for being short with me and that she really had to get whatever she had to get done…done. It was a bill I think. I don’t know, I handed all of the finances off to her. She looks at me quizzically, states “You look pale. Go lay down.” I take a look in the mirror, marvel at my powder-like complexion, and proceed to lay down under multiple quilts and blankets. At this point my wife tells me “Put on some underwear; you lose a lot of heat through your balls.” This is technically correct methodology for rewarming after hypothermia though I’m sure EMS isn’t on the scene yelling, “SIR! YOUR BALLS ARE IN NEED OF RAPID REWARMING!” I’d be happy to increase my tax rate if they were going to do that as protocol from now on though.
After some restless tossing and turning, I take a warm shower, feel life rush back into me, crack some jokes about how that was a “Great idea” inspired by Tim Ferriss and Richard Nikolay. The thing I didn’t take into account is that they could, at any moment, get out and take a hot shower. The moral of the story? If you’re going to try this, don’t do it 10 miles from the nearest shower should things suddenly go wrong…unless you want a great story.
My Achin’ Wrist
So on June 3rd my dogs decided it was a good idea to try and kill one another. In the process of showing them how this is a bad idea, I caught a Beagle canine right in the back of my hand (the middle, proximal metacarpals if we’re specific). After 2 weeks of triple antibiotics, my hand returned to its normal size. Fast forward to July 4th: I workout and include wrist supination/pronation exercises in addition to my (somewhat regular) wrist extension exercises. I wake up sometime in the middle of the night unable to sleep because my wrist hurts like mad. I’ve had my share of soft tissue injuries from basketball but this was really gnarly. One week later I still have a nice fat lump near the point of the injury:
Digit extension is still tender but improving. The ol’ rest/ice/compression/elevation had been helping, though I’d really like to get my hands (haha!) on an ultrasound device to speed up recovery. Seems (seems) to be a course of treatment like any other tendonitis. Onward.
You have limits…what will you do when you reach them?
Steve Prefontaine was an obscure distance runner made famous by Jared Leto…
Even this surprises Jared Leto.
Actually “Pre” was a record-setting distance runner that is cemented is mythology by tragically dying in a car crash. “Pre” believed that there was no such thing as talent: it was a myth and he was merely willing to suffer more than anybody else. He was great at suffering but as it turns out he was very talented. His VO2 max was 84.4 ml/kg/min, which to put in perspective is higher than Lance Armstrong’s VO2 max. To further put in perspective VO2 max, you can very nearly maximize whatever your lot is in ~ 6 weeks of very dedicated VO2 max training. And Pre smoking weed on his couch for 6 weeks would likely still have a higher VO2 max (I don’t know if he in fact did smoke marijuana but I’m using it to make a point about the lack of train-ability of something like VO2 max).
While there are a host of things that can be trained and substantially improved, and you have to go out and really try to find them in order to see what the limits are, the fact remains that we have limits. When you reach that limit, how will your training change over the course of your life as a result?
The 21 Convention
As previously mentioned, I’ll be speaking at the 21 convention next Thursday. The topic of my talk is “Great Expectations: Training over a Lifetime.” I’m going to mostly be doing a live version of my “manifesto” regarding training, defining your own goals, being smart, science of achievement, talent, and limits. People don’t like talking about inbuilt limits; hell there has been a slew of books recently about talent being a overrated (even the aptly titled “Talent Is Overrated“). Especially in our cozy puritanical society, it is comforting to believe that with just a little hard work anybody can be the best at anything. This is in fact false and I’m going to discuss much of this at the conference, not to dishearten people, but to put control in perspective (some of which I discussed in my “Trichotomy of Control” post). Make no mistake hard work is required but no amount of hard work is going to push you passed the ceiling of your talent; some people win with more practice because they’ve realized their potential versus a person who, while having a high potential, has not worked hard enough to realize their potential. You can work 20,000 hours and still lose to someone with a higher talent who has worked just as hard.
The rest of the talk is going to be about clients I have over the course of their training careers, basically finding new challenges that they don’t have control of (age) and some that they do (picking new activities/sports to work toward personal bests in). It’s going to be personal experience meets standing on the shoulders of giants; I cannot wait.
