Weight Gain, Jem Finch style

This would absolutely work, if you did it often enough:

"Jem was worn out from a day's water-carrying. There were at least twelve banana peels on the floor by his bed, surrounding an empty milk bottle. "Whatcha stuffin' for?" I asked.
"Coach says I can play [football] if I gain twenty-five pounds by year after next I can play," he said. "This is the quickest way."
- Jem and Scout Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Chapter 26.

Whole milk + lots of extra calories (healthy ones, even). Twenty five pounds in two years on a diet like that? No problem, even for a very active boy.

Book Review: The Pain-Free Program

by Anthony B. Carey
Published 2005
254 pages

The Pain-Free Program is subtitled "A proven method to relieve back, neck, shoulder, and joint pain." The book is aimed at restoring functional, correct posture in people who have lost it.

The book is a posture-first approach, rather than point-of-pain-first as in Pain Free. The latter asks "What hurts?" and then works on fixing your posture to address that issue; this book asks "How is your posture dysfunctional?" and then works on your posture. They both reach the same point - doing specific mobility drills and stretches and exercises to take you out of dysfunction. They just start at opposite ends of the spectrum of diagnosis. It's probably a bit unfair to compare the books, but having read Pain Free first, it's an unavoidable comparison. You can't help but read one book in light of the other.

The book inevitably opens with a (rather long) introduction, aimed at explaining why you might be dysfunctional, why correcting it will help you, and why this approach will in fact correct it. Basically the first 67 pages of the book are selling you on the idea of postural corrective exercises. The seventh chapter is what opens up the meat of the book - posture diagnosis and correction.

Chapter 7 outlines six posture forms. These range from rotated posture, hunched back/rounded shoulders, head-forward, etc. and everything in between. The posture types are pretty broad but further details explain how you might across multiple posture types. Further information is provided on how to address multiple forms at once, or in which order to address them if you can't tackle them simultaneously.

This is followed by three different exercise programs per form - one for physical workers (labor and other gross motor work), one for dexterity workers (fine motor skills, mostly), and mixed mode (people who do some of both, or some of everything in the case of full-time parents). Each of these is pretty well put together, but with one issue - every exercise is illustrated . . . the first time. Subsequent times explain the exercise but lack the picture and provide a page reference. The illustrations are generally single-picture illustrations, so you just see someone somewhere in the process of doing the exercise, not a beginning/middle/end approach. A fair number do show start and end positions, but not all of them do. The result of this is a lot of page flipping to do a program.

Another downpoint is that you do really need outside help to assess your posture. This means you need to read and understand Chapter 7 and then have someone else do the same and assess you, or have someone help you take pictures. Assessing yourself in fine points is difficult. While finding pain points is not (your knee hurts or it doesn't), knowing that your right hip is subtly raised and your right shoulder is dipping when you move is quite difficult to assess accurately. Then, you have to slot your job into one of three categories and exercise off of that. This leaves a lot of potential failure points - discern your posture, pick the correct combination of forms, select the correct weighting of exercises based on your idea of how your job impacts you, and then page-flip through the exercises. Tough. Get it wrong, and you might be reinforcing bad posture at worst and just not accomplishing anything at best.

The approach does seem very solidly grounded. Many of the exercises exactly (or nearly exactly) duplicate corrective exercises from other sources, just under different names. This is a positive (you know people use this stuff broadly) and a negative (they call it something else). Like Pain Free, it has a continuing exercise program for long-term use, but it doesn't really address athletics or actual strengthening. If I'm going to bench press, or golf, or do MMA, what do I need to do to keep from bringing more problems back down on me? It's not clearly addressed, either in forms or in the text.

Rating:
Content: 4 out of 5. The book is complete as far as it goes, but it lacks the detail you need to keep going forward.
Presentation: 3 out of 5. The book is well written, and the pictures are good, but need more before/middle/after shots. Too much page flipping during actual use.

Overall: A good book if you're looking for a posture-first approach to fixing joint pain and a body pains in general. It's a bit more analysis-intensive than Pain Free, but its approach and progressions are more clearly spelled out. Recommended.

There was a nice article recently on T-Nation by Jesse Irizarry:

Freakish Strength with Proper Core Training

The article covers some interesting points:

- an actual definition of what "tightening your core" really means.

- a drill for pelvic lifting/tightening the core.

- How to use a curl-up, bird dog, and side plank to strength specific aspects of isometric core strength.

- Dynamic progressions like the landmine, rollout, or suitcase carry (aka a Farmer's Walk variant).

- A discussion of breathing during lifts.

Good stuff, and worth the the time to read it through. If you're lifting heavy, this is useful. It's even more so if you're doing MMA, where the ability to breath while keeping your core tight is potentially the difference between winning and losing.

Prowler sale

Just a quick FYI, my favorite piece of conditioning equipment is on sale:

Prowler Sale

It's only until Thursday, March 8th.

Article Review: Roadwork 2.0

If you missed this article by Joel Jamieson, it's worth reading:

Roadwork 2.0 - The Comeback

Joel Jamieson espouses the very old school idea of using steady-state cardio to improve aerobic conditioning for combat sports. Short version: he thinks you should do roadwork.

It's more common to see people training short-burst stamina in the gym to support their MMA fighting or get ready for a match. But Joel Jamieson has been arguing - with a lot of scientific basis - that you need an underlying base of aerobic conditioning to succeed in combat sports. This article also provides an 8-week framework you can use to organize your aerobic conditioning.

Pallof Press variation

I must have missed this the first time around, but my boss introduced me to it:

Pallof Press 2.0

It's a tube based variation with movement. Give it a try; if you do it correctly it's very challenging.

Book Review: Pain Free

Pain Free
by Pete Egoscue and Roger Gittines
Published 2000
298 pages

If you accept Dan John's idea that the body is one piece, you'll understand this book's approach, too. The basic idea is that the body must move, and move correctly, to be healthy. Chronic pain is a sign of dysfunction that must be fixed with proper movement, not drugs or surgery. Pain isn't based at the site of pain (usually) but rather is the result of cascading dysfunction from some original point of problem.

The book starts with an introduction, and a general discussion of chronic pain. From there, it goes into specific body areas and how to deal with pain there. The book starts at the feet up. Each chapter discusses pain in that body part in general, gives a description of a successful or "too late to fix" case, and then gets into specifics. Each chapter has an explanation of how the pain and dysfunction starts, and how to address it.

The exercises - "e-cises" - are well-described and illustrated well. The descriptions are concise enough for easy read through, and clear enough to follow after one read. While it's not always immediately clear why an exercise might help a remote body part, the text explains how and why a, say, hip adductor exercise will help an ailing shoulder. The whole "body as one piece" approach makes sense.

Nicely each program gives you an estimation of the time needed (and it's pretty accurate) and the frequency.

The book also includes a general maintenance program and specific programs for dealing with common sports pain. It's both aimed at being curative (fix the dysfunction) and palliative (relieve the immediate pain), and ultimately preventative (keep you moving properly so it doesn't happen again). They do seem to work, too - pain reduction in my personal experience and those of I've used the programs is immediate, and in the medium term the pain is less intense. Long-term, it's not clear, but it's reasonable to expect that to continue.

The maintenance plan also makes a nice general mobility warmup, or active rest on off days - it's easy movement through natural ranges of motion.

Rating
Content: 5 out of 5.
Presentation: 4 out of 5. The main downside to the book is the amount of flipping each exercise requires. This is a useful space saver, but it means you flip back and forth when actually following the exercise lists.

Overall: If you're in pain chronically, or you know someone who is, this is an excellent resource. No mysticism or mumbo-jumbo, just motion to effect improved function. The maintenance program is half-bad as a warmup, either, or as general mobility prep. Highly recommended.