Skinnier People or Skinnier Pants?

This is only peripherally training related, yet it reveals a lot about 21st century Americans and the quick fix.

Your Pants Are Lying to You About How Thin You Are

Indeed, they are.

Never mind the waistline on your pants isn't necessarily your widest point, if you carry visceral fat above the line of your hips. So it's a) inaccurate even if the measurement was correct and b) inaccurate on top of that.

So instead of thinning down, we'll just mark down the size and keep on keeping on'. And Boris was just talking about cutting corners . . .

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Technique First

I trained a variety of people today, and all of them showed some form of compensation pattern we needed to fix. Mostly compensating for a current or prior injury. It's not just them - I have the same general problem.

What I basically told them was this:

Your body will find a way to do a motion if you demand it. It will find a way to lift the weight, make the step, climb the stairs, pull the bar down. That's not the goal.

The goal of weight training is to do it correctly, in the way that's best suited to your long-term health and success, and then progressively add resistance to strengthen it. If you put weight before technique, you'll teach yourself to compensate for weakness with bad form. The goal isn't to move the weight, it's to train the body to perform a motion correctly with increased strength and efficiency.

Something to keep in mind the gym.

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Live-Man Prowler

Here is a "fun" conditioning workout for a small group. Don't do this alone - in fact, it doesn't work alone.

Get a small group of fellow victims, a Prowler (we used my red Econo Prowler), a few plates, and a short running distance.

Pick an order, and then start pushing the Prowler - high handles out, low handles back or vice-versa (the suck evens out, no matter which you choose).

As soon as the first person's trip ends, the next victim starts his or her run. The idea is to keep the Prowler moving. Don't let it stop for more than a few seconds - if the person next up in the rotation can't keep up, skip him or her and jump ahead. Be read to take it from the person as it comes back in, and duck aside as you finish so you don't get run over. I call this "Live-Man Prowler" because in live-man sparring, one guy just keeps sparring and new people swap in and act as partners...usually switching every round or every submission. With this, the Prowler itself is the "one guy" and the trainees all switch in on "him."

The first time we did this, the prowler finished up with gleaming skids from the friction, and they were hot to the touch. Well hotter than you'd get from just leaving it on the hot August blacktop in the sun. We warmed up with a barbell complex for a couple rounds first, plus the usual dynamic warmups.

We only ran it about 50 feet or so one-way (so around a 35 yard round trip), and used only 25 pounds on each horn. We did 20 total trips apiece, or that was the goal at least - not everyone made it all 20.

This can be intense, and you really need to know when to quit and when to rest. I peaked out at something like 120% of my estimated maximum heart rate right after trip number 20, although it did drop down to my usual recovery zone in only a minute and change. That's despite the weight (65 + 50 = 115 pounds total) being much lighter than the 250 or so I do with a normal Prowler on turf. The lack of rest means that even though it never feels "heavy" you just can't suck enough air in to recover.

You can do this I-go-you-go approach with anything, but "Keep the Prowler Moving!" makes for a fun challenge, and it forces you to keep working without fully recovering. If the grinding sound stops for more than a few seconds, you're just not doing the workout.

Have fun!

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Book Review: The All-Pro Diet

By Gonzalez, Tony, with Dulan, Mitzi
Published August, 2009
256 pages


This is another celebrity workout book, with a twist - it's a celebrity diet book. Take one celebrity (NFL pro Tony Gonzalez), add one Registered Dietician (Mitzi Dulan), and you get a conversationally-toned and fairly chatty book about how to eat.

The diet comes with 17 rules to follow. They're pretty straightforward, like "2. Eat Every 3 to 4 Hours" or "14. Avoid Added Sugars." But they're also a little overstated. Number 13 is "Never Skip a Meal" but that could easily have fallen under #2, and #14 could have been combined with the other couple of rules about sugar and starches - fast-digesting carbohydrates.

Most of the book goes to convincing you to follow these rules and why they're effective. It's scattered with anecdotes about healthy and unhealthy eat by Tony Gonzalez and his teammates. The book is also packed with recipes, which is helpful if you follow the diet.

I'm giving the diet short shrift here because I'm basically interested in the workouts. The diet isn't something you haven't seen before if you are familiar with John Berardi's work. I've linked to his articles before. It's nice to see another diet that supports these ideas - lean protein at every meal, frequent meals with a balanced approach to the contents, whole grains instead of white flour, getting a good Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio, and so on.

The workout free weights - no machines! It features undulating periodization with a deload. What's that mean? It means:
Week 1 - 3 sets of 10 reps
Week 2 - 4 sets of 8 reps
Week 3 - 5 sets of 5 reps
Week 4 - 3 sets of 10-12 reps with less weight than week 1.

The exercises are all good ones, although there are some oddities - the plank is renamed the "yugo," the jump squat is called the "bounder," the Romanian deadlift is described as an "isolation exercise" when it's technically a compound lift. You also do 250 crunches every warmup - that's quite a lot of them for a warmup, since reps that high aren't going to do much to make you stronger or carve up some impressive abs. Otherwise, you jump rope to warmup, then do compound exercises like RDLs, power cleans, squats, lunges, dumbbell bench pressing, curls, and pullups. The workouts are oddly (or not oddly?) described in football terms. It makes sense since the co-author is a football player, but I'd bet not a lot of players are buying this book to learn how to lift. Or maybe they are - although the book is aimed at a broader audience it does take some pains to play to the athletic crowd.

Rating:
Content: 3 out of 5. Good diet, good workout, but it's all about the same.
Presentation: 3 out of 5. It takes a long time to get to the point and uses that annoying "celebrity telling you what the expert told him/her" approach. The charts and pictures are clear enough.

Overall: The diet seems sound enough, but they did go a bit overboard on the rules - 17 is a lot to remember. The workout is sound enough, too, and it's a good start. There are a lot of other resources out there, though, and this one doesn't have much to shout out its uniqueness.

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One-Arm anti-rotation exercise

If you don't keep up with Dewey Nielson's blog, you probably missed this one. He's put up a new video of a suspended anti-rotation exercise. It's not easy, but it certainly seems effective.

TRX Prone Reach

You'll need either a suspension trainer or one of the DIY versions I mentioned yesterday.

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DIY Suspension training

Thanks to Kenny Croxdale and Stu Ward for posting these over on the EXRX forums.


DIY Blast Straps - Pete Mazzo shows you how to make either your own TRX Suspension Trainer clones, or a DIY version of Blast Straps. You can get those stirrup handles on Elite FTS, just like the original straps.

As for those TRX Suspension Trainers, Ross Enamait shows you how to make your own versions of them, too.

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Sparring increases cortisol?

Thanks to Conditioning Research for finding this one.

A study was done on Tae Kwon Do practitioners that showed that sparring (essentially, live fighting practice) increased cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone that is generated by exercise. So far, so good.

The study further showed that sparring - 3 fights, 6 minutes each, 30 minutes between fights - lowered anabolic hormones (hormones that encourage muscle growth) in the fighters, and further lowered testosterone in males (but not females).

This isn't surprising. When you train, you increase the stress levels on your body. That's the point of training - you put stress on your body and it super-compensates and becomes stronger, better adapted, able to go longer or work harder.

Nicely they uses "elite" athletes - presumably actual competitors? And not just untrained people. So these folks should have been used to the stress of contact fighting.

My main questions here would be:

- What exactly did the fights involve? How much contact, how much force, how much protection? I'd say, odds-on, that the more contact the more stress. However, [i]any[/i] contact is going to ramp up the stress level, even if it's just light contact sparring. Why? Contact is contact, and risk of injury should put anyone into a slightly-higher stress level even if they've gotten to the point of considering routine.

- Was this an acute reaction only? Meaning, did they suffer a catabolic reaction immediately, but then later did it level off or taper off, or indeed result in an anabolic (muscle-building) reaction?

- A great study would be to do this on wrestlers and BJJ stylists and judoka - sports were all of your practice involves some contact. Does the stress level go up as the intensity goes up? Is live sparring always catabolic, or is that an acute response (meaning it happens immediately) that leads to a long-term anabolic effect? Hard to say, but if so it might explain why martial arts gets you a bit strong but despite all that hard grappling and pulling and straining, it's hard to get truly strong just on the mats or in the ring. You need higher-intensity exercise but presumably with less overall time and less psychological stress.

- Finally, if martial arts sparring is catabolic, what do we do about it? Post-sparring, should you act as if you just did a heavy weight training workout, which also increases your cortisol initially? If so, post-sparring you'd want to drink protein and simple, fast-digesting carbohydrates (i.e. sugar) and use any usual post-workout means to reverse that catabolic (tissue-burning) reaction and switch it back to an anabolic (tissue-building) reaction.

I'm very interested in the results of this study.

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