Big News!

Big News! A few days before embarking on my trip to Lapland, I got an email from Lou Schuler, whom most of you will know as the author of The New Rules of Lifting, former fitness editor for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, and general fitness guru, as well as the proprietor of the “Male Pattern Fitness” blog.

Lou recently got an offer he couldn’t refuse from a site called T-Nation, which I’ve mentioned here numerous times. Apparently he’ll be overseeing much of their editorial material, encouraging all the fledgling strength coaches and exercise physiologists out there to spread their wings, fly, and share with all the fitness geeks out there all the newest secrets to getting the Bodies They Want and Rightfully Deserve. Sounds like a great gig, and something he’s ideally cut out for.

Due to his new obligations, though, Big Lou is stepping down as from his post as “Male Pattern Fitness” blogger and has asked me to take over for him.

And I said yes.

That doesn’t mean much for most people reading this: just that from now on you’ll be hitting up the MPF site instead of this one for my latest ramblings about fitness. (I’ll figure out some fancy way that this site will automatically redirect you anyway, so it will be an even smoother transition). I will most assuredly be updating that site more often than I’ve been doing this one—particularly lately—in part because the overseers of that site expect me to, but mostly because I’ll hopefully be inheriting many of Lou’s readers over there and they’ll probably expect me to keep up something approximating Lou’s furious blogging pace, heaven help me, and I hope not to let them down too horribly.

I’ve enjoyed keeping up this blog, have enjoyed the crosstalk with many readers on this site, and I hope that you’ll all join me over at MPF starting later this week.

I’d like to add in closing—and, I imagine, REALLY closing-- that I’m very pleased and rather flattered that Lou has asked me to fill his shoes. When I first read ‘The New Rules of Lifting’ years ago I remember thinking, “Not only is this guy informed to the gills but the dude can WRITE, too.” Turned out I already had two of his other books on my shelf. As far as I’m concerned, Lou continues to set the standard for fitness writing that is smart, engaging and, improbably, hilarious. Without his much-imitated style to make it go down easy, it’s all just a bunch of sets and reps, and really, who but the most geekish among us cares about that stuff?

I started reading his blog right around that time, and shortly thereafter started this one, which, if case no one has noticed, owes a lot in form and content to The Big Man himself. Lou has nurtured along some of the biggest names in the fitness world, encouraging them, presenting them opportunities, and, I gather, kicking them in the butt once in a while, and I gotta say now I’m honored to be among them. So—thanks, Lou. Stop by any time.

Everyone else: Male Pattern Fitness-ho! See you over there later this week.

--Andrew

Two Great Fitness Resources for Women!

Although I'm sort of a journeyman in this industry, I like to think, as Robert De Niro says in THIS BOY'S LIFE, that I know 'a thing or two about a thing or two.' But there's one thing I'm not and never can be without a lot of surgery, hormones, and therapy, and that's a woman. I like to think that fitness is fitness is fitness, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that, but the fact is that women do respond in subtly different ways, and have often have different needs and goals, than men.

So if you happen to be a woman interested in fitness, you should definitely check out the following resources:

1) Rachel Cosgrove's Blog. Like me, Rachel is a triathlete. Unlike me, she's an Ironman finisher. She has also coached numerous figure competitors to high finishes and, from her writing, appears to be in the know about all things fitness-related. I just discovered her blog today, and it's a breath of fresh air. It's also nice to have someone out there writing about training for endurance events who is equally well versed in the world of strength training and diet. Meaning she knows how to train for extreme events without getting injured. I've never met Rachel, but I'm told she coaches locally and I hope to saddle up on my bike with her group sometime in the near future. I fully expect her, and probably most of her charges, to leave me choking on their dust.

2) The New Rules of Lifting for Women, by Lou Schuler, Alwyn Cosgrove, and Cassandra E. Forsythe. If it's anything like its predecessor, this book will hardly need my endorsement. Back in 2005, Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove (husband of Rachel, above) put out an unassuming-looking fitness book called The New Rules of Lifting, which has become, in my estimation, pretty much the gold standard for practical, up-to-date, and clearly-written advice on the fastest and most effective ways to lose fat, gain muscle, and increase strength. Chat rooms sprung up for people using its programs. Among fitness geeks, a mini-revolution was born, in which long-time lifters started accepting its very new, and rather controversial ideas, as the new gospel of How To Weight Train the Right Way. And frankly, I think it's deserved. Alongside Chad Waterbury's Muscle Revolution and Mike Boyle's Functional Training for Sports, it belongs in the library of absolutely anyone who's the slightest bit interested in fitness.

So I'm doing something I really should never do, and that's giving this book a blind endorsement, because I fully expect this book to be every bit as innovative, thorough and readable as its predecessor. I know both Cosgrove and Schuler the tiniest bit (the latter only via email, but that counts these days, right?), and they're absolutely the top of their field. If it's decreed by Schuler and Cosgrove, you can rest assured it Will Build Muscle and Burn Fat. I know less about their collaborator, Ms. Forsythe, but from all accounts, she, too, is the genuine article.

A word of warning here, the book isn't even OUT yet, and WON'T be before the holidays, meaning that you can't even purchase it as a gift for a friend. Then again, giving a "get in shape" book to a woman you love for Christmas is dicey territory, so maybe it would work better as a New Year's present to yourself to go along with your resolution to hit the gym hard this year.

Have a great weekend.

How Not To Set Up Your Gym

Choice in just about everything can sometimes just be a plain distraction.

Take, for instance, the gym where I’ve been working out these last couple of months up here in Washington. There are, and I counted, five resistance machines that are variations on rowing, none of which can hold a candle to the bent-over row exercise that one can do with a good ol’ Olympic barbell set.

There are almost as many overhead pressing machines, none of which are as good as a standing overhead dumbbell press or barbell overhead jerk—but it’s tricky to find a place to do those at this particular gym, because the Olympic lifting platform area is, in a stunning display of inanity, located in the one spot on the gym floor with an unusually low ceiling. Meaning that the one spot in the gym where lifting large, heavy objects with great speed overhead is the primary goal has an eight-foot ceiling. The light fixtures tremble whenever I go over there, and I’m no giant, folks. A truly tall guy who wants to do some Olympic lifting has got to find some empty floor space amongst all those machines in the high-ceilinged area, which I’m here to tell you is pretty much impossible, cuz there ain’t no empty floor space to be found.

In the past, I’ve gone on exasperated rants about exercisers who go to all the trouble of carving out the time to exercise and then simply can’t seal the deal by actually putting in a real workout. That behavior makes no sense to me.

But now I begin to think that sometimes the health-club facilities themselves are set up to actually deter effective workouts. Contrary to what you might think given my profession, my workouts, for instance, are nothing particularly fancy. On days when I strength train, I use a combination of free weights, body weight exercises, Olympic lifts, a pulley-machine move or two, and some stretching drill. It’s a variation on the kinds of things you can see in popular fitness magazines like MEN’S HEALTH, which, at present, are not too far off from what you would have seen fifty-plus years ago in similar publications. They’re sort of “horse sense” workouts.

You would think, then, that given that these kinds of workouts are almost universally recognized as the best way to spend one’s gym time (quibbling over details aside), that weight room facilities would be set up to accommodate PRIMARILY those kinds of workouts, with a secondary emphasis on more arcane exercise methods. But they’re not. In my gym, for instance, I’ve got to walk through a sea of machinery to get from the bench-press station to that low-ceilinged Olympic lifting platform to perform bent-over rows. The squat racks—of which I suppose I can be grateful that there are any at all—are tightly crammed in, three in a row, such that two people using racks right next to each other would resemble a jousting tournament. The squat racks and Olympic lifting platform are jammed into the least inviting, worst lit, and most unsafely-configured area in the entire gym. Who would want to spend any time there?

Finally, there’s NO place to perform walking lunges, or plyometric jumps, or dynamic flexibility exercises, aside from the aerobics studio, which is almost always occupied by people taking classes. Nothing against classes. In fact, I’ve poked my head in there and seen some real sweat going on in there from time to time. But open space is important and useful in a gym, and this gym has almost none of it.

The other day I was warming up in the treadmill area, which overlooks the gym floor. Reflexively, I took a quick visual survey at what the people were up to in the gym below. What I saw made me almost cry with joy: the machines were languishing. No one was touching them. Instead, everyone was over by the dumbbells, benches, squat racks and chinning bars, putting in real effort off in the low-ceilinged, poorly-lit corners of the place. And these weren’t just the hulks, either: they were the older clients, the female clients, the people with a long way to go.

A fluke? Probably. Still, I wonder how much better these gym managers and owners could do--and how much better their clients’ results would be--if they set up their facilities to accommodate and encourage challenging, effective workouts, rather than subtly funneling everyone towards workout equipment whose effectiveness is sub-optimal at best and dangerous at worst?

**********************

Lou Schuler, of the indispensable health, fitness, and all-things-Schulerian blog Male Pattern Fitness has a totally different angle on my topic from Monday. Lou is the father of three active kids, a veteran of many sports teams, and currently a coach for one of his daughter’s soccer teams. As such, he’s got a different very slant on things than I do, and it’s worth a read.

Heck, his stuff’s always worth a read.

Long Live Lifting

There was an article in SLATE Wednesday by pediatrician Sydney Spiesel called "Beware of Diet," which concludes that diets are overwhelmingly not effective in helping people to lose weight and keep it off. At one point Spiesel summarizes the findings of a study by UCLA psychologist, Traci Mann:

"...the experimental subjects were kept on their low-calorie diets for 18 months without other weight-loss interventions... and their weight was measured again a year after the diet ended. A comparison of the dieting subjects with the control group... showed some weight loss a year post-diet, but it was disappointingly small: an average decrease of 3.75 pounds. The other six long-term studies (which... included other interventions besides diet) showed similarly unimpressive results: The average dieting weight loss maintained over extended time (between 2.5 and 10.5 years) was less than 2.5 pounds.

"Mann and her colleagues also examined other studies. In 14 studies that lacked control groups, but followed dieters for at least four years after a prescribed reduced-calorie diet, the average early weight loss after dieting was almost 31 pounds. But by the end of the follow-up period, on average the dieters gained back more than 24 of the pounds they had lost. In 10 studies in which nutritional scientists tracked the weight of people who put themselves on any diet of their choosing, the results were even worse. Of the 10 reports, only one described lasting weight loss, two showed no long-term effect, and the remaining seven studies found that dieting led to weight gain in the long run...

"Mann's analysis casts serious doubt on the value of dieting for weight control. In my pediatric practice, I've become increasingly reluctant to push dieting on children, even very heavy ones... I am coming to believe ever more strongly in the value of pleasurable exercise for weight control and for independent health benefits."

As a pediatrician in an age of skyrocketing childhood obesity rates, Spiesel is on the front lines of a major health crisis. Appallingly, though, his medical training left him woefully unprepared to tackle the problem. He writes that he was essentially taught to counsel overweight patients to eat less, and that if at that point, they failed to lose weight, it was not due to any shortcoming in that rather facile advice, but instead, to a moral failing on the part of the patient. The fact that 24/7 dieting takes almost Herculean vigilance and willpower has in a sense absolved the medical community from addressing obesity on a deeper level: it has meant that doctors could make their standard recommendation and then blame the patient when their advice failed. Mann's rigorous study, however, does an excellent job debunking the "eat less" myth, and, well, at the very least, we can praise Jesus for that.

So "eat less" doesn't work? Stop the press.

I may just be a lowly fitness guy, but I'm here to tell you: thou needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this. It's been in just about every fitness book and magazine and matchbook cover I've read for the last 25 years.

I have something of a love-hate fascination with the freakshow that is professional bodybuilding. I think what they do is both fascinating and a little weird. Still, maybe I need to cut them a break and conclude, as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in broken English, circa 1975, that "it's not any stranger than getting in a car and trying to drive a quarter mile five seconds. That is to me strange."

However one feels about bodybuilders, though, one unquestionably valuable service they provide is to investigate questions about the limits of human physiology, among them, "how lean can a human being get while holding onto as much muscle mass as possible?" Using their own bodies as science labs (often chemistry labs as well), bodybuilders have been trying to answer that question since at least the '50s. Over time, many of the common practices of bodybuilders and other athletes have been systematically tested and refined over the years by people with white coats and letters after their names, and the practices that work have eventually made their way into common fitness lore read by me, you, and thousands of individuals who wish to lose weight.

Take, for instance, the standard bodybuilding operating procedure on losing fat while maintaining muscle. Generally the suggestion is that you should eat six times a day, reduce your consumption of carbohydrates, particularly in refined form, and consume ample amounts of protein. Vegetables and fruits are essential. Exercise should largely take the form of strength training, as excessive aerobic exercise can lead to a loss of muscle mass.

For Pete's sake, does this sound familiar to anyone? It's only the Cliffs Notes form of what you see in pretty much every bestselling diet and exercise book from the last five years.

Now I'm not saying we should turn to the bodybuilding community, with their two-hour bicep workouts, their extreme diets, and their creative use of pharmaceuticals for balanced and practical advice on eating and exercise. But in a sense those guys are the theoretical physicists, out there on the fringes, whose crazy methods often seem to find their way, in a less extreme form, into common, John Q. gym-goer usage. And I for one feel a little bit bad for all those big guys, schlepping their 200-pound dumbbells to the bench for their seventh set of flyes, while some pencil-neck in a lab coat is winning the Nobel Prize for their decades-old methodology.

Partly due the the efforts of the big guys, fitness geeks have long known that arbitrarily eating less is a poor fix for weight loss, mostly because if you're not simultaneously doing something to maintain your muscle mass, any weight you lose will be about half fat and half muscle. Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive: it burns calories just sitting there on your skeleton making you look pretty, and of course it burns even more calories helping you move around. So when the body senses that food is scarce -- i.e., when you "eat less" -- it will quite naturally dump some of the tissue that is costing the most energy (muscle mass) and hold onto the tissue that costs less to have around (fat). The trick is to convince the body to hold onto the muscle mass, because the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn both at rest and at play, so anyone gunning to lose weight should make building muscle a top priority.

Strength training is the fastest, most effective way to build muscle mass that we know about. It's why if a client wants to lose fat, the first thing I do is get them lifting some challenging weights. Only then do we talk about diet, "cardio", and taking those famous "brisk walks" that are supposed to do everyone so much good.

The piece of the puzzle that Spiesel and Mann seem to be missing is that dieting alone -- without an intense strength training regimen to accompany it -- causes a loss of muscle mass. So the majority of the subjects of Mann's trial were losing at least as much muscle as they were fat. Since muscle mass is our most effective tool in the fight against fat, it makes perfect sense to me, and to any fitness pro worth his clipboard, that those subjects would rapidly regain any weight lost at the conclusion of their period of dieting. That many of them would gain even more weight on top of that also makes sense, since, thanks to their diets, they now had less muscle mass on their frames with which to burn the fat.

Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove draw an analogy in NEW RULES OF LIFTING: if you don't weight train while trying to lose fat, you're like a CEO who fires his best workers in the midst of a financial crisis. Maybe you'll save some money in the short run, but you're setting yourself up for financial ruin in the shockingly near future.

For what it's worth, I applaud Spiesel's decision to recommend primarily exercise, and not dieting, to patients who wish to lose weight. Without suggesting that strength training is the cure-all for obesity, or that all people great and small are perfect candidates for a heavy iron-pumping regimen, I do think that many of Spiesel's patients could do even better if among his recommendations was, specifically, a healthy dose of strength training. Not only would they gain muscle mass, lose fat, and feel better about themselves, they would avoid the joint damage, pain, and muscle loss that can occur when heavy, sedentary people suddenly try to do a lot of traditional, weight-bearing cardiovascular exercise like running, which in this particular context could do more harm than good. Added to an exercise routine like that, a smart diet can only help: fat loss will increase, and muscles will have the nutritional support they need to continue to strengthen and grow.

It's not easy, of course. Having worked with obese clients in the past, I'm aware that every step can feel like a struggle. But if Mann's study blessedly helps put the final nail in the coffin of "eat less," perhaps Spiesel's work will help usher in a new era of "lift more."

For a Lou-Schuleristic take on the Spiesel piece, click here.

Exhortation to Exploration

There was a recent article on that 'We-Don't-Allow-No-Sissies' strength-training site, T-nation, about fragmentation within the strength-training community. T.C. Luoma argues that powerlifters and bodybuilders don't get along; figure models and female bodybuilders give each other the cold shoulder; mixed martial artists and practitioners of CrossFit stare angrily at one another from across the protein-shake bar. And no one serious about lifting weights wants to have much to do with those beanpole endurance athletes like runners or triathletes -- what are THEY trying to prove, anyway?

Now, you might not know who all these hypertrophied characters are -- suffice it to say that they're all variations on mesomorph types you wouldn't want to trifle with. I agree with Louma's point about the cliquey behavior of the different groups -- while at the same time still believing that, as Lou Schuler has suggested, there are more similarities than differences among their training methods. The serious rift, as I see it, is not how much resentment the average Powerlifter Pete has for the average Bodybuilding Bob, but rather their mutual disdain -- indeed, xenophobia -- for Pilates Priscilla, and other practitioners of different movement methodologies altogether.

And that's a shame, because looking outside the box -- and I mean WAY outside -- can cast fascinating new light on our usual, day-to-day practice, whether that involves lifting enormous amounts of weight, hitting a golf ball, spear fishing, or playing lawn darts. I'm not just talking about switching to a 4-iron or doing three sets of eight instead of two sets of fifteen. I'm talking about putting down the clubs and dumbells altogether and spending some time sitting at the feet of someone whose perspective you've never even considered.

Quick example: years ago I saw a video on something called the Alexander Technique, a movement system founded by an actor named F.M. Alexander who had a chronic problem with losing his voice on stage. Observing his own behavior carefully, he found that his neck and shoulders became tense whenever he made an entrance, constricting his breath and tightening his vocal cords when he spoke, and thus causing his frequent bouts of laryngitis.

To alleviate the problem, he developed a system of physical actions, reinforced by simple, internal verbal cues that counteracted his natural tendency towards tension. As a result of these cues, and the physical awareness they helped him develop, not only did his voice remain strong, but he found that he was far more energetic and spontaneous on stage, and far less exhausted afterwards. Codifying the technique, Alexander began teaching other performers, and they, too, began to move more freely and easily. Virtually all his students reported that any chronic pain they had been experiencing had disappeared, and that their physical endeavors now seemed smooth and natural.

All well and good, you say: Alexander's work may have relevance for performers who need to project an air of effortless relaxation on stage; but what about people who have to to produce real physical force, such as athletes and powerlifters? Does it help them?

The answer appears to be yes: perhaps the most striking aspect of the video was the footage of one of Alexander's disciples working with a karate practitioner who seemed tense and clumsy while performing his fighting moves. After the instructor made some simple adjustments to the man's neck, head and shoulders, his moves were not only flowing and energized, but clearly more powerful and effective as well. Though seemingly soft and internal in its approach, Alexander's methods also work well for practitioners of harder arts as well.

Apparently, the solution to getting stronger or faster, and perhaps leaner and more muscular, may not always lie in pushing harder and faster, but also in learning to work on a deeper, subtler level, to broaden one's awareness from simple, gross muscle movements to an almost dancer-like awareness of the entire body in motion.

The Alexander Technique is really just one of dozens of movement methods that are out there to be studied and learned from. For years I thought that a standard standing toe-touch was an effective hamstring stretch -- until I went to my first yoga class and discovered that I'd really just been reinforcing bad posture by over-flexing my spine. Leading back expert Stuart McGill has recently shown that people with back pain usually have stronger back muscles than people who are pain-free, thus debunking the common belief that strengthening the back will help alleviate pain. His solution? A series of fine-motor control movements that help his clients develop greater sensitivity, firing the correct muscles in the correct sequence for pain-free movement. Among his recommendations is advice on how to activate your tongue muscles for improved alignment!

Discussing tongue placement is not something that occurs to many strength and conditioning coaches (and no one, and I mean no one, has a mustache like McGill's).

In the ten-year period during which I practiced the martial arts, I must have studied with a dozen different teachers, all masters of one art or another. Occasionally I'd hear one of them enthusiastically recommend something that another teacher had vehemently rejected: a hand or foot placement during a block or a strike, perhaps, a particular style of footwork, maybe something about the optimal distance between you and an attacker. I liked hearing about the differing points of view because it reinforced my sense that the body's expressiveness was virtually limitless, that a given technique could be both foolish and brilliant, indispensable and execrable, depending on the context, point of view, and particular inclination of a given practitioner in a given moment.

The take-home lesson for muscleheads -- and as a 20-year veteran of strength training I'll happily include myself in that group -- is that we need to come out of our crustaceous, hypertrophied shells a bit and realize that in order to grow more, get stronger, and function ever more effectively, we'd do well to occasionally investigate entirely different schools of thought than the ones we're used to. I'd say that same to anyone who practices yoga and avoids strength training lest they "tighten up" or a t'ai chi master who refuses to experiment with kung fu lest it interfere with their perfectly balanced chi.

Even the smallest towns have master movement teachers out there, quietly passing on their lifetime of knowledge to anyone with an couple of free evenings a week. Seek them out. Let them open your mind a bit. Get out of your comfort zone. You'll probably get a lot out of the class, be smarter for it, and find a new perspective on your game of choice as well.

And they'll probably learn a lot from you, too.

(Last minute edit: Just read a new piece by T.C. Luoma in T-Nation that mentions tongue positioning during ab exercises! Oh, sweet irony!)