Easy On Your Knees

Since I'm hanging my hat in the Pacific Northwest at the moment, I thought I'd spend some time talking about knees.

Wha--?

I went for a long walk yesterday, trying to jam some of Shakespeare's words into my cranium in such a way that they'd stick. At the end of my walk I realized that I was experiencing some knee pain, which is one kind of pain I haven't experienced much of over the years. Oh sure, I've got a football injury from my freshman year in high school, when the wiry and sickeningly strong Mike Rich tackled me in such a way that my right foot was pinned to the ground whilst I tried desperately to escape by twisting my upper body like some upright, mangled worm, causing unfamiliar alarm bells to go off in my knee. Nothing popped--thank God for supple teenage connective tissue--but every now and I'll be hiking or walking down a steep hill and my knee will give me occasion to think of my good friend Mike Rich.

But, generally, my knees have been pretty healthy, thank goodness, so when I mentioned my knee pain to a local friend, she said, "Oh yeah--that just happens up here. It's the moisture."

I'm glad it's not my cartilage.

So, what's the deal with knee pain?

Shamelessly stealing Mike Boyle's formula,(which he admits to shamelessly stealing from Gray Cook), I've had some good luck recently with addressing clients' knee problems by working on the ankle and the hip joints. That's sort of counterintuitive, but it makes sense: the knee is a pretty simple joint, after all. It just bends in one direction. The ankle and the hip joints are, by comparison, much more complex. There's more room for error and a far greater likelihood of faulty movement patterns that will gradually wear on the knees. Far more effective to address those problems than simply to do endless sets of leg extensions and curls, which may help stabilize the knee but don't address the actual cause of the problem, which is, generally speaking, is those poor movement habits.

In the Boyle formulation, the knee is a joint that needs stability. The last thing you want is a "flexible" knee joint--which is why you don't see anyone in their right mind doing "knee hyperextensions" in the gym (unless they're in the MMA studio, in which case the hyperextendee probably isn't too happy about it). The joints above and below the knee need optimal mobility, so you DO see people stretching their hips and ankles. The butterfly stretch, the runner's stretch, and the calf stretch are all familiar to people with even the most rudimentary gym experience.

If your hip and ankles are supple and responsive, your knees will be much more likely to stay healthy. If they're not, you're pretty much guaranteed to hurt yourself at some point.

For the ankles, make sure you're keeping your calves not just strong, but also loose and flexible as well. Stretch both the upper and lower calves by performing ankle stretches both with the knee joints locked and slightly bent. Circling the ankles and performing standing hip circles to ensure optimal mobility in all directions is also helpful.

For the hips, one of the best moves is the kneeling hip flexor stretch, which I've mentioned in previous posts. Not only will that move help inhibit the frequently-overactive hip flexors, it will also help facilitate glute activation, and inactive glutes are also an indirect cause of knee pain. If your butt muscles aren't a-firing, your knees will suffer for it. Any lying bridge exercise will help activate those muscles too, as will as side leg raises, and, one of my new personal favorites, elastic band side shuffle.

1) Grab the handles of a resistance band. Stand on the center of the band with both feet, keeping about eight inches between your feet. Hold the handles at the sides of your waist at belt level.
2) Walk laterally to your right, stretching the band as far as possible with each step. Continue for 10-15 steps. Repeat movement moving to your left.

Squatting form is also key to knee health. Many people squat by trying to keep the torso upright and driving the knees forward. Instead, always think of sitting into a chair: the movement starts at the hips.

Finally lengthening the adductors--or inner thigh muscles--can also be helpful. The traditional butterfly stretch is a great one for this, but you can get creative with all kinds of weird yoga stretches as well.

Summing up, ankle mobility, flexibility and mobility in the hip flexors and adductors, good squatting form, and glute activation can go a long way towards keeping your knees healthy.

Failing that, stay out of the Northwest during the rainy season.

A Ph.D Asks ME a Question

A few weeks ago I mentioned an old buddy and lifting partner of mine in this blog. As Internet karma would have it, he wrote me shortly after that and we started up some online fitness gabbing. Now Deano's no fitness aficionado like me, just a lowly, barely-literate Ph.D in biology, so, predictably, he had a few questions for me. I thought I'd post a piece of our back-and-forth here.

A track-and-fielder in school, Deano's currently trying to break the 5-minute mile barrier, his own personal Everest. (In a previous email to Deano I mentioned Chad Waterbury, the iconoclastic strength coach I mention here, and that's the "Chad" he's referring to):

It seems like Chad favors exercises that use multiple muscle groups simultaneously to build strength and mass in any given group. You and I used to talk about isolating muscle groups to really hit them. His approach does make a lot of sense to me when the goal is to perform a task efficiently: My training for the mile is largely about learning to run a 5 minute mile pace without putting any needless stress on any one part of the body. But I'm surprised that his approach works better if the goal is to bulk up a particular muscle group. In other words, I'm saying that his philosophy sounds like what I do, not what I thought a weight lifter does.

The idea of isolating a single muscle group -- which is not physiologically possible -- comes from bodybuilding. Most people seeking to add the maximum amount of muscle to their frames perform lots of single-joint exercises like curls, calf raises, leg extensions and the like, in addition to old-school compound moves like squats and presses. Some coaches and online lifting junkies may dispute me on this, but, based on what I know of the training protocols of most serious bodybuilders, and from my own personal experience, performing some single-joint training is crucial if getting maximally buff is your number one training goal.

Much of the thinking about muscle isolation comes out of the Weider school, where every common-sensical lifting axiom has "Weider" stuck in front of it, as in "The Weider 'Gravity Exists' Principle," or "The Weider 'Oceans are Wet' Theory." Weider's books and magazines were certainly my main source of lifting advice back when you and I were pumping iron back in Hanover, so that's why I trained that way: I didn't know any different!

Weider has been taking a lot of heat lately, but lots of guys get effectively huge using those methods (with perhaps some help from a needle or two) and as I said, the majority of people who are big for a living seem to continue to use them. However, Waterbury and many of the other pioneers these days, like Alwyn Cosgrove and Mike Boyle, come at things from a slightly more functional/athletic standpoint (though Boyle's blood might boil if he read 'functional' next to his name!). They are less interested in muscle for muscle's sake than in health, strength, and athletic performance with improved appearance as a desirable side effect.

But there are subtle differences even among the approaches of this new wave as well. Waterbury's background is in weightlifting (more concerned with strength than appearance); Cosgrove is a fat-loss expert (mostly concerned with body composition); and Boyle is an athletic coach (mostly concerned with keeping pro athletes healthy and strong). So all these heavy hitters have their own angle, and none of them are focused as exclusively with turning you into Quadzilla as Weider was -- or as you and I were back in the throes of our 1980's teenage machismo.

Again, the faithful will claim that the system devised by their respective figureheads works best for everything: strength, muscle mass, body composition, power, sports performance, looking good naked. But I don't find that to be true. I've never been as big as I was in college, when I was using a Weider-esque body part split, but I got very lean using Cosgrove's methods and felt quick and athletic on Boyle's programs. I'm only a few weeks into using Waterbury's methods, but I can already feel myself getting stronger on key lifts.

Obviously there's some convergence among all these methods: Boyle's athletes still look great; Waterbury's charges still get lean; Weider devotees still get strong. It's more of a question of emphasis than developing one quality to the exclusion of all others. But if a band of evil robots came to Earth and threatened to devour anyone with over 10% bodyfat, I'd put Cosgrove in charge of the worldwide fat-loss blitz. If the same robots said they had a hankerin' for any puny earthlings who couldn't bench press twice their bodyweight, I'd elect Waterbury to Benching Czar. And if the robots gave us a sporting chance and said they'd let us go if we could best them at a human-on-robot game of flag football, I'd nominate Mike Boyle to head up the strength-and-conditioning department of Earth's Beat The Robots team.

The other guys would be deputies, no question. But even specialists have specialties.

As pretty much every great coach has acknowledged, it's easy to get caught up in the small variations that make up 15% of the experts' programs, such as whether an isolation move or two is worth the time in the gym. Far more productive is to focus on the 85% that they DO agree on and make sure you're getting plenty of that. What this all goes to show is that, unsurprisingly, there is no single best way to train for every individual for every goal. And frankly I like it that way: without a little variation, without even -- dare I say -- a little good-natured frisson among the experts and their acolytes, I'd probably have to pack up my blog and go home.

Frankenstein No More!

I have to admit that I'm pretty abnormal in that a new workout program or idea gets me really excited, especially when it's one that I can incorporate into my own regimen. I certainly like hearing about the latest trends in resistance training for seniors, but it's nothing like when I read an article by a coach I respect who says, "Descending sets have magical properties!" or "Seven sets of four reps will give you the ability to turn invisible!" Heck, I even get excited when some coach I haven't heard of, or actively despise for the dishonor he's visited upon my family, says something weird and off-the-wall about exercise that I think just might work. I can barely wait to get to the gym and put it to work (Disclaimer: the invisible thing doesn't work; I only became slightly translucent).

The one exception has been a training method that's been getting a lot of play during the last few years. It's called total body training, which, as the name suggests, is a method whereby you work all major muscle groups in the course of a single workout session.

This method will strike few people as novel: it's been around since the fifties, and I've used it on clients since I first started training professionally. But the alternative, a "split" system, has always seemed cooler, more advanced, more intense. Total body training seems almost quaint by comparison, partly because it's so simple: go in the gym, work out all your muscles, go home, rest and eat, come back a couple of days later and repeat. In a split system, you divide the body into parts, working some parts one day, some parts another day. An upper-lower split is common; so is what's called a push-pull split, but the possibilities are endless, including what I like to call the "Frankenstein" split, wherein your body is divided into so many sections that you only get around to training the entire thing about once every ten days or so.

The complexity of the split system is what makes it perfect for obsessive exercisers like me: you can fret about the acute variables till you're blue in the face. When I'm planning a new routine for myself, Heidi will often find little scraps of paper strewn about the house with little workout charts and calendars on them, filled in and scratched out as I search obsessively for the better mousetrap of strength-training routines.

But there's really no obsessing with total body training. It's about as straightforward as it gets.

It just seems too easy, I'd think. I'm too advanced for this first-day-of-school stuff. Just six exercises? Just three or four sets each? JUST THREE DAYS A WEEK? What would I do with myself for the other half hour of my daily gym time?

Good old fashioned hubris, folks.

After all the hectoring, all the chat-room talk from the gym rats who have suddenly seen the light, all the disapproving grandmothers at the Y telling me, "You don't need so many sets for your traps, there, son," I decided to give total-body-training a try for, really, the first time since I began working out in the 80s. No more twelve sets for chest, eight for biceps, fifteen for legs. I was going to go by the book, whittling it down to absolute basics.

I decided not to follow any specific coach's system, but basically the workout I devised is a hybrid of the systems of a bunch of guys who are way smarter than I am about this kind of thing, notably Alwyn Cosgrove, Mike Boyle, and Chad Waterbury.I call it my Boylegrovebury routine. I called it the Waterboy-grove routine for awhile but was getting funny looks.

You know where I'm headed here: it works great. It's tough, it's more intense than most split systems I've done, and maybe most useful of all, it's fast. The workouts take about forty minutes, giving me plenty of time to do all those other things in the gym that usually get the short shrift, like dynamic warmups, post-workout stretching and the like. I leave the gym feeling great. Surprisingly, I'm handling weights as heavy as I ever have; recovering well, gaining size in some places, losing it in others as appropriate. It's not just the maintenance routine I expected it would be: I'm making progress, and I'm getting sore.

I wonder if, in a way, all those years of "advanced" training primed the pump for me to return to a lower-volume system. Thanks to all those "chest days" and "leg days," and doing isolation moves till the cows came home, I finally know something about the way my body's put together. I can squat and deadlift with good form, something that I believe took me about ten years to learn to do well. So three working sets is now three real working sets, not two sets of flailing and one set of work. I wonder if it's even possible that that advanced strength trainers in general need LESS volume than intermediates for this very reason.

Presses, chinups, rows, squats, lunges, deadlifts and other basics seem like moves you master with a couple weeks of training. So does the total body training model. The obvious next step seems to be to look for something else, something new, something more advanced. But these moves are really the pliés and straight punches of iron pumping, the things you learn on your first day but will never stop perfecting. When I watch a great athlete in action, it's not so much his ability to call on a thousand obscure techniques and fancy moves that impresses me, nor is that what makes him a good player. It's his mastery of the basics: Tiger's drive, Albert Pujols' swing. Heifetz probably could have made an audience cry playing a G major scale.

Sure, there's a place for advanced techniques in training, but since returning to the oldest of old-school training methods, I'm reminded again that they'll never beat the basics.

PS: I'm going to be offline for a few days -- off to the San Juans for a reunion of my massive Irish-Catholic family till next Monday. In the meantime, check out the various new links to the right of this text! "Greatest Hits of DF," and the video link -- which will be up as a blog entry shortly -- are both free and make great stocking-stuffers!

Call the Functional Training Abuse Hotline!

Tell me if you haven't seen this at your local gym: a trainer who has every client perform every set of every exercise standing on some kind of unstable surface, one eye closed, perhaps juggling two balls in one hand and spinning three plates in the other. It doesn't matter whether the client is an overweight, middle-aged woman or a skinny fifteen-year-old boy, the guy looks like he's prepping his client pool to become an acrobatic troupe busking for handouts on the Santa Monica pier.

Ask any of these trainers what they’re doing and they'll tell you, with barely-disguised scorn for your tacky "dumbbells" and antiquated methods, "Oh, this is something called 'Functional Training.'"

The very name is polarizing, isn’t it? Like the terms "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice," the name implies that anyone who takes issue with your position must in turn be "pro" something abhorrent. Call your methods "functional" and you suggest that what everyone else is doing has nothing to do with the way the body functions. Which is, of course, absurd -- the body functions in a lot of different ways. "Functional" training emphasizes a handful of them, just as martial arts or racquetball or, for that matter, lying on the beach emphasize a handful of others.

Now, before I continue my hostile, one-sided rant, let me say that not all practitioners of functional training are as out to lunch as the hypothetical bonehead described above. Scroll down a few entries in this very blog and you’ll see my enthusiastic report on the Perform Better seminar, which was run by folks who call themselves functional training practitioners with well-deserved pride. But coaches like Mike Boyle, Gray Cook, and Eric Cressey analyze the physical functioning of their clients with expert scrutiny and base their exercise prescriptions on the specific needs of each athlete; they don’t just throw everyone on a Swiss ball and hope for the best.

Quick quiz: what more closely resembles something you actually do on a daily basis? Raising and lowering your body weight while standing with two feet on the floor -- i.e., squatting -- or lying supine on an inflated rubber ball, alternately pressing two medicine balls while keeping just one foot on the floor? Certainly, the first movement looks a lot more like something we do all the time: getting up out of a chair or a car seat, getting something out of a low cabinet, bending to pick up a child or a bag of groceries, heck, sitting your rump down on the toilet for a few contemplative minutes a day. By all rights the squat should be considered far more "functional" than the seated Swiss ball single-leg alternate medicine ball press, yet it's that second, patently absurd movement that would make the average gym-goer say "Now THAT'S functional training."

As if in order for a movement to have functional value it has to look like something you'd learn at clown college.

Look, I totally get stability balls, though I use them mostly for stretching and ab work. I get single-leg movements, though usually I use these moves in conjunction with conventional squats and deadlifts. My personal training certification forced me to learn so many stability moves that it makes me unstable just thinking about it. If I followed their system to the letter every client would practically have to walk a tightrope blindfolded before they could be trusted with anything so dangerous as a three-pound dumbbell. But why in the Sam Hill is the world of fitness so extreme that whenever an idea or a system either proves popular or has some actual merit or effectiveness -- as functional training admittedly does -- we get dogmatic and say, "Well, everything else must be pointless. Everything we’ve done up to this point is totally and completely wrong. We have to do everything standing on one foot, and once we can do that easily, we have to do it standing on a Bosu ball, then on a Swiss ball, and then on a Swiss ball on a Bosu ball on one foot."

Because for some reason that's functional.

I think what a fair number of otherwise smart people lose sight of while working from the "functional" angle is the fundamental question of WHICH function? In my snarky example above, what function is realistically being trained aside from the ability to perform that particular arcane exercise? For the person performing it, what carry-over will that movement realistically have outside the gym?

The sound idea behind functional training that's somehow gotten lost amongst Swiss balls and balance boards is that we should train movements that are as close as possible to movements that we encounter in everyday life. So adding a twist to an overhead press isn’t a bad idea, because I could picture, without too much effort, having to put an item on a high closet shelf and having to add a twist to get it in there just right. But I have to tie my mind in knots to figure out a life situation analogous to performing barbell curls while standing on a Bosu ball: bilateral butter-churning in an earthquake? Milking two inverted cows while standing on the fence between their pastures?

I sense some functional devotees poisoning their pens already, and I can hear it coming: instability challenges the nervous system, there's more proprioception (sensory feedback) to deal with, it's more challenging and more fun.

Well, regular old hardcore weight training challenges the nervous system as well. Smartypants strength coach Chad Waterbury is doing his best to educate the less gifted among us about that. More fun? Perhaps, for some people, but I'd postulate that the little bit of amusement that some people might get from imitating Cirque du Soleil performers comes at the expense of a lot of fat loss and muscle gain. Some resistance moves with an instability element added are indeed challenging, but the challenge is PRIMARILY going to be neural, not muscular. That is, the hardest part of doing the exercise will be keeping your balance, not lifting the weight, which means you're training yourself to be a better balancer, not a stronger person -- and not a significantly leaner person, either.

Now I'm all for balance work -- and for the fine-motor work that is another integral part of functional training as it's now defined -- but only if, and this is a big if, a person really needs them. My mother came down with a nasty case of the shingles a couple of years ago and had some trouble balancing for a while after that. A neurologist recommended she do some simple balance exercises -- which were essentially variations on some textbook functional training moves -- and they seem to have helped to clear things up. So functional training was valuable for her. Many older, deconditioned exercisers, people recovering from injuries, and those with severe muscular imbalances would be good candidates for this kind of work as well. But once good, healthy, pain-free, symmetrical movement patterns are established, and you no longer walk like Keith Richards coming home from Trader Vic's , it's time to put the Swiss balls away and get to work.

Andrew

PS: For anyone interested in receiving my monthly TIPS via email, shoot me a message here with "Add (your first and last name) to mailing list" in the subject line or go here and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. This is a free, convenient way of keeping up to date with me! Just be sure to continue checking back here every few days for regular blog updates, which I do NOT send out to subscribers -- they just sit here on this site, waiting patiently for you to sign on and read them. (Don't worry: I won't give your information out to anyone else!) Thanks for reading-- A

Fitness Conference Rundown

Just got back from Chicago, where I attended a three-day summit put on by PERFORM BETTER, which makes fitness products and puts on educational seminars like this one.

The main thought that ran through my mind throughout the conference was: wow, there are a lot of people in this field who are far smarter, better informed, and richer than I am, and let's face it, Freckles, many of them are about 10 years younger than I am.

These thoughts only occasionally threatened to drive me screaming from the room. In between bouts of hyperventilation and nausea, though, the weekend was pretty terrific.

A few specifics:
FRIDAY, 5/11

I attended a lecture by a guy named Thomas Plummer, who's a multiple gym-owner and zillionaire. He cursed like a sailor while sagely advising trainers to behave courteously. Early in his lecture he warned us that he'd piss us off, and I think he managed that. How could he not? Since he's management at the highest level and most of us are trainer-drones, it was like Donald Trump addressing a roomful of croupiers. Nevertheless, he's a funny guy, and certainly knows the industry. Some rather sobering information about the future of the industry, where we're headed, and who will survive. The upshot: I'm dead.

Next, I attended a workshop given by Ed Thomas called "The Subtle Side of Fitness." Ed's a courtly chap who carries himself like the lifetime martial arts/yoga/old-school fitness devotee that he is. Lots of interesting photos of old-time health clubs, overstuffed with gymnastic equipment, climbing ropes, ladders, balancing towers and the like. His point was that physical awareness and coordination, which used to be the cornerstone of the fitness "industry" (such as it was) should find its way back in. He's right, and those old gyms looked like a lot of fun. Reminded me of some photos I saw of a gym belonging to a guy named Mark Twight, who trained the actors for the movie 300. Twight's place is a converted barn with a bunch of heavy stuff to lift and things to climb and swing from. Give me that over Hammer Strength any day.

Thomas' presentation and photos also made me think of my late paternal grandmother (who was almost 102 when she died five years ago). Kathleen Walsh Heffernan was a P.E. teacher in the early 1900's, and probably worked in environments very like the ones in Ed's presentation: there were photos of young women climbing walls and ladders and hanging upside down in puffy skirts and what looked like ballet shoes, and Ed told us that this was where fitness was heading...again. Somewhere, my grandmother was beaming.

The final lecture on Friday was given by a guy named Bill Parisi on the art of networking. Parisi has a franchaise called "Parisi Speed Schools" that cater mostly to kids and adolescent aspiring athletes. It's a business model based on combatting childhood obesity--and on making Parisi lots of money, which it has done quite effectively. Parisi's one of those big, animated, passionate guys who could probably make millions selling sand in the desert. It doesn't matter if you know he's working Dale Carnegie's principles on you all day and all night: he's irresistible. One of his lessons was that you need to find a niche to market yourself in. After the presentation, I chatted with him a bit and told him I was getting into fitness writing. His immediate response: "THAT'S YOUR NICHE!!"

SATURDAY, 5/12
Got up early to work out at the Hyatt Regency's very civilized gym. Unsurprisingly, about a dozen very fit trainers were already there when I arrived at 6:30 AM, shunning the cumbersome machinery that cluttered up the place. Instead, they stood about performing difficult, full-body stuff that required enormous balance and coordination...not unlike the impassive, shockingly aligned exercisers in Ed Thomas' photos and prints. One female was cranking out more chinups than a Navy SEAL. The wave of the future indeed.

Felt pretty good about the workout I'd put in until about an hour and a half later, when, after a shower and breakfast, I sauntered into Juan Carlos Santana's "Combat Training For Fitness" class. Over the course of a forty-minute workout, he easily flattened the hundred or so trim, muscular training types who showed up. Santana has trained a host of Ultimate Fighter types, and relies primarily on continuous circuits using body weight squats, jumps, lunges, and a few primitive devices like elastic bands and kettlebells--another new-old school workout device--to get the job done. Suffice it to say that I wished I had neither eaten breakfast nor showered before that particular class.

Like Parisi, Santana's another magnetic guy who you could see leading a charge on a battlefield and getting everyone down to the residents of the local retirement community to follow him to certain death. I like to think I push myself pretty hard when I work out, but at Santana's urging I squeezed out more reps with more focus than I dreamed possible.

Amidst all the sweating, grunting and cries of "Oh God," Santana made an interesting point: that, from yogis sitting in lotus position for days on end, to monks who fast for weeks, to Native Americans who suspend themselves on hooks piercing the skin on their backs, the endurance of pain has long been seen as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. It's a good observation, and ties into something I've been ruminating about for a few weeks now: the crossover between the pursuit of fitness and a deeper, more intangible awareness that turns regular exercise into something approaching a spiritual practice. You don't want to get too "out there" with that line of thinking, but there is something to it. As I've noted before, the language of religion and the language of fitness have lots in common.

Next was Al Vermeil, former trainer for the Chicago Bulls, and I by that I mean THE Jackson-Jordan era Bulls, not the wayward, motley crew of the last few years. Vermeil's job was to keep seven-footers healthy in one of the winningest, most popular franchaises in professional sports. He was good--an older guy with absolutely nothing left to prove, just out there, spreading a little knowledge and wisdom like there's nothing he'd rather be doing. He approaches training from the physical therapy angle, meaning that I've got to race to keep up with all the transverse abdominis, quadratus laborum, and piriformis talk flying about the room.

One interesting point he made was that many back problems and postural issues are the result of poor motor control of the fine muscles around the spine. The general public is often told that "strengthening the abdominals" will rectify back problems, but Al's point was that before you train the larger, superficial muscles of the core, you have to re-teach the smaller muscles--whose names are hard to pronounce, much less spell--to work properly. If you crank out thousands of sit-ups and leg raises without the smaller muscles doing their thing, what you get is a condition known as "global dominance:" big muscles doing the work of small muscles, which is like trying to write by moving at the shoulder joint rather than the wrist and fingers.

Last of the morning lecturers was Mike Boyle, whose book FUNCTIONAL TRAINING FOR SPORTS I've praised to the heavens in this space before. Mike's another highly-accomplished pro-sports trainer who to me, manages to bridge the gap between brilliant, analytical guys like Vermeil and guys like me who just want the lowdown on techniques we can apply to our everyday clients. Boyle has a cohesive fitness philosophy that is based on thousands of in-the-trenches hours keeping highly-paid athletes on the playing field and out of the rehab clinic. He's got a few controversial ideas, such as an incurable distaste for weight-room warhorses like the back squat and the barbell deadlift, but it's hard to argue with a guy who's had this much success and whose methods smack of so much good old-fashioned horse sense. A few months ago I saw a photo of me from when I was training using exclusively Boyle's methods, and even though his training programs are designed for performance and not aesthetics, I actually was looking pretty good at the time; you might have even pegged me as a guy who exercised regularly. Further evidence that if you train for function, form tends to follow.

To my surprise, Mike's lecture even offered some empirical evidence for my "Grow it early and you'll never look squirrelly" theory that I wrote about a couple of weeks back. On one hand it's good to have my instincts validated; on the other hand, now I can't claim it as my personal, unproven pet theory. Bless/curse you, Mike Boyle.

The early afternoon was taken up with more bon mots from Santana and Boyle, and concluded with a lecture by a guy named Ryan Lee, another fitness-industry-marketing machine cut from the Parisi/Santana steamroller-of-a-personality cloth. Lee made it seem like making scads of money in the fitness industry is and should be ridiculously easy. He also made it clear that I should update my blog at least twice a week (Ulp...Well, here's once THIS week). Lee had some great ideas and did make me think that there was plenty more I could be doing to jack up my business, and not just on the training end. So get ready for Andrew Heffernan's SIX PACK BRAND VITAMINS!

SUNDAY, MAY 13th
Didn't get much sleep the previous night because I'd ventured out from the confines of the convention center the previous night to attend a production of TROILUS AND CRESSIDA at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Good show, but, immersed as I was in the world of training, my mind kept wandering to the methods I might use to improve the physiques, posture, and abdominal tone of the actors' physiques. Occupational hazard, I suppose.

Gray Cook was another sports rehab guy, an engaging speaker with a disarming down-home quality that, along with his running I'm-a-redneck joshing, disguises how brilliant he is. He's another physical-therapy guy whose approach I'd like to continue to learn more about. The primary thing I took away from his lecture was to address postural and functional problems before training for strength, or, For God's Sake, Knucklehead, Don't Let Your Clients Use Bad Form! A good lesson.

Alwyn Cosgrove was next, who I would rave about if I hadn't done so seventeen times in this blog space already. Suffice it to say he lives up to his hype, leads a brutal exercise session, and despite having only recently emerged from a barrage of successful chemotherapy treatments, still does a mean one-leg squat. Following the endurance sports models of Team In Training and Avon's Walk For Breast Cancer, Cosgrove has raised a nice chunk of change to fight cancer with his program LiftStrong--an 800 page book-on-CD filled with cutting edge fitness articles, information, and his own, very personal Cancer Diary. Cosgrove is definitely one of the good guys.

Finally, Eric Cressey is a preposterously accomplished guy who, at age 25, is not only a very successful powerlifter but one of the most highly respected trainers around. Just listening to his lecture and getting a sense of the depth and scope of his knowledge made me wonder what the hell I've been doing frittering away these last 36 years. Part of me wanted to jump up on the stage and strangle him in all his youthful, charming, and articulate glory, but one look at his arms and chest made me realize that even that was a futile fantasy. My only comfort is that someday, many, many years after I've fallen into decrepitude, dementia and death, Eric Cressey, too, will die. Sure, there will be streets in Boston named after him, an Eric Cressey annual parade, and hoards of future gold medallists tearfully crediting him with all their success, but he will be dead, and I must be thankful for that one, tiny blessing.

Overall, it was nice to be in an environment where fitness geekhood was the norm rather than a freakish abhorance, and to rub elbows with some of the top people in the field. Credit must be given to Chris Poirier, who was the conference coordinator and responsible for assembling this fitness dream team. The summit is coming to Long Beach and Providence, and it's well worth any trainer's time to check it out.