Are You Pressing Your Luck in the Weight Room?

Two pieces of fitness advice happened to cross my radar over the last couple of days.

The first one was in Outside magazine. Thanks to the efforts of an impressively persistent door-to-door salesman, I believe I hold the longest subscription to a single periodical in human history. Should global warming sink, roast, or suffocate us all, I'm told an enterprising band of cockroaches will continue to deliver Outside to any single-celled organism that carries even a trace of my DNA.

That's okay, though, because I like the magazine. I drool over the cool outdoor gear even if I have no idea how to apply it; I carefully memorize the tips on surviving in the wilderness with a comb, a stapler, and some needle-nosed pliers, because, you know, anything could happen. One moment you're living in air-conditioned comfort in the suburbs of LA, the next moment? Boom, you're dropped from a helicopter into piranha-infested waters without so much as a clean pair of longjohns.

The advice in question came up in a piece called "Your Heart," which is part of their "Owner's Manual" series about taking care of various injury-and-disease-prone parts of your body. One of their suggestions on cardiac care was "Lift Less." The authors argue that strength training can be detrimental to cardiac health, citing cardiologist Dr. Abraham Friedman, who says that "Isometric exercises don't do much to help your heart... In fact, they can be potentially harmful if that's all you do, since it can thicken the heart muscle." The conclusion is that people should lift moderately, with lighter weights -- no more than half of body weight -- to avoid causing spikes in blood pressure.

In other words: lifting is bad for your heart.

The second fitness tip was in Forbes, under the headline "Weight Training Benefits Elderly, Too." According to the article,

"Pumping a little iron can help elderly nursing home residents and heart failure patients gain strength for everyday life, the American Heart Association says... The heart association statement cited one study of a 10-week period of resistance training among nursing home residents with an average age of 87 that resulted in improvements in strength and stair-climbing power. In a study of older women who were heart failure patients, 10 weeks of resistance training resulted in a 43 percent increase in muscle strength and a 49 percent increase in the distance covered in a six-minute walk.

The statement also notes that elderly people and women who suffer from coronary heart disease...can benefit from...resistance training...Dr. Art Labovitz, cardiology director at St. Louis University School of Medicine, said that despite increasing knowledge about the benefits of resistance training, the public perception is likely that it's largely off-limits for heart patients.

In other words, lifting is good for your heart.

Forbes or Outside? Dr. Abraham Friedman or Dr. Art Labovitz? Prudence or perseverance?

Hedging my bets, I'd say the answer is, in a way, both...ish. How's that for a definitive answer? Just call me Randy Jackson.

Let me explain: two impulses pull fitness trainers in diametrically-opposing directions. On one hand, like our brethren in medicine, we seek to "do no harm" to clients, so we're on the lookout for any movement that might injure them, evidence of poor dietary or sleep habits, any sign of fatigue or over-training. On the other hand, in order to get results, we DO have to shove them -- sometimes kick them rather forcibly, out of their comfort zone. Some very beneficial forms of exercise involve an element of discomfort. A hard workout will cause soreness for up to a week afterwards. Exercise is itself a form of stress, and microtrauma to working muscles is an essential part of the exercise-recovery equation. So a trainer is always caught between the need to take care of clients--to help them recover from injury and feel good--and the need to push them to exercise with sufficient intensity to create a beneficial training effect.

The best trainers have an uncanny ability to sense what their clients need on a given day. They may come to the gym, clipboard in hand, ready to grind a client to a fine powder with their superset of step-ups and Bulgarian split squats, only to see the person waddling in, lower back torqued up to beat the band. Those trainers will scrap the program they had planned and improvise a workout based around flexibility and relaxation. Equally, if a client is feeling full of energy on a planned recovery day, those same trainers might throw the client under the squat rack till he begs for mercy.

This is one of the subtler skills of being a trainer and can spell the difference between having a client list that's always full of energy and making progress and one that's always falling down tired, injured and sick. One-on-one, at least the trainer has has a fighting chance of matching each workout to the needs of each client.

But what if that same trainer had to write a fitness program for literally everyone? What if he were charged with creating a workout across the board for every single man, woman, and child, in the world? Impossible, you'd say, and you'd be right. But in a sense, that's what groups like the American Heart Association, and, to a lesser extent, popular fitness magazines, are trying to do.

So, given that admittedly impossible task, the writer-trainer might choose to be as prudent as possible: he might take the approach that it's better for a large number of people not to progress than for one person to get hurt, and so his guidelines might be very gentle and rehabilitative. Equally, knowing that few people push themselves hard enough when they exercise, he might choose to make his recommendations exceptionally challenging, ensuring good results for people already in decent shape, while at the same time alienating, and possibly injuring, a portion of his audience.

In a way, that's the primary difference between the Outside and the Forbes prescriptions: the one takes the careful path, the other a more encouraging one.

As you can probably guess, I'm inclined to favor the advice given by the American Heart Association. For one very obvious reason, it's made by a whole group of experts rather than the single doctor cited in the other article. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that Outside simply took an old-school tack and had the bad luck of releasing their article just as the AHA released their newer, less stringent set of recommendations about strength training as it pertains to heart health.

Part of my reasoning, of course, is biased by experience: I'm a lifelong lifter and so any news that supports my zealotry is, in a way, all right by me. But even objectively, the supporting evidence cited in the Outside blurb is fairly vague and somewhat misleading. Dr. Friedman talks about the dangers of isometric muscle contraction, which only represents a small fraction of what most weight trainers do at the gym. Ironically, there is far more isometric muscle contraction in the average yoga session -- a form of exercise typically associated with improving heart health and lowering blood pressure -- than there is in the average strength training workout, where muscle contraction is primarily concentric and eccentric.

I understand that weight training can enlarge the heart muscle, as can many other forms of exercise, and that people who die of heart disease often have enlarged hearts as well. But I'd be interested in seeing evidence that exercise-induced hypertrophy of the heart itself causes health problems, or whether in fact an enlarged heart is simply a coincidental similarity between people on opposite ends of the heart-health bell curve.

Finally, Dr. Friedman, who, it must be noted, is himself a distance runner, says that strength training can be a problem "if that's all you do." Yet for many people, strength training is ALL they can do. Aerobic exercise is, to my mind, a much more difficult entry-level fitness activity than strength training, where the level of resistance and intensity can be controlled much more precisely. I'm not yet among the elderly, but I had nasty childhood asthma that prevented me from running, but after a few years of strength training, running became easier, then actually pleasurable, and now, finally, an activity in which I compete with some (modest) success. I suspect that the same would hold true -- on a reduced scale, of course -- for older exercisers: the local muscular strength built through resistance exercise would enable them to walk further, climb stairs more easily, and generally move with more ease and freedom.

So when it comes down to it, I suppose I'm not being as Randy-Jacksony as I thought. Unless you've got a compelling reason to think you're the exception, I'd say it appears that lifting can be of great benefit to your quality of life, your mobility, and your ticker. Dawg.

Cyborgs Spotted at Glendale Y

I've been back in the gym and off swimming, biking, and running for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say it feels good, not only to get out of the globally-warmed temperatures of Southern California, but to bend cold, hard iron to my will, get a massive pump on, and feel like a huge, macho stud -- that is, until an actual huge, macho stud walks up and asks me to leave my maximum poundages on the bar so he can warm up with it. Sometimes going to the gym feels like a trip in Gulliver's footsteps: one moment you're towering over Lilliputians, the next, cowering at the feet of behemoths.

I work out at a YMCA, which I heartily enjoy, largely because I encounter a huge range of people: some who have been working out for longer than I've been alive; others who have been alive since about the last time I worked out. Some of them look great, others not so great; some of them are working hard, others are going through motions as familiar to them as breathing and just about as challenging. But there's history there, and camaraderie, and some good, honest sweat.

Lately, however, I've been noticing that a new breed has arrived: cyborgs.

The first one I saw was a kid who spent his entire workout speaking loudly to no one in particular: as he exercised, between sets, as he stretched. At first I really thought he might be schizophrenic -- until I realized that he was wearing an earpiece and talking on the phone. During his workout -- if you can call it that -- I also saw him retrieve a text-message and watch what must have been a pretty funny video on his phone-device, because he was laughing to beat the band. The weights stared at him, inert, disapproving. The boy couldn't stand to be unwired, offline, or out of the loop, for long enough to pound out his sorry program of a half-dozen sets of barbell curls and twenty minutes on the treadmill. I'm probably too young to grumble about "kids these days," but -- Jesus H. Macy, kids these days.

There's another cyborg that I've seen so often at the gym that I have a name for him: Elliptibot. Elliptibot's upright, mechanistic movements on the Elliptical trainer are what gave him his name, but his constant cell phone use confirms his cyborg status. His trainer -- or programmer, if you prefer -- waits patiently while Elliptibot receives his cell-phone orders from the mother ship, then reboots Elliptibot back into his workout. He only gets in about eight minutes of real exercise in the course of his hour appointment, but for a half-human, half-machine, that's actually not too bad.

When we first moved to Southern California I stumbled into the Bally's on El Centro, which turns out to be the Clockwork-Orange Central Programming Pod for gym cyborgs the world over. In the Initiation Room -- cleverly called "Cardio Theater" to entice recruits -- there are probably 200 pieces of cardio equipment lined up to face a bank of massive TV screens. Now I can't say for sure, but if I had a pair of special sunglasses like the ones Roddy Piper wore in "They Live," I bet those TV's are all broadcasting the same message: OBEY.

So it's great that these people are in the gym at all. Right there that puts them ahead of most of the population, who either don't work out and don't have gym memberships, or have them and don't go. Elliptibot may be doing his very best to squeeze in activity with his obviously stressful career, and this is all he can manage. And, admittedly, some people are way more likely to go to the gym if they can do so wired into their iPods so they can listen to the Beastie Boys, or with their cell phone handy so the babysitter can call them if little Suzy flushes her retainer down the toilet. So on one hand I should really cut the cyborgs some slack here.

Still, I think these people are doing themselves a pretty major disservice, and not just because the workouts they're getting in this spaced-out state are not challenging and not effective in getting them in better shape. I've recently started to think of a workout as a means not just of building muscle or burning fat, but also as a means of creating or reinforcing behaviors. Ideally, the behaviors you create are beneficial, and the body will positively adapt to them. Bench press a difficult weight, with good form, for instance, and your body becomes more adept at that behavior, and more willing and able to repeat it in the future.

But the body has no idea whether the information you are sending it is beneficial or detrimental. The dumb ol' nervous system just does what it's told by your smartypants brain, and so if you arch your back on that heavy bench press, or bounce the bar off your chest, or shorten your range of motion so you can have bragging rights to 274 pounds instead of just 270, well... you get "better" at doing that, too, meaning more willing and able to use bad form and endanger yourself in the future.

There's a scene "Starman" when alien Jeff Bridges learns to drive a car by simply by watching and imitating Karen Allen. When Allen nervously hands him the wheel, he drives beautifully until he comes to a yellow light, at which point he floors it and flys through the intersection. Panicked, Allen asks him why he was so reckless and Bridges replies that he was just doing what he had observed her do: "Green light means go. Red light means stop. Yellow light means 'drive really fast.'" You have to cut your body a break here, because it's just doing what it's told.

What am I driving at? Just this: the distraction devices that people use in the gym reinforce the "body-as-brain-transport-device" model. Most people spend the major part of every day using primarily their brains: at work, at a desk, parked in front of a computer; at home, in front of the TV. If we continue this disassociative process in our workouts, well, we reinforce that idea: my body may be thrashing around beneath me, but my head is elsewhere. My body is not really a part of me. After all, that call's coming in. I'm watching Montel on Cardio Theater. I'm literally talking on the phone right now, this moment, as I "work out."

I've spent lots of time studying Eastern arts of one kind or another, so forgive the woo-wooishness here, but I do think that the notion of focus, of full, body-and-mind engagement is one aspect of, say, martial arts or yoga training, that we miss in our chatty, blaring, stateside emporia of muscle. So wherever and however you work out, the challenge is to do so in a way that you remain engaged throughout the session and thereby strengthen, rather than undermine, the connection between the body and mind. If that means you've got to set a really high bar for yourself so that you have no choice but to focus, great. If that means taking an actual martial arts or yoga class, fantastic. Heck, if that means you have to actually put an iPod on to help keep Motormouth Mike from screwing up your rhythm, go for it. But if you see your workout as, in a sense, "programming" time for habits and behavior, the point is to try to program beneficial, useful code into your CPU rather than more nonsense that you'll have to go back and correct later. It really doesn't matter whether the movement is very basic and simple, like a warmup you might do every day, or very challenging, like going for a maximum-effort squat or a full-out 5K run: if you're present in the movement, trying to perfect it, make your form better, stretch more deeply, keep your body even more aligned, that movement will reinforce the mind-body link that our busy lives often seem bent on severing.

The good news is that cyborgs aren't the only clientele I see at the Y. My absolute favorite gym denizen is the frail-looking older guy who somehow performs feats of athleticism so unlikely that his movements appear computer-generated. These are guys who have practiced, worked hard, and stayed present with sport and exercise for so long that even as their bodies are starting to fail, they still have it where it counts. I don't play basketball, but I'll often catch a few minutes of a three-on-three game while I'm stretching beside the court to warm up. There's a guy who's probably around 70 who simply can't miss a three-pointer. He can't walk or dribble, either, and that weakens him as a player. Still, it's pretty amazing to watch. He just stands there, well clear of the mayhem under the hoop, waiting for his man to get distracted or held up so someone can pass him the ball. When they do, he shoots. And makes it. Every time.

Then there's the other guy, paunchy, lank-limbed, and roughly the same age, who, every few days, hobbles up to the chin-up bar, grabs it...and does about 30. Then he hobbles away, not even breathing heavy.

I don't know what these guys are eating, or how I can get some, but I do know one thing: I've never seen any of them with a cell phone. Coincidence?

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!)