The Two Hardest Parts of Any Good Workout

Moderation is good. I'll never deny that. For a while, I felt a strong urge to moderate... MODERATION. Ever since I got my last adjustment at the Chiro (I'm still pissed about having to take the "look but don't touch" tour at Bodytribe!), things have been good. I'm healthy, feeling good and have been in the right frame of mind to push the pace, doing some nasty-tough work in my training. Everything's good and I don't have any interest in backing off at this point.

I learn a lot when I train. Aside from the task at hand, I notice things about myself as I'm training. As I've made things harder for myself, I'm reminded that there are two, key points in every, difficult workout. They're the two most difficult times in the whole experience.

GETTING STARTED
Sally made a great point in a tongue-n'-cheek look at what, in part, makes a strength addict: being nervous about the hard days. He says a lot of goofy things but Matt Furey was right about this: getting started is 50% of the workout. This isn't too hard to figure out why: it's the act of taking a body that's in a comfy, cushy, wussy mode and forcing it into a brutal, painful place... VOLUNTARILY! It's not natural for most humans to do that by choice. Beginners have trouble accepting this. More advanced trainees hesitate to do what they know has to be done. Still, out of habit and willpower, they do it anyway.

THE WALL
This point in the workout has a lot of names and I'm just deciding to use the marathoner's term for this experience. It's the point in any workout where you realize that you're getting tired and you may not be able to do much more. You probably feel like stopping. You know that this is bullshit, of course. Now, it's not enough to rely on what you've got in the tank. Now you've got to use your mind and push it. This is where the REAL work gets done. This is where progress is made. It might feel like you're going to die but KEEP FUCKING MOVING DAMMIT!!!! You won't, trust me. The body is capable of handling a lot of stress. Chances are good you're no exception. Stay focused and work through it.

I may be preaching to the congregation on this one and for hanging with me on that, I thank you. It's come to my attention recently that there are some newbies out there looking for advice and direction. I don't want to leave anyone behind and refreshers never hurt anyone.

Obstacles, Barriers, Goals... and Age

Obstacles. They're inherent in training, regardless of where they came from. We place them in our paths as a means of pushing ourselves to become better. Sure, most people call them goals. They're still something that gets in our way of our journey. The journey is about getting physically better. To get better, we have to become more than the obstacle.

There are other obstacles though. There are the unwelcomed and unexpected ones that pop up here and there. Work, travel, or injury are different than our goals because they slow down the process of making the journey. It's all just something else that has to be conquered. Still, there's one huge obstacle that we all have to deal with someday: aging.

Things on our body don't seem to work nearly as well as we start to get older. We're a collection of a several trillion cells that make copies of themselves over and over again. Just like a piece of paper on the xerox, the copies of the copies get duller, weaker, and lesser quality as you keep going. Old age is the lead-up to the ultimate barrier to all of our physical endeavors: death.

Even as I enjoy what is presumably my physical peak, I'm not deaf, dumb and blind to the fact that at some point, age will join the list of obstacles that impair my ability to reach goals. Lord knows I've heard from everyone I meet over the age of 40 that I just won't be able to do the things I do know when I'm their age. I get sick of it too. What I refuse to accept is the idea that age-related breakdown is a barrier.

ob·sta·cle \ˈäb-sti-kəl, -ˌsti-\: something that impedes progress or achievement

bar·ri·er\ˈber-ē-ər, ˈba-rē-\: something material that blocks or is intended to block passage

Do we have to stop the strength journey just because we get older and become a less-sharp copy of ourselves? Someone forgot to tell this 66 year old woman...


Yes, I fully realize that there is a lot that's wrong with this picture but there's even more that's right about it. Strange would be a gentle way to describe a grandmother in that kind of condition wearing a bikini and a wig. Amazing might be another. Grannies in bikinis should be something seen in a "Girls Gone Saggy" video. Instead, she decided to give old age the middle finger and not go down to degeneration without a fight.

The might be the key point to the journey: keeping the right outlook... a positive outlook. Assuming aging is a barrier to movement is the negative way to look at things. Treating it like an obstacle to overcome is a better outlook. Bob Delmonteque even goes so far as to declare that it's possible to get younger as you get older.
While I have questions about how long that can be maintained through natural means, I don't doubt that it's possible to do such a thing to some degree. Take Sally's recent blog entry regarding aging and muscle for example. In it, she said...

I’m 35 years old and I’m stronger, slimmer, with less body fat and more muscle than 10 years ago. In other words, I’ve been able to reverse that trend by taking action.

I’ve not done it through ‘cardio’ or by starving myself. I’ve done it through regular weight training and a good diet.

This is not about how great I am or what sacrifices I made. I’m not a professional athlete or bodybuilder, just a regular person who has committed to being in good shape for as long as possible.

I don't know how long I can keep up what I'm doing. I don't really care. I'm going to keep at it and simply work around my limitations, hopeful to exceed them or just happy that I can keep going despite them. Either way, I'll keep moving. Hopefully, I can surprise myself and others with how well I can do it.

What exercises could we NOT live without?

Okay, 3,000 miles of driving, one hyper-extended thumb, and too many days of not making any money have come to an end and I can do some blogging...

If strength were an element, I'd think it would be safe to say that it would have to be carbon. I've said it in previous posts: strength is such a raw product, capable of being molded into so many different ways. Well, look at how many different variations that carbon can take on...



The allotropes (look it up... it might be a nice break from porn) of carbon are positively dizzying. It can form the hardest and softest materials. It can abrade as well as lubricate. Its found in solids, liquids and gasses alike. It's just like human strength. Think about the number of very different athletes that, for a brief period of time, have been considered the strongest people alive, for one reason or another, or that I can remember in my lifetime...




Isn't it kind of amusing to read or listen to people insisting that there are things (ie: certain exercises) that must be done to be the strongest? If strength can be refined in so many different directions, how can one set of exercises possibly satisfy so many differing takes on strength?

Or, are there really exercises that we all should be doing, regardless of what we're training for? Are there really exercises that have that much of a universal training effect of making you strong for, well, pretty much everything? In other words, I'm asking a variation of the old, "if you could only do ___ exercises, what would they be?"

First of all, I'd have to point out that most exercise species as we know them have so many variations that they've become their own genus. So, what we may be really asking is which physical culture taxonomic rank is the most valuable to all of our needs.

We'd have to take into consideration is how unique of a training benefit that it provides. Many joints are capable of quite a few action. So, trying to pin down one or two exercises that are so unique and universal in their benefits doesn't seem doable to me. The Pec-Major jumps to mind. There are a myriad of ways to stimulate this piece of meat and saying that only one exercise is too important to not do since it can move (and therefore be trained) in so many ways.

Contrast this to the legs. The movements of the legs are far more limited. So, are the number of exercises that they can do. Therefore, if I had to name my first genus of exercise that pretty much every strength training couldn't live without, I'd have to go with the squat.

Paul Anderson thought so and I see no reason to argue with someone coronated by many as the strongest man in recorded history. There are a lot of variations on this one, weighted and unweighted alike. Whichever you choose to kill the goals you aim at is your business. Taken as a whole, I don't think that there is a good enough substitute for the ol' fashioned "knee bend."

The second exercise not to be lived without has got to be the pull-up/chin-up. What do you have for pulling muscles in your upper body? What do you use for upper body climbing work? It doesn't really matter. The pull-up works it. Really. Hard. Really! Fucking! Good! Plus, it does it all in one movement.
Even the most basic pull-up and chin-up variations can be practiced by the majority of strength trainers for a long time before they get to the point that they need to search out harder variations. To top it off, a lot of them don't even require extra weight to increase the difficulty.
If memory serves me correctly, I think that my friend Ed Pierini threw up a routine on his now-retired blog about a routine consisting of just squat and pull-up work. I didn't follow it to the letter but I took the idea of the pull-up/squat combo to heart and I've used it several times in the past year. It's a fitting way to train with what I'd consider the two most valuable exercises that can be done.

What do you think? What are the exercises we couldn't live without?

Why I train... and why I'm not writing as much

The header on this blog reads that I post two new entries a week. I don't know if my regular readers have noticed but for the past month or so, I haven't met my self-imposed goal for blog entries. Longer-term readers probably also notice that around this time of year, my blog output starts to drop off. This is my really busy time at work. This year, it's exacerbated by a key employee walking out at pretty much the worst possible time: right now. So, my life just got more chaotic, my free time shaved down, and my overall stress level elevated.

We all have these kind of times in our lives and especially in our training goals. A lot of strength trainers build their training around sports. Even those who don't do sports model their training around those who do. After all, goals are inherent in sports. Routines get crafted, equipment is acquired, training environment is established and modified to suit the goals.

I put up two goals for myself this year. The first one was to climb a 3" thick rope. The second was to complete Andy Patterson's and Michael Rideout's Magic 200 challenge. I finished off that one but the rope climb has been elusive. Basically, my ability to train with rope hinges on availability of finding someplace where I can hang a rope at least 14' off the ground. Or, more specifically, do I have a forklift available to hang my rope? That hasn't been a given this year.

I like challenges as much as any of us, don't get me wrong. Thing is, I can't afford to revolve my training around a fixed goal. If I hinged my ability to train towards a goal as the whole reason why I train in the first place...well... I might not be doing much of anything in the way of regimented, intense movement.

Still, there's a goal that I always keep in mind and I train towards: I want to keep the aging process away for as long as possible. Okay, I haven't even gotten to 30 yet but I'm still keeping it in mind. Looking ahead, I don't want to be that person who has the long, painful decline into death. I don't subscribe to the notion that such a life is an impossibility. That's why I look up to people like Jack Lalanne so much.

Oh... good article...along the same lines as what I'm talking about!

The nice thing about this goal is that I can always train towards it and keep it in sight, no matter how little I have to train with or how much my training environment is altered.

In the meantime, I'll try to get some more stuff posted soon. If you'll excuse me, I've got to get ready to head west to Sacramento...

You, the Caveman

Much of modern humanity has done something that's presumably unique in Earth's history. There are enclaves on this planet that have managed to bend nature to their will rather than the other way around. If you're reading this, then chances are good that you don't have to worry about killing, catching, digging up, or gathering your food. Chances are also good that many, many generations of your family tree haven't had to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The notion of living off the land is merely fodder for dreary, post-apocalyptic movies as far as you're concerned.
There's just one problem: our bodies haven't adapted to this new reality of this environment nearly as fast as we've managed to shape it. While the thoughts and worries of day-to-day survival drifts farther out of our minds, our body still operates on that premise. Where that becomes problematic is our lack of realization of this and how it relates to how we take care of our bodies. That's why I don't think that articles about how cavemen function are hype. If we're going figure out how to live, we need to understand the "why's" of how our body works.

We may not eat like him, but we still function like him!

I've read several articles in the past year and a half about how our we get fat. I've forgotten most of what I read but I didn't miss the bigger picture: our bodies have a lot of different ways to get fat. There's easily a half-dozen hormones that could be released that trigger the growth of blubber. Maybe more. The take-away lesson: Every body loves fat and it does anything it can to get it! That's why arguing about low calorie vs. low carb dieting is pointless. High calorie diets will make you fat. So will high carb diets. Fat is the body's energy bank account when the food runs away or dies off for the season. Look around outside if the leaves are falling off the trees where you live: every animal's doing everything it can to get fat! We used to have to do that too. Our body hasn't gotten the memo. It's still trying to do everything it can to get fat.

This also dispels another, bullshit notion: being fat is genetic. Well, not exactly. It might be genetic, yes. Thing is: WE'RE ALL DESIGNED TO GET FAT!

We can't leave out movement either. Face it: too many of us don't move enough. I guess the modern world assumed that after working ourselves to death (which we don't do these days... NOT BY A LONGSHOT!) by our mid 40's for the first 10,000 years of our existence, life would be heaven... if. we. barely. moved. at. all. We move so little that we seemed to have forgotten how to move properly. So, when the sedentary decide that it's a damn-good time to start moving, they turn to... I can understand why most people turn to some kind of long-slow distance running as a means of re-igniting the desire to move. It's one of the few activities that you don't really need anything to do. You don't need a machine or gear (although "they" have convinced a lot of people that they do!) to do it. There's just one problem: that's not what we were built to do! We've got two basic types of muscle: fast twitch and slow twitch. Many of us know this, and we know what they're all about. In case you don't...

Fast Twitch=powerful, intense, contractions. last no longer than 60 seconds
Slow Twitch=much less intense and powerful contractions. lasts for a long time.

There is no such thing as a medium twitch muscle fiber. When we were troglydtes, we journeyed over massive swaths of land over a period of days or weeks or we moved with great intensity for very brief periods of time. We weren't designed to move kinda fast for sort-of long periods of time. The first Marathon runner died after he finished. So, if you're new (again) to moving remember this when you exercise: move in a strong, intense manner or move very, very slowly. Forget the in-between shit!

While you're strength training keep this in mind too: if you're trying to get as strong as possible, you're failing. No, really... you're probably not even using a fraction of your muscle power. That's what you don't hear about much when discussing different types of strength: absolute strength. We only contract our muscles with a fraction of it's full-force potential. The mind only releases this extra power when it senses a life-or-death need to do so. Releasing this kind of power usually injures tendons and ligaments. This explains the mom picking up the car stories... or The Mighty Atom. Or, as so wonderfully chronicled in the Discovery Channel in The Human Body: Pushing the Limits(<----THIS IS A HINT...BUY THIS!!! ),the story of the guy who pushed a 1,000 lbs rock off his chest to avoid being simultaneously crushed and thrown off a cliff...

Let's just play devil's advocate for a moment: what if you could? When the mind senses a need, it will force the body to do it's bidding. That guy who threw the boulder off his chest tore some muscles up and gave himself the mother lode of tendinitis doing so. Compared to dying, that's a fair trade-off. Is getting a too-big weight off the ground, with the same results, for the sake of pride a worthwhile trade-off?

We can verify a lot of conclusions about how our body works by examining why it would need to work that way. Even as we advance our technology and modify the relationship between ourselves and our environment, we need to keep in mind that our past is still alive and well within our bodies, regardless of whether or not these adaptations serve a purpose or not anymore. One thing that we haven't been able to bend to our will is our body's function and regardless of what many say, science doesn't hold any promise of changing that. We still have to adapt our behavior to our bodies.

The Death Walk

Is it called a duck walk or an elephant walk? Since I'm out here in the world, strength training usually not in a gym and almost always alone, I don't know what some people may have dubbed certain exercise moves. I figured someone must have grabbed onto the ends of a sandbag, picked it up, and walked with the bag at knee-level before I thought of it. I just had never heard of anyone doing it, or what they might call it. So, I figured that the elephant walk would be as good of a name as any. David Lemanczyk informed me that, in Strongman, it's referred to as the duck walk. He did agree with my thought that "elephant," sounded much more cool and tough tough than, "duck."

Dave's one of those guys you just don't want to believe when he shows up on a forum board. 6'3", 200-whatever pound guy who works out with a 170 lbs sandbag, can partially squat 1,000 lbs, and can do a one mile, 100 lbs sandbag carry in about 15 minutes? Yeah, WHATEVER... JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER, LYING, FUCKING GEEK 17 YEAR OLD WUSSY ON THE FORUMS! A closer review of his web site and his youtube page reveals...

Dave lemanczyk is a 6'3" 200-whatever-lbs guy who works out with a 170 lbs sand bag, can partially squat 1,000 lbs, and can carry a 100 lbs sandbag one mile in about 15 minutes. No keyboard-warrior here!

Anyway, Dave reported doing this on Rosstraining about a week ago and it really inspired me. As you've probably noticed, I've really gotten into working out with sandbags lately. I've done a lot of carry work with them but usually preceded by some sort of squat work, usually a Zercher squat to zercher carry. By the time I'm getting to walking with the sandbag, my upper back and arms are half-gone from holding the bag, cutting back on how far I can carry the sandbag. I usually only go 50-60 paces.

Dave put the idea in my head to do some sort of longer-distance carry work-only. If you haven't figured it out, I'm kind of opinionated and I'm a strong individualist who likes to do things my way. Besides, I couldn't decide HOW I wanted to do a long-distance sandbag, farmer's walk. There are a lot of ways to hold a sandbag. I have the problem with choosing ice cream flavors too. I decided to take the same route that I do with ice cream: all of them.

That's how I came up with this workout that decided to give an even-cooler appellation: the death walk. I do this workout on weekends when I'm killing time at work. The job site that I'm working on has a circular driveway that measures in at 210 paces, one time around. So, every time I went around, I did a different walk with the sandbag, alternating between the easier ones and the harder ones. This isn't too hard to determine: farmer's walks that place the weight over the spine, closer to the body, and don't use the arms and grip as much are easier. Here's the batting order:

Across the Shoulders
Overhead
left shoulder
Elephant Walk
Right shoulder
Zercher
Across the Shoulders
Bear Hug

Obviously, the three easier carries are pretty self-explanatory. In the event that I'm double-labeling some of these, I'll explain further...

Overhead
This is probably the hardest of the bunch. Carrying a bag overhead really does a number on probably every muscle originating or inserting into the scapula. What's less obvious is the the incredible need for wrist and forearms stability while doing this. Plus, you can't get this one over with fast. Walk too fast and that bag gets harder to hold steady! No, you have to suck up the pain on this one and walk more deliberately.

Elephant Walk
While the Overhead might be the hardest, the Elephant is the most annoying. Trying to hold that bag at, or slightly above, the knee fries the biceps and the grip. Letting it fall below the knee dramatically shortens the length of your stride. Either way, the constant slam of your legs into the bag makes the bag move a lot, making your core work over-time. Did I say it was annoying? Too gentle of a description...IT'S FLAT-OUT MISERABLE!

Zercher
I'm going to keep up the tradition of calling any exercise with this arm positioning the Zercher. That way, I'm pretty certain everyone will know what I'm talking about. Either way, this is a good one for the biceps and the Traps, UPPER, MID, AND LOWER!

Regardless of the way that the sandbag is carried, I find that I get the most out of any of them by trying my damnest to maintain proper posture as much as possible. This detail makes every sandbag walk, no matter how "easy"... hard work! No sagging shoulders, bent wrists, or slouching under the weight! It's also probably a good idea for your overall health. If posture can't be maintained, then a lightened sandbag might be in the order. In my not-humble, not-professional opinion, You should use a sandbag that's borderline-really-fucking-difficult to carry for two minutes.

This is the kind of conditioning work that I like doing the most. Carrying a heavy, awkward object has got to be the epitome of the often abused-misused term, "real world functional strength." I have to take my hat of to Dave-L for giving me the kick in the ass to realize that carry work with the sandbag can be an awesome workout, all on it's own.

The Best

Always be on the lookout for knowledge. You never know where you’re going to find it and it’s also surprising how you can find something useful about one issue when looking for answers to something entirely different. Several weeks ago, I was in church listening to the priest talk about the latest gospel. Among the things that he mentioned, he talked about being good enough for God’s standards and how the effort to be the best at earthly things often times ran contradictory to the goal of being the person that God wants us to be.

These words hit me quite differently two weeks later. My wife and I took my grandmother to see her sister in upstate New York. My wife felt like driving, which bored me to tears. Everyone was still tired from waking up so early so with nothing to do but sit silently and get car sick from my wife’s driving (no easy task), I picked up the latest issue of Muscle and Fitness out of sheer boredom. The latest issue discussed the training of the stars of the Expendables. Actually, it only discussed the physically largest stars of the Expendables: Stallone, Dolph Lundren, Randy Couture, and Terry Lewis. The writers of the article took the time to dead-pan the cast of “300” as merely 175 lbs actors with body paint.

Guys who look like they could kill 25 people

The next article afterwards was a very interesting juxtaposition: Real life war heroes. Real life “Expendables.” Of course, none of these Expendables looked liked the previous, fictional “Expendables.”

Guy who actually did kill 25 people!

That's when something occured to me. A lot of the training that people do is to be the best, or at least better. In theory, superlatives aren't subject to people's thoughts and feelings on the topic. That's not true though. We're unable to figure out for sure who was, or is, the best. Plus, defining the best would have to be based on criteria made by other people. There are a lot of man-made standards out there. Was Paul Anderson stronger than Matt Kroczaleski? Or is Ron Coleman way more powerful than both? It's hard to say since one was a powerlifter and the other did mostly Olympics lifting. Coleman is a bodybuilder.

That brings another question up: is that standard of strength that we're judged by worth meeting? Do we really want to take enough steroids to keep up with Coleman? Do warriors in battle need to be as imposing as Dolph Lundren to survive combat? Where does your health fit into this equation? Paul Anderson was a big, powerful man but live long enough to collect social security, something most people in the USA were. He was born with a kidney condition that doomed him but could he have hung around longer if he trained differently?

Being the best in these strength games are just that: games. I'm not trying to say that's a bad thing. Certainly I'd think it's a more constructive use of time to lift big, heavy shit than to waste time on the internet arrogantly talking-up how tough you are or playing GI Joe-like strongman comparison's. At the end of the day, it's all exercise, something that most in Western society sorely lack these days too.

Let's not confuse games' overall worth in our lives. The games we play, and the training we do, should be to fulfill ourselves, be it emotionally or physically. Things go wrong when we seek a sense of fulfillment from others.

..."and may the god of your choice bless you!"