Welcome to the next BAMF Athletics Science Sunday Sermon.
This one is little science and more rant. It comes from a rather more broad-based complete misunderstanding of the concept of fitness by my standards. Something we’ll get into at a later date. The definition of fitness is one that CrossFit made all the more clear to me. My introduction to CrossFit showed me a way in which I could develop a “broad general fitness” at the expense of nothing – to the layperson. What I mean is, I would become elite at nothing, but certainly capable of a great deal more than my peers. What I found with CrossFit was that though I developed strength, I could always do with more. The same applies to you. You need to get stronger. Now and forever.
What is Strength?
Lets cover the basics first. Weight training is not bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is very specifically about developing large, well-defined, symmetrical muscles. Any kind of strength a bodybuilder develops is incidental in their goal to develop ‘the perfect physique’. There are a million misconceptions about weight training: holding your breath will kill you. Going below parallel will destroy your knees, the clean & jerk is a dangerous exercise. Isolating muscles allows them to perform better. All of this is common knowledge in the fitness industry and all of this is complete nonsense.
Getting stronger builds muscle. This is called hypertrophy. There are two types of muscular hypertrophy – sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar. It really pisses me of that the ‘good’ one is hard to pronounce. Sarcoplasmic develops a bodybuilder type musculature. Swollen muscles with very little relative strength gain. Note this. Just because someone has gigantic muscles, does not necessarily make them strong (relatively speaking). There are a great deal of big weak people walking around.
Now onto the good one. Myofibrillar. This type of development is badassed. Muscles get a little bigger, but you get a whole lot stronger. I consider myself to be a novice in terms of strength and can lift twice my own bodyweight. This is just the beginning for me. I expect, someday, to be able to lift three times my bodyweight. All without becoming the size of a house.
Why Stronger?
Now the juice. You have to get strong. You have to maintain this strength throughout your life. If you don’t you will become old and frail. You know how old people use handrails to get up stairs? Armchairs to ease getting up? Handles to get into the bath? It’s because they didn’t spend their life maintaining strength. They grew weak. They got osteoporosis from a life of net acidic food, they stopped having an active life at 19. By choice. You have to choose not to do this.
When you perform strength training exercises, like the squat, deadlift, press and clean & jerk, you will cause a massive hormonal response. Your bones will increase in density. Every sinew in your body will become thicker, healthier, more robust. Your joints will move freely. Your flexibility will increase. You will develop a strong physique without doing a single ‘isolation’ exercise. You need only battle with Mean Ol’ Mr. Gravity.
A novice will reap massive reward from a simple program of heavy lifting and nutrition for months without having to change a thing. Every unit by which you can be physically measured will improve. If you continue to do this, you will find that all of your peers, by the time you reach 60 are a shadow of their former selves. If they fall, someone calls an ambulance and rushes to assist. If you fall, you get up and laugh it off.
Strength is a more important commodity than anything else you can develop. It will protect you in your dotage, when all others are bound to the wheelchair. You can retain mobility when others rely on the help of younger, ‘fitter’ members of society. I am currently observing first hand a someone disappearing before my eyes. A 67-year-old pensioner, with a life filled with high energy food and a sedentary lifestyle means that when disease reared its head, there is no protection. This pensioner, disease is finding easy to kill. It most certainly doesn’t have to be this way. If you make yourself a hard target for decrepitude and disease, you minimise the chance it will attack you. If it does, you will have a fighting chance.
Why are you not doing this?
Is this Fit & Healthy?
It is not fashionable to be strong. It is fashionable to be able to run far or cycle fast or have sharp abs. These things are great, but will not protect you in old age as well as would the maintenance of a strong body. Endurance athletes push themselves to incredible feats of human performance. It will not last. The combination of hours spent training, combined with horrific diet most will consume to replenish those depleted glycogen stores will cause them to age quicker than someone who is economical with their training and much stronger. In the real world, there is no comparison. It is not essential that you are able to run 26.2 miles in 3 hours. It is essential that you are able to interact with your environment with less fear of injury or disease. Spin class will not save you. Bicep curls will not save you. Running for two hours a day will not save you. A strong body just might.
What About This?
What if you were to become strong and pursue all that other stuff? If you could develop a body that could withstand the rigours of life into old age, but were also able to run, jump, climb, bike as long as you want too? Now we’re talking. The funny thing is there is nothing to this. All you have to do is build a strength base, maintain it and spend the rest of your time concentrating on your chosen sporting hobby. Don’t have one? Fine. Make it strength training then. Chase numbers for as long as you are able.
Built to Last.
I realise there is little data to back up my argument. This is planned. It is your responsibility to put yourself in everyday life situations and decide what type of physical prowess would serve you best. I hypothesise you will decide on the ability to lift heavy things, sprint fast and be self reliant is of greater importance than the ability to run a 3 hour marathon. This is a noble goal, don’t get me wrong, but it comes at a price. That price is your ability to become future proof in relative terms. The exertion levels are too great for little reward. There is a reason why Grecian statues looked the way they did.
Below is a video of a mentor of mine, Mark Rippetoe, aged 49 squatting 142kg at a bodyweight of 97kg for 10 reps. Note the depth of these squats. They are legitimate. They are not the 140kg squats I see in my gym, performed by large roaring men who seem to lower themselves six inches and stand back up again three times in a row.
Look again at the picture of Paula. Add 18 years onto her. Now throw her and Rip down the stairs. Which one will get up?
It is your duty to protect yourself by becoming and staying strong. The good news is it’s easy and I can show you how. All you need to do is ask.
Stay Badassed™
The Conundrum
I have been thinking about this off and on for a fairly long time now.
Physical ability, life and location can really influence a person’s ability to maximise their athletic potential / longevity. This is of great interest to me. A recent setback caused by illness / time off resulted in my returning to the gym and feeling like a novice again. I wanted to fast track my strength & conditioning gains back to that which they were quickly, so delved again into looking at various training regimens to see if I could employ one of them to speed things up a little. There are a number of utterly fantastic coaches out there who are prescribing amazingly effective workouts. These guys have a moderately different focus on what the real key to fitness is, but any one of their programs would be good. Good, but perhaps not right for me. Or a novice. Allow me to elucidate…
The Novice / Returning Athlete
Both of these people have things in common. Usually more than one would admit. I began to look at things from a novice perspective, while adding my own training proclivities / imperfections into the mix
Training Modifiers:
Additional Sticking Points:
Up until very recently, I suffered from all of these. This puts a massive twist on what type of workout regimen you can select and how you implement it in your box of choice. Let’s cover these in (some) detail:
Lack of Strength
This is something we all suffer from. We are simply not strong enough. It’s all very well to say this generally, but more specifically, we (by we I mean either novices or returning athletes) are therefore unable to perform a great deal of work. This would have a massive effect on any regime you chose that relied on you being able to handle the weight prescribed. If I were to choose to do CrossFit, Coach Rut‘s Max Effort Black Box or John Welbourn‘s CrossFit Football, I would require either a semblance of strength or a knowledge of my 1 Rep Max (1RM herein). I remember having a lengthy discussion with your friend and mine, Mark Rippetoe about 1RM and lifter maturity. It was discussed that a realistic 1RM was only possible after about a year of serious (as in consistent and with good technique) lifting. Less so for returning lifters, but still applicable nonetheless. You need to have been doing this stuff a while before your 1RM is your actual, full-blown 1RM. There is another piece to this puzzle – scaling. If you’re not strong enough and you know it, to handle the prescribed weights in a given program, you scale – simple. Not fucking simple. Not by a long way. Scaling is a tough thing to get right, if you can even be arsed (no. 4 in Additional Sticking Points). I can’t. I don’t like scaling anything. I don’t like having to think about it. I don’t like getting up in the morning, seeing what has been prescribed by someone who doesn’t know me or my abilities and then attempting to scale it on-the-fly. It is an arse-hassle. For novices, even if they could be arsed thinking about it (I could, once) they might get it badly wrong and be left feeling either like they’ve done nothing or that they’ve crashed through an hour-long crucible of pain and don’t recover for a week.
Lack of Technique
So, your regime of choice asks you to perform a whole bunch of snatches or muscle-ups or squat cleans. Have you been practicing these things? No? Do you even know what they are? I do, and I suck at all of them. So then, what do we do with that? We’ve been asked to do some exercises we suck at / can’t do, so we either manage to do the workout with poor technique (thus potentially developing some bad habits) or we chose to do something else, which isn’t really the point of a prescribed training regime is it? If I’m training to get fitter, healthier and stronger, there is little point in wasting a workout trying to teach myself how to do something badly. If I choose to do something I’m good at, perhaps that will result in me having reduced capacity in the next prescribed workout because it hits the same areas I chose to.
Lack of Confidence
A bucket of syrup that carries on from the last two rather neatly. Let’s say I was following CrossFit. The prescribed workout is something I can do, but I’m not sure if I’m doing it quite right, not sure what weight I should prescribe, not sure if I’ll get in trouble from the management, not sure if I’ll be confident enough to run from the bar I have left sitting in the floor to the rower, to the pull-up station in my gym. Get the idea? If you’re not steeped in this stuff, starting out / retuning to it isn’t any kind of fun. Training is meant to be fun. You’re supposed to enjoy thinking about Deadlifting, or having a bar in the rack position or doing Power Cleans. Not having confidence in what you’re doing will have a substantially negative effect on both your strength AND your technique. That is folly.
Poor Facilities
Another can of worms. It can go either way, too. You might only have access to some commercial Globo Gym, or you might be going to a massive CrossFit-esque box. They can both generate problems for you. First, Globo Gym. I train in Fitness FIrst in the South Side of Glasgow. It has two 20kg Olympic bars and 3 other hollow ones that look the part but weigh less. There is a decent squat rack, bench, array of dumbbells and a couple of almost acceptable stations I can do pull-ups from. That’s it. Suppose I’m following CrossFit and today’s WOD is “Helen” – 3 rounds of run 400m, 21 1.5 pood (55lb) kettlebell swings and 12 pull-ups. I’m not strong enough to handle the prescribed weight, so I have to chose a lighter one. I also realise there are no kettlebells, so I have to grab a dumbbell that might do. I have to do my running on a treadmill, because it’s impossible to get outside without totally ruining the flow (and therefore intensity) of the workout and the chin-up station will topple over if I do kipping pull-ups. So. Am I strong enough to handle the prescribed weight? Have I got the technique required to do these exercises? Am I confident enough to look like a retard thrashing about in this gym? Can I be arsed scaling/altering this workout? Makes for an interesting problem doesn’t it? Most of these excellent training systems are designed for a certain kind of place and being performed under the watchful eye of a great coach. Not something we have in abundance here in the UK. Next, what if you are training in a sprawling behemoth of a CrossFit type facility? You can still run into problems. I did.
When I went out to the U.S to learn all about CrossFit and do my certifications, I was in a great facility. It was not without it’s problems. The coach was convinced that everyone should train all the time. Since I was over for a month, he expected to see me in there, doing classes with the rest of them every single day. I signed my disclaimer saying that if I maimed myself, it was my fault and I was set free to train. I was a complete novice at all of the movements. I could kind of run, had a little residual strength for pull-ups etc, but had never Deadlifted, Power Cleaned, swung a kettlebell, or correctly learned to do a kipping pull-up. I was thrashed relentlessly and my performances were always dire. The culmination was doing “Grace” (30 overhead anyhow Clean & Jerks for time with 135lbs). I had no idea whether I should scale the weight or not, so I started with the full value (30lbs less than I weighed) and two reps in my back went. I dropped some plates off and finished the next 28 reps in an abysmal 9 minutes and change. The next day Mark Rippetoe taught us all how to Power Clean at the Barbell certification. If the coach at that facility had interest in my interests rather than just thrashing people, he’d have managed to give me a weight I could handle so that I completed in a decent time, was suitably destroyed and felt like I’d accomplished something. As it was I had injured my back and finished last. Not ideal. If a novice was to visit a CrossFit facility, they could very well suffer the same consequences. It is very hard to know before going in at the deep end whether or not your coach is giving you workouts that are going to be of maximal benefit to you, again limiting your abilities as an athlete and failing to achieve that which is important.
Poorly Defined / Unrealistic Goals
If your goals are a 1’23″ Fran time or a 300kg Deadlift and you’re a 45 year old overweight female, you perhaps need to re-evaluate. For years all I aspired to was getting awesome times for the benchmark CrossFit WODs, but because it is, by design, such a mixed modality system they were never realised. I figured out that perhaps just thrashing myself with metcon wasn’t going to get me closer to my goals, so switched to having equally unrealistic strength goals. I was comparing myself to all of the superstars of the sport of fitness. Big, strong, monsters with an athletic pedigree, years of experience and a facility that had everything they needed. It is the most depressing thing for novices and returning athletes alike to watch as they crawl towards unattainable goals, or move further from them. I’ve seen this with metconaholics, whose only goal is to get ripped. They hammer themselves during metcon workouts, will eat little and perhaps come back for a second workout in the hope that they’ll lose that last 4% of bodyfat. They end up getting fatter due to the amount of stress-hormones in their body. If you haven’t thought out your aims and objectives well, you could just bury yourself in futility and walk away from training for good. Jim Wendler makes a great point in his 5/3/1 manual (buy it) about setting realistic expectations and attainable goals. Progress is most certainly PROGRESS.
No Consistency
Almost all of us have jobs and lives. Training is something that has to fit around that. This might mean getting up at an ungodly hour to train. Theoretically, this isn’t a big deal, but if you attach that to attempting to be sociable in any way, you may find going to bed at 22:00 is useless. Moreover, in a household where others are still up and about, it’s not exactly fair on them either. Let’s take this a little further. You had a day off yesterday and trained in the morning, had an awesome post-workout meal and got a lot of admin done during the day. You’re going to the cinema tonight with your partner. To recover, you need 8 hours of sleep. You’re working tomorrow at 09:00. It takes round 30 minutes to get there. The minimum time you can get up is 07:30. Bed by 23:30? Pretty unlikely. This means you might be a little wiped out at work, but you can make it through. Bummer is, the next day you are working at 09:00 again and are busy at night. This means you’ll have to be in the gym for an hour from 06:30 (when it opens) and be landing back at your place for 07:30 so your day isn’t shot to shit before it begins. A string of confounding days like this can really set you back in terms of recovery and / or actual quality of training. Things get worse if you don’t have a good training partner, don’t get any support for what you’re doing, feel like you’re stagnating or suffer from the last thing in our list:
Can’t Be Arsed
This comes to us all. Some more than others. I think it is equally difficult for those starting out and returning athletes who have suffered from a real confidence knock. It is easier not to train, but at the same time destroys both your mind and body. It’s like those people who know they should lose weight, but find themselves cramming pointless carbs into their face. The opportunity for escape from this problem is slight. You have to muster all the courage, willpower and hate you can. I mean that. You have to hate the situation you are in. You have to think ‘fuck this’ and hit the button. Only you can do this, but it is a tough one to push.
The Solution?
Like I said at the beginning of this meandering rumination, I have been thinking about this off and on for a fairly long time now. I feel I have come to a conclusion. It is my intention to roll out and experiment with a training regime that will address as many of the above pitfalls as is humanly possible. Logically, progressively, simply and effectively. I have had help from a number of my friends, whether they know it or not, and even more help from people who barely know me or maybe never will. These sources I will cite, as they have guided me to this conclusion with their hard work. Hopefully, some of you will try it out and tell me how it works out for you.
Stay Tuned & Stay Badassed™