Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Exercise

Thoughts on Strength Training For Women

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A friend recently asked if I could help her design a strength training program (and I just finished). And while I made one for my wife and made jump/chin-up/and general strength programs for clients in the past, I still just felt the need to look more into the research on women’s health issues and the relationship between those issues and strength training. Of course, the general benefits of the iron pill still apply.

Here’s the basic formula:

Perfect form + reasonable exercise choice + progressive resistance + rest and calories = strength gains. 

But many weight lifters, male or female, don’t want strength per se. Men will want bigger arms, women bigger glutes or “toned arms.” 

While trainers should take these considerations into account in program design, general human improvement is the goal of any training program. I would say that personal trainers ought to follow something like ‘help people be happy‘ as a first principle.

Here are some difficulties faced by women:

  1. 40% of women in the United States are obese. Obesity is associated a host of mental and physical health problems. It is associated with social issues as well, specifically perceived attractiveness to both men and women. Weight gain happens so frequently in college, that it has the nick name, “the freshman 15.” That period of weight gain frequently continues through middle age. Equally dangerous is being thin but having a high bodyfat percentage. This is known as being skinny-fat.
  2. Roughly 25% of American women use prescription medication for depression, anxiety, and other psychological problems. Women disproportionately struggle with depression for a host of reasons, one of which may be physical weakness. In fact, women are twice as likely as men to be depressed.
  3. Women disproportionately develop osteoporosis.
  4. Women can become pregnant, which is physiologically and psychologically stressful. Not only so, but a large percentage of women simultaneously want to become pregnant at some point but delay pregnancy into their thirties or are obese, both of which decrease one’s chances at becoming pregnant.   

Now, here is what some research says about the effect of strength training on these difficulties:

  1. Strength training is a remarkably effective intervention for obesity and body composition. Improvement in body composition is important for those who are obese and those who are ‘skinny-fat.’ In this sense, strength training contributes to cardiovascular health, decreased cancer diagnoses (cancer increases in obese individuals), perceived attractiveness (strength training can decrease waist size and increase hip circumference, thereby moving the Waist Hip Ratio between 0.65-0.75 which is apparently the gold standard in terms of cross-cultural attractiveness and perceived fertility), fertility, and several other markers of general well-being associated with a healthy BMI and body composition. 
  2. Exercise generally both aerobic and resistance training in particular have “a large and significant antidepressant effect in people with depression.” One intriguing theory is that depression evolved as a bargaining tool for resource acquisition during periods of physical weakness. And while I make no recommendations about health or drugs on this blog, in the case of depression
  3. Resistance training improves bone health in young adult and post-menopausal women.
  4. Strength training improves markers of physiological and psychological health in post-partum women. Strength training before and during pregnancy, especially when combined with aerobics  is associated with a host of benefits. These benefits include: decreased time in first stage of labor, decreased back pain, lower incidence of gestational diabetes, healthier weight gain, heavier babies (good or bad?), less time off work for pain, lower incidence of preeclampsia, and increased cardio-respiratory fitness. For obese women, exercise generally, is associated with proper regulation of ovulation, though overtraining can have a negative effect on fertility. Also, progressive resistance training may contribute positively to an total treatment program for PCOS due the association of PCOS with insulin resistance.

Strength training has an almost panaceaic quality for several of the problems faced by women as throughout their lives.

 

 

 

 

Music Monday: Motivation for the Gym

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Here is a metal-esque song that really only exists to listen to prior to or during intense exercise:

I highly recommend this song for getting pumped up for a heavy set of squats or dead lift, but it’s also a good “getting to the gym by car” song.

Any other gym music recommendations?

Punching Bags

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It was finally cool enough to work out in our garage rather than at the gym.

Avery and I lifted weights and I hit the punching bag.

I increased the intensity of my blows just because I thought my hands had hardened up pretty well over the past several weeks. This resulted in two things.

My wife noted that hitting the punching bag looked pretty manly. She’s seen me dead lift and squat nearly 400 pounds in the same day and just gave me a fist bump. But watching me punch an invincible target that never gets hurt, tired, or offended looked manly. I know she’ll support me if I have to fight this guy:

It also resulted in some of my skin peeling off when I washed my hands later. It wasn’t from abrasions, it was just from pounding. It happens.

But then at church, somebody asked, “Who have you been punching?” “I don’t punch anybody,” I said. Silently, I reasoned that I was just exercising like a young man at the wrong age.

Two Weight Lifting Book Reviews

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As with all books, fitness tomes range in quality and genre.

Some are essentially reprints of complicated protocols used by coaches.

Others attempt to give training advice based on evidence, whether scientific, anecdotal, or testimonial. Some attempt to give theories of training from principles. Here are brief reviews of the latter sort.

McGuff, Doug, and John R. Little. Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 

Many people might think this book is bogus, especially because of the subtitle. But the book is a marvel of attempting to use scientific research that really is not about training protocols in order to come to conclusions about the human body. Those conclusions are used to infer the most efficient training program available. Thus the system is brief, simply, hard, and safe. This is also one of the best books for pointing out the rather comprehensive benefits of strength training. 

When the subtitle says, “12 minutes a week” it does not mean only twelve minutes in the gym. It means doing each set of exercise to muscular failure for one hard set after a warm up. Thus your squats performed in this fashion might be a set that takes one minute of smooth reps taking 4 seconds each for 12-14 reps. After training in this fashion you will need to rest briefly before your next exercise. But with adequate rest (less than the book prescribes…I’d say to train this way between 1 and 4 times a week) you will make progress. So the twelve minutes is referring to the fact that a six movement routine will, ideally require 6 minutes of time actually lifting the weight after a warm up. Doing such a routine twice a week is 12 minutes of training.

Perryman, Matt. Squat Every Day Myosynthesis, 2013 Kindle Book

Perryman’s book is superb. He challenges several misconceptions by trying to look at the nature of the human person in a “meta” sort of way. You are a dynamic system so training your body in increments makes sense, but it does not necessarily work like this “Stimulus, rest, adapt, repeat.” He recommends that to make long term gains it is useful to expose your body to difficult but not impossibly difficult stimulus on a regular basis, like every day. This sort of protocol will not be best for saving time, but it might be best for injury recovery (due to a weird feature of connective tissue), psychology (you don’t have to psyche yourself up to lift heavy weight if you do it every day), and strength (because the movements are trained so often that they actually become a skill). 

Conclusion

These books, though widely divergent in conclusions, might be the best books that are easy to read for understanding the human response to exercise. Both approaches work and both are based upon the same principles. Depending upon your goals and values (time/strength/soreness/nagging injury healing, etc) you can use one or a combination of both approaches to approach your desired level of fitness. 

Fatigue and Heavy Lifting

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When I was younger I used to train really hard. I still tend to do so. But when I was younger, I don’t even remember why, but I decided that it would be important to test my ability to lift insanely heavy weights under psychological distress. To simulate that state, I did what I hate the most: I ran. I would run 1.1 miles in the windless, midnight heat of Texas (I got off work at 12am back then). I would time it so my roommate could try to beat my time next time he ran. Then I would rest for 3 minutes or 1.5 minutes depending on the day and do a 20-rep squat or warm up to a 3X3 squat. I would then do deadlift, bench, chins, and a single of clean and press for fun. I only weighed about 135 back then because I could only afford, on average, about 1300-1500 calories a day.

In the last year I’ve bumped by dead lift up to 375 for easy singles and my squat up to 365 for the same. I’m not that strong at the moment because summer break comes with a whole list of challenges that make routine gym adherence difficult. I did buy some on-sale equipment for the garage though. That brings me to my point. On days when it is inconvenient to make it to the gym, I do some dead lift, ab roll outs, and heavy bag in the garage. But I decided: why not do dead lift under psychological distress like in the old days. Anyhow, I was doing 255 for reps after hitting the heavy bag for three three minute rounds. Then today I did a three minute round and two five minute rounds on the bag. It was about 91 degree out, but the heat index was 102. I could only pull 205 off the floor five times before I felt like collapsing.

Moral of the story: in door strength training is definitely good for you and most certainly to be preferred to other fitness craziness. But, if you want to test your meddle (while taking safety precautions for heat and fatigue) doing heavy weights in a state of metabolic and psychological distress will certainly indicate what you’re made of. I’ll look up research on this topic and post it later.

Baking Soda as a Sports Supplement?

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One of the amazing things about the world is how seemingly disparate things are connected in profound ways. One of these connections is between sodium bicarbonate (household baking soda) and intense physical exertion.

I use Sodium Bicarbonate for my heartburn when it comes up (less common these days thanks to eating less carbs), but I never would have guessed that it functioned as an ergogenic aid.

But. these studies indicate that it does:

  1. Saunders, Bryan, Craig Sale, Roger C. Harris, and Caroline Sunderland. 2014. “Effect of Sodium Bicarbonate and Beta-Alanine on Repeated Sprints During Intermittent Exercise Performed in Hypoxia.” International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism 24 (2): 196–205.
    This study notes that Beta-Alanine and Sodium Bicarbonate combined or separate seem to have no effect on performance, but did have an effect on blood pH. The authors also admitted that other studies found results which indicated a positive effect on performance under different circumstances.
  2. Mueller, Sandro Manuel, Saskia Maria Gehrig, Sebastian Frese, Carsten Alexander Wagner, Urs Boutellier, and Marco Toigo. 2013. “Multiday Acute Sodium Bicarbonate Intake Improves Endurance Capacity and Reduces Acidosis in Men.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 10 (1): 1–9.
    This study indicated that several days of acute doses of sodium bicarbonate prior to competition increased endurance performance and reduced acidosis.
  3. McNaughton, Lars R., Jason Siegler, and Adrian Midgley. 2008. “Ergogenic Effects of Sodium Bicarbonate.” Current Sports Medicine Reports (American College of Sports Medicine) 7 (4): 230–36.
    This meta-analysis shows sodium bicarbonate supplementation to be generally effective for increased athletic performance. It does note that roughly 10% of people tend to have intestinal distress due to its ingestion though. The analysis showed 10 studies which noted a positive effect due to sodium bicarbonate supplementation, 2 which showed decreased performance (both involving swimming), and 5 which indicated no effect.

 

I found several more studies indicating that the effect is positive and a few more that noted little to no effect or determined that individual differences may dictate response to the chemical. I don’t really have a desire to improve my exercise performance utilizing baking soda, but it may prove useful for athletes and casual people who train for pleasure or their well-being.

I’m not a doctor though so this blog can’t diagnose or treat diseases. Also, do note that you can overdose on the stuff. If you wish to see a more comprehensive review of the subject that does not require access to ebsco or a university library, Chris Beardsley reviews the literature here.