Geoff's Miscellany

It's a pretty great tweet.

When the gym is your lab: Bro-Science

If you go to any gym, you'll find a great deal of unusually specific information about strength training. Strangely, you'll find very little in-depth knowledge of anatomy, physiology, or scientific literature appended to it.

This information is Bro-Science. The problem with Bro-Science is that it differs from gym to gym based on a combination of the shared experience present and the amount of time people spend on the Internet and what lifting forums they frequent.

TLDR

I did an experiment based on some new data I discovered about tendons. My 8-year knee tendinitis is gone as of 2014. It had to do with exercising more frequently. I got a lot stronger in just 3 weeks. After 6 weeks, I hit my then all-time squat max of 365 for an easy single rep.

Training Efficiently

In my own life experience, perhaps the safest and least time-consuming way to pursue total body fitness is to train with somewhere between 6 and 12 exercises and train with perfect form, taking each exercise to a state of complete positive muscular failure, briefly resting and then moving to the next exercise. Your muscles are getting an intense workout, your hardest reps happen when the muscles are producing the least force (because they are tired) and none of the movements are "explosive" thus accelerating the weight to very high velocities and risking injury. During workouts of this nature, your heart feels like it might explode out of your chest, you breath very hard, and your veins pump lava or pieces of broken glass. The problem with training this way, at least for me, is psychological. Every workout must be all out if you wish to make steady progress. Other problems are related to trying to plan for enough rest and when you train this way the metabolic demands are high. Research shows that muscle protein adaptations last for up to 21 days after the most recent bout of training. Energy system adaptations can begin to regress within 4-7 days. I wish I could remember where I found that data, but I remember everything but the name of the study and it's authors...which means nothing. Nevertheless, training like every workout is a zero-sum game can be psychologically defeating. Also, the training is seldom enough that other types of adaptations apparently cannot happen (more on that later, as it is the point of the article).

Researchers have found that under the typical conditions of care for obese and overweight individuals that:

"current nonsurgical obesity treatment strategies are failing to achieve sustained weight loss for the majority of obese patients. For patients with a BMI of 30 or greater kilograms per meters squared, maintaining weight loss was rare and the probability of achieving normal weight was extremely low. Research to develop new and more effective approaches to obesity management is urgently required.(58)"

When I was a personal trainer I had always hypothesized that strength training would lead to positive outcomes for pregnant women and the child, particularly if they had been training prior to the conception of their child.

Since I'm not a research center and such training could be high risk, I just wouldn't train a pregnant woman. The wisdom in the early 2000s was, "don't engage in strength training if you're pregnant." Among trainers the wisdom was, "that doesn't make any sense, but don't do it to avoid a lawsuit."

So asks Tyler Durden in, Fight Club.

I think it's a serious question.

And even for men to prefer gymnastic exercises by far to the baths, is perchance not bad, since they are in some respects conducive to the health of young men, and produce exertion—emulation to aim at not only a healthy habit of but courageousness of soul...But let not such athletic contests, as we have allowed, be undertaken for the sake of vainglory, but for the exuding of manly sweat. Nor are we to struggle with cunning and showiness, but in a stand-up wrestling bout, by disentangling of neck, hands, and sides. For such a struggle with graceful strength is more becoming and manly, being undertaken for the sake of serviceable and profitable health.^[1]

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 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?

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:

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.