Hospitals and Gyms

My father was scheduled to have surgery at Stanford Hospital on Friday, and the surgery was supposed to last 6 to 6 1/2 hours, so I made sure to bring a good long book. This is a textbook, I enjoy reading textbooks on training because I know I will be reading about scientifically proven methodology, not something that once worked for some fitness model and is now "the best method" as stated in a woman's magazine.

William J. Kraemer and Steven J Fleck are two of the world's leading experts on strength training. Although at times some of the parts of the book are rather dry (it is required reading after all), the parts are important to understand training as a whole.

Thursday prior to the surgery we were meeting with many of the surgeons (we met 4 of the 6 anesthesiologists!) and I was having a conversation with one about ...steroids. We were sitting around waiting for technicians to perform tests for my father and this fellow hung around to chat.

I was telling him how great my cholesterol levels were and how high my HDL is, he countered saying that women have the benefit of estrogen to keep their HDL levels high. I told him how my physician insisted on checking my levels all the time, to be sure my supplements weren't "tainted". Steroids will screw up your cholesterol. He agreed and he said this: "male bodybuilders have horrible HDL levels".

Now he didn't say "some" so in his mind all bodybuilders take steroids. Just a little tid bit of information as to the world's perceptions of bodybuilders.

But that was Thursday, as we pre-registered (sort of like a race) and met all the physicians, it would be a fairly involved procedure, actually, two of them.

So, on Friday as I sat in the surgery waiting area, I couldn't read or think, they had a live band playing blues! Here is the flyer for the band:

Now I thought that was very nice to have live music, but it seemed rather odd to me to have a loud band blasting music as people waited for their loved ones to come out of surgery. Rather over the top wouldn't you say? My brother called me from Barcelona and I had to walk all the way to the end of the corridor just to get out of range of this howling band.

Stepping back to the morning.....I had arrived there at 5:00 am and stayed with my father until they took him away at 7:15 so I thought I would zip back home and go to the gym, shower then go back to the hospital.

I arrived at the gym at 8:00 and had never seen it so crowded, I don't typically come at that hour and on a week day to boot. I noticed an awful lot of finely coiffed and dressed ladies, a gal I see in the early mornings calls them the LTL (Ladies That Lunch) and I was dumbfounded by the amount of plastic surgery I could see.

Hmm, I didn't seem to fit in very well, especially with the bulging biceps and skimpy workout clothes, I got more than my share of looks. But, several waves later and lots of" Hey your late!" "What are you doing here at this hour?" and I felt better, I just got into my training, it was back and biceps day.

I finished my training and walked out to go home to shower and get back to the hospital and what do I see in the parking lot? This and I started laughing out loud:

My gym has hot coffee in the rain and free valet parking! What a riot!  I asked the attendants if I could take this and they scrambled out of the way.

As I got in my car, still laughing about the valet parking, I realized it's not just my gym, it's my community, it's my world.

Even though I make fun of my world, I realize I am very lucky to be able to do the things I want, I live in a great community and am surrounded by wonderful people and I have a multitude of opportunities.

The world, no matter how silly or frivolous, is my oyster.

Deadlifts and Squats

 

People ask me all the time what they should do in the weight room. I know there are so many different exercises, it can be overwhelming and intimidating.

First, as I have always said, you really need to hire a trainer. Not just any trainer, but someone who understands your goals and has the knowledge to help you reach those goals.

Interview them, find out what experience they have and make sure they are in agreement with your goals. I once had a trainer who thought women shouldn't be muscular- only "toned" so we ended up parting ways as I wanted to get big and he didn't want me to get big. We are still friends though.

Anyone (and I mean anyone) can be a Certified Personal Trainer, it isn't rocket science. There are some certifications that are considered better than others, and some can even be taken online, which means anyone could actually take the test...

You may actually have a friend who is willing to help out, just don't suck up too much of their time, they need to train too.

But maybe you don't want a trainer, or can't justify the expense, or you don't know anyone who can help out, what do you do in the gym?

Deadlifts and squats.

These are the two most important lifts that you can learn and you should do.  They should be the core of your training, you should do them every week without fail.

What are the least popular lifts in the gym, the ones that few people do?

Deadlifts and squats.

Why? The answer to both is simple. They are effective and they are hard.

That's why they are the best and the least popular!

These two lifts work your entire body, every inch of it. And any strength coach worth their salt will tell you the same thing. Also, they are not going to aggravate a bad back or bad knees if you do them properly.

Please don't mistake a 40 pound fixed weight bar with a proper Olympic bar- with weights added!  You need a real weight, one that will scare you a bit and make you take a deep breath as you approach it.

Oh and if you are a woman, you know what will impress men more than any other lift in the gym?

Deadlifts and squats.

Start lifting and start living!

Below is a video where Matt Wenning watches a lifter squat, and corrects his technique.  Matt is one of only a handful of people to total over 2600 lbs in a professional competition, hold an all-time world record of 2665 lbs in the 308-lb class, and bench press over 800 lbs in a full powerlifting meet. He currently the owner and a private strength coach at Ludus Magnus gym in Columbus, Ohio, a personal trainer to many executives and professionals at Capital Club Athletics, and contracted by the US Army. He also works with firefighters, physicians, children with disabilities, and all forms of athletes in the Columbus, Ohio, area. If you like this video, there is a part 2, 3 and 4 of the same fellow as Matt helps him to increase the load he is able to squat.

You will be able to find the rest of the videos at EliteFitnessSystems

Email readers will need to navigate directly to the blog to view the video.

Reverse Hyper

I am forever working on the posterior chain, this is the missing link for most people.

It is vital not only esthetically, but for your health to ensure a strong lower back, glutes, hamstrings and calves. 

A strong posterior chain will allow you to run faster, squat more, deadlift more, and make sure you fill out your jeans a lot better than most people!

There is a piece of equipment called the Reverse Hyper, and like the wonderful Glute-Ham Raise, most gyms don't have one, they are tough and not for sissies, so gyms choose to have a biceps curl machine instead....

The Reverse Hyper was invented by Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell after breaking his back.

My gym doesn't have one, so I have to make do with what I have. You can perform a very effective Reverse Hyper with a flat bench and a firm stability ball.

I was doing this last week and a trainer stopped and watched. I finished and he asked where I learned to do it and I explained I used to use a Reverse Hyper when I trained with SC, and I hated every minute of it, but knew it was a great exercise. 

The trainer said he was impressed, he never saw it done like this and he thanked me, said he learned something from me.

When Maria was taping this today, another trainer and her client were watching. As I finished the client said "that is physically impossible!" and the trainer said "Wow! Amazing!"

I told them, "No, it isn't physically impossible, in fact, it is quite easy and if you did it, you would have a butt like me!"

I am demonstrating a reverse hyper in the video below. I caution you, unless you have a very strong lower back, do not hyper extend your legs up as far as I do, I can do this as I have well developed muscles in this area- beginners should try to maintain a more neutral position (don't bring your legs up so high, I wouldn't be going so high with weights on my ankles).

Once you have become accustomed to this, add weights strapped to your ankles. Make sure you perform the movement slowly and deliberately, do not swing or use momentum!

Turn up your speakers! There is a great clip by Dragonfly to accompany this short 22 second video. Email subscribers will need to navigate to the blog to see the video.

Fat Loss

A friend of mine said to me "It's easy for you to lose body fat".  She was serious.

I want to publicly state for the record, that I never said it was easy to lose all your body fat. I am sorry if I ever implied it was easy or if I ever gave anyone the impression that it was no big deal.

It's hard as hell.

It's probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done. But I have done it many times and I am always successful. This doesn't mean it is easy though.

Anyone can lose body fat and get down to a ridiculously low figure, in the picture above I am fairly low, it's a week before a competition so I am about 6%. I am at the gym practicing my posing and laughing as one of the other members cracks a joke.

It takes will power, determination, patience and the desire to win. It also takes a huge amount of support from the people around you.

It means being hungry. That's hard, people don't deal with hunger very well. A lot of it is psychological, I mean, we are really an over fed nation, but we are greedy and want it all.

It means not partaking of meals with friends and family, you bring your own and are happy with it or you isolate yourself.

It means not having a great deal of energy at times, depending on where you are in your diet. You just want to give up.

It means learning to not be a whiner. No one likes to listen to you complain about your damn diet!  You chose to do this, so do it and shut up! (special dispensation is allowed for fellow competitors in the same boat, sometimes we need to chat each other to make it through the day).

But you can do it, anyone can. I don't want anyone to fail because I made them think it was easy. It's one of the hardest things you will ever accomplish.

Take the journey with me, follow along and you will experience my hills and valleys along the way.

Good Girls Tone, Bad Girls Lift

I love this shirt, it says it all. There is really nothing that is more offensive to me than a trainer who talks about "toning". There is no such thing as lifting weights for toning, you either lift big weights and get stronger and bigger or you lift itty bitty tiny ones and get squat.

I see people doing it everyday at the gym and it really is a shame. They have made the effort to actually go to the gym, but when they get there, they waste their time.

A very good explanation of "toning" can be found in my book Practical Programming for Strength Training by Rippetoe & Kilgore.

The modern fitness industry's concept of "toning" muscles is specious- it might sound cool, but it lacks any tangible and definable meaning. The term "muscle tone" or tonus describes an electrophysiological phenomenon, a measure of ionic flow across muscle cell membranes. It can be thought of as the muscle's readiness to do anaerobic work. The more "fit" the muscle, the more electrophysiological activity it exhibits at rest.

Lack of exercise leads to poor tone, aerobic exercise improves tone a little bit, low-intensity weight training improves tone more, and high-intensity training improves tone the fastest.

As a test, go poke the traps or quads of an elite weightlifter at rest, if she'll let you. They'll be hard as rock. The same muscles of an elite road cyclist at rest will be firm, but not hard.

Then compare both athlete's muscle tone to that of a sedentary person. The results will be quite enlightening.

Most exercise programs that claim to improve muscle tone are actually lower-intensity hypertrophy programs and are only moderately effective for improving muscle tone. If "tone" is the goal, strength is the method.

So go out and lift some heavy weights!

Quads with SC

I trained with SC on Saturday, first time since May. I had a great time! It was quads, quads, and more quads.

I got there at 8:30, it was nice to sleep in, of course, I had no choice, he wouldn't meet me any earlier.

The glutes look great so we need to hit quads and hit them hard!

First, something to "jack up my CNS"  (central nervous system). We set up the squat rack, with the bar low, so that I need to dip down slightly, keeping a straight back, bending the knees so I can grab it with an alternate grip.

I will do this 5 times, basically I am bending at the knees 6 inches or so and then straightening my legs while gripping the Olympic bar, and then setting it back down.

We load weights on, I do 5 reps. Rest. We load more weight one, I do 5 reps. We load more weight on. SC says " Do you know how much this is?"

I tell him not to say that to me, my head will get in the way and I won't be able to lift it. I look at the bar, there are three plates on each side, three big wheels. I am lifting 315 pounds of iron.

I do three more sets. I need to rest.

We talk a bit, about what is going on in our lives, I like catching up, I enjoy his company. I like the facility, it's serious business, we are the only ones there. Iron, rubber flooring, dust and chalk, no fancy stuff. And 11 Olympic lifting platforms, a real gym.

Now it's front squats. I will go as heavy and as low as I can. 5 sets of 5 at 135 pounds. Front squats are a lot more difficult than back, and they really make your quads burn.

Next step ups, but not the ones I have ever done before.  These will focus entirely on my quad, of course a bit of the glute gets activated, that cannot be helped, but my quads feel this, it is hard. Slow and steady.

I have an Olympic bar across my shoulders, with only 10 pounds added on each side, believe me that's enough.

I will step onto a high box, it's 18 inches I believe.  I place my left foot on the box and lean over so that all weight is on the left foot and the right toe is barely touching the ground. I will push up onto the left foot, straighten my leg then touch back down with the right; however, big difference form regular box steps, my right foot never touches the ground, only the toe does and only for a second.The weight remains on the working leg the entire time. Time under tension.

The quad is absolutely burning. 10 on the left, then 10 on the right.

If I was doing this on my own I would have stopped, but I can't stop with SC sitting there watching me.

I rest, then two more sets, it takes forever.

It's been an hour and a half, time to stop.

David took this picture on Sunday, my shoulders and arms look good, quads are not sore yet, but they will be on Monday. My traps are sore from hoisting that 315 pounds so many times.

I LOVE this!!

I want it all!

Put your training into perspective. Here is another excerpt from "Winning Ways: How to succeed in the gym and out"

Self-Canceling combinations.

"I want to get huge, shredded, strong- I want it all." It's a familiar refrain, and it would seem that with a little creativity and a lot of effort, it's possible to pull it off. As you know, however, appearances can be deceiving. As much as you might like to believe you can have everything, you can't. In fact, the best way to get nowhere is to try to get everywhere at once.

It's easy to see why you can be led down the path to the everywhere-nowhere syndrome: every day images of everything from pro bodybuilding victories to Olympic gold medals are around to tantalize you. One moment you may be captivated by someone winning the World's Strongest Man competition, and the next you may be thinking triathlons. Left, right, up, down: add them all up and you land just where you started. That's the problem with trying to combine too many things or, more important, things that work in opposition to each other. It's those self-canceling combinations that can really block your progress.

Let's oversimplify things just to illustrate a point. To get bigger, you need to consume more calories than you burn; to get leaner, you need to consume fewer calories than you burn; Thus, when you simultaneously want to get bigger and leaner, you should eat more calories than you burn and you should eat fewer calories than you need. That's the classics self-canceling combination- whatever you do  in one direction is offset by what you do in the opposite direction, so you end up where you started. It certainly is possible to simultaneously increase muscle mass and decrease fat, but the point remains that some goals are easier to combine than others, and some goals are largely mutually exclusive. It's the mutually exclusive goals that you need to learn to manage, not just for your physical progress, but also for your peace of mind. 

At the heart of these conflicting goals is the unwillingness to make choices- after all, if the game show host only lets you choose one of three possible doors, your decision automatically requires you to give up the other two. In real life, with nobody enforcing rules like that, you want to try to open all three doors- at once no less. Part of the problem here is just knowing, or not knowing, what you want most. You can argue that one of the best ways to figure out the answer to that question is to give things a try, to see how they work for you.

The first thing to realize is that no choice, no matter what you think, is going to be perfect, and as long as whatever you choose isn't lethal, you can probably correct your course if you want to. Most people stumble in the first part of the process because its too easy to get fooled when we consider things like potential goals. Research psychologists talk about "focusing illusion" when people make judgments. You make focus on something that's actually inconsequential, or you may exaggerate how much something will change your life. For example, you may think that if you can add five inches of muscle to your upper arm, your whole life will change for the better, but what you may find is that having a bigger upper arm means just that: your upper arm is several inches bigger than it used to be. You didn't get smarter, better-looking, more merciful, or anything else that's good in the process-your arm just got bigger. Sometimes that's exactly what happens, and you can imagine the cold showers awaiting all the commercially ambitious Olympic gold medalists who didn't end up on the Wheaties box or with a Coke contract.

The point is not to denigrate any goal you may have but to make it easier to pick your goals by realizing that nothing is perfect- and that the concept works in both directions: whatever you give up isn't likely to be the be-all and end-all any more than whatever you choose is. Once you realize that, you can lighten up on yourself a little and use the breathing room to pick one goal or maybe a couple that go together. You may decide to train for size and strength at once, but combinations such as simultaneously trying to gain weight and run a faster marathon don't mix.

In a word that has a lot of compelling choices, sometimes it's hard to pick one while giving up another. The way out, you think, is to mix a little of this with a little of that- a reasonable approach, as long as you avoid self-canceling combinations.