“Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.”

When I was a kid, I always scored well on those standardized tests they like to give children. I remember taking an IQ test when I was no more than seven or eight, and while I was never told the results, I was put into a ‘gifted program’ shortly after that. I was routinely praised as intelligent, as ‘the smart kid’, as all those kind and not-so-kind terms we use for so-called over-achievers. I was placed in an environment that told me I was smart — that defined me as smart — and created expectations from that stereotype.

Then I reached high school and, without being too nice about it, fell apart. I quit caring, and since I didn’t care I didn’t try. I didn’t care about school work, I didn’t care about learning, and threats of working at McDonald’s forever didn’t faze me. That attitude, of defining myself by a stereotype and its expectations, of treating failure as a personal trait, of judging things in strict good/bad terms, stayed with me for most of my adult life. It bled over into college, into relationships, and into my lifting.

Though I didn’t realize it, I operated under what Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck divides our mentalities into two distinct mindsets. Those like myself hold to the above-mentioned fixed mindset; you’re born with certain gifts, and if you aren’t good at an activity, then that’s that. People don’t change, and if you suck you just suck, so you might as well give up. The fixed mindset focuses on ability as an unchanging (and unchangeable) quantity.
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We all know about losing strength on a diet. I sure do. Most bodybuilders do. Any time I make a reduction in calories and limit carb intake, my strength goes into the gutter. What I’ve always found interesting is that a lot of the top-end strength — max weights and max reps with lighter weights — tends to take a pretty substantial hit within the first 2-3 weeks. For reasons I’ve yet to figure out, the squat takes the biggest and most direct hit. Benching and overhead work suffer, albeit to a lesser degree. The deadlift slumps a little; I won’t be able to approach max lifts but the 80-90% range usually stays intact at the beginning.

This is my sample of one, so your observations and strength gaps will vary, but I think almost everyone can claim a similar experience. It’s easy to write it off as being tired from the diet, and certainly muscle loss would be a factor later on down the road — especially on Bro-trition plans that almost want you to lose muscle. Muscle loss doesn’t explain rapid loss of strength on allegedly muscle-sparing diets, though.

The biggest hit comes to endurance and stamina. This makes sense; with lowered energy reserves, the high-weight, low-rep work should be best preserved. Higher volume anaerobic work, which can mean anything from sets of 8+ to high-intensity conditioning methods, always suffers the most. General work capacity, the ability to stay active and springy for the duration of a normal weight-training workout, diminishes.

Most of this can be explained by the calorie deficit. But it’s always felt, to me, like strength loss in the heavy stuff, especially that rapid loss of squat strength, had another factor behind it. I know ‘fat is strong’ and all that, with a big strong bloated midsection being great for squatting. But it doesn’t make sense that a lift would take such a hit right off the bat. The quick strength loss can’t be due to muscle loss, not that soon into the process.

Central fatigue would explain it nicely. A tired body creates a tired brain. Rather, a tired body is a tired brain. A calorie-deprived, glycogen-depleted body can’t manage the same performances it could with a full battery.

Central fatigue is the loss of performance due to changes in activity of the brain or spinal cord, changes which are triggered by an avalanche of signals from the body. You read that right — what we call ‘neural’ fatigue results from neural and chemical signals everywhere else in the body.

The brain oversees the universal stress response through the hypothalamus, which regulates both adrenal and reproductive hormones and the immune system, among other symptoms. Getting worked up mentally or emotionally filters down to physical symptoms.

Fatigue is task-dependent. You get tired in different ways depending on the activity. There will be cases where muscular fatigue is the limiting factor. Other instances limit performance at the brain and spinal cord.

Get the body tired and the brain follows. It helps to stop thinking of the brain and nervous system as independent units, separate from the rest of the body. Living organisms don’t work that way. Stress is universal. Exercise affects muscle and central-neurological factors, which include the endocrine and immune systems. You don’t just train your muscles; you’re training the whole body.

This is why I’m skeptical about the usefulness of acute hormone changes, the testosterone and cortisol and growth hormone spikes that everyone worries about. These hormonal spikes and depressions are superficial, the symptoms of a deeper issue. Affect the real cause and the hormones will fall in line.

When you get tired during exercise, it’s not just your muscles wearing out. The entire motor-control system gets worn out up in the CNS. You lose the ability to generate maximal contractions, and to sustain sub-maximal contractions, which can lead to wackiness. Wackiness like increased injury risk. Awhile back I came across these two studies:

Fatigue-induced ACL injury risk stems from a degradation in central control.

Combined effects of fatigue and decision making on female lower limb landing postures: central and peripheral contributions to ACL injury risk.

These papers show a reduction in central motor control when fatigued — the effect happened even in the unexercised limbs — which may lead to an increased risk of injury. That’s not a surprise in itself. We can always blame poor form and execution for injuries; being tired during a complex and relatively high-risk movement is begging for trouble. High-skill movements don’t mix with fatigue.

What I find interesting here is the central-level effect. The injury risk isn’t increasing because of tired muscles. Motor control isn’t suffering because these girls ‘broke down muscle fibers’. We’re observing these effects because tired muscles create a tired brain. The CNS is worn out, which causes motor control to suffer.

Calorie restriction signals specific effects in the brain. Reduced levels of amino acids, especially tryptophan, affect the hypothalamus and hippocampus, filtering into the endocannabinoid and dopamine networks that affect your behavior, mood, and motor control.

The serotonin hypothesis of fatigue has been around for years. Serotonin is associated with lethargy, anxiety, depression, and generally being an unmotivated stress-avoiding slob. Changes in serotonin behavior, particularly its relationship with the hedonistic dopamine, are strongly linked to central fatigue. Poor performance in athletes is directly associated with change in serotonin behavior.

A recent-ish paper has shown that eating carb-rich ‘comfort foods’ can attenuate some of the symptoms of Addison’s disease, a form of adrenal dysfunction. It’s interesting that a deficit in the brain’s energy supply can be linked with HPA dysfunction, and that we see similar symptoms in dieters. While I don’t want to overstep my causation privileges here, I don’t think this is a coincidence; the Addison’s patient has a pathology, while the chronic dieter voluntarily limits food intake. In both cases a brain-level deficit cascades down to an organ-level problem. We see the hormone changes and intuitively blame them, when they’re only symptomatic. The real issue is in the brain.

Studies on BCAA and carb supplementation do show improvements in cognitive function and perceived effort (exercise feels less hard), but at the same time there’s not a lot of evidence behind the idea that they improve performance. I can’t help but think of the difference between normalizing a deficiency and triggering improvements above baseline — the same way that insulin-sensitizing supplements work in diabetics while having no measurable benefits to healthy folks. Restoring normal function doesn’t imply a performance gain in the already-normal.

Carb-depleted muscles send out their own signals. When you train a muscle under normal fed conditions, you get the usual indicators of damage and inflammation, but there’s plenty of energy to trigger the anabolic recovery process. Take away the precious glycogen reserves, and that changes. Muscles depleted of glycogen release more inflammatory cytokines, metabolic waste products (like ammonia), and the overall anabolic response is diminished while competing energy-conserving systems switch on.

Exercise and weight loss do tend to favorably improve inflammation in the obese, as obesity can be thought of as a disease of chronic inflammation. But again: what’s good in an unhealthy population doesn’t always work the same way in the healthy trying to push to extremes in a sport. Moderate exercise and maintaining a healthy body weight are positive effects. Chronic, excessive exercise — the way most ‘exercise fanatics’ like to train, when left to themselves — elevates inflammation. Reasonable, limited amounts of exercise are good. Repeated muscle-smashing sessions, in strength or endurance, probably aren’t.

Low-carb, low-calorie diets are probably enhancing central fatigue even if eating more won’t improve performance in well-fed people. Central fatigue is a protective effect, remember. Neural output scales back to avoid injury. You feel like crap so you’ll stop the behavior and rest. In physiological terms, calorie restriction triggers a kind of stress — some of which is beneficial, mind you, but only if you don’t go out of your way to make problems with stupid workout routines.

As long as you’re not pulling a Traditional Contest Diet, which is to say starving yourself with chicken and broccoli while spending two hours a day on the treadmill, I think you’ll adapt to the lowered calories within a few weeks. Martin’s Leangains method gives the option to train fasted, which sounds counter-intuitive, but I’ve found it to be fairly effective if the training is right and if you allow some time to get used to it. Those of you accustomed to a 50-set body-part workout and pre-workout shake with 300g of carbs may be in for a shock. But you’ll adapt. I find that I enjoy fasted training as much or more than training fed, provided I have enough stimulants in me.

Despite the original dip in strength, you can still make gains on a diet ranging from mild progress to pretty damn good improvement. Your real rate of progress will be a function of the calorie deficit, your conditioning coming into the diet (conditioning as work capacity and as ‘peakedness’ of strength), your lifetime experience (a guy benching 500 lbs for reps can expect a different maintenance-improvement curve from a guy benching 250), and how well you adapt to low calories.

Because of the central fatigue effects, I think there’s a strong case to be made for using supportive gear during a diet. Use a belt on big lifts. Use straps on pulls, if you need them. Dieting doesn’t mix with big lifts, but you can at least mitigate some of the damage. Using equipment can help take some of the mental focus off those trouble areas (like abdominal pressure and contraction, or grip) and, in the case of the squat, you’re probably getting a boost from the intra-abdominal pressure.

That’s a total guess mind you, but I’m going by what I feel when squatting well-fed, and squatting after 4-6 weeks of a diet. My gut just feels emptier and more fragile, and the ratio between belted to unbelted squat reinforces the idea.

The balance between frequency and volume has to change. Strenuous exercise creates a big dent in recovery ability and increases inflammation, which isn’t a big deal if it doesn’t happen often. Chaining yourself to the treadmill and continuing your Bro-volume workout sessions isn’t the best of ideas while trying to diet without drugs. Previous conditioning and work capacity will come into the picture, of course, but it’s probably a good idea to slash your usual volume in half (at least) if you’re used to annihilation-style workouts. It doesn’t take that much work to maintain muscle.

I think frequency can be kept fairly high as long as you’re willing to scale back the number of strenuous workouts. Low-intensity cardio in small amounts can be done daily. You can even lift daily if you keep the effort in check and don’t go nuts with the tonnage. The idea is not doing less; the idea is to do less of the stuff that you can’t recover from.

In biology, it’s rare to find an instance where more is always better. Biological systems respond in dose-response relationships. More is better — to a point. Once you get past that ideal range, more is worse. You can visualize this as an inverted U-shaped graph, with the ideal range falling into a nice hump between the two extremes. Although this relationship originally developed to describe the relation between psychological arousal and performance, it fits strength training data perfectly.

An inadequate stimulus doesn’t trigger any response. An extreme stimulus overwhelms the organism, causing more harm than good. The hump, a moderate stimulus, is where you want to be. Too little won’t do anything and too much is harmful.

Extremism captures the thought process of many exercise fanatics. If some is good, more must be better. This probably isn’t a conscious thought process in most people; I’m convinced that, much like overeating, exercise addiction hides beneath our rational minds, and that allegedly rational mind later rationalizes our actions.

You can tell people over and over that doing 50 sets for biceps isn’t helping you grow. You can tell them that sprinting to exhaustion every day won’t help them lose weight. You can tell them that cleans with wrist-wrecking form — for time — have no real benefits. Tickle the brain chemistry with the right combo of exercise and social interactions and none of that matters. The endorphin high might as well be heroin; the social gathering, a hit of coke. This is why overweight housewives chain themselves to the treadmill and never see any changes. This is why stupid Crossfit WODs happen. Suffering and pain become the quintessence of the addiction.

Pain means productive. Pain means neurochemical reward. Pain means reinforcement from the herd.

If the connection to the facts aren’t made in more subtle ways, you might as well be telling a crackhead that drugs are bad for him and hoping he’ll quit since you’ve told him the truth. People follow feelings, not rational self-interest.

Exercise in low to moderate amounts reduces inflammation. Exercise in moderate amounts is healthy and anti-inflammatory. Training to exhaustion, to the point of muscle damage, triggers a much larger inflammatory event, and this can cause you to feel bad (sickness behavior) and reduce performance (central fatigue).

Why the discrepancy? Healthy people are just that: normal folks, sedentary and untrained, coming to the gym and activating all that dormant biology. All those genes wake up and start working within their designed parameters. Moderate amounts of stimulus, including discomfort, are healthy. But the dose-response effect matters: what’s good in moderation becomes bad in excess.

I was prompted to write this post by a comment reply I left a few weeks back, and then by a fortuitous paper which came to my attention a week or so back.

(And as a late addition, this review came out just yesterday, which I haven’t had time to peruse but seems to lead right down the same street.)

What do these two things have in common? They discuss the need for causing muscular damage when training for muscle growth and, to a lesser extent, strength. The premise: muscle damage isn’t required for growth or strength gains.

I discussed this topic in all its Labcoat glory in my older article on DOMS and in Maximum Muscle. The summary, for those not willing to risk the aneurysm, is that muscle damage is incidental to muscle growth. DOMS (muscle soreness occurring post-training) is incidental to both damage and growth stimulus.

For years, we’ve been told that our goal is to ‘break down the muscle’ so it will grow back stronger. There’s a kernel of truth in that statement. Hypertrophy is work-induced — that is, you make the muscle Do Something, which stresses both force- and energy-producing structures in the muscle fibers, and in response those fibers get larger. The parameters for that Something are still an amorphous mass of vaguery, but we know some important points:

• Intensity must be above a certain value, or else the stimulus isn’t strong enough to do anything. Usual values fall from 60% on up to 100% (or more, if using eccentric contractions).
• Intensity should be less than our maximum (less than our 1RM), or else we can’t do enough work to create a stimulus. A weight producing 95% of a muscle’s max tension is heavy enough, but you may not be able to eke out enough reps to matter.
• Work (measured as volume, tonnage, or time-under-tension) must be ‘sufficient’ to cause growth; it’s not enough to lift a heavy weight — you have to lift it enough times to matter.
• Fatigue, in the sense of immediate inability to contract (what you’d call concentric muscular failure), affects the activation of muscle fibers and probably contributes to the growth response by preferentially training the hypertrophy-prone fibers.
• Because of that fatigue effect, the intensity variable might be fudge-able if the mechanical work is sufficiently difficult — as in the case of longer sets to failure and repeated sets with brief rest intervals.

The formula’s pretty simple. Lift moderately heavy weights for a moderate amount of moderate-to-hard reps. Intensity plus tonnage plus fatigue yields bigger muscles.

Heavy weights are self-explanatory. ‘Power training’ has been the prescription for size since olden days, relying on low-rep sets of heavy weights mixed with high-rep, but still heavy, work. Volume, tonnage, and time-under-tension are all ways of describing how much work is done. Volume is the ultimate determinant of growth, as hypertrophy is work-induced, as long as the work is heavy-enough. Bodybuilding has long favored this mode of training, promoting multiple sets and exercises for high(er) reps.

Indicators of muscle damage, on the other hand? They just don’t rate. There’s no evidence whatsoever, besides the fact that DOMS happens with resistance training, to support the idea that we have to damage our muscles. The popular idea of trashing a muscle, putting it through strenuous, exhausting workouts, has no basis at all.

That’s what this study shows us, confirming that hypothesis along with other work. The soreness and indicators of muscle damage that accompany a new workout program are symptoms of that unfamiliar stress. Your muscles aren’t used to moving weights around, and they take a beating for it. But even after they adapt, you can continue to get bigger and stronger. No damage required.

There is undoubtedly a fatigue component to muscle growth, and this fatigue component ties in to the stimulus of eccentric contractions. There’s a difference in four sets of 10 with one-minute rest breaks, and five minute rest breaks. There’s a difference in using your 10RM and using a weight that lets you complete all four sets without so much as a grunt. But fatigue is not the same as damage; damage is a function of training through fatigue.

Labcoat Warning:

I’m not talking about metabolic glycogen-depleting AMPK-activating fatigue. This has to do with what’s called excitation-contraction coupling, which uses calcium ions (Ca++) to set off a cascade that winds up with a contraction. During a fatiguing contraction, ATP levels are insufficient to disengage myosin and actin links that form as the muscle ‘pulls itself tight’. The proteins stiffen and Ca++ builds up in the cell. That fiber’s now out of commission, and is a biochemical mess.

This acute contractile-protein fatigue doesn’t immediately affect energy reserves, but it does cause that feeling of weakness you get when you really trash a muscle with sets-to-failure or very short rest breaks. There’s also evidence of a link between this kind of eccentric fatigue and Almighty Growth Factor Supreme, MGF.

Pushing to (and through) fatigue is, again, a common aspect of traditional bodybuilding programs, and for good reason. Local, acute fatigue in a working muscle — within reason — almost cheats the nervous system, tricking it into stressing different ranges of muscle fibers and (possibly) increasing the expression of powerful growth factors.

Because of this complication, it’s important to realize that recruiting a muscle fiber — say with a very heavy weight that causes maximum fiber recruitment from the first rep — isn’t necessarily the same as training it. To train a set of fibers, you need variable rep ranges and some degree of near-failure effort (I’ll leave the bickering over ‘near failure’ and ‘omg momentary ability’ to Cyberpump. Remember Cyberpump? Man those were fun days.)

But real damage to the muscle? Nah. Damage is overrated, and based on older animal models of muscle adaptation. Damage can and does happen in human muscles, but it’s not desirable — we see it happen in distance runners and other long-distance athletes, and the results aren’t pretty. Inflammatory cytokines come out to play, and there’s some evidence that this can cause fiber necrosis (although this may only be in those animal models). From the authors of this study:

From an engineering perspective, damage as a necessary precursor for restructuring would seem to be a poor ‘design feature’, requiring unnecessary vulnerability (i.e. sarcolemma damage, soreness and weakness) in response to a requirement for additional strength. It seems that a need for added strength to be coupled to a requirement of damage-induced diminished strength would certainly be avoided by natural selection if possible. Indeed, during chronic resistance training, whether an athlete experiences muscle soreness and damage at the onset of training would seem to have no impact whatsoever when training continues uninterrupted over months or years. The addition of muscle size and strength that persists after years of continuous training must be completely uncoupled from any initial damaging bout of muscle damage months or years prior.

Muscle damage is most assuredly not helping you get bigger, stronger muscles. The good news is that most sane strength-training programs aren’t going to push you to that point. Damage is the kind of thing you’ll see happening in the frat-boy workouts of EZ-bar curl drop-sets, where they start with like four 10s on each side of the bar and do back-heaving sets to failure while the other guy takes a plate off at each stopping point. You might get some of those in those step classes where they use the weights and have you doing high squats and that kind of mess. Anything that takes strength training and treats it like endurance work, cheering you on to ‘push through the burn’, is probably doing more harm than good.

For our practical go-to-the-gym needs, the truth is that growth stimulus happens on a continuum, and anything you do that’s in that equilibrium zone of intensity, volume, and fatigue is going to stimulate some kind of positive response. Create a little stress and you get a small response. Do more, and you get a bigger response. Train so much that you kill off half your muscle fibers and get a case of rhabdo, and you’re well into the Lethal Dose segment of the inverted-U curve.

There are many ways to maximize the net growth stimulus by futzing with each of those variables — which is why Oly lifters can have huge traps and thighs while rarely going over 5-6 reps, and curl-jockeys can actually wind up with pretty big arms by doing nothing but multiple sets of 12-15. Regardless of your favored method, the goal was put best by Lee Haney: stimulate, don’t annihilate.

Growth occurs when the net work is enough to create the required stimulus, and fatigue which results from that work may help that along — in other words, get tired from using heavy weights and hard-ish sets — but as this study and others like it show, fatigue-induced damage, resulting from excruciating exhaustion-by-volume, just isn’t necessary. Fatigue is good in moderation. Training to brutal, messy exhaustion isn’t so good.

The moral of the story: don’t train like a frat-boy.

In keeping with my theme of exploring the psychological side of training and nutrition, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on the cognitive and behavioral factors that go into decision making. As I said in my last book review (Switch by Chip & Dan Heath), the fields of cognitive science and behavioral psychology are underrated by us in the the fitness-related fields.

I know I was a prime example not that long ago. It was easy, almost intuitive, to write people off as ‘stupid’ or ‘uneducated’ when they fell for shameless marketing gimmicks or self-destructive ‘Bro’ training and diet methods. How times change.

I’m still convinced that human beings are irrational beings and emotional decision-makers. I’m still convinced that self-deception is a big part of that irrationality, such that very few of us are even aware of our schizoid natures. It’s just that I no longer think this condition is something to write off as ‘people are stupid’.
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You’ve just sat down for dinner. Tonight, it’s a bag of Cheetos, a 3-liter of Coke, and a large pizza. You know it’s bad for you. You know it, and yet you don’t do anything about it.

You’re at the gym. You have no real performance goals; you’re only here to look better. Your diet today has been a few sticks of celery, an apple, and a salad. You know that you shouldn’t run on the treadmill for two hours. You know it, but you do it anyway.

Congratulations, you’ve just experienced the action of endocannabinoids. Most neurosci research focuses on dopamine and opioids as the key regulators of reward-chasing and hedonic (pleasure-seeking) behaviors in the brain. But there’s plenty of evidence that endocannabinoids play their own role in signaling slothful, gluttonous, greedy, and other delectably sinful behaviors.

As with all neuronal activity in the brain, the endocannabinoids work in pairs of receptors and neuromodulating chemicals that affect said receptors. CB1, as we call this receptor, is the same place that tetrahydrocannabanol — THC, the most chronic of goodness to be found in marijuana — does what it does. CB1 makes its home in the basal ganglia and limbic system. If you’re not up on your brain anatomy, those are fairly primitive regions responsible for appetite, mood, motivation, and reward-seeking behaviors, among other things. Action and the decision to want or not want a behavior filters through here. This will make more sense shortly.

Despite some claims to the contrary, neurochemistry plays a huge role in the regulation of energy intake, appetite, and overall bodyweight regulation. For an overview, Boguszewski, Paz-Filho and Velloso have an excellent review paper here (full text courtesy of Viamedica, PDF format) discussing the neuroendocrine regulation of body weight.

I like review papers. This one is especially interesting for detailing the interaction between the brain, the body, and various environmental signals in regulating appetite and energy intake (which aren’t always the same thing), and thus worth a read. There’s a detailed section on the action of endocannabinoids which relates to the topic at hand. As the authors state:

The endocannabinoid system participates in energy homeostasis by central and peripheral actions that influence appetite, motivation for consumption of palatable food, production and distribution of fat, energy expenditure, and glucose and insulin homeostasis.

Endocannabinoids, the CB1-binding chemicals native to the brain, play a major part in this bureaucratic regulatory cascade:

CB1 is widely and abundantly distributed in tissues involved with energy homeostasis, including brain areas such as the hypothalamus, brain-stem, and mesolimbic region, and peripheral tissues such as the GIT, fat, liver, muscle, thyroid, and pancreas. The binding of endocannabinoids to CB1 receptors results in increased appetite, weight gain, lipogenesis, and lower insulin sensitivity. In the hypothalamus, endocannabinoids increase the production of orexigenic neurotransmitters and reduce the anorexigenic signals. In the reward centre of the mesolimbic region, they promote motivation to seek and consume palatable food, while in the brainstem they block the signals of nausea and satiety transmitted by the vagus nerve. Peripherally, endocannabinoids facilitate the absorption of nutrients in the GIT, stimulate lipogenesis and im- pair glucose uptake in muscles. Accordingly, CB1 knock-out mice are hypophagic, lean, insulin sensitive, and resistant to diet-induced obesity.

Eating, feeling good, the regulation of appetite, and obesity (including overeating behavior) can all trace back to this beastie. Is it any wonder that people can’t control themselves while swimming in a calorie-rich environment?

You may find this old knowledge, but a startling number of people don’t. Failure to understand the central regulation of body mass, appetite, and energy intake leads to things like believing in Low Carb Magic.

Hilariously enough, the authors point out that insulin, long blamed for over-eating by Low Carb Magicians, diminishes appetite through these regulatory pathways:

Several studies have shown that the central action of insulin promotes anorexia, increases energy expenditure, and reduces body weight.

In humans, the central anorexigenic effects of insulin are potentially important for the future development of insulin analogues with higher and faster hypothalamic signalling compared to their peripheral actions, in order to avoid the weight gain commonly observed in the treatment of diabetes.

You want to be hungry, eat bad food, and get fat. There’s just no arguing it. The solution involves the brute-force Eat Less approach, and it helps to add that with the Move More term. Our bodies want to get fat, and if we don’t apply deliberate behavior interventions, that’s exactly what they’ll do. To most people, avoiding unwanted weight gain involves major lifestyle changes and commensurate procrastination and excuse-making, although there are certainly possibilities to smooth over the process.

I realize that it’s not as simple as saying ‘stop eating so much, fatty’. It really doesn’t work that way, as much as we’d love that to happen. These neurological and hormone signals are powerful stuff — the endocannabinoid system is how cocaine and opium make you feel good and how they turn addictive (more here). There’s a lot of evidence that other addictive or compulsive behaviors use the same neuro-circuitry:

“Remarkably, rewarding behaviours activate the same brain circuits that mediate the positive reinforcing effects of drugs of abuse and of other forms of addiction, such as gambling and food addiction.”

There’s will power, and then there’s built-in unconscious programming that takes more than conscious effort. Making a change rarely is so simple as knowing what you need to do. There have to be motivational changes and situational changes to help the process along. If there is a power to low-carb diets, this would be it. You make it easier to eat less by staying more full and by keeping binge-inducing foods out of sight and out of mind. You get into a habit of being a healthier person and sticking to the changes you want to make.

No insulin-induced dysfunction of adipose tissue need apply.

Big surprise, but this also affects exercise behavior, thus explaining runners that won’t quit running themselves into the ground, or figure girls that won’t get off the treadmill while eating 800 calorie diets and wonder why they feel burnt to cinders. Destructive exercise behavior leads right back to these reward-seeking pathways.

Endocannabinoids are good, but this mindset of constantly chasing what feels good can lead you down dangerous roads. Your body’s feel-good machinery isn’t tuned to your goals of being fit and lean. The clichéd ‘listen to your body’ slogan doesn’t account for the possibility of self-sabotage.

The lesson here is that your body doesn’t always want what you — conscious, analytical, rational you — want to happen. If you want to make changes, you have to realize this and not only fight for physical changes, but work to change your mental frame of reference as well. Your psychology is part of your physiology.

I think there’s something to be said for understanding the real basis of the problem and equipping yourself for the hard slog ahead, rather than cutting carbs and hoping for the best. The same goes for training; sometimes less really is better. One model offers you a real understanding and a mechanism for troubleshooting. The other might as well be a scared ostrich with its head in the ground. Honesty equips you for the process. Honesty allows you to cope, and to troubleshoot accurately.

Knowing what you want, consciously, and working towards those goals with deliberate, intentional steps — including whatever motivational and situational steps may be required — is the way to success.

I realize I’ve been stepping out of the usual bounds the last few months, which may put off some people. I promise all my talk about psychology and cognitive science does have a point, and is most assuredly related to goal-achievement in athletic activities (which includes successful eating strategies).

It isn’t that I think training discussion is exhausted. The theoretical side has distilled to nitpicking over details that don’t matter. It’s interesting in the way reading about quantum physics is interesting; a good time-waster, if you’re in the hands of a Hawking or Kaku or Brian Greene, but most of the readership really doesn’t get it. The concepts and the mathematics are too obscure; to make the material accessible, it has to be sloganized. Transforming nuanced concepts into one-off sound-bites is the origin of Bro-Science, so I think that’s best avoided.

The Just Go Do It discussion doesn’t involve much more than asking how you like to work out, or finding novel ways to come up with numbers to lift. You can make that as complex, or simple, as you please.

But the mind, now there’s an untapped area. Think past the classics like ‘mind-muscle connection’ and the motivational one-liners reminding you that ‘mind is everything’. It is, without a doubt — and like all uselessly vague clichés, it tells you absolutely nothing of value.
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Back in part I (read that first so you aren’t lost), I talked about the unconscious nature of motor learning and skill training, and mentioned how the brain rewires itself in response to outside changes, which include exercise. Now I want to discuss what this means for fitness goals.

We’re taught to fear overtraining from day one. We know, since we’re told so often, that if we train too much, we’ll basically die. A whole culture has developed around how to plan and apply training programs so that we avoid doing too much while trying to scratch out some kind of progress. I know it, as I was part of that culture.

Recent experiences have had me rethinking that viewpoint, to the degree that I’m no longer sure what’s a genuinely physical limit, what’s a psychological roadblock, and what’s just a good idea, limitations aside. ‘Overtraining’ has moved out of my vernacular — and this has happened because I stopped caring about the consequences.
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From Anthony Colpo:

When Matt and Jeff point this out, Fred replies:

“First, the editor of our book chose NOT to put a bibliography in the book. She also did not want too many technical references. She also felt that since two physicians were writing the book, this was authority enough.”

Heaven help us. Now you know why I have such a low opinion of most mainstream publishers and the popular format pap they produce. Evidently, valid scientific references are far too “technical” for their apparently stupid readership; far better to go with the “appeal to authority” phenomenon:

“Who needs citations?! Two of the authors have some fancy-sounding initials after their names! Yep, that more than makes up for the complete lack of scientific support for the absurd statements made in the book!”

Bingo.

An MD is trained in medicine, not in sport science. As made clear by their ‘review’ of the literature, they have no concept of even the most basic exercise science principles.

In Maximum Muscle, I did a fairly exhaustive look at training tempo and how it interacts with neurological and muscular interactions. If that weren’t enough

But the uncited claims of MDs — who obviously have no experience training anyone beyond the niche of untrained beginners — are sufficient?

Naw.

Empirical evidence and science (when you look at it honestly) agree on this one.

I’m not exactly sure where to start this post, because it’s a departure from the straight-up, I did this at the gym kind of thing I normally talk about. I’ll start with a little background.

I have a wide range of nerdly interests outside of weight training. I’ve mentioned that my approach to strength and physical culture came out of my earlier geekiness, but what I don’t talk about often is that my interest in the science of biology doesn’t stop with exercise and nutrition. I don’t want to go into a lot of the personal-philosophy details, mainly because they aren’t very relevant and more importantly, they’re kinda out there, and I don’t want to bog the place down with my wider thoughts.

For now, let it suffice to say that I’m big on neuroscience, how neuro-bio-chemistry relates to psychology, and how both of those relate to physical stress — the universal response to an organism being bothered by its surroundings.
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I don’t have any specific thing to talk about, but in keeping with my un-resolution for this year, I’m making myself write. This may wind up being a stream of consciousness link-post, so be warned.

I was in training a client last night and saw that my gym has a Prowler now. I’ve never used one before, but the mean-looking thing has come highly recommended by everyone I know that’s used it, so I’ll add it into my slowly-growing rotation of conditioning work.

Speaking of conditioning work, and going back to last week’s whining about being too beat up and (more importantly) unmotivated to train for big lifts anymore, I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading on the importance of hypertrophy and GPP/conditioning work as we get older.

Dan John — one of those guys that you’d be an idiot to ignore — wrote a great article called The 4 Pillars of Strength. The whole thing is a great read, whether you’ve seen it before or not, but what caught my attention was under number four:

Hypertrophy’s first phase should last until the gains begin to slow. Hopefully, this stage of the career will parallel the athlete’s attempts in team or Olympic sports. I’ve come to describe building muscle as “armor building” for the sport athlete. There’s a need for some mass, and the protection that mass delivers for the contact athlete…

At the next stage, the gentle downward slope after the initial year(s) of easy muscle gain, I always argue to put pure hypertrophy on the shelf and play around with some other things. Watching strongman contests on television will give you the insight that maybe doing farmer walks or pulling massively heavily objects for distance might help your body gain some mass.

On the other tack, it might also be a time to look at a dedicated leaning out phase. I’ve noted before that a serious fat loss attack seems to lead to greater muscle mass when you go back to “normal” eating and training. If you’re continuing an athletic career, there may be no better advice than to expand into strongman training and look at some fat loss. If the recent Track and Field Nationals taught me one thing, it’s this: Elite athletes ain’t fat.

What most people don’t realize is the next stage. As we age, the need for hypertrophy training increases compared to other training qualities. Yes, the master athlete might need to focus on maintaining or increasing muscle mass.

Let this be said: It’s assumed that the older athlete has the necessary techniques and a base in some kind of strength training. As we age into our middle years and beyond, the fight to hold muscle mass is probably the single best indicator of health.

As we prepare to enter Sunnybrook Senior Center, the bulk of our training probably shouldn’t be shuffleboard. Rather, we should be doing a program with roots in training for Mr. America. Body part training, split routines, machine training, high-rep work, isolated muscle training, and a rigid adherence to sets, reps, and rest periods is the appropriate protocol.

The hypertrophy curve is based in reality. All too often, we ignore that first dip and keep striving for more and more. Give yourself four or five years of armor building, then move into some other areas of strength training. For the athlete, certainly make sure you’re training for hypertrophy some of the time but never fully drop those higher rep workouts out of your training program. Certainly, leave room for the Olympic and power lifts, but don’t abandon the mass work.

That’s gold right there. Those of you who suffered through the original Maximum Muscle might have picked up on a similar theme from me: learn the basics first, develop a foundation of strength and technique (aka developing body awareness and learning how to move), then move on to more specific goals.

I like Dan’s thoughts on going through the initial growth spurt, then backing off to something else. The trend these days seems to be get as big as possible by overeating…and then keep on overeating to get even bigger. Guys: gains slow down. You get an initial burst of size that you might milk for six months, maybe a year if you really push it. But after that, it’s all diminishing returns. Overeating after that only gets you fatter — and unless you’re pinning up a gram a week, it’s not going to help you get stronger.

(Yeah, another rant about drug-bulking: just because your favorite strength athlete eats 10,000 calories a day with moon-face doesn’t mean you can pull it off. That’s right up there with muscle-mag fetishism.)

What I’m really liking here is his thoughts on overall development. You go from the initial learning, foundation-building stage, move to something else. Do strongman, compete in powerlifting, play a team sport, or get lean bodybuilder-style. There’s room for all of them; the point is, don’t grind away forever trying to bulk up when your time would be better spent on other things.

You might see what caught my eye, based on my earlier comments. Older athletes will benefit from hanging on to muscle mass — even if that means doing a straight-up Bro-split. This speaks to me; feeling like I’ve leveled off, I find the most enjoyable training I do now combines a little heavy stuff with a lot of hypertrophy-based volume work and conditioning work on the side.

Why does this happen? Well, there’s definitely changes in central hormonal action with age, the decline in GH and testosterone and such that everybody moans about. But we also see local changes in muscle tissue, with lesser autocrine/paracine (local growth factors) responses to exercise and diet both. Muscle becomes less responsive to exercise and to amino acids, and consequently the adaptive growth cycle is blunted.

There’s likely something to my ideas on needing a bigger whack, per workout, to get satellite cells dividing and fusing. There’s weirdness that happens when a muscle is trained to exhaustion, per bodybuilding orthodoxy, versus training it more strength style with lower reps and fewer reps. Most of the latter is neurologically focused, without taxing the muscular stuff quite as much. The difference between merely contracting a muscle (even hard contraction) and exhausting it is probably significant.

Myonuclei may or may not atrophy (it appears they don’t, at least not for years, hence “muscle memory”), but having more genetic material and protein-synthesizing equipment in a muscle is never a bad thing. For more mature muscle (mature in the sense of older folks, and in the sense of muscle that’s been built over years of training), traditional bodybuilder training ranging from HIT-style to Weider-pumping does good things. You’ve built the base, now the trick is refining it.

The biggest mistakes I made as a beginner were spending too much time trying to Get Big, and then spending too much time ignoring conditioning work. By conditioning I don’t mean running; I mean not doing anything that got my heart rate up. Complexes, circuits, sprints, sled pulling & dragging, hell even high-rep work…don’t ignore these things. We get drilled with this idea that any endurance work will destroy our strength and make us into Runners, but that’s just not true. What I find these days is that as my work capacity improves — from doing More Of Everything, including non-taxing strength sessions and more conditioning work — my lifting improves. The best lifts I’ve put up in the last few years have come during phases of very high activity, whether it was during my diet cycle of 2009 or my Bulgarian training phase a few months back. That can’t be an accident.

I think the biggest problem is focusing too much on One Particular Goal, year-round, with no focus on other things. If I could do it over again, I’d spend at least a little time keeping in work-capacity-building GPP training, and more bodybuilder-esque training at least part of the year. This is where the periodization wanking would come into the picture, so let me stop that right off the bat.

You need more planning than WODs “for time”. That’s too inconsistent. On the other hand, plotting out precise year-long macrocycles, detailed to the last workout, is too much. I like moving between high-volume phases and high-intensity phases, between phases that push conditioning and phases that push strength. That’s about as complex as my planning gets. Spend a month, six weeks, maybe two months pushing one — you stop when you hit a reasonable peak — then switch to the thing you weren’t doing. It’s really that simple.

My oddball fascination with autoregulatory training has moved me away from any strict workout structure. I have a plan, but I don’t know the details until they happen. I track numbers. Lots of numbers: I know what lifts I’m working with and how hard they were. I rest and shift gears when a particular approach stalls out. I try to take an easy week out of every three to four. If I had competitive goals, I don’t think I’d do this. Competitions need more structure. I think.

(Sometimes I have second thoughts about this, wondering what it’d be like to take a more lackadaisical approach to PL meet preparation, not sweating over it, just training hard all the time and then showing up to knock it out. My experiences with specific PL prep have been pretty awful, meaning I get hurt every single time, so I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone through the Orthodox Peaking Cycles and just shown up to lift. Oh well.)

I did warn you that this was going to be stream of consciousness.