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.

I don’t make New Years resolutions. Resolutions are empty. Resolutions are goals you say you want to achieve, and yet rarely achieve. I don’t see the point in that. Still, my No Resolutions rule aside, I can’t help but reflect at this time of year and think about what I did wrong and what I’d like to do better. I just don’t make any firm commitments.

I’ve gotten into a bad habit of going for months at a time without any updates, and I need to stop that. If I’m going to bother keeping the site up, I need to update it on a more regular basis; weekly would be ideal. I’m considering making Thursday or Friday my new-blog day, just to give me a deadline and force me to sit down and write. Something. Anything. I have been doing a lot of writing in the mean time, mind you, only nothing that’s gone out on the blog.

To be honest, I’ve gotten very (very) tired of exercise-related discussion in the last odd year, and even more so in the last six months. I’m not sure why.

My goals have definitely changed. I said that 2010 was going to be my last year of dedicated strength-sports training. I wanted to give it one last run after meeting a great group of lifters in the new country — and true to form, I wound up with a few new injuries for my trouble. That was the last straw for me.

Those of you who’ve met me know I’ve got a small frame, and while I’m not one for excuses, it’s pretty clear I’m not ‘built’ for 600 lb squats and 400 lb benches. And it’s not for lack of trying — it’s that a joint explodes or muscle tears every time I push.

Add that to the fact that I’m not a 20 year old anymore. A lot of the old insecurities that originally pushed me in the direction of GETTING JAKT just aren’t there — and neither is the recovery ability to tolerate the training.

I’m still lured by the idea of a big squat, deadlift, and overhead press, but at the same time I can’t spend 100% of my time chasing big numbers, either. On a related note, I’ve entirely dropped the bench press, besides high-volume dumbbell work. Long-armed proportions plus bad shoulders make that exercise a losing proposition.

I’ve been playing around with some acrobatic kind of exercises, stuff like one-armed snatches and overhead presses with a barbell, the bent press, and one-armed chins. Why not? They’re something different and fun.

I think that now, past the GET BIG AT ANY COST phase and being done with any particular competitive goals, the smart thing to do is shift away from that kind of training and mix in a little GPP/work capacity stuff. More than likely I’m going to switch to a more balanced kind of training, mixing the strength work with conditioning like I did back in 2009. That was productive, and I felt better to boot. Add in the Feats of Strength stuff as skill work and I’ve got something to do.

So there’s that. The other issue has to do with the fact that I’m just plain tired of being online and dealing with online personalities. I’ve mentioned this in an older post, but, with few exceptions, I don’t want to deal with people on the internet. I don’t want to deal with the egos, with the mentally-ill, with the nitpicking pedantry, with all the various kinds of nonsense. This has gone on for over a year now and I’m finding that I’m much happier not dealing with the drama. I know, it’s odd coming from me, the former crown prince of hate and trolling, but I’ve moved past that.

To anyone wondering, there’s your answers. My goals haven’t so much changed as evaporated, and I haven’t figured out how to fill that gap. My lack of motivation in the real world translated to no desire to talk about the subject online.

Still, I feel like I’m feeding my own confirmation bias. I don’t want to train, so I don’t talk about training. I don’t talk about training, so I have less motivation to train. And so on. Thoughts reinforce behaviors, behaviors reinforce thoughts. Maybe I need to break out of cycle by talking about training again.

Yeah, I know, I know. I said I don’t make resolutions. This isn’t a resolution. It’s an intervention with bad timing.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter @ImpulseStrength or the slightly more updated Tumblelog. And send me ideas. I’m going to try to free-wheel it, but ideas always help.

Glassman emphasizes how different CrossFit is from other programs.

“CrossFit is the application of the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics to human movement, something else that is kind of unique for us,” Glassman says.

Unique, you say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomechanics

Biomechanics (from Ancient Greek: βίος “life” and μηχανική “mechanics”) is the application of mechanical principles to biological systems, such as humans, animals, plants, organs, and cells. Perhaps one of the best definitions was provided by Herbert Hatze in 1974: “Biomechanics is the study of the structure and function of biological systems by means of the methods of mechanics”.

Biomechanics is close related to engineering, because it often uses traditional engineering sciences to analyse biological systems. Some simple applications of Newtonian mechanics and/or materials sciences can supply correct approximations to the mechanics of many biological systems.

Crossfit is different from other programs because it does what sports science has done from the beginning.

Let’s do a poll: gin or ignorance?

Not a lot to talk about this week, so I’m just gonna repost some links I put up on Tumblr throughout the week in case you missed them.

The science of muscle hypertrophy: making dietary protein count — A new gem from Stu Phillips, who has been on a roll in recent months. Phillips has also been doing an on-going debunking of this meme surrounding post-workout testosterone and GH spikes. The full text is free at the link.

The Influence of Positive Framing — a post from the PsyBlog about positive framing, or trying to be more half-full people rather than more cynical half-empty types (which is something I’m trying to get away from). This ties in to my recent post about keeping it real and how we choose to frame our situation, irrespective of the actual facts involved.

One Hand Clean to Shoulder — A short demonstration of the one hand (barbell) clean by Maxick. I’ve been getting into one-armed barbell lifts because they’re pretty cool, and more importantly they’re something new and interesting to focus on. This helps me get out of my rut of being unmotivated. The whole book is online for viewing and it’s worth a read.

Lessons learned as an adolescent (and adult) lifter from Paul Carter. An excellent read about goal setting, being consistent, and the differences between beginner and more advanced lifters. Some gems here.

On another note, I’ve been playing around with cold-brewing my coffee. I stumbled on this while searching for ways to boost the caffeine content into some kind of super-coffee, at which point I found the Black Blood of the Earth. Intrigued, I did more searching on cold-brewing and found two articles that really sum it up. Lots of talking and nerdish nitpicking comes down to this: stick some coffee in a jar with some cold water and let it sit, then filter it. Pretty simple.

My test-recipe uses plunger-ground coffee with a 3:1 ratio of water to coffee with a brew time of 24 hours. So far this has worked well. The high-octane output is indeed smoother, less bitter and acid-y as the coffee nerds claimed. There seems to be some disagreement about the caffeine content, but whatever I’m doing is turning out liquid meth. I can pour about 100 ml into a glass and be buzzing hard before I’m half done. That’s saying something for a caffeine addict like me.

This would be a good thing for iced coffees and, well, for buzzing like hell, which was the original point of the exercise. If you like enough caffeine to make your eyes bleed and have mild hallucinations, this is worth a try.

I think by this point everyone has noticed the trend toward functional fitness, cross-training, and tactical elite athleticism that’s been creeping into the fitness industry. With the rise of Crossfit and everybody else rushing to copy-cat, it’s hard not to notice the rush of people jumping on the bandwagon of functional circuits for time, the sudden appearance of people wearing Vibrams or Chuck Taylors — the hallmark of shaved-headed powerlifters c. 2001-2008 — while doing weird combinations of deadlifts and plyometrics and other assorted exercisey things not generally seen in your average gym.

Those of you that know me know I’ve been half-ass critical of that in the past. Only half-ass, though; I couldn’t and still can’t bring myself to full-on hate, because there are a lot of positives that have come out of this trend. It’s hard to deny that getting people more active in general, and exposing them to solid strength & conditioning practices in the process, is a good thing on balance. Even putting aside benefits like the Andro Broads, Crossfit and the wider functional-fitness movement it has spearheaded has done a lot to popularize the effective training methods that I’ve tried to promote for years.

Again, on balance, this is a good thing. But this does not preclude any criticisms.

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I’ve mentioned in a few places that I’m pretty burned out on lifting at the moment. It’s all mental, meaning that I’m really feeling sick of being in the gym all the time and really have to talk myself into going.

It happens. Train long enough, and especially when you find yourself without any real pressing goals, and it’s unavoidable. The solution has always been to go on a bare-bones program, something that’s brief and to the point, at least a little productive, and not so focused on a specialized goal.

I figured I might as well go back to a more well-rounded kind of training, similar to what I was doing early last year (2009) with the hybrid strength and conditioning plan that worked so well — two weight days, two conditioning days that were streamlined “metcon” workouts and 20-30 minutes of tempo work on the cycle. It worked just fine, so I’m trying to angle back in that direction.

Diet right now is a pretty loose interpretation of intermittent fasting — I’m keeping the meal windows at a strict eight hours, with a pretty decent-sized meal at noon or so, mostly grazing throughout the afternoon, then another decent-sized mostly-protein meal before bed. One of those big meals winds up being the post-workout feed, and I get a shake with 100g of whey before and during the training session. Pretty basic stuff really; it works as long as I don’t go too crazy with the ice cream.

As far as the training, I’m doing a pretty minimal routine right now which is about as far from the Bulgarian/Broz routine as you can get without quoting late-stage Mike Mentzer. I wrote up a post on the forum just now which covers the strength training I’m doing and why. I’d been planning on doing this write-up anyway, so I’ll link it to save the typing.
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If you don’t come to the site often or only read updates through an RSS aggregator, I’ve recently updated the AmpedTraining.com theme (again, yes). This involves some futzing with some of the code, and I’m going to start migrating some links from one place to another soon, so if anything wacky comes up while you’re browsing around, please let me know. The site is 95% functional as of my testing, which has covered the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. If you’re using IE, Safari, or anything iPhone or Android-ish, likewise let me know of any oddness.

I also did a little housekeeping on ImpulseStrength.co.nz to fix some dead links and get rid of some rough edges. That’s my “business” site compared to this being more of a personal thing, so there’s not meant to be a whole lot of content there. But likewise, if anything sticks out as glitchy, pass it along.

I just saw this from Broseph magnate Alan Aragon (not to be confused with the Tolkien character or Viggo Mortenson) on the Facebooks.

http://www.printfection.com/brainygear

I got dibs on the Placebro Effect.

For anyone that’s interested, I’m going to start pushing posts from this blog to my Impulse Strength Tumblelog as well as here. What this means is…well, not much in all honesty. I am a little more active on Tumblr than here, so it may be of interest.