_ The gym is a place for experimentation, play, and physical expression. It is not a place for punishment, shame or degradation. In my imaginary utopian society, the gym is a place where people are free to express themselves physically, without overbearing structures, pressures to conform, or any kind of humiliation. Trying to ‘work off’ the cream tart you ate three days ago is futile. It’s a socially sanctioned form of self-flagellation, and will ultimately lead you to self-loathing and feeling like a failure. Your health and the shape of your body are not determined by a primary-level mathematical equation comprised of a whole bunch of pluses and minuses. Your shape is determined by your hormonal environment, your genes, your sleep and stress levels, and a billion other things that cannot be calculated, let alone controlled. Whatever you ate, and however you judge it, it is done – it’s assimilated, it’s metabolised, and there isn’t this special pocket of fat that’s reserved for donuts or chips, that you can dip into for energy when you’re exercising or skipping a meal later on. It doesn’t matter how much you ate before, in the future, you will need to eat again.
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A statue of Bruce Lee There seem to be all kinds of studies around, saying conflicting things. Or if not conflicting, just championing the benefits of different approaches to training. Sometimes vilifying others. Since it seems all forms of training involve benefits and risks, how do you determine what you want to train, how you want to exercise? Enjoyment. That’s it. Often when I’m training, I feel like I should be doing more ‘cardio’, or I should rest for more, or less time, in between sets, or I feel like I should do a certain number of sets or reps, or I should pair this exercise with that, and I wonder about maintaining a balanced physique, and developing my strength efficiently, and all that jazz. There are two thousand-million opinions on what’s best, and I don’t have the time or inclination to listen to them all. _ I like to talk a bit about athletic development, but it’s not always obvious what that means. The way you compete at your sport and the way you develop yourself as an athlete are quite different. When you see someone sprint at the Olympics – that’s not what their training consists of. There is sprinting, yes, there’ll be other things too, but it’s not a matter of just busting your ass as hard in training as you do in competition. The process of development is different from the testing method. The way you get better at something is not just by doing that thing at maximal intensity, all the damn time. That’ll get you some part of the way, but it’ll also get you fatigued, miserable and burnt out. Developing your athleticism means paying attention to what helps you to progress. Sometimes that’s going to be working at insanely high levels of intensity, but usually it’s not. The science of strength training is interesting. Depends on who you listen to, of course, because we (trainers) do like to talk. Something I keep coming back to – I forget the exact numbers, so bear with me please – is the difference between intensiveness (your perceived degree of effort) and intensity (as a percentage of your one rep max). Exercising for your health is not at all complicated. It is generally enough to seek out something you like, and do it regularly. People like to give advice like move every day, and in truth, I don’t think there’s much more to it than that. But I’m still writing more, anyway. Exercise and food are the same; they should leave you feeling good - capable, nourished and strong. They should not leave you feeling bad - depleted, exhausted or inadequate. There’s a strong argument that the most healthful, natural exercise program you could follow would include plenty of movement most or every day (at a low intensity – such as walking, taking the stairs, and/or having a job where you’re on your feet as much as you’re sitting down) and doing something at high intensity one to three times per week. It’s easy to forget that all things exist in context and to take for granted what has brought us to this place. As a kid, I had an awareness that exercise was good for you and it could be fun, but perceived societal pressures and my latent (mostly unindulged) desire to rebel prejudiced me against ‘going to the gym’. Also, as is often the case when you’re young, I didn’t have a sense of self-discipline or dedication towards my own personal development. Generally we need some problem to come up – something to remind us that things could be better – something to inspire us to change. If left to our own devices, with little to complain about, we are unlikely to evolve at a rapid pace. Or any pace. And that’s fine – if you don’t need to develop, if something doesn’t inspire you to change, sooner or later something will and our responsibility is only to ourselves – to be aware and respond to our needs truly. So says I! The farmer's walk Okay, when you’re tackling an exercise like chin-ups, it’s easy to get intimidated. There’s a balance between doing enough ‘assistance’ work and too much. If you only train the individual components such as elbow flexion and grip strength, and neglect taking your body through the whole general movement, it’s hard to progress. Likewise if you just try to muscle them out without thinking about breaking them down, it’s also hard to progress. Come to think of it, they’re chin-ups. Progression is always going to be hard. But if you break it down well, you can work out an effective training process, one that works for you. In the last post I did on chin-ups, I took a look at the general movement, with varying degrees of assistance from the legs. So you didn’t have your entire body-weight hanging from the bar. In this post I’m going to talk about grip strength and how to develop it. Clearly, if you’re going to be able to do chin-ups, you’ll need to be able to hang from a bar. This can be a lot more difficult than is sometimes suspected. Considering that we’d like to build up to multiple repetitions of the chin-up, being able to hang from a bar with a straight body (a dead hang) for 45 to 60 seconds is a good goal to shoot for. It’s easy not to make time to stretch. I suppose it’s because of the view that it won’t help us get into a smaller pair of jeans, and it’s very easy not to make time to exercise in the first place, so it seems to fall by the wayside. But if you maintain the view that bettering your health is why you train, can you really get away without stretching? Olympic lifters are some of the strongest people in the world, but we hardly ever talk about how damn supple these people are. If you want to be able to squat down to the ground, without rounding out your lower back, you need the most incredibly supple hamstrings around. There are a number of reasons I like this photo – see how straight his lower back is? How the feet are flat on the ground, even if the shoes do have an inbuilt heel? How the chest is up and open, the shoulder back, and the bar is well supported? How the wrists are extended but the grip remains strong? Fitness Gadget #87: The Kettlebell Are you pursuing the truth of your own development, or are you buying into the propaganda that shames you and exploits your fears? This is a running theme with me, and the question arises because I feel my training wants more structure. I’ve been going to the gym and playing, as is my prerogative, and it suits my desires and sense of personal satisfaction well. Also it’s pretty much all you need to be healthy. I’ve been doing a lot of pull-ups, and I’ve progressed well. But every three or four months, I’ll tire of simply playing, and I’ll start to seek out some sort of structure. Then, having worked within a given structure for three or four months, I’ll typically go back to my gym time = play time approach. This is true to my sense of satisfaction. There’s a balance between playtime and learning new things, which is based on curiosity and experimentation. The old-school treadmill. Milling by treading. I only realised it lately – there is no such thing as cardio. Or to put it another way, everything is cardio. Which of course means the same thing, because when you realise everything you can do stimulates a cardiovascular response, the term becomes kinda meaningless. Your body doesn’t know when you’re training ‘strength’ or ‘cardio’ – nor does it care. These are concepts that we made up. Your body knows intensity and duration. It doesn’t matter what exercise you’re doing, if it’s short duration and high intensity, it provokes a strength response in the body – in the muscles and nerve connections. When you’re training for an extended duration at a lower level of intensity, that isn’t ‘cardio’, that’s endurance training. What’s the difference? ‘Cardio’ refers to cardiovascular conditioning which means: stuff that makes you breathe hard and gets your blood pumping. Everything does that, to varying degrees, depending on the intensity and duration. Ever done a heavy set of squats? Blood’s pumping hard, after ten seconds. That’s a cardio response. Sprinting, squatting, bench press, chin-ups, burpees, jumps – all of these stimulate your heart to beat faster and provoke a strength response in the body. Yet we think of sprinting as cardio and squats as strength work. That’s odd. Complete with heavy boots... I really like chin-ups, they’re one of my favourite exercises because they’re a great test of strength, a good personal measure, a yardstick, a bench mark, a what-cha-ma-callit. For whatever reason, I find them a rewarding and meaningful exercise. But people get the test and the training method mixed up all danged the time. It’s like school – you don’t just study information that’s pertinent to the test – the purpose of the test is to see whether or not your education is actually giving you an education. If you do only study what’s going to be on the test, you’ve just wasted your education. Likewise – you test your strength to see if your training is working; to see if it’s providing you with the athleticism it should. If you’re not progressing, you aren’t the failure, your training methods aren’t working for you. That’s what your test-results mean. Your training should be more comprehensive than just vainly attempting a test you can’t yet complete. And, like education, your training should be thorough and broad enough to equip you for life, and it’s good to remember that tests are nothing more than measures of progress. Unless you’re hanging out a window, your ability to ‘do a chin-up’ is probably not that relevant. But being able to pull your own weight, literally, having good stabiliser muscles and all over strength – which is to say – having a functional body with strong joints, good mobility, impressive lung capacity and endurance, well that stuff will serve you for life. That’s a good education for your body. |