No pain. No fear. This variation with the slingshot may be one of the best pressing exercises for people with orthopedic concerns. I haven’t even a faint hint of joint irritation. video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu1Ju-Qje3h/
I recently saw this bridged decline bench variant by @larrywheels (although he was actually on a bench) and so wanted to try it. But the fear from my pec tear was still there. Then - wouldn’t you know it - last week in my garage I found the same #slingshot I used during rehabilitation after my surgery a few years back. Thanks to @marksmellybell and @mbslingshot for this wonderful little apparatus. Although I can barely get the thing on and off my arms. This winter, I’ve deviated from my normal/abnormal training and been practicing more classical bodybuilding lifts. Seeing as this is the heaviest bodyweight I’m going to let myself get this year, I’m testing what strength feats I can before I get little again. The fact that I could push it, go heavy, and feel no pain or fear leads me to believe this is a great variation for all populations, both compromised people with injuries and advanced athletes for maximal overload. The repetitive overuse syndromes common with flat bench have many solutions. Namely, stop doing the exact same flat bench press. Also, people need to balance out the skill of the shoulder with movements for the back and external rotation. That all said, going into the bridged position incorporates lats, changes the angle of press, and (when paired with the slingshot) makes the shoulder feel just peachy even at weights and intensities in excess of normal flat bench work.
0 Comments
Elevations in total cholesterol don't have a proven and defined correlation with heart disease risk, let alone cardiac event. The stories behind why anyone came to believe such a connection existed are complicated. Many an author have gone to task to explain how the errant belief ever came into being, how pharmaceutical companies vending cholesterol drugs were loathe to let the public become educated on the topic, and how dogma around this subject pervaded medical school training. I'm not interested in covering all of that today. It's been done to death.
Instead, in short summary I want to create clarity for the layperson, with nothing that is contended in biology, biochemistry, or medical science: 1.) cholesterol is a necessary ingredient for every cell in the human body 2.) your intestines, liver, and adrenal glands are responsible (not the consumption of cholesterol) for how much cholesterol is in your blood 3.) total cholesterol is meaningless without looking at the subsets of particle sizes 4.) cholesterol particles and especially triglycerides fluctuate quite a bit within a single day There is no one in all of medicine or science who disagrees about these things These aren't debated. Rather, people forget these four facts, and then end up at disparate conclusions. Keep these four things in mind. And, as you do, you'll notice that just suppressing cholesterol in the body can be quite counterproductive. When you study all of the hormones which are synthesized from cholesterol, you get really worried about your cholesterol getting TOO LOW, not too high. While you are active or losing weight, you'll have INCREASES in triglycerides from time to time. That's your body breaking down stored fat. And frankly, just the notion that dietary fat or cholesterol is gumming up the arteries was a non-starter from the get-go. Take butter, lard, coconut oil, or heavy whipping cream, with their incredibly high cholesterol and saturated fat content and apply them to your hands. See how high the friction on your hands is now. Your hands can barely move against one another, right? Now take syrup or honey and apply to hands. Now your hands glide smoothly without any friction whatsoever, right? Yeah. You get the idea. It's definitely the dietary cholesterol and saturated fats which were causing damage. And the acceleration in heart disease prevalence definitely has nothing to do with those "heart-healthy" carbohydrates. Right? *wink wink* This email was sent to me by a client who is indeed visually very different. He started somewhere around 290lbs. That’s all fine and nice. But the important thing is inside he is transformed and we’re past the two year mark (second photo is a graph he sent me a ways back). The progress in these numbers is great. But also he’s strong as hell (deadlift went from an unsteady 45 to an easy 350-400). He is off of medications. He does activities like downhill skiing FASTED for 10 hours. That is an internal identity shift. That’s not just a bolt-on weight loss story.
External visual weight loss is our fixation. But if the stats under the surface don’t change 2 years later, 5 years later, 10 years later, and the mentality of the individual doesn’t change, who cares? You don’t even have to watch closely and you’ll notice shredded people on IG and YouTube who are absolutely struggling with both depression and terrible internal health. Cool photos, bro. But where is the internal change? Nice six pack. But are you happy? That’s a great posed smile. How about a candid pic of contentment? Nice transformation. But did it lead to getting OFF of drugs? According to Will Rogers, step one is to stop digging.
I see this with people in fitness and in business. A sort of gambler’s mentality double-down addiction seems to take over. Since the last effort at “dieting hard” and exercising too much didn’t create any lasting change, might as well do another 30-90 day aggressive attack again, right? First, stop digging. Then, start thinking about building some steps. Everyone wants to skip the vital step of building steps. “Don’t bother me with steps; I’m too busy digging.” Just pause. Stop digging. Reflect on steps. My son asked me how humans thought before the invention of words. I told him that’s a valuable question. I asked, “What do you think their internal voice sounded like, since they didn’t have a language?”
Sounds and symbols and lines and grunts. There is zero inherent power to any written or spoken word. We gift power to an inanimate collection of angles and inflections. Only by great assumption and expectation does a message grow out of a phrase. But it could always just as easily be the opposite of what we take it to mean. A person’s words may be received as if to shake the world. But the same words could be received no differently than the creaks and crackles of an old tree rocking in the wind. In fact, the waves of sound coming from the cellulose shifting in the foundations of a tree may mean far more than the most profound words we’ve ever felt. I’ve heard and seen people respond to another person’s words, saying, “it can’t be taken any other way.” But what a sad, small response. Any words can be taken all other ways. That is their beauty. Because they are nothing but what we take them to mean. We gift them the power of light or darkness. We can make a mountain out of a molehill. We can a molehill out of a mountain. To my son’s question, what would you think or do without language? Would you take the sounds of nature as threat or as art or as peace or as motivation? Think long and deep on it, since the complexity of language is just another view and sound of nature. And it can all be taken however we find it to be productive or not. We can burn up energy on indignation. Or we can draw energy from inspiration. We make meaning. They will always boil down “failure” to lack of hard work or lack of will.
It just isn’t so. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that until you’ve worked a decade of 60-100 hour weeks in big box clubs where you cannot isolate yourself inside your phony bubble. You wouldn’t know it’s wrong until you run scientific experiments on metabolism. You wouldn’t know it’s wrong if you didn’t look to find any other explanation. You wouldn’t know such a thing as TOO MUCH exists if you never study economics. I have known the hardest working, most dedicated, most compliant people who are already PAST the point of diminishing returns. When you are PAST the point of diminished returns, you don’t get MORE benefit from MORE input. You get less. I’m ashamed of how I and some of my early employees created imaginary narratives about gym-goer regulars who increasingly got in worse and worse shape over time (circa 2005). We thought they were closet eaters. We thought they just weren’t working hard enough; or they were eating “too much.” But then we got to know some of these people, well, like REALLY well. One girl worked out twice a day, HARD. She met with me and a few of my employees for nutrition programming and we found she was UNDEREATING. This was not a total statistical outlier, mind you. I’ve come across this HUNDREDS of times. Again, if fitness is your hobby, not your true profession, you wouldn’t know this. Your data set is incomplete. I mean, I think it’s cool that people who like being in shape call themselves trainers or coaches. But just check yourself. Before you have over 10,000 hours of dedicated time focused on laypeople and helping them improve, please shut up. You found something that works for you and your tiny little populace of basic bro clients. Please stop making grand sweeping generalizations about humanity. And if you don’t understand how human physiology can gain fat while undereating and working out A LOT, just recuse yourself from the discussion. I once had a client whose blood lipids, glucose and calculated liver glycogen reserves represented about 2800 Calories. Her MEASURED resting metabolic rate was under 600 (the calculation tables would’ve anticipated she be closer to 1800). She couldn’t get her heart rate high enough to burn more than about 160 Calories per hour. And at an hour she’d be ready to collapse. Even if she fasted completely and worked out four days in a row, there was no guarantee her body wouldn’t just break down proteins in order to feed the gluconeogenic pathway and spare body fat. Never mind the fact that my collapse comment wasn’t hyperbole. Ok, genius, tell me how to solve this one with your calories-in/calories-out “just push harder” methodology. Iron will and hard work don’t overcome physical laws. No single technique works for everyone. Move more/eat less is a decent idea; and it’s not terrible advice all the time. But it misses a fair bit of nuance, namely that most people aren’t eating enough NUTRIENTS to run a halfway decent metabolism. Some conditions are different than others. Once you are “in shape,” you are an anomaly, and abiding by very different rules than the average American whose underlying health is extremely compromised. I have a client who lost 20lbs over the course of 6 weeks when I forbade him from exercising. That’s right. I demanded that he NOT exercise. He was in a state of complete overwhelm. And I reasoned that he needed to REDUCE perception of stress. Exercise can be an eustress for anyone. But it can be past the point of diminishing returns for people who view it as torture. There are ample studies showing that two groups of people dieting and exercising the same way have different results based on sleep. Rest and recovery contains a magic we are loathe to understand. Now, advances in bacteriology and microbiology are showing us that our symbionts are powerful allies or enemies. There’s a complexity that we can’t escape, no matter how simple-minded we wish it would be. Push harder is simple. It sounds good. It makes for a great motivational speech. But its practical application value is ZERO for a lot of people, maybe most. Stress must be managed, and intelligently leveraged. It can’t just be heaped upon itself wantonly with an expectation of good. And if that’s all anyone ever returns to in their philosophy, there’s a good chance they’re a fake fitness “expert.” Lots of different diets and exercise programs accomplish the task at hand. For weight loss that keeps it off, one factor supersedes all others: consistency (http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/default.htm).
What can be sustainably integrated into your identity for the rest of your life? That’s it. 1. This is a signal best suited for children who are GROWING
2. As an adult, it’s an indicator of micronutrient supply/demand inequity (i.e. - look at choline and B3 first, not calories) 3. It’s the symptom of fat loss 4. It’s tied into Pavlovian conditioning; so, after you neglect it several times in a row, it goes away One of the first clients I met nearly 15 years ago had had a stunning 80lb weight loss in about 2 months. That was from bypass surgery. In the 10 months prior to meeting her, she gained 100lbs. In the course of a year, she had for a moment been one of the most exciting testimonials for rapid loss that you could imagine, and then ended up 20lbs heavier than her start.
I am constantly educating people on sustained lifestyle. It may come across as shocking to people who have not worked tens of thousands of hours in the fitness industry, but momentary snapshots aren’t worthwhile. We have to make it bigger than loss. It really must be about optimizing life. And I question the validity of the general emphasis on scales and body composition. Where I’ve seen people improve HEALTH (and the rest of fitness for that matter) is in the establishment of regular positive behaviors, not vapid superficiality. video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BuunEq1n7ey/
It’s an indication that you have good spine health, you have thoracic extension, you have the mobility to not just hit healthy ROM in shoulder flexion, but that you can actually exert force in a flexed/laterally-abducted/rotated shoulder. And in our culture, that basic motion required for this exercise is so absent/undertrained that people have given up on overhead training altogether in some cases. Per the suggestion of my friend @petertressel, I revisited this lift which I was not able to perform without nerve pain for a few years. With the safety rails placed where they are, I could reposition as needed and avoid the bottom portion which has triggered nerve issues on my left side previously. This is how you can safely bring back the joy of behind-the-neck training. Given that it went decently, I could foresee reducing load and working the bar all the way down to the traps or even re-attempting behind-the-neck jerks in the not-too-distant future. For people with certain injuries, imbalances or challenges, start with basic dowel work and examine wall posture checks. If you can’t easily work dowel drills, it would be ill-advised to attempt pressing behind the neck. If you can’t hit basic starter positions with heels, hips, shoulders, head, and forearms simultaneously in contact with the wall behind you, then that will be your goal first. “What are these drills and checks?”, you ask. Stay tuned. Once you have them, set up a stop-gap like I have here. After that, 200-400lb overhead presses will come next. |
Elev8 Wellness
|