You decided to drive up a hill. You sense the engine working harder. Naturally, take your foot off the accelerator, right?
A lot of times as we take on a mountain, the effort required goes up dramatically. Sensing the resistance, there is a lot of emotional response: overwhelm, hopelessness, helplessness, defeat. But is precisely at that point that one has to push harder. When all seems futile is the exact moment that your exertion is about to overcome. Rightly, the body thinks it can’t continue this level of output. So it ceases. But we have not left for ourselves a break. Rather, we have left for ourselves a whole mountain, except now without momentum. Push on.
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You ARE Doing It.
The wisdom of the doulas - nothing is expressed in potentiation. Either something is. Or, we don’t mention it. There’s no “maybe.” There’s no “you can do it.” Not “it may be.” Instead, you are doing it. Right now. This instant. You are doing your diet, your program, your religion. They may be productive or unproductive. But, you ARE doing it. When people embark on fitness efforts, I find it counterproductive to talk in potentiation. Sure. Philosophically, you “can” do all kinds of things. Who cares? You ARE doing it. As we spread out the perspective, we must also cast aside "bad week" or "good choices" and all the pats on the back or the guilt and shame. The past is passed. The future is coming. Now is all we have; and in the now you are doing it. There's no need to make up for anything. There's no need to feel bad about anything. There's no atonement needed in your program. You are doing right now the sum total of your in-the-now execution. There's no next week. There's no tomorrow. There's no first of the month. There's this instant. This is critical skill in fitness success. Humans have a tendency to place themselves in an emotional state of reward or punishment that is disconnected from the present. They'll think about "time wasted" on making no progress, and then they throw away the current opportunities. Or they'll think about some future start date, some imaginary forthcoming week with perfect compliance, productive eating, daily workouts, no challenges. This thought is so exciting that people get a sense of accomplishment in the present. It's similar to how wearing a FitBit satisfies a psychological need to think you're doing something productive for health and fitness even as both worsen. Wearing a FitBit isn't DOING anything. What are you doing? Not later today. Not tomorrow morning. RIGHT NOW. Yes. You "can" do anything. You "may" end up doing a lot. But right now you ARE doing it, whatever it is. For positive feedback or critical self-awareness, you ARE doing it. Famously, Richard Dawkins has stated that the universe is indifferent. But it is not. We are the universe, in part. We are the same particles and elements which comprise all things in this universe, from black holes to Saturn’s rings.
Insomuch as we are apart from it, the universe is not even close to indifferent. It is inimical to life. Not just inhospitable, the vast majority is dead set upon the end, nay, even the prevention of biological flourish. Look at the empty silent cosmos. Our petty sliver of one tiny world contains a brief cosmological instant of life. That’s it. That. Is. It. All the rest would snuff out life immediately. Go ahead and test this. Grow a plant on the surface of the sun, the crushing gravity of most heavenly bodies, the vacuous space without atmosphere. Even the extremophiles of our caves, our ice, and our volcanic undersea vents haven’t a hope beyond the Van Allen belt. People talk about how unfair life is on Earth. Try to see how fair it is in the other 99.999999999999999% of existence outside of the Earth. With great pride, people announce their apathy: I don't care; not my problem; why bother; not worth it. We may utter a sentiment like this in the futile attempt to pretend like things will naturally get better or like our vote doesn't matter. That ostentatious indifference, however, is actually siding with the majority of the universal constraints which actively snuff out life. We pick a side when we don't pick a side. Time and entropy are in a non-stop divine mission to destroy all that is beautiful within biology and living creatures. They don't need another ally. They need another enemy. Insomuch as we are a part of it, the universe is supportive... when we choose to be. Let us choose. Let us be combatants and warriors against all which seeks to worsen ourselves, our neighbors, and our world. Let us not claim the ignorance which accelerates our health degradation. A daily counterproductive food intake is a vote to worsen ourselves. Let us not claim the ignorance which tolerates the oppression of people. A daily inaction toward our fellow man is an active attack on him. Let us not claim the apathy which amplifies our Earth's destruction. A daily dismissal of our impact is an effort at negative impact. And let us not make the great mistake of indifference. $10,000 Reward Remains Unclaimed: to The First Person Who Accidentally Gains Too Much Muscle6/19/2019 After the first two people said this nonsense in my presence in 2004, I levied a $10k reward for the first person to do it. The prize remains unclaimed.
No one has ever inadvertently packed on too much muscle. That includes male genetic superhumans who are anomalous statistical outlier freak athletes. Maybe 4 people on earth make so little myostatin and such immense amounts of IGF that they put on more than us all. But that’s it. Everyone else, here’s what is actually happening: The moment you go from inactive to active or from using pointlessly low resistance (like lots of aerobics and 2lb dumbbells) to actual stimulus (lifting weights which will improve strength), your body is going to carry more immediately-accessible energy within muscles. This can correlate to a “weight gain.” The well-intentioned - but extremely misguided - person reasons that he/she is going to keep adding “muscle” at that rate, when in fact all of their gain has already come to a halt. It wasn’t muscle to begin with. This leads many people to think they “put on too much muscle,” when, in fact, all that ever happens for anyone is an initial 2-8lb increase in glycogen stores and on-site fluid availability. That’s the ceiling. You’re done. I wish it would keep going. But the next size gains could take ten years of slaving at heavy weights. We see that female athletes who become incredibly stronger end up right around their starting weight or less, even when they jump from no heavy lifts to ALL heavy - and extremely heavy at that - lifts. There are 125lb women with over 300lb deadlifts for reps. You are being silly when you say that lifting heavy weights leads to too much muscle. The second - and tightly-connected - problem is that everyone has too much body fat. Trust me. When you lose all but the trace amounts of fat on your body, you are NEVER going to react by saying, “wow, there’s a lot more lean mass on me than I thought.” Ask any person who BECAME lean. I’m not talking about lifelong ectomorphs. Ask someone who thought he or she was lumbering around with piles of muscle but got down to shredded. You may have 30 fewer pounds of muscle than you thought. Get a DEXA scan every 3-6 months, and you will be confronted with a very inconvenient truth. So, an already-obese person picks up a dumbbell, gains some healthy intracellular weight, and reasons that she puts on “too much muscle” too easily. And then this fallacy reinforces a monumental problem in our culture: The actual truth is NO ONE puts on too much muscle; the average outcome is a 1lb LOSS per year. That’s right: you’re actually losing ONE POUND of muscle and/or lean tissue (bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments) EVERY YEAR. And the ONLY thing that can slow that train or reverse it is heavy strength training. THAT IS IT. I’ve seen it thousands of times. As people age, fat loss becomes more difficult. It’s becoming more difficult because you have 20 fewer pounds of lean tissue on your frame than you did two decades ago. At 65 years old, a person who weighs exactly what he did when he graduated high school has 48 fewer pounds of muscle, intervertebral disc, knee cartilage, and skeleton than he did at 17. So people look at their bellies in confoundedness. They throw up hands in exasperation. They say, “I just can’t explain it.” Well... I can. You lost piles and piles and piles of functional tissue and replaced it with energy storage. The hormones which drive muscle development are disappearing every day. And you added to that a dearth of skeletal stress. You don’t sprint. You don’t pickup heavy things. What did you think would happen? Female clients lament how their husbands can “so easily” lose fat just by dieting a little or walking more. “Right,” I say; “because they haven’t lost all their muscle... yet - just wait.” And sure enough, a few years later, the same exact woman says, “my husband is having a much harder time getting the ‘weight off.’” “Yep,” I reply. It’s predictable. We’ve created this cult of scales. But the scale isn’t showing you that each year you lose at least a pound of muscle and replace it with at least a pound of fat. DEXA is showing that to people. Skinfold calipers is showing that to people. Plethysmography and hydrostatic weigh-in IS showing that. People take lean tissue for granted. It isn’t granted. It’s actually being stripped from you this very second. And your next hiking retreat or ultramarathon isn’t going to keep an ounce on you. But, the check is waiting if you think you know better. I’ve conducted well over 10,000 consults and observed tens of thousands of gym-goers trying heartily to pack on a milligram lean tissue. You don’t gain too much muscle. If you did, you would live painfree and health-issue-free forever. There is a revolution afoot. If you're more than 20 years old, you likely remember a time when you or a schoolmate broke a limb and were in a cast the whole summer or practically the whole school year. If you've been paying any attention, you'll have noticed no one does that anymore. The science of healing has changed a lot. Official guidelines for post-surgical patients went from weeks or months of inactivity to "get up and move ASAP". Movement IS the cure. In fact, we're having to question a lot of previous recommendations about rest as a treatment due to more and more findings pointing to the fact that some of the hormones and enzymes involved in healing will not be produced during inactivity. This Harvard paper explores the concept even with regard to back pain: https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/babying-your-back-may-delay-healing?fbclid=IwAR0hMkGyMV7R2bqQ4YHySgRR6aSd_qgqgvB-v6MlGg-41s6V2cdDuRm_qPE
It should've always been evident that there is such a thing as too much rest. But the propensity toward torpor bled out into all kinds of areas of medicine. Think about directives to have pregnant women or people with cardiovascular disadvantage "not push themselves." In the first case, we were telling someone who is going to engage in the most physically demanding activity of her life to prepare by doing nothing. In the second case, we were telling someone whose only hope comes from physical improvement to avoid the very stimulus that provides improvement. It's no surprise then that even certain aggravation, certain pain, is not really going to improve by avoidance strategy. The average American loses one pound of skeleton, tendon, muscle, ligament, cartilage per year and gains one pound of fat per year every year after age 25 or so. Our problem is not that we need more rest from movement. Our problem is that we are getting the exact health and body we deserve from our ever-increasing rest. I have had the great fortune of being able to observe tens of thousands of members and clients. I have never seen a longterm successful outcome from avoiding intense lifting and heavy weight training. Every single pretext for rest ends up amplified by rest. Even when people discover a short-term reduction in pain symptoms or irritation from discontinuing intensity, 100% of the time their overall status is worsened in the mid-term to longterm. A single week break from physical activity can lead someone to lose a substantial amount of endurance and stamina. A two-to-four week break loses both the skill of strength and the deep anti-inflammatory benefits from contracting skeletal muscle. I've known people who had great reductions in their need for surgical intervention while they trained hard three days per week, and in some cases these same people had a linear increase in surgical need correlating to their reduction in lifting intensity and frequency. One client in particular forestalled all cortisone injections, surgeries, and pain medications at the peak of her hard training. In the wake of increased work demands, she started to experience a tiny uptick in her pain, ironically interpreted that as a reason to reduce her training, but at EACH step of frequency and intensity decrease she had a measurable linear increase in her need for pain meds and cortisone injections. She thought she was trading the acute irritation of lifting weights for improvement. But she was trading short-lived pain for longterm deterioration. Getting weaker and weaker, her path was predictable, but unavoidable with the increases in rest. On rare occasion I've encountered some laggard clinicians who err on the side of gratuitous rest periods for their patients. I don't know if they don't read their own journals or if they skipped the continuing education workshops. But this is not evidence-based any more. This is ignorance-based. As such, every single time it worsened the situation. I have a client whose neurologist recommended 4 week rest periods after a 3-part procedure. That added up to 12 weeks of low to no physical stress. Mind you, this client is a person with a movement disorder wherein we KNOW that inactivity aggressively progresses the disease. The outcome was tragic. The client lost coordination, all conditioning, and well over 25% of his strength. The procedure, which should've improved the situation starkly, appears to have done absolutely nothing. In fact, even a year later, it's evident that the 12 week rest period made a permanent negative impact. It was completely out of step with the neurologist's own official guidelines. Brain surgery patients should get up and moving as soon as humanly possible for very good reason. The motor cortex informs the rest of the brain's health. So, technically, you can't even heal properly UNTIL you incorporate exercise. That's not even mentioning risks of clotting and stroke. It's just basic sensibility: we don't get better by removing the stimulus to get better. Orthopedic pain is a tricky item. There are so many emotions wrapped up in it that 9 out of 10 times people's intuition leads them to reduce the physical activity such that pain really doesn't go away AND the genuine orthopedic pathology worsens at an accelerating rate. Consequently, at long last we can see this changing in the medical and physical therapy guidelines. And we have proof positive in astronaut studies. Weightlessness doesn't make anything better. We require a certain amount of physical stress to just hold this thing together. Babying the body seems prudent from a certain point-of-view during aches and pain. But that babying is causal in the worsening of your condition. People worry about the PRECISE rep count. I hate to break this to people: reps don’t matter, like, at all.
In exercise physiology and biology, the definition of energy systems feeding into the citric acid cycle is all about time under tension. Your muscle fiber hasn’t clue one whether you performed 37 reps in 45 seconds or 3 reps each over the course of 15 seconds a piece. It’s physics. Force times distance is work. Power is work over time. Reps don’t matter because you could lift MORE weight for MORE reps and still REDUCE the work and power performed by going a lot faster and/or decreasing the range of motion (the distance over which force must be produced). That is, imagine person A can squat 100lbs for 10 reps over the course of 30 seconds at a greatest-depth of 90 degree knee flexion. If she increases the weight by 5lbs (5%) and the reps by 5 (50%), but reduces the knee flexion to 45 and completes the set in 25 seconds, not only will she have performed significantly far less work (more than 30% less as the force produced on the eccentric portion drops dramatically with faster reps) and power (at least 10% less), the improved leverages with reduced time will drop her perceived exertion by several factors. The weight and reps both went up a substantial percent. But the stimulus dropped by MAGNITUDES. All the body knows is motor unit recruitment and sarcoplasmic adaptation. If you solely focus on rep counts, there is no obligatory need for the body to change. Absolutely no one who understands exercise science cares about the rep count ALONE. What was the duration of effort? What was the perceived effort? What was the load’s percent of 1RM? What was the range of motion? These are some interesting questions. But reps: 8 or 10? 20 or 30? 100 or 1000? No. Nothing valuable to be gleaned there. From one point of view (that of “pushing” the human spirit), there’s always five more reps, no matter what. From another point of view, an effort is alactic when maximally handled for 0-15 seconds, lactate at 15-45 second, and aerobic after 45 seconds. If an exercise program tells you a rep count, the proper response is to ignore entirely. The set demands 15 reps? Cool. What if you get to 15 and have more in the tank? Do more. What if you can’t get to 15? Cool. DON’T DO 15. The asinine and endless rep recommendations from fitness enthusiasts don’t help laypeople. I’ve seen someone think they’re performing a productive set when they complete 12 reps but clearly have 70 more in the tank. I’ve seen people think they’re “failures” because they don’t achieve a made-up number. No. No. No. Just challenge yourself intelligently in a progressive manner. That could be 1. That could be none. It could be 17. In fact, I kinda like prime numbers exclusively for rep goals. They’re more trustworthy, since they’ve fewer escape routes when divided. Without a lot of other reference points, reps don’t friggin matter. If nothing else, be humble enough to learn.
I’ve seen absolutely broken people become athletic, turned their lives around, accomplish unbelievable things. But they were willing to be mentored or taught. On the contrary, overconfident students were done before we met. From the moment I began to interview possible employees back in 2005, I would ask cocky candidates, “how do you pour more water into a full cup?” I’ve since seen it in conversations with would-be clients here and there. Until someone is genuinely and deeply willing to reevaluate, they won’t grow. And I have met a lot of full cups. Be ready to empty your cup. Otherwise, the content will remain the same. Down over 50lbs
30+%bf ➡️ 13%bf This is one of those incredible clients who dialed in every piece of the coaching: the training; the nutrition; the recovery; the supplementation. And it so obviously shows. You can follow her at @megsdrakester23. Her journey involved first focusing on diastasis recti. With that she made outstanding closure of her abdominal fissure at the outset. The composition change was a nice addition. But her overall strength improvements, which aren’t so easy to showcase in a quick post, were the most staggering. People like to think of fitness as products; but they’re ongoing processes. Likewise, with this client, the journey continues to evolve, even now as she is in the midst of another pregnancy. In third trimester, and she squatted nearly 200lbs last session! Just start. People think they have to do 50 new lifestyle behaviors. Just one is solid.
As people get some steam rolling, they still believe they must need the 50 item checklist. You don’t. You don’t want it. You don’t need it. Modern humanity has created a litany of impossible requirements for itself. One is being a perfectionist and multi-tasker. Neither one is a real thing or possible; they're mutually exclusive; but we definitely try to do both in our minds, and end up being neither in our deeds. In the fitness world as well, the centerpiece of CrossFit has generally been "work out as hard as possible for as long as possible." Again, these are mutually exclusive. In exercise physiology, there is EITHER maximal intensity for as short a time as possible OR maximal duration for as little intensity as possible. These are quantifiable places on a spectrum of human performance. Likewise, we want to start AND rock out a 50 item list. No. These too are mutually exclusive. Even entertaining the "clean up every area of my life" concept itself negates starting. Be realistic. You aren’t going to eat 42 egg whites and a pound of spinach (and nothing else) a day every single day for 4 months, fasted cardio every single morning for 4 months, and the same 5 workouts each week every week for 4 months (I’ve done EXACTLY this before). And even if you do, then what? Just start. Get strong. Stop shooting yourself in the feet. Be realistic. A weigh-in isn’t a strategy. It isn’t a motivator. It is data, cold hard and INCOMPLETE data, with no need whatsoever for emotional attachment.
As a conscious decision, I have almost never shared my personal metabolic experiments WHILE doing them. Partly, this is because I don’t want to call more attention to weigh-ins, and contribute to the social reinforcement of scale-worship. Partly, the weird stuff I do, though educational, is not particularly analogous for the layperson. That said, this go-round I am going to share during the experiment. This was my peak weigh-in 2.5 weeks ago. To be clear, I was gaining weight on purpose, in order to regain lower body strength and mass lost from last spring/summer experiment (I didn’t train legs for 6 months). I don’t have an end-weight goal, though I expect to end up under 225 to be pretty lean. During this particular season, I will relegate myself to only 16 minute bouts of “cardio” for cutting down. I’ll share methodology along the way, all of which has to do with strategy and steps, NOT weigh-ins for anything except dispassionate data collection. |
Elev8 Wellness
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