“Wow” is all I could say when Jared sent me this picture. Swipe left for his accompanying message. He’s just a great guy, a genuine family man, and a solid client. I consider myself fortunate to be part of his journey. To boot, ask him yourself, and you’ll find that none of the small incremental changes we’ve implemented came at a cost of feeling burdened or sacrificial. In fact, we worked hard at REDUCING demand and self-criticism. These are important, because they determine long term success. We began distance coaching in the Fall; and since then, we know he is down at least 45-50lbs. However, between his strength metrics (some have tripled or quadrupled since then) and this photo, I think it’s safer to say the net fat loss is closer to 70lbs. In part because we aren’t sure of his exact starting weight, in part because of what I’ve seen in thousands of 45-50lb weight losses in over 40,000 hours of professional experience, and in part because he is literally outgrowing his available gyms, weights and fitness equipment, I know the muscle gain is significantly beyond the typical 10-15 that a bigger male will gain when he begins lifting. He has exploded in athleticism and mobility, all of which influence continued success. And the key is this: we never raised his weekly time cost for exercise beyond the beginning steps or beyond what he himself deemed reasonable. As such, he never had to “check out” as a husband, father, friend, or professional to achieve this. Efficiency and mindset reign supreme. What a fantastic job at working steps. And what a great testament to the long term lifestyle transformation approach, where we largely avoid rapid extreme over-stressors.
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“I don’t want to get too big” is a sad sentiment from both men and women. It won’t happen, even if you slave to make it happen, by the way. Training for size is a full time career of obsession. No offense, but you don’t have it in you.
From women, there’s often an accompanying sentiment, something like “weights will make me big.” Mind you, this is generally coming from people who are currently carrying excess mass, and the “heavy weights” at which they balk are 20lb dumbbells. Here’s a young woman @vilma__olssonwith a slender and moderate build, but squatting and deadlifting over 400lbs, and bench pressing over 255lbs. 255lbs is what her arms push, and her arms are tiny. She’s driven and training relentlessly to be as strong a competitive lifter as she possibly can be, and she still isn’t overbuilt. You’re living in a fairyland if you think that what isn’t occurring for this hard of a worker will accidentally happen to you. You won’t get big. But you should get strong. Quit putting it off. Without risk, you’re already dead. Risk is living. You’ve no clue what you can do until you hit what you can’t. How do you know your limits, if you don’t risk failure beyond them?
People eliminate risk, only to find they’re less creative, less fulfilled, less positive, more stressed. The beauty of physical training lies in the regular, palpable actualization of outcomes beyond prior thresholds, but only after risk. I have mentors who built wealth from little. They had to commit to endeavors, during which, if they failed, they would’ve ended up homeless. They KNOW risk. Then, I’ve met people who don’t know risk. They play so far under capacity and resources that whatever big success they point to is... quaint. Some people are so stably risk-averse, they stopped feeling alive a while ago. No amount of travel or experiences seems to light the spark anymore, because they’ve sterilized their lives from risk. I didn’t get the reps (https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx5bKl2HWhc/). No surprise. I’ve been more focused on legs recently. But I felt more life in that missed attempt than some people feel in their whole year. And nobody. What “I” think of as “me” is somewhere between a process and a journey, not a product. There is no “I” in the sense that the past happened to some other person at a point in the universe which no longer exists; and the very next moment everything enters a new physical space which renders the present as past. Growth or change relies on accepting this truth.
When I first meet people, they want to “get right down to business,” talking about exercise or diet or orthopedic problems. I’ll try to slow them down with my first and most important question: who are you? We’ll get to workouts and eating habits and injuries. But how did you become the person you are today? It’s an imprecise question as described in my opening paragraph. Yet that foundation is critical to how you should approach exercise, nutrition, and pain management. The question to discover that foundation most often strikes people as unexpected. Their response of surprise strikes me as having low self-awareness. As people tell their stories, I pay close attention to the types of words they use, and the perspective or themes that arise in their personal narratives. I want to know how this person defines himself or herself, and how they approach effort. When I turn it around, and explain who I am, I make an effort to describe the journey I’ve travelled in life all the while pointing out that THAT isn’t “who I am.” Titles and experiences and roles and rites of passages and monikers and names are our futile attempts to slap permanence on that which is fundamentally impermanent. None have any objective value. Once, while talking about adding certain increasingly authoritative credentials to my list of accomplishments, a client of mine said, “Jonathan, most of the time I’ve found that people aren’t set free by a suffix but enslaved by it.” He’s a medical doctor. I heard a very similar sentiment from another client who is a double PhD from a revered school, an Alzheimer’s researcher with some impressive published papers. When I’ve coached dietitians and physical therapists and notable lawyers, at some point, they all say something similar. Most accurately, “I” was just a guy who learned some things, made some mistakes, and listened in order to endeavor to improve, not by any brag of my own, but all by the grace of God and the support of people around me. Where was this effort made? Professionally, in health and fitness. Personally, in many domains of life. Who AM I? No one. Nothing. And nobody. Where am “I” going? On a path influenced by someone who was just a guy who learned some things, made some mistakes, and listened in order to endeavor to improve, none by any brag of his own, but all by the grace of God and the support of people around him. THIS is where I’m trying to go with people. Once they can genuinely connect with the fact that they really aren’t a self-made fill-in-the-blank, they can grow. We have all gotten to a moment in time which relied quite heavily on our environment. How many stories have you heard about the person who raised himself by himself in the woods without even a pack of wolves to defend him? Right. People want to think they are “who” they are without help, without others, without giving credit to all which came before. That viewpoint is a problem, since it doesn’t allow for you to become different. Most succinctly, “who” we want to be is a searcher and a listener. Pause. Think about this. Without those two, we have already found all we will ever find; and we will have already heard all we’ll ever hear. Thus, we will get no more than we’ve already had. And we cannot become any more than we’ve already been. “I” am nothing. I had a brilliant professor for Islam in college. We covered a replete history of the religion and the accompanying aspects of the cultural and surrounding historical influences. He had a penchant for noting incredibly wise observations on even unrelated topics. He once remarked, “some people have a philosophy, worldview, religion that is Absurdity: they say, ‘we believe in the Absurd,’ meaning that so much in life is contrary to expectations that they eventually come to expect absurd notions rather than logical ones.”
Although I am a pragmatist; I think I have more deeply become an Absurdist. Especially as I’ve obsessively worked with people on health and fitness and very closely observed so many people, I’ve found no better explanatory model. One of the most often spoken remarks I’ve heard is “I know what to do; I just don’t do it.” Ok. Well, I challenge that you know what to do. But let’s take for granted you actually know that you know what you’re talking about. This is absurd. You have a formula for success, but refuse to implement it? Around 90% of people who get gym memberships don’t use them, or certainly not effectively. The same can be said of workout equipment at home, videos, etc. People have access, only to refuse the use of their access. FitBits and other tracking technology have been increasingly adopted by American adults for the same 10 years that we have accelerated the obesity rate. It’s not about awareness. In fact, propose whatever other sentiment you like, whatever other excuse you feel legitimate, and you’ll end up empty-handed under scrutiny. It’s absurd. People work hard at worsening their health. Early in my professional career I noticed that ON AVERAGE people who had the most ample resources of time and money did not have the best health. People who live in comfort avoid the discomfort of growth. People who live in discomfort have seen this song and dance. To this day, the only people I know who can afford in-house chefs or consistent meal prep programs struggle far more in taking care of themselves than people who are slaving to feed their families. I know guys who could have every single perfect and tasty meal made for them every single day, but they don’t. They could train every single day; but they refuse. They have the time to do whatever it is they like; but, just like all of us, they fill the calendar with other things. It’s absurd. A big piece of this absurdity is due to purpose. People without deep meaning tend to make worse decisions for their personal health: https://www.asc.upenn.edu/…/strong-life-purpose-healthier-c… When I say meaning, I’m not referencing whatever banner it is you wave in order to convince other people that that is your mission. I’m talking about deep down in your heart. If making beneficial choices is a persistent battle wherein you chronically lose, it may be time to reevaluate purpose. This would make sense, obviously. But the Absurdist in me expects you won’t do it. The most rational thing to do would be to take the feedback of ever-worsening health and take a critical eye at ones own beliefs and how he/she operates throughout a week. That’s sensible. That’s logical. So I expect you won’t. But I hope you will. And I’ll keep trying to rephrase it every way I can to help you try. This is my new favorite finisher for legs (video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx2gkdQDtHl/). You won’t need added weight. You won’t need many sets or reps. You won’t need a platform to begin with, because the tissue won’t be ready for this extreme angle in most people, even highly trained athletes. Be careful. Gently work your way into increasingly greater depths over time.
What I’ve now seen is that foot health helps or hinders execution of sissies (and a whole lot more) in most people. The foot should be as or more dynamic than the hand. If you have always used it as a petrified hoof, you won’t have the foot mobility or toe strength to handle a deficit or maybe even full ROM at floor height. BUT, over time, you want to gain this capacity regardless, since, as evidenced by this movement, it does dictate how well you move through the rest of the chain, ankle, knee, hip, back, and even neck. People will complain of neck, shoulder, back, hip, knee problems without ever addressing the ankle and foot. Go ahead and get new window panes; still got a crap foundation. There are people with atrocious MRIs who are pain-free. There are people with no obvious imaging issues with intense pain. Several weeks ago, BBC ran a piece on a woman who experience NO PAIN during pregnancy and delivery, accidents or surgery: https://www.bbc.com/…/uk-englan…/the-woman-who-feels-no-pain
For reasons we don’t fully understand, a lot of people experience pain when they are doing something beneficial or productive for the body. Those same people feel little pain while they avoid improvement, and they have a great reduction in symptoms while they actively make themselves less healthy and fit. Meanwhile, there are people who don’t experience much or any pain during damage; or they’ve even de-trained the feedback loops in the body which would hold them back from injury so they can’t rely on “pain” as a demarcation for discontinuing certain activities. It’s a paradox. Sometimes you must suffer acute excruciating physical pain, mental, or emotional suffering, in order to improve. Other times, you must hold yourself back when there is no pain signal, because you may be doing harm anyway. This doesn’t even scrape the surface of the psychological component of “perception.” I’ve seen people feel physical pain acutely when absolutely nothing physical is going on. I’ve seen my kids fall or take an impact trauma without acknowledging the event. Pain doesn’t tell the truth. We tell it what to do. So there’s this multi-faceted skill with regard to pain. Some of it is genetic. Some of it is Pavlovian conditioning. Most of it is directed by how practiced or skilled you are at being in pain. Sympathetic over-activation comes in and takes over. And occasionally a reliably reproducible motion or angle can trigger it. But that doesn’t even mean you should avoid that motion or angle. Because pain lies. And it may be the very thing you need to do to improve and reduce your lifetime overall sensation of suffering. I’ve had orthopedic pain and injuries, nerve damage and oppressive nerve pain. But a great eye-opener was when I had unrelenting body pain during an infection. I had joint pain, spine pain, and debilitating nerve pain from... nothing. As I reduced my physical activity it did basically nothing to reduce the pain. In fact, the only thing that got me out of the non-stop daily suffering was MORE pain from activity and lifting. Likewise, from a whole litany of contributing factors, I had chronic hip pain from 1998-2008. 10 friggin years. I had to hobble some days. Ultimately this was resolved not through avoidance, but through embracing increases in pain as growth, such that my baseline of pain experience dropped out. Reliance on NSAIDs also worsened the situation, since they block tissue repair. I had to endure worsening to experience bettering. And I’m not in any way insinuating that this is an analog for other people’s pain. It’s variant. It’s frustrating. In summary, however, it’s totally unreliable and misleading. I’ve worked with hundreds of ankle sprains where we can get people better by making the tissue burn in a deep pain worse than ever experienced. Elbow tendinitis can be remedied sometimes THAT day with very high repetition excruciatingly painful sets of exercise. Persistent rotator cuff aggravation gets better when we increase motion and remove the ice, compression, and pain meds. There isn’t an answer. It’s just food for thought. We can get so skilled at being in pain, and so emotionally adept at connecting fear to the cure, that we never really get better. We can lose the win by chasing momentary highs, escaping effort, and living a life punctuated by reaching for “relief.” But real relief never truly comes. Only in desperation does someone find a way out. And it’s usually to go through the very door they’ve feared opening and stepping through. When confronted with “no pain, no gain” I shake my head in disappointment. I’d much rather hear people tout the goodness of “no pain, no pain.” But, as I covered in the above paragraphs, a lot of people have been trying to follow the path of “no pain, no pain” only to live a life of pain. That physical pain reinforces itself by bleeding over into the mental, emotional, and psychological side of things, which, in turn, raise physical sensation of pain. It’s a tough spot in which to find yourself. So surely we must show more compassion to others in pain and our own selves when in pain. That all said, the flip side of the coin is a a bold tough love with ourselves when we may really be digging a pit instead of building a ramp. Pain is deceiving. Your butt has been asleep in the Catskills for over 20 years. It missed the revolution.
Hip activation and hip strength is fundamental to good living. When people have difficulty connecting to strength training form, technique, or even enjoyment, a lot of times it has to do with SGS (sleepy glute syndrome). It’s no surprise. And it’s nothing about which to feel shame or guilt. We put ourselves in hard chairs, seated in a flexed hip position for all of our schooling and formative years and often continue the trend beyond those years. Constant, persistent, chronic sitting IS hip flexion. The hip flexors (psoas major, minor, ileacus), therefore, are short (and still possibly weak), while the primary hip extensor (glute max) is long and weak. We doubly confuse the situation by taking two other hip extensors and shortening them. And the rest of the butt is practically dead while we place direct pressure into it by sitting all the time. This is no small issue. Your butt is sleepy. In 100% of movement assessments, I don’t see optimal control of hip extension and abduction. I haven’t met one distance runner yet who has great hip control. Yet, control of hip extension, abduction and rotation would prevent back pain, various knee issues, and even upper spine, ankle and foot problems. Loss of balance and the propensity to fall as we age is connected to ever-weakening hip musculature. People with strong glutes don’t fall. They don’t break hips. They don’t get joint replacements. They don’t have back pain. They don’t have knee pain or ankle and foot issues. They live better and longer lives. So what do we do now? Well, probably bridge to begin with, and only in a way where you can feel the glute firing hard. In 15 years of movement analyses with thousands of people, most people are barely safe to stand. The glutes are so asleep that when they squat even a little all they feel is quads, knees, and back. So people will avoid squatting and do leg press or walking or hiking. But this amplifies the problem. It doesn’t solve it. Because you simply chose a movement which plays to your weak glutes and keeping them inactive. So I say start with bridge. If you have a very solid strength coach, you can performs squats and lunges and deadlifts pretty early in the program. But if you’re going it alone, 99% of the time you’re going to irritate back, knees, and ankle even with a basic squat, EVEN when your form “looks” perfect. The look is wholly immaterial. You must connect with your hip extensors while you complete an exercise that IS hip extension. I don’t mind hip thrust and step ups and any other form of activity. Just keep in mind that your butt has been asleep for at least 20 years. So there’s no obligation to wake it up now through activities like cycling, running, or group workouts. I know many people who injured themselves doing extremely light group workouts because the instructor SAW “good form.” That’s a red herring. Correct activation and proper sequence of firing is the definition of proper technique. These are proprioceptive loops tied into your own nervous system’s skill and tactile feedback. Visual confirmation does nothing in a lot of cases. There are some tell-tale signs with extreme lumbar extension, inward collapse of knees, over pronation, arch flattening, etc. But in a group or on your own, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll miss this. I mean, I have clients who were collegiate D1 athletes and their current control of hip is a joke. The average person who pulls up a YouTube workout video or attends a group workout has odds stacked against them. This is no indictment on groups or instructors. It’s the nature of how we in the industrial modern world have gone out of our way to detrain standard human movement. Your butt has been asleep; and no amount of hope or hearkening back to the pre-revolution days is going to bring you up to speed. There was indeed a revolution, by the way. People in the fitness industry and the exercise science communities have been increasingly raising awareness about the importance of glute control for two decades. However, even amongst the initiated, they generally still spend more time in a sleepy hip flexed position. Prospects seem dim. But if you can spend even a modest amount of time paying attention to this critical ability, prospects are great. Strong hips improve life. Awaken your Rip Van Winkle-Butt from its slumber. There are at least four situations wherein your body composition is improving while you feel “squishier.” Be aware.
1.) You are finally crossing the barrier between maintenance/gain and actual fat loss: Your body is loathe to change. Most people are walking around with a stockpile of energy in the body which ISN’T fat. Thanks to a functioning liver, every time you burn off blood sugar, you will make more EVEN WHEN YOU HAVEN’T EATEN. There is an unknown threshold for this. That is, you can even deplete muscle stores of glycogen and those in the liver, and your body will still make more EVEN WHEN YOU HAVEN’T EATEN. As the muscles get depleted of readily-available energy, they are less full and literally occupy less space without losing any tissue, making the skin by comparison “more”. Congratulations. You finally are crossing the resistance toward obligating the body to use SOME fat. 2.) You are oscillating across the barrier to fat loss: This situation is similar to the first. However, if you aren’t doing very strict progressive strategies with nutrition, or strict ketogenic nutrition or extended multi-day fasts, you will replete then deplete, replete then deplete. Every time you cross the baseline, the skin will feel comparatively greater than it did while depleted. This phenomenon is actually utilized in body building, where you attempt to time maximal skin dehydration DURING maximal muscle repletion, making the skin comparatively thinner and tighter than it was even hours prior. It’s tricky, because, in the same way, the bodybuilder’s physiology will have “spillover” at some point, possibly on the way up, making the skin puffier. Individual timing and repeated muscle contraction disproportionately engorges skeletal muscle versus skin retention. 3.) You are nutritionally so low that your effect from strength training has decreased: This is tied into the technique bodybuilders use for contest or photo shoot prep, except the opposite. Your weekly “pump” is decreased. That is, as you diet progressively harder, you are decreasing the frequency of intensity such that muscles run “flat.” This is essentially the first situation, but persistent. Your overall program is in fact running you at a deficit sufficient for fat loss. The rate of depletion is consistently outstripping the repletion rate AND there isn’t a lot of blood volume available for acute muscular swelling. Insulin is low, so sodium retention and blood volume drop (along with blood pressure). You’ll feel “extra skin” which may even persist after goal, depending on individual and total loss. Until the fat loss is substantial enough to dramatically thin the skin, this state is a constant. I jokingly refer to it as “the sweet spot” because it is a state where you keep getting wrong intuition signals all the time; and it can be emotionally and psychologically defeating. You simply have to persist until you get shredded enough that there is no squish. The good news is that when sleep and nutrition are on point, you won’t really lose any muscle here. But for advanced athletes in particular, I find they pretty much self-sabotage at this stage because it “feels” like they’re getting worse. And when they began a cutdown effort fatter than they were willing to tell themselves, this period can last weeks. That is, when you think you have 20lbs to lose, it's probably more like 40. When you think you have 100lbs to lose, it's probably more like 150-200lbs. People grossly overestimate how much lean tissue is in the body. And we really only discover how little is left when you've stripped off all the extra subcutaneous and visceral fat. 4.) unrelated/related inflammatory cascades and biorhythms: There are a lot of these. But I’ll try to catch four common themes. a.) Females have a much higher propensity toward stress-induced fluctuations in fluid retention. And they have the added frustration of a hormonal backdrop aimed at surviving famine and holding on to everything possible. When stress hits, they tend to respond more with a growth signal than a loss signal. As more stressors come in, their bodies (on average, mind you) try to get bigger. As such, they have a far higher propensity toward thyroid insufficiency and metabolic downturn with even “normal” dieting and exercise. That all said, I have had female clients lower on DEXA scan and skinfold caliper pinches WHILE weight was up from a fluid retention episode based on an emotional fight the day prior. This obviously leads us to the next issue. b.) Periods - both in the classical sense AND there are hormonal cascades and cycles which continue occurring directed by brain and other tissue even with IUDs or in peri/post/menopause. The classical monthly cycle is easier for the layperson to understand. Your body fat can be low; but your body can create enough hormonal cascade to retain fluid in an amount in excess of the fat loss. But, wake up call: there is basically no such thing as a classical monthly cycle. Extreme regularity with low and consistent symptoms is RARE. So you can imagine (and yes, I realize that I can only imagine) that for many many women the unpredictable and variant nature of hormonal fluctuations makes skin “squish” totally unreliable as a marker of progress or compliance. They simply have to work steps in a dark hallway sometimes. And that itself is a stressor tied into note a.). It’s also why I spend most of my coaching time focused on mindset and physical capability versus body composition. Extreme stress mongers may not be in a position in life to safely pursue major body comp changes. But we are all always in a position to work productive steps. c.) food sensitivities/allergies I know. You don’t want to admit you have them. You’re thinking, “It’s a fake pseudoscience concocted by beatniks in Portland.” I wish that I had the incredible luxury you have to continue believing that. And make no mistake: if you so won the genetic lottery that you are still able to dismiss food sensitivity, you do indeed live a luxurious life wealthier than some billionaires. If you have even the slightest openness in your mind, I’ll leave it at this: go eat poison berries. No seriously. Go eat them. What even makes them “poison”? They look, smell, taste, and even chemically are very similar to edible berries. What’s a’ matter? Scared? The obviousness of this subject is ridiculous at this point in human history. We know that the tiniest alteration on the periodic table is the difference between life and death. Move just a few subatomic particles, and oxygen is fluorine. There are foods you eat which will make the skin squishier. In fact, they may make you in totality squishier. I know almost no one who went from overweight to absolutely super lean without removing grains and dairy at the end. Lookup published scientific research on foods and endocrine impact. They affect our hormones. End of debate. d.) drugs They’re in food. They’re in packaging. They’re in your soaps. They’re in you. I’m mystified at the willful ignorance some people display on this one. I’ve heard the exact same person in the same hour blame weight gain on a prescribed medication while also scoffing at the notion that additives in packaged food or laundry detergent could possibly affect them at all. See c.). Find at least one exercise you like or look forward to in the 5 categories of lower body push, lower pull, upper body push, upper pull, core control. I love upper body pulling exercises. That is the only reason that I’m the only person on earth to perform a momentum-less muscle-up at over 240lbs of bodyweight, over 30 consecutive clean wide grip pull-ups over 240lbs, and I do Kroc rows without chalk or straps with up to 275lbs. Likewise, my reverse flys are ridiculous (https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx0WbB5jPX5/), but because I ENJOY this. You have to enjoy something in physical activity in order to stay plugged in.
It doesn't matter what I like to do, what your favorite fitness influencer likes to do or tells you to do, what your local gym owner says you should do. All that matters is healthily and honestly evaluating which things you can look forward to, be good at, tolerate or dislike. If you dislike the whole host of them, guess what: you will not get a benefit and/or cease the effort altogether. I’m an advocate for standard and conventional lifts. Have some proficiency at them in order to be highly functional. But some people just aren’t going to come to love them. Find variants with which you have some enjoyment and to which you look forward. Work your weaknesses, sure; but also give your heart the pleasure of being good at your strengths. |
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