Making Muscle – Page 6 – newstasis :: a blog about improving wellness

A Shift In My Thinking About Workout Nutrition

Up until recently I held the view that the most important aspect of workout nutrition was the post workout shake. It is made up of at least sugar and whey protein powder although I will sometimes add glutamine and creatine to it. The goal of the shake is two fold – first, large doses of high glycemic index carbs will cause a huge release of insulin which will promote energy transport into the cells and secondly, supplying the body with protein and anything that the muscle cells will need to fully recover when insulin levels are high will result in a great cell uptake of these nutrients.

Over the past few months I have been taking large doses of BCAAs before and during my workouts on the belief that supplying my body with the materials it needs to regrow BEFORE my body starts to break-down protein may prevent my body from breaking it down. Check out my rationale for why BCAAs will increase the likelihood that you will increase lean body mass. My experiences with them have caused me to alter my view considerably. If the goal is to prevent the body from entering a catabolic state during a workout, waiting until AFTER a workout to consume the protein shake is already putting the body at a disadvantage from a growth stand point. You are in a much better position if you don’t take the steps backwards (entering a catabolic state) before you enter the anabolic state.

The approach I am taking now is to consume some dextrose (high glycemic index carb) and whey protein before I start my workout. I may consume BCAA’s during the workout if I’m training a large body part (legs) or doing a higher volume or intensity workout. So far it seems to be helping. I’m finding that I have more energy and I’m getting a better pump in the working muscles.

Considerations When Trying to Build Mass

Very often people will ask me what the best rep range is for building mass. It’s a simple enough question but like everything else with the body, the answer isn’t as simple as saying “6-9″. From my experience it has more to do with training age, time under tension, and movement speed.

Training Age:
As one trains, they get better at recruiting motor units and are therefore able to achieve the same workout with fewer reps. E.g. assuming the average newbie is able to recruit 40% of their motor units. As they perform reps, fatigue will set in and in order to continue the set, they will need to recruit different motor units. At some point they will fatigue all available units and the set will have to end. Assuming a 5% fatigue rate of the total units per rep, they will be able to do 12 reps before they fail.

Someone who has a higher training age will be able to recruit more units per rep. They will also have more muscular endurance which will delay fatigue. Assuming they are able to recruit 80% of the available motor units per rep and that 3% of them fatigue per rep, they will be able to do 7 reps before they fail.

The end result is that failure occurs after 7 reps for the trained athlete and 12 reps for the new athlete. Both achieve the same physiological state of failure; it just takes fewer reps for the trained athlete to get there BUT they’ll be using a much larger weight.

Time Under Tension:
Regardless of most other factors, the length of time it takes to complete a rep will impact the amount of work that one is performing and it will impact the amount of motor recruitment. 6 reps with 505 tempo will recruit more fibers than 6 reps of 211 tempo. When someone asks a question which is better for growth, 4-6 rep ranges or 12-15 rep ranges but doesn’t mention tempo the question is impossible to answer. 12 reps at 101 tempo = 24 seconds TUT while 6 reps at 505 tempo = 60 seconds TUT. You’ll get better size gains with 60 seconds than you will with 24 seconds, but you’ll be able to handle more weight for sets lasting 24 seconds vs. those lasting 60 seconds.

Rep Speed:
Some of the motor units *may* not be recruited at slow speeds while others will not be recruited when moving at a fast speed. IF you do not recruit a motor unit the muscle fibers that these motor units control will not grow. There is also a growing body of research that indicated that the growth potential is not the same for all fiber types / motor unit types – fast twitch appear to have the potential to grow more than slow twitch.

Putting It All Together:
Keeping TUT between 45 and 75 seconds and varying rep speed is key once training age reaches a certain point or, more accurately, once you gain a certain amount of control over your motor units. Remember too that the body adapts quickly to EVERY action that it has to perform so variety is key.

Lean Muscle Mass and the Older Individual

I remember my dad’s 60th birthday. We had a surprize party for him and we stayed up late playing guitar and having a few beers. We ended up in the garage so my mom could sleep and sometime around 4 AM my dad stood up saying “I don’t feel 60″. He jumped up, grabbed one of the rafters and started doing pull-ups. I think he managed 5 or 6.

I remember thinking that there was no reason why he shouldn’t be able to do 5 or 6 pull-ups when he’s 70 or 80 because I’ve never been a big believer that people have to decay as they age. Frankly, I think your body will continue to do what you get it to do until you die. Of course there have been heated debates with people who believe that muscle wasting is a symptom of aging.

Making A Strong Case For Building Muscle by Ellington Darden Ph.D presents some evidence that my belief is correct.

… researchers found that inactive men gradually lose muscle as they get older. But the athletes who continue to train throughout their 30s, 40s, and 50s, tend to keep their muscle mass stable. The loss of muscle was not age related, they concluded.
“We can see that the amount they have is directly related to the amount of time they spend exercising,” says Evans. He also referred to strength-training research in which 80- and 90-year-old men and women significantly increased the muscular size and strength of their leg muscles.

Life is long and even as the years continue to mount, the body continues to function as it always did. The key is to keep doing what you want to be able to do when you get older. This is important for EVERYONE. Start NOW to ensure that you will be able to as you get older.

Did you hear me? START NOW!

What I Learned In 2007 – Eric Cressey vs. Patrick McKinney

Inspired by T-nation author Eric Cressey’s What I Learned In 2007, I decided to put together my own list of things that I learned in 2007 (note – Eric’s 2006 article was my first ever post so be sure to read this years version).

1) Gifted athletes do not necessarily look remarkable but there is something weird about the way they look when they train. A few weeks ago we did the athlete testing for SST’s 12 week football academy. There were a variety of assessment tests but the one that stood out to me was the penta jump. This is basically a standing long jump with 5 jumps instead of just one, all linked together in a fluid unstopping order. It is a skill, but talent does impact ones performance.

Many of the athletes performed unremarkable, which is what we expect to see at the start of the camp because many of them are untrained and are coming off of a month or two layoff from exercising. But one of the athletes, a 14 year old, look weird doing it. He seemed to float away from me when he jumped – each jump took him so much further down the turf than any of the other athletes. His distance way 6-8 feet longer than any one else in his age group. I wasn’t very surprised to see his sub 5 second result in the 40. He’s 14 years old and pretty small. I’m looking forward to seeing how he’ll continue to improve as he grows pounds of muscle and gains more complete neural control over his muscle firing patterns.

2) Fish oil supplements eliminate most of the shoulder pain I experience when I’m lifting heavy. I’m both shocked and happy to have found this to be the case. There is practically no fire in my shoulders in the days following my chest / back workouts. There used to be pain that prevented me from sleeping and stopped me from training heavy in the summer. This is all but gone now, thanks to 6-10 grams of fish oil per day.

3) Great athletes embrace coaching, lifters tend to ignore it. How someone responds to feedback plays the biggest role in the quality of feedback that they get. The gifted 14 year old listens to all the advice and coaching that he is given and he continues to improve, and people continue to coach him. This isn’t surprising because people do not like to waste their time. IF someone isn’t going to follow the advice that is given to them, people learn very quickly to stop giving it to them. Personally I begin to disengage from a person after the first time they role their eyes and DON’T change their movement pattern – they can role their eyes, call me a prick but so long as they change their movement pattern I’ll keep coaching them.

When it comes to lifters most of them do not want to lift correctly. They lift the weight and not the movement. I look away a lot when I’m at the commercial gym because I don’t want to see someone hurt themselves and feel responsible from helping them. I’ll offer advice to a young lifter on the off-hand chance that they want to become better, but more often than not they don’t want to hear it. This is too bad for them and good news for Rachel because she’s going to be an athletic therapist and will have a lot of people to work on.

4) Energetic coaching is more important than knowledgeable coaching when it comes to working with young or inexperienced athletes. Young people don’t not have the movement inventory or body awareness that older people have because they have spend less time in their bodies interacting with the earth. Most athletic movements are going to be new to them and they are not likely to have the motor control to move their bodies in the way that is required in order to be performed the movement correctly. For this reason, advanced coaches are not going to be able to use their knowledge to facilitate improvements within this population. More importantly, given that it is frustrating to be bad at something, particularly when a coach or another athlete does it with ease, inexperienced athletes may find quitting an easier choice if they do not find any enjoyment in an activity. An energetic coach can help bridge the gap between a lack of experience and learning a new skill and will often help the young person find joy in an otherwise unrewarding experience.

5) Rotator cuff muscles are primarily fast twitch fibers and should be trained in the 7-10 rep range with fast effort and slower negative tempos. This one could have read – people should train their rotator cuff muscles. I started doing internal and external rotation exercises just after I started working at SST after the cause of my horrific posture was pointed out. While I am still imbalanced in this area, I’m catching up and standing taller than I ever have.

6) Steady state cardio promotes fat storage while high intensity interval training creates more EPOC that will result in greater fat loss over the long haul. I credit RPM with starting my brain thinking about this one. The choreography is interval based with exertion levels growing from comfortable to breathless. One of the things I found once I stopped trying to keep my heart rate at 150 was that I was more tired at the end of the workouts and couldn’t do so much riding. I also noticed that there is only have a finite length of time that I can get my heart rate above 160 and once this time is up I get too fatigued trying to bring it up there again.

As this relates to fat loss: you need to workout very intensely to promote fat loss, but you need to workout at various levels of intensity to get the most fat loss because it requires the most amount of energy to adapt to many different level of effort. Also, if you workout at just one intensity, your body will quickly adapt to make it more and more efficient to work at that level the next time. This means if you are working out at a level that requires fat as fuel, the body will adapt to store more fat to fuel the effort next time. If you keep it at a steady state, your body will become so efficient at working at this level that it will stop losing fat. Given that your activity level will not change, it is unlikely that you will alter your diet to account for this improved efficiency and will begin to eat a calorie surplus thus promoting fat storage.

7) Spell check and proof read your resume a number of times before you submit it. We initially passed on a trainer candidate because of the typos on his resume. I looked over his resume a week later and thought that maybe there was a good reason why the mistakes were there. When we chatted it was obvious that there wasn’t a good reason but that he was a good candidate. He did fantastic in his interviews and we hired him. He is a gifted trainer with a wonderful demeanor that allows him to connect with almost everyone he engages. I’m glad I called him because he is a real asset to the team and a good human being. But I almost didn’t take the chance because of something that is very easy to avoid.

The Myths of the Squat

The Myths of the Squat and Bench Press – by Rob Wagner is a great read for anyone who as been forced to consider the injury potential of squatting ATG (ass to ground) and it is well referenced. It is worth mentioning that I have yet to receive a single citation from an ATG squatting nay-sayer about why full and deep squatting is bad from someone with healthy knees; they can be passionate detractors but lack any evidence to support their claim that it will destroy healthy knees.

Myth # 1. Squatting is bad for your knees.
Dr. Klein’s can take the credit for launching this one. Studies carried out over the past twenty years have rejected Klein’s findings. In a study that looked at the effects that full squats and half squats had on knee stability showed no change, over eight different tests for stability, when compared to a control group. To determine the long-term effects the same researchers looked at the knees of competitive powerlifters and weightlifters and found that powerlifters and weightlifters had tighter knee joints than the controls (Chandler & Stone, 1991). Another study found that the involvement of the hamstring in full squats plays a role in helping protect the anterior cruciate ligament (Manariello, Backus & Parker, 1994).

If you do squat and don’t go down very deep, you are limiting your growth potential as well as capping the sports specific performance benefits of the exercise for a few reasons:

If you squat through 50% of the range of motion, you will need to do twice the number of reps to do the same amount of work.
Partial squats either limit the time under tension (which is critical for hypertrophy) or force the athlete to move very slowly to achieve the time under tension. Slow movements tend not to be very sport specific.
Partial squats do not cause the same amount of GH release because they do not force the body to work as hard.
Partial reps do not improve strength along the entire length of the muscle belly so you will be weak once your knee flexes into the untrained range.

NOTE: there is a time and a place for partial reps if you have good knee integrity but the bulk of your squatting should be ATG deep. If you have poor knee integrity, deep squatting my not be the right exercise for you.

My First Functional Workout

I closed on Saturday so I decided to do a full body functional workout. I did the following movements:

Tire flipping
Battle ropes
Farmer carries
Pull-ups
Dips
Keg press
Log press
Sled pulling

It was an energy systems workout so I used perceived exertion as the guide for how much work I should be doing. I did 4-5 sets of everything except the sled pulling. It took me about 45 minutes.

What I liked:

Most of the movements are new to me so it was easy to stay focused.
The keg and log press are a lot easier than Olympic lifting because I wasn’t afraid of banging my hips into the bar.
I got that lung burning feeling that I only get during the first hill ride or race of the season.
My heart rate went up very quickly.
The tempo of the workout is closer to that of trail riding than my usual weight training because pull-ups and dips do not work the entire body like tire flipping or farmers carries.
It was fun to really push myself that hard.

What I learned from it:

Battle ropes are brutally hard on the body and lungs – I was expecting the tire flipping to be the toughest aspect of the workout but after about 25 seconds of whipping the ropes I was “fall on the ground” tired.
A keg that is partially filled with water is a tough implement to hold overhead.
New and novel movements are a lot more physically taxing than well practiced movements with substantially more load.
It is possible to get a really good workout in a junk yard using “crap” so you don’t have to rely on state of the art equipment.

I was a little sore yesterday, particularly in my chest and lower back, but it felt good. I think I’m going to enjoy closing on Saturday’s a lot more now!

Long Steady Distance / Low Calorie Diets, Cortisol and Brain Aging

Last summer Tony agreed with me that I was probably killing myself with all the cycling I was doing. Soon there after I wrote Shortening your life by too much exercise to capture what I call the finite beat hypothesis – the heart has the potential for a certain number of beats and once these beat occur the heart stops working. It is a theory that seemed to make sense to me at the time.

In September when I started working at SST it became evident that the volume of cycling that I was doing was slowing my muscle growth because of the high level of cortisol associated with exercising longer than 45 minutes. Once I dropped down to one cardio session per week my lean body mass started to increase. If cortisol can have that dramatic an impact on lean mass creation what impact does it have on other body tissues?

A devastating impact.

Stress hormone may speed up brain aging outlines the findings of a recent study on an elderly population. The goal of the study was to determine if there was a relationship between cortisol levels and hippocampus size and neural density. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that is implicated in memory and spatial awareness functioning. It has long been known that in most individuals, there is a decrease in hippocampus size as they grow older and, as a consequence, ones performance on memory and spatial awareness tasks decreases with age. However, this new study indicates that the degree of deterioration is related to cortisol levels such that those individuals who have higher levels of cortisol show greater impairment and the size of their hippocampus is reduced when compared to those individuals who have lower cortisol levels.

What are the practical implications of this finding?

If you want to keep your brain functioning at a high level for the duration of your life you need to decrease the amount of stress you experience. This doesn’t just mean psychological or mental stress, it also means physiological stress.

Steady state cardio sessions that last more than 45 minutes have been shown to increase cortisol levels as have intense resistance and strength training sessions of the same length. Limit the length of these to less than 45 minutes and if you can’t, make sure you consume some simple sugars during the sessions to mitigate the bodies natural cortisol release in response to a drop in blood sugar level.

Very low calorie diets or eating behaviours that include not eating for more than 4 hours in a row should be avoided as they will cause a release of cortisol.

You should eat within 20 minutes of waking to help lower the level of cortisol in your body – cortisol is very high in the morning because you have not been eating. The sooner it is reduced, the sooner the negative aspects of cortisol will be eliminated.

Remember that cortisol is a wasting hormone that causes your body to consume itself to maintain functioning. When cortisol levels are high very little of your body will grow and we now know that this includes your brain. If you want to maintain a high quality of life into your senior years you need to avoid activities that promote cortisol release when you are younger.

Working out vs. Training

I used to workout and I got pretty good results. I had a nice lean body and was more or less able to eat whatever I wanted. My friends would say that I looked good and I didn’t have any fear taking off my shirt.

Now I train and I get great results. My body is a work in progress. I can’t eat what I like anymore and I don’t listen to people when they comment of how I look. I take my shirt off to change and my girlfriend gets more out of the way I look than I do.

What are the differences between working out and training?

Purpose:
People who workout are trying to improve their appearance or some characteristic of their body. It could be to lose a few pounds, to lower cholesterol or normalize their blood pressure. In most cases there is an end point and once the individual reaches it, they can enter their maintenance phase and don’t need to workout as much.

People who train are primarily trying to improve their performance. They are pursuing something, a number or reps, a weight, a time, but they are after something that is slightly more objective than “looking good”.

Drive:
Most people who workout do so fairly consistently. They do more or less the same thing every week e.g. cycling class on Monday and Wednesday, upper body weights on Tuesday, lower body weights on Thursday and whole body on Saturday. They do more or less the same exercises during these workouts and rarely change things up because they are happy to be improving.

People who train cycle through their exercises and change their programs when things stop working. They are not content with simply improving, they need to be improving as fast as their potential allows them.

Intensity:
People who workout do so primarily with moderate intensity. After their workouts they are glowing and look like they are full of energy. They’ll be able to laugh and joke right after and will probably have a shower before going home.

People who train look close to death after they finish. They will have given everything they have to their training and will likely be gasping for air, soaked with sweat and generally feel worse than they did when they started. They’ll be consuming a protein shake while trying to recoup enough energy to change and go home. Their energy level will be low for a while and they are not going to be joking or laughing.

Passion:
People who workout feel less strongly about what they are doing. More often than not it is about feeling good in the moment and having fun. While working out may be an aspect of their identify, it does not define who they are. They workout based on their schedules. They’ll tell you that they workout and will often try to convince others to do the same. They may even invite others to workout with them.

People who train ARE their training. Their training takes over many areas of their life and is often the focal point of everything they do – training sessions determine when they eat, sleep, work and socialize. They’ll make you wait until after they have finished training and won’t try to convince you to train with them – if you aren’t already doing it you aren’t anyone they would want to train with.

Satisfaction:
People who workout get a lot of satisfaction from working out. Good enough is good enough. They won’t talk about achieving their potential because they feel they already are.

People who train tend to have fleeting moments of satisfaction. They may experience a high or bliss right after competition or achieving one of their goals, but soon thereafter they find themselves raising the bar and starting towards an even higher goal. They will never be happy with their performance and this is why they continue to train.

Never Give Up – CrossFit Video

From the CrossFit website we learn that “CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.”

They have a lot of videos on youtube if you would like to see what it is all about. ‘DL, J RingDip, RopeClimb‘ is one that tells the story. It is a little messy but it is a great example of determination and how the body responds to high levels of lactate.

Throwing-up is a natural response by the body to high levels of lactate and high levels of lactate is the natural response to intense exercise without sufficient oxygen. Lactate inducing workouts are fantastic for fat burning because of the massive amount of EPOC (excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption) they create.

I believe that this type of training is going to become very popular because it is effective at leaning a person out, building relative strength and developing mental toughness. It teaches a person how to ride the line between too much exercise and just enough exercise and this will allow them to get the most out of their time at the gym.

I don’t see many people working out like this at commercial gyms but did get people to the threshold a few times when I was a trainer at one – my boss didn’t like it very much because it was “bad for business.” I don’t know what he was talking about because my clients got results and renewed with me; but it could have had something to do with the fear instilled in the new members who see them holding buckets to their faces.

Time To Fail, Again – Problem with Commercial Gyms

It is January and the busiest month of the year for all commercial gyms. This month alone counts for 15-20% of the years new memberships. The problem is that 5% of the people who sign up will NEVER set foot back in the place except to cancel. In 6 weeks another 25-35% of them will have stopped coming. In three months another 25-30% will have stopped. By this time next year, only about 15-25% will remain.

I appreciate this time of year for a few reasons. There are a lot of new people in my class, so I have a new opportunity to change peoples lives by helping them find that “oh my God” moment when they have pushed harder than they thought they could and realize that they are still in the fight. My classes are full and there are people waiting at the door to get in; this means that those who do make it in are going to work harder and not leave midway through.

But on a more cynical / realistic level, this time of year marks the start of one of the worst periods for 75-85% of the people who join the gym. It represents the moment in time when they made a mistake and actually believed that they had the ability to change their life and become the healthy person they thought they were.

I’ve seen 1000’s of people join and quit the gym. I’ve sold 100’s of people on the dream that they could look like me, the trainers, the regulars and the sexy people on TV, only to have their dream fall apart a few weeks later when they realize that they are not ready to achieve their goals. I used to feel bad about it so I stopped selling at a commercial gym.

When I’m teaching RPM at GoodLife, I try to be encouraging, upbeat, high energy and honest about what the participant are about to go through. I tell them that it is going to hurt, I let them know that it is going to take a few weeks of sustained effort before the class starts to get easier, I mention that I was once brand new at it and that I found it to be one of the toughest gym experiences I had gone through in spite of the fact that I raced mountain bikes and had been active for most of my life. I try not to sell anyone on the “you can do it” dream and instead try to sell them on the “it’s going to suck until the end of class” reality.

I’ve learned that there are 10-15% of the population that are going to burn 80% of the calories. These are the people who are already working out and will remain working out regardless of everything. These people need coaching on form and that is it. They supply the motivation and will find their way to the gym when the roads are closed due to snow, on Christmas day when everyone else is at home, and when they are in their time of need. Working out for these people is similar to prayer for the faithful – it’s what they do when they need to find peace.

How do you become one of the 10-15% if you are not one of them?

The easiest way is to get a personal trainer (PT). Over the years I’ve gone from considering PTs as jocks who count reps to considering most of them to be jocks who hold the unmotivated to their promises. I’m not certain but I have the feeling that most people show up to their appointments because they have public integrity and don’t want to go back on their word to another person; but it could have something to do with the $0 refund for no-show appointments – the notion of losing $60 for not showing up to an hour appointment may serve as more of a motivator than the fear of dying from an obesity related illness.

There is a lot of talk in the business about personal training and how much commercial gyms profit from it – very often the gym pays the trainer only 25-35% of the hourly cost of the session. This means they get 65-75% PLUS the monthly membership cost. But, when you get down to it, most PTs are getting a fair wage based on what they actually know and they also get to be “Personal Trainers”, which carries some prestige in many gyms.

But it is an undeniable observation that those who train with PTs WILL stick with their workouts for a longer period of time. If you are not one of the 10-15% who treat working out like worship, getting a PT will allow you to behave like one of them and it will help you stay diligent with your workouts.

I have nothing to gain directly from encouraging people to train with a PT because I do not work for a commercial gym – SST uses floor coaches to offer guidance to all of the members who are working out. My suggestion that working out with a PT will increase your likelihood of success is based on years of observing the sales cycle in a commercial gym. If you are not already working out there is a 85% chance that you will fail to become one of the ones who work out UNLESS you get professional help. Get an expert and change your life. Otherwise you may just be helping to buy all the new and shinny equipment I love to workout on.