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!

The best way to stop someone from giving you feedback is to make the person regret giving it to you. The quickest way to do this is to attack the person and call their credibility into question because these things will evoke a visceral reaction in them.

I noticed myself almost doing this the other day. My Group Ex cycling team leader took my class and we team taught. After class I asked him for his feedback. He likes the way I teach and believes that I have a good handle on what I’m doing. He suggested that I verbally coach and cue the riding positions to help the participants find a more athletic position. My automatic reaction was to think “I did that” and then “I did it more than he did” then “who is he to say that?”

What do these thoughts indicate?

“I did that” - this one really amounts to me interpreting what he is saying as an attack on me. My reaction was to assume his suggestion to do it more meant that I didn’t do it at all because I am not very good at instructing.

“I did it more than he did” - this is the beginning of the personal attack on him. It is basically something like “I did it more than you, you are saying that I need to do it more therefore you really didn’t do it at all”. It draws his credibility into question and it starts to paint him as being a hypocrite.

“Who is he to say that” - escalation the personal attach by belittling him; basically calling his qualifications into question so I don’t have to consider what he is saying.

In less time than it took to think it my brain had perceived and defended against an ego attack with no conscious input from me. The thoughts just presented themselves one after the other and in no time at all I had create the reason for not listening to what he was saying.

Fortunately over the years I’ve became more aware that I have these automatic reactions to the things I unconsciously perceive so I didn’t say or do anything other than listen to what he was saying and let the thoughts wash over me. I trust my team leader because I believe he is a good person who has my best interest at heart. He’s also a good instructor with good form and great fitness so his advice and feedback are both useful and honest; I know that it will help me and that is why I asked him for it.

Talking back to the automatic response:

“I did that” - I did, I know I did because I remember doing it and I do it every class. I do it out of habit because I’ve been instructing for a while. However, there was nothing to indicate that more positional cueing would have had a negative impact on the class or that it wouldn’t have helped them out. In fact, more of it would have been a good thing. It’s good feedback.

“I did it more than you did” - I don’t know if I cued the class more than he did but it really doesn’t matter. His feedback is good feedback - it isn’t good feedback because he or anyone else does it, it’s good feedback because it would have made the class better.

“Who is he to say that” - who is he not to say it? He’s an expert so what he has to say about it is worth hearing. Even if the feed back was to come from one of the participants it would have been worth hearing. People have a sense of what has order and what is unnatural; you don’t need to be an expert to offer advice on ways to improve something. This is particularly true when receiving feedback about an experience. Anyone having the experience BECOMES an expert so their feedback is worth hearing.

This week I took his advice and cued more. I did notice an improvement in the performance of some of the participants. Their shoulders stayed back while their chest remained up and open. When I cued their posture towards the end of the tough tracks some of them seemed to respond and increase their effort. By remaining open to his feedback, I became a better instructor.

If you notice that you have a tendency to close off when people offer you advice or feedback, you may want to consider talking back to your automatic response in order to reprogram it.

Eat Food. Not Much. Mostly Plants. A great article by T-nation author TC outlines 11 important rules for eating in the 21 century.

The farming world is very different now than it was 50 years ago and we are eating a bunch of food that didn’t really exist a couple generations ago. As a consequence our bodies are turning into temples of illness.

These new foods and the illnesses they cause are not isolated to humans. Cattle have had their diet of grass replaced with grain and corn feed.

Cattle don’t do well on grains. It makes them sick and they then require antibiotics. Furthermore, it changed the fatty acid content of their meat. Whereas normally the grass-fed creatures had omega-6/omega-3 fatty acid ratios more consistent with wild game or wild salmon, the corn-feeding turned them into hoofed heart attacks in waiting, the ingestion of which slowly clogged the nation’s arteries.

But we can now buy eggs that have been enriched with omega fatty acids to make up for the lower levels of these in beef - too bad for the chickens that their diet now contains food loaded with fatty acids. No doubt we’ll fix this by changing something else in the food chain.

3. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. 

We all know this one. The periphery of the grocery store is lined with fresh food, food that rots, food that’s alive. Those are the most nutritious foods. Of course, the suggestion isn’t fool-proof as Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt is in the dairy case.

Rotting good, staying “fresh” for years in a box bad.

6. You are what you eat eats too.

As discussed earlier in this article, cows and sheep are meant to eat grass, not seeds. If they eat too many seeds, they get sick and require constant antibiotics.

A grass-based diet for farm animals means the meat, butter, or eggs you eat, along with the milk you drink, contains fewer omega-6 and saturated fats, as well as higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.

9. Eat wild foods when you can.

Wild plants are richer in antioxidants than their domestic cousins. Since they have to defend themselves against pests and disease without the help of man, they had to get tough — develop a bevy of interesting and potentially healthful (to man) phytochemicals — to survive.

The rest of the rules are worth reading although they may make you somewhat cynical about our abilities to continue to fed ourselves. 

I feel productive when I’m reading online. It feels like I’m learning. There is a sense that I’m doing something that will improve my life. It feels important.

I’ve talked to my friends about this and some of them report a similar feeling - if you are sitting in front of a computer reading or typing you MUST be doing something that is important. Facebook is as good an example this - it consumes a lot of time and feels like it is a worthwhile pursuit when you are doing it.

It turns out that we’re hardwired to seek out information because we find it rewarding. Lee Gomes’ Why We’re Powerless To Resist Grazing On Endless Web Data reveals some interesting new information about how the brain responsed to information.

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

We are almost helpless when it comes to our need to bring in information. We are born junkies for things that make us think. My morning ritual of checking email, my blog reader, cnn.com and the weather network is a ritual because my brain pumps out the reward chemicals when I do it.

Does it do me any harm? I think so. In all honesty, I don’t think someone can consider themselves fully self-aware if they are addicted to chemicals; even if my brain is producing them, I’m still hooked.

I wouldn’t suggest that we stop using this reward mechanism to serve as the motivation for information seeking behaviors but I do suggest that we gain control over when we go looking for the fix and what we do to serve up that fix. Just because our brain rewards us for reading the latest celebrity gossip doesn’t mean that ingesting this information does anything to improve the quality of life.

Steve Pavlina’s The Most Direct Solution to Any Problem is a great article. He suggests that the best way to solve a problem is likely the most direct way to solve the problem.

Many problems will have multiple direct solutions, but often these solutions will be unsavory at first glance because they’ll require courage, self-discipline, creativity, or persistence to implement. But if we can somehow get ourselves to follow through, we know the solutions will actually work.

…Another example: Suppose you’re interested in starting a relationship with someone, but you don’t know how that person feels about you. One direct solution would be to simply walk up, explain your thoughts and feelings, and ask if s/he is interested in discussing the possibility of a closer relationship. This will take less than a minute to say, and regardless of the outcome, at least you know where you stand. Of course this solution may require a lot of courage to overcome the possibility of rejection, but it’s very simple and straightforward.

The article goes on to say that very often ones laziness or insecurity prevents them from taking the direct route, favoring instead the path of least resistance; which too often is doing nothing about the problem. But there is a saying that goes something like “if you have a problem and in three months you have the same problem, the problem is actually you.”

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.

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.

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.

I used to dread being by myself. I became a distraction junky and remained in situations that were not good for me for too long. I wouldn’t do the things I needed to do unless I was with someone else - instead of going to the supermarket to buy good food, I would go to the nearest variety store and get junk food. I did this because there was less shame than walking up and down the ails pushing a shopping cart alone. I happened across an old journal entry from a few years ago - October 9th, 2004 - that marked the ending of this difficult period in my life.

It is Fall. There is that familiar leaf rotting smell in the air, it gets dark around 7 and it is kind of cold. 

I start at Goodlife on Tuesday. Monday is thanksgiving and I quit my Weedman job on Thursday and went camping at Albion Hills, staying at site 80 - our Hot August Nights spot.

Finally going camping by myself was great. There was a little weirdness to it at the beginning, but I guess I got used to it. I’m looking forward to doing it again and I wouldn’t rule out going to the Eastern Townships by myself.

Des made a comment “at least you didn’t have to entertain some girl so you could have fun” and it’s so true. Since I can do everything I want by myself that I use to need company for, getting into something that requires more effort or putting it on doesn’t serve any purpose. Go it alone and enjoy the company of others, but always remember life is a lot of fun NOW without her in it. If she is going to be in my life, it is because she adds to it. I always have a choice and I can choose me and live without them. It is good advice, the company of just me is good company. 

I don’t know why the switch flipped in my head that Thursday when I quit my seasonal Weedman job and went camping alone. I guess I was just sick of living a mediocre unfulfilling life of dependency on others. I remember when I paid for the site and the clerk asked how many people were with me and I said “just me” wondering what she thought about me being by myself. The thought didn’t last very long because she asked if I was going riding and when I said yes, she said have fun. There was a flash of awareness that I wasn’t the first or last person to check in my themselves.

That weekend marked the moment in my life when I stopped being a child and decided to face the world on my own.

Years later I’m able to see the significance of that weekend. My interactions with others are now lot more rewarding because I feel more at ease with them. I don’t fear the interactions ending because I do not dread being by myself. I have fewer friends now than I did before but my time with them is a lot more fulfilling and genuine.

Life got a whole lot better when I became my own best company because when you are at ease with who you are you can do everything you need to do.

10 Important Lessons by Charles Staley was posted in T-Nation.com a while back. There are some great lessons there but the one that resonated with me the most was his first:

1. The majority Is ALWAYS wrong, therefore DO THE OPPOSITE.

I consider this idea to be my central operating paradigm in life, and rarely have I found it to not be the case. Even if you apply this concept absolutely, across the board, without critical thought, to every aspect of your life, you’ll end up better off.

Here are but a few examples:

— The majority of people have no goals. Therefore, establish goals for yourself.

— The majority of people don’t train. Therefore, train.

— The majority of people think that seeing their doctor regularly is essential for optimal health. HAVING GOOD HEALTH HABITS is essential for optimal health.

—The majority of people don’t plan for their future, and end up unprepared for their retirement. Therefore, prepare for your future.

—The majority of people watch TV for several hours per day. Therefore, don’t watch TV.

—The majority of people spend many hours per day in a seated position. Therefore, spend more time on your feet.

It is an interesting way to look at things - doing what the majority do is a great way to be average.