In my Training - Then vs. Now post I made reference to training rotator cuff and the lower trap muscles to help maintain muscle balance. I mentioned that my posture had suffered as a result of neglecting these areas. I failed to mention that improving performance is another very good reason for training these area.

Why will doing external rotation and lower trap movements improve your lifting numbers?

Metaphoric reason - a well tuned car will run better than a car that misfires on one cylinder, even if each car uses the same amount of gas in the same period of time. Well the body is the same way so if it is well tuned (has proper muscle balance) it will be able to move a greater load with the same amount of energy. When someone suggests that you do external rotation movements to help you improve any of your lifts, the goal is to restore or establish balance in your body.

Practical reason - balanced rotator cuff muscles allow the shoulder joint to move in a natural way thus reducing impingement’s while balanced trap strength allows an athlete to retract and set their scapula correctly before lifting to ensure proper movement patterns.

Balanced lower traps and rotator cuff muscles will allow for appropriate recruitment patterns given that the body does not have to overcome false load vectors due to bio mechanical compensation caused by misaligned force vectors (if your not moving the load in the right direction, part of your body needs to pull it into the right direction which will waste effort). What it comes down to is if you are able to use ONLY the muscles that move the load in the direction that is needed more of the recruitment energies go to those muscles and your lift numbers will increase.

Aren’t traditional shoulder pressing or lateral raises enough work for the rotator cuff and lower traps? No. There is almost no humeral rotation with laterals and overhead pressing so, with these movements, the rotator cuff muscles play only a stabilizing roll. These isometric contractions do not improve strength significantly throughout the entire range of motion so the benefit of these movements is mostly to the primary movers (deltoids). Therefore, these movements are not sufficient to correct strength imbalances in the rotator cuff and lower trap muscles; with someone who is balanced however, they will often be enough.

If you want to lift heavier you need to correct any rotator cuff and lower trap imbalance as soon as possible. Doing so will not only improve your numbers, but it will also improve the quality of the movement sparing your shoulder joint a lot of unnecessary stress.

Recently I’ve reconnected with some old friends who I used to workout with at the high school weight room. Given what I know now, when I look back on those days I see that I did more stuff wrong than I did did right. The purpose of this post is to outline the 5 things I would do differently if I had it all to do over again.

1) I would train rotator cuff and lower trap muscles. For most of my life, my posture has been horrible - my shoulders have been extremely internally rotated and my upper back has been rounded. The day of my grade 8 graduation I dad told me to stand up straight. I didn’t listen. Worse still was that I started lifting weights in high school and trained chest every other day - essentially doing the exact opposite of what I needed to do to correct the problem.

Now I do a lot of external rotation movements and lower trap work along with being very conscious to retract my scapula when doing any lifting. I also train chest once every two weeks. Balance is being restored for the first time in 25 years and I’m walking taller, feeling better and lifting more.

2) I would train my weaknesses. I was a tree climber when I was young because I spent the first 9 years of my life in Ireland. I wasn’t exposed to any of the throwing sports until I moved to Canada so I had very little reason of raise my arms above my head. As a consequence, I never really developed the ability to recruit and fire the muscles in my shoulders and upper traps so these body parts tended to lag behind. Given that these body parts didn’t grow when I trained them in high school, I didn’t put very much time into them. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

3) I would train my legs more. Most than 50% of our muscle fibers are in our legs. Given that the body will only get as strong and as big as it needs to be, neglecting them is going to slow mass development. It is also going to eliminate any of the growth hormone and testosterone boosting effects that aggressive leg training promotes. More importantly, I wouldn’t have looked imbalanced for so long. A huge upper body balanced on tiny chicken legs is not a good look for anyone and it hurt my credibilty as a fitness professional.

While squatting 225 lbs isn’t exactly the most fun you can have in the gym, it is very rewarding to be able to lift that much. It’s probably strength that I will never use but my brain has adapted to the neurological motor unit recruitment requirements that lifting heavy loads necessates so lifting things is easier as a result. It’s better to have more strength than not enough.

4) I would rest more. I trained too much when I was younger and I didn’t allow enough time between workouts to fully recover.

This page from kidshealth.org goes over some recent numbers about childhood obesity and the finding that 1 in 3 children is now considered overweight or obese. That’s a lot of young people who are suffering now and will be suffering for most of their lives. Carrying extra body fat makes all activity in life more difficult and there is an innate tendency for people to judge obese people more harshly as a result of their weight. I think some harsh judgement is fitting for someone who has control over the food they buy and eat, it is unfortunate for the younger obese person because up until a certain age, they have almost no control over what they eat.

I have little doubt that there are psychological reasons for many eating behaviours but when it applies to the escalating obesity rate with young people, I believe the obesity preceeds any psychological problems. If the young person’s brain is void of issues then the cause of the obesity is environmental in the form of poor eating behaviors taught by their parents or caregivers. Simply put, fat people breed lean people and then proceed to make them fat.

Fattening up a child is one of the worst things a parent can do because it harms their child but there is something even more insidious about it. Fattening up their children serves to make the obese parent feel more normal because it creates another fat person. Think about it this way, if 2 fat parents have 2 lean children, the ratio of fat to lean people in the family is 1:1. But if 2 fat parents have 1 lean child and 1 fat child, the ration of fat to lean is 3:1. If 75% of the people are obese, obesity can be regarded as the norm. If both children are fat then they have a 100% obesity rate making obesity completely acceptable. Obese parents, by making their children fat, create a life preserving fiction that being fat is normal and nothing to be concerned with or treated.

Fat parents rarely teach their children how they should be eating, what foods to buy and how to prepare these foods to maintain a lean body. They also never model lean as a way to live life. Their food choices are taught to their children, along with the obese lifestyle, as things that are normal. Lacking evidence that says anything different, the children learn that these things are how it is. They do not see a choice until much later in life when the habits are formed and their is a solid foundation of adipose tissue ready to soak-up the extra calories and store fat. By the time they realize that they do have a choice the odds are stacked against them that they will ever be a healthy weight because their body’s have become so good at storing fat.

For the obese parent it is not too late to stop abusing your child but you need to start now. You need to make a big effort to eliminate the behaviors that made you fat in the first place and begin to model the behaviors that will help to maintain leanness. You need to do this even if you will never enjoy a long lean life; just because you were victim to the consequences of poor eating behaviors doesn’t mean that your children need to be. There is more than enough information available that will help you make the right choices that to continue to make the wrong ones amounts to deliberate ignorance. The clock is ticking because your children are watching you and making your behavior the reality. How you act now is how they will act in the very near future. Give them a solid foundation to make their life easier than yours has been.

Over 6 months a man named Chris Coleson lost 80 pounds eating food from McDonald’s. It’s great when someone is that successful in changing their body composition. I think the story is LESS remarkable when the McDonald’s thing is added in but I have little doubt that we would have heard anything about Chris Coleson’s weight loss had it not been for him eating only McDonald’s because Chris wouldn’t have lost the weight.

The McDiet itself amounts to an almost starvation diet - Chris was eating about 1400 calories per day down from close to 5000 per day. He was weighing in around 275 lbs and would have needed around 2400 calories per day to maintain his weight. A 1000 calorie per day deficit is huge and isn’t anything that I could recommend that someone do for very long. It would have been unpleasant and very difficult to do.

It is pretty unlikely that you have ever eaten 5000 calories in a day more than a few times in your life. It’s pretty tough to do. When I am bulking, I’ll increase my food intake to around 2500-3000 calories per day and I’m basically force feeding myself. I have no concept of what it would be like to double my food intake and make it a daily habit to eat that much. But I can guarantee this: IF I was able to make it a habit to eat 5000 calories per day it would be one tough habit to break and I doubt that I would have the will-power to reduce my food intake by 75%. Chris did exactly this.

“I would literally sit at the refrigerator and just eat out of the refrigerator,” he said. “I would attack the kids’ school lunches that [my wife] had prepared the night before.”

I think it would be safe to say that Chris had some compulsive eating behaviours before he made the decision to drop the weight. Another factor that makes his accomplishment so interesting. For some reason, his belief that he would lose weight eating only McDonald’s was enough for him to stop his compulsive eating and enter into an almost starvation diet for 6 months. Why would this thought be the catalyst for Chris’ success?

Chris knew all along that his behaviour was what was making him obese but like many people who have consumption disorders he had likely given up on his ability to do anything about it. He also knew that his obesity was shortening his life given the family history of heart disease but again, he had likely given up hope of doing anything about it. He had lost control and needed something external to help him find the motivation to make things right. Setting the goal of losing weight by eating only McDonald’s was the external factor he needed.

I think that is the lesson that we should take out of this: you may need to set an unreasonable goal in order for you to achieve the really tough things in life. Good for you Chris!

Ravi Raman’s Living The Dream post is a great example of the power language has on our thinking. What he outlines is very similar to the technique’s taught and encouraged by GoodLife Fitness clubs with their sales staff; before we went to meet any prospect, we would use some form of self-talk to get ourselves in peak attitude in order to authentically embody the “Good Life” that physical fitness affords everyone who chooses it. While GoodLife’s approach comes down to good business - people buy from happy people so I closed more sales than those who were not happy - it also improved my overall level of happiness.

Ravi touches on this as well, citing an improvement in his mood when he responds in a happy way to others. In my experience it is a universal truth that negative self-talk will lower ones mood and when someone is depressed their self-talk is always negative and defeatist.

When you’re depressed it is very hard to see anything as positive. One of the best exercises I have found for improving this is to write out reasons why you should be happy or reasons why some of what you are saying to yourself is inaccurate. It doesn’t have to be very much, just enough to plant a seed of doubt about the accuracy of the negative self-talk to mitigate your response to it. For example, when I say that things are never going to be any different from how they are now, I’m quickly able to see the word “never” as an over generalization. Once I realize that things are not always going to be the same, I’m able to start to believe that there are other alternatives to the situation and I am free to work on achieving one of them as opposed to remaining victim to my perception of an unchanging world.

The first couple of times I tried this exercise I was amazed at just how gullible I was when it came to believing self-talk. Frankly, I believed everything my internal voice said without questioning it until I learned that I CAN question it. The power of this lesson is the realization that it works the opposite way too - you believe the positive stuff as strongly as the negative and you will continue to believe it so long as you continue to create it. The only thing you need to do to create it is to make the choice to be happy.

So when you go to work or do anything that isn’t 100% your passion, make sure you remained yourself that you are living the dream and make it the truth by saying it.

Cosgrove’s Five Ah-Ha! Moments: The Education of a Misguided Trainer by Alwyn Cosgrove is a T-nation article outlining 5 important moments of enlightenment. The ones dealing with body composition are the ones that I found the most interesting:

Ah-ha! #2: For fat loss, the post-workout period is where the most important “something” happens. 

…When comparing total calories burned from exercise, the researchers found the endurance training burned 28,661 calories, while the interval training group burned 13,614 calories. In other words, the interval-training group burned less than half the calories of the endurance-training group. However, when the researchers adjusted the results to correct for the difference in energy cost, the interval-training group showed a 900% greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group. In other words, calorie for calorie, interval training was nine times more effective than steady state exercise.

What we can conclude from the study is that interval training is much better at eliminating fat than steady state cardio REGARDLESS of the number of calories burned during the training session.

Why would this be?

I’ll speculate a few reasons:

1) The cost of recovery is greater for interval training than it is for steady state training in terms of absolute calories and duration.

2) The body is less efficient at adapting to interval based training so the cost of recover never really decreases. The body adapts very quickly to steady state training so after the first couple of workouts, the recover cost is already a lot lower. There is a diminishing marginal cost associate with steady state that doesn’t appear to be there with interval training.

3) Interval training relies on a variety of energy systems to get the work done and there is a great recovery cost when replenishing stores to multiple energy systems as opposed to just one.

Ah-ha! #5: Hypertrophy is a systemic response and effect, not a localized one.

All the talk about bodypart training versus full body routines, isolation exercise versus compound exercise, etc. is based upon a fundamentally flawed concept: that hypertrophy is somehow completely regional-specific.

The researchers compared the effects of a weight training program on 5RM strength and arm circumference and divided the subjects into two groups. Group 1 performed four compound upper body exercises, while Group 2 used the same program but included biceps curls and triceps extensions.

The results showed that both groups significantly increased strength and arm size

However, the addition of direct arm training to group two produced no additional effect on strength or arm circumference after 10 weeks of training.

The additional localized training did not result in anything that the bigger compound exercises didn’t provide.

This one blew my mind because I finially had scientific confirmation of something I’ve been saying to people for a long time. People often ask me how do they get their arms to grow or how do they bench press more. My answer is always to say “squat more” or “start to deadlift.” Those who follow the advice grow and get stronger upper bodies while those who take the time to point out the flawed logic remain exactly the same.

Two important things here: don’t ask for advice if you don’t want to follow it and more importantly, the body is only going to get as big and as strong as it needs to. If it isn’t as big or as strong as you would like it to be, do things that increase the demand for size and strength even if it isn’t in the areas that you want to improve and you will grow.

I think this happens for a few reasons:

1) The hormones that make the body grow impact the entire body and not just the area that is trained.

2) The body will conserve energy at every opportunity. If it isn’t being taxed in a particular way, it is going to do only what it needs to do.

3) The body strives for balance because muscle imbalances lead to injury and an increase in effort (wasted energy).

It’s a great article that may change the way you view things.

People don’t spend enough time looking at their stool after they go to the bathroom. Poop is, after all, what is left after our bodies digest and absorb food. It is waste; basically the useless stuff that the body does not need and cannot do anything with. If one is eating a well balanced nutritionally sound diet the waste they create should be the same all of the time - given that the body will consistently absorb the same nutrients and leave behind those items that offer nothing of nutritional or biological value.

Take a look at the following chart:

Once you get over what exactly it is that you are looking at, you should notice that stool ranges from solid to liquid. You can make certain determination about digestive system health based on what your waste looks like.

For example, type 1 and 2 are more solid and very dense; indications of a lack of fiber and possible dehydration. Type 3 and 4 are regarded as healthy. Type 5 to 7 are less dense and almost formless - indicating that water is not being reabsorbed from it or that you’re body is trying to rid itself of something in the digestive track.

It is not unusual for the body to produce a greater volume after increasing fiber and carbohydrate consumption or for decreased volume to accompany increases in meat and protein consumption. However, changes that last longer than a couple of days are an indication of a problem.

Tejvan Pettinger’s post Things We Hate to Admit outlines some tendencies of human behaviour that make life tougher than it should be. Each offers a lesson in self-awareness but three stand-out to me as things that, if everyone accepted, would make time on this planet a lot more enjoyable and productive:

We are responsible for what happens in our life. Very often people assign blame to those around them without ever thinking “what did I do to make this happen?” Admittedly they are some true victims in the world, random acts of violence for example, but these instances are few and far between. I’d estimate less than 1/10 of the stuff that goes wrong in ones life are these types of things. More often we suffer the consequence of our own decisions and poor choices.

When something bad (or good) happens in our life our first question to ourselves should be “what did I do to make this happen?” If you answer it honestly, 90% of the time you’ll see yourself as the creator of the circumstance that made it all possible. This is good news because 90% of the time you have the choice to change something and avoid the same mistake (or repeat something and enjoy the same outcome). This is a very empowering realization.

We are Drawn to the Negative. The bad stuff pops into our awareness constantly and it should; from an evolutionary psychology perspective seeing the bad is what has allowed our genes to be passed along from generation to generation given that those who could not see the bad would have gotten killed by a predatory when they were very young and never have passed along that trait.

Like many of our genetic traits, this one is outdated for modern societal living as there are very few circumstance in daily life that require this ability to perceive the bad in everything. For example, in the last 10 years there has been one circumstance were my ability to perceived the negative probably saved my life but I was walking home alone one night and that is NEVER a good idea. However, the trait is alive and well in most of us and it’s running at full speed keeping our stress levels high.

We Cannot Change Other People. This is one of the most important lesson in life yet it is not taught in class or by many parents. EVERYONE has their own experience of reality and to them, it is as real as your experience of reality is to you. Unless you have shared many of the same life experiences it is unlikely that you’ll perceive life in the same way as another. It’s also very unlikely that you’ll be able to change them so don’t bother trying.

I’m not suggesting that you don’t engage and education others given that new experience is the only ways to have any influence on one’s behaviour and beliefs. I am suggesting that you empathize with others and accept that they are right too, even when you don’t see eye to eye with them. By removing any resistance to their way of viewing the world you’ll be able to have less dissonant interactions and enjoy more quality time together.

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.

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind is an op-ed piece by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang in the New York Times. Every time I read something like this it seems to light my brain on fire. I recommend you read the article but the key thing I took out of it is this: any mental process is a biological process and has the same properties as most physiological processes of the body. What got my brain going is the fact that there is a finite capacity to mental processes and an adaptive quality to them.

Self-discipline or will-power, it turns out, is very much like muscle strength, finite and adaptive. The article reports the finding that when someone uses their will power to do something like quit smoking, they are more likely to display a decrease in discipline in other areas - they gain weight for example because they are not able to control their eating. However, over time they are able to grow their level of self-discipline and reach the point of being able to not smoke and not over-eat - one adapts by investing effort and grows their finite capacity.

So what? Well, this knowledge is important for a couple of reason:

Given that people have a finite amount of will power, their chances of success for adopting a new habit or eliminating a bad one greatly increase if they do not try to do too much at once. If we take changing body composition as an example, we know that you need to do two main things to achieve a leaner body - exercise and eat well. You increase the likelihood of being successful if you pick one of them to focus on for a month and then start to focus on the other. If you focus on both at the same time your limited will-power will be split between the two increasing the chances that you fall off the wagon on one or both of them. You are better to make small steps and slowly build up the number of good habits.

Also, people cannot use the excuse that they “just don’t have the will power” to stick to something. True, they may not have it right now but if they invest the time and effort they WILL end up developing it and it will allow them to stick to it.