5 Things To Think About by Alwyn Cosgrove

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.

The Simplest Diagnostic Tool

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.

Things We Hate To Admit

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.

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.

Mental Process are Biological Processes

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.

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.

Approach Life As You Would Approach Death

“Death is not sad; the sad thing is that most people don’t ever really live at all.” This is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom from Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Since I first read those words I have had the good fortune of talking to a few terminally ill people. If you’ve ever spoken to someone who knows they are going to die, you get the feeling that what they have to say is important.

In my article Sometimes Bad News is Good News I related my feelings surrounding a urine test that revealed protein – an indicator of kidney failure. The test turned out to be inaccurate so my life didn’t take the turn I thought it was going to but the experience impacted me. You gain a lot of insight into your life when you think that it is going to end.

I was lucky, my test was negative. Some people don’t have that good fortune and need to accept that their life IS going to end a lot sooner than they ever imagined. Last Lecture By Dying Professor contains a video about this subject. The video that is embedded at the top of the page contains a short version of Randy Pausch’s last lecture – this page contains the entire lecture and other information about Randy.

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!

Feedback Destroyer – Mitigating an Automatic Response

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.

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.