newstasis :: a blog about improving wellness – Page 51 – Finding An Amazing Life, One State At A Time

Lessons From A Lifting Mentor

I have been lucky enough to have listened to a few mentors in my life. One of them is my friend Adam who I meet when I worked for GoodLife Fitness Clubs in Milton before I moved to Chatham. He was an unlikely mentor because he’s about 10 years younger than I am but when I met him there was a stillness to his demeanor that struck me as significant. Here are some of the most important lessons that I have learned from him:

Almost everything is right, at least for someone on the planet. Adam doesn’t say that stuff is wrong (other than some of the moral things like murder, theft and dishonesty) because there is someone on the planet that it applies to. I once asked him which were better front squats or rear squats. He looked at me blankly and said both. When I asked him what he meant he answered with the question “which is better oranges or a car?” I laughed and saw his point. Oranges are better for make juice out of but a car is better for driving somewhere. Front squats are better for some and back squats are better for others.

Question the origin of common knowledge. Just because it is common doesn’t mean that it is accurate. One of the first common notions he got me to question had to do with squats. In the fitness industry there is a prevailing thought that one should never squat below 90 degrees because it will destroy the knees. I held onto this belief too until Adam asked me where it came from. He was unsatisfied with my answer “it’s just what everyone tells me” because it lacked any scientific evidence. So I went looking for a study that explained why squatting below 90 degrees is bad for the knees. I haven’t found one. In fact, I found a lot of them that said that it is better for someone who has good flexibility and no connective tissue damage in their knees to squat right down. There is significant evidence indicating that the vastus lateralis is more fully engaged when squatting below 90 degrees.

It’s okay to be the only person in the gym who does Olympic lifts. Adam used to do some weird stuff in the gym. It stopped being weird when I realized that he was packing on the muscle and getting really strong while everyone else remained more or less the same. Olympic lifts (the clean and jerk, and the snatch) are Olympic lifts because of the amount of muscle recruitment they facilitate – both lifts require massive neural coordination and motor firing to complete successfully. It is not surprising that most world class throwers and sprinters incorporate these lifts into their training cycles. It is also not surprising that most ego lifters don’t go near them as it is humbling to struggle with a sub 100 pound clean and press when you’re able to rep 225 on front squats.

You keep the journey alive when you continue to learn. I’m not sure Adam will ever be complete because I’m not sure he knows where he is going. He knows that he wants to learn as much as he can and grow his knowledge so he can be an expert in many areas but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any intention of ever saying “I have arrived”. His quest for wisdom is inspiring because it is about the journey and not about the destination. Every lift is special, every paragraph or lecture is an opportunity to grow, every conversation is another chance to learn. He doesn’t waste a moment.

Changing Body Composition – Find And Listen To An Expert

I remember thinking when I heard about JFK Jr. crashing his plane ”why do people think lawyers can fly?” It was sad, because he was young, and two other people died along with him. But it wasn’t that surprising to me, because he was a lawyer. He was a hobby pilot at best, and frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea to go flying with hobby pilots. If you want to fly, get an expert pilot to fly the plane.

I hold the same opinion when it comes to changing body composition. When I need to change something about the way my body looks; I ask an expert for their advice. I then follow their advice until I look the way I want to, or I realize that their advice doesn’t apply to me. It’s pretty simple. If I don’t look the way I want to it is because I don’t know how to make myself look that way. If I did know I would be doing what I needed to make it happen.

When I was a trainer at GoodLife it became obvious that almost everyone THINKS they know how to eat in order to change the way they look IN SPITE of the fact that they don’t already look the way they want to. When I asked them why they hadn’t achieved their fitness goals yet, their answers were all basically the same – it was due to a lack of effort and not a lack of knowledge. Hearing these excuses day in and day out was the main reason I made the decision to stop training people, and focus most of my energies on my own fitness and health related goals.

I give a lot of nutrition presentations to parents of young athletes, and I find it remarkable that so many sceptical people trust their children’s training to us, but don’t believe me when I offer them guidance concerning optimal nutrition for athletes. Sure there are some who agree with everything I say, and there are others who agree, but admit that it’s difficult and expensive to eat that way. But I’m baffled by the people who continue to tell me that fat is bad; that human beings need lots of grain; that too much protein will destroy the kidneys, and that supplements shouldn’t be given to young people. When I ask them how they know these things; they say that they don’t know how they know; they just know that they know. I don’t try to convince them, because my role is to educate, and people can only be educated when they are open to new information.

I try to win them over by saying that what they have been doing is not bad or dangerous because they are still alive. I suggest that it is just not optimal. I inject some science into what has traditionally been taught by parents. Serving size and food choices are perfect examples of this – we tend to eat the same foods and similar amounts of food that our parents feed us. In talking to these people, I try to make them doubt the scientific basis of their knowledge in an attempt to get them to open their minds a little. Over time, some of what I say may get in and make a difference at a later date – an approach that has worked with a number of my peers and clients. Those who are receptive to what I say begin to make the changes they have always wanted while those who remain sceptical tend to remain on the same path they have been on most of their lives.

I do consider myself an expert on nutrition; at least as it applies to body composition, because I have done everything that I recommend. I have also been a heavy guy who needed to learn the right way to eat, because my food choices were making me fat. It took a long time to figure it out, but once I did, I was able to bring about the changes I needed in order to improve the quality of my life, and to make my body look the way I had always wanted it to. But I only gained my knowledge because I remained open to what experts had to say about nutrition, and the results came only because I listened to their advice.

If you want to change the way you look, chances are that you are not an expert. Your first step is to accept that you don’t know how to make it happen. Your second step is to find someone who does know. And your final step is to follow their advice COMPLETELY. It’s very simple, the best people get the best results EVERY TIME.

Changes In My Training Since I Started at SST

I have gained 8 lbs since I started working at SST. My body fat has remained more or less the same. I credit this to a number of variables but the most significant one is the dramatic decrease in the amount of cardio exercise I am doing. I’ve gone from riding 2 to 3 hours a day to doing 1 or 2 cycling classes a week. Doing 15-20 hours of cardio training a week is stressful on the body and causes a dramatic increase in the amount of cortisol that the body releases and, since cortisol helps the body liberate energy from protein, I wasn’t growing very much when I was riding in the summer.

I have been aware of the theoretical implications of excessive cortisol secretion for a while, this is just the first time that I set out to eliminate it. When I was bulking last year, I cut out most of the cardio and dramatically increased the amount of resistance and strength training that I was doing but did so much of it that I don’t think there was as big a decrease in cortisol secretion as there has been recently (heavy lifting is very stressful on the body and it causes a release of cortisol). I’m doing about 4 hours of lifting with one hour of cycling per week vs about 10 -12 hours of lifting last year.

Given the time of year and the dramatic drop in temperature recently, I don’t miss riding so much because I’m used to having to stop. I also don’t miss doing hours of indoor riding. In fact, I enjoy the one class I teach a week MORE than ever because I have enough energy to give it 100%. The intensity is much higher when you have had enough time to recover completely and I am more authentic on the bike – when the choreography calls for breathless I am able to get to breathless which makes the participants work that much harder – a big change from the summer when I was teaching 7 or 8 classes a week, most of them in the evening after riding the trails for a couple of hours.

The approach I am taking this year is smarter because I have a lot more support from the coaching team at SST. They have filled in many of the gaps I had in my understanding of how the body functions and what I need to do to get more growth out of it. Their insistence that I eliminate most of the steady state cardio to decrease cortisol secretion and keep testosterone levels high has made my body more anabolic, and their suggestion to change my diet to replace most of the grain carbohydrates with fish oil and protein has helped me avoid gaining fat.

I know the summer will return and I’ll race again next season, so I’ll be back on the bike again next spring. But for now I’m enjoying the changes in my body composition that the decrease in cortisol and the off season bring.

German Volume Training GVT – Experience So Far

So far I can say that it is by far the most gruelling workouts that I have ever done. It starts off fairly easy because the weight isn’t anywhere close to a maximum lift (it’s closer to 75%) but after a few sets the fatigue begins to set in and it becomes tougher and tougher. By set 5 I am questioning whether or not this is the day that I’m cutting my workout short because I realize that I’m only half way through.

Others report that sets 7 and 8 are the toughest and then things begin to get easier, and I’m starting to notice this too. Mentally, set 6 is the worst and physically sets 7 to 9 are brutally hard – particularly on back day when I’m doing pull-ups.

The pump I get is decent but my body tends not to hold it for the full duration of the workout. The only exception is day 4 when I train arms for 10 sets of 10 then 2 shoulder exercises for 3 sets of 12. My biceps get so bloated that I find it really tough to curl the weight completely. I don’t normally train my arms because they have always seemed to grow enough with just the back, and the chest and shoulder workouts that I do. They’ve responded extremely well to the direct training GVT prescribes.

I have been at it for just over 3 weeks and am enjoying the changes that my body has gone through over the last 24 days. My muscles look fuller than normal and I have delayed onset muscle soreness throughout the entire length of the muscle vs. just at certain parts. While DOMS doesn’t necessarily indicate that you have had a good workout, paired with the new fullness of my muscles I’ll take them as a good sign.

Why We Over-Eat

20 Minutes to a Hard Body Get Full Without Getting Fat, And Other Tips by t-nations Chris Shugart paints an interesting picture of why human beings act the way they do when it comes to food. All in all, we are far from a perfect species that uses advanced and accurate methods for determining when we’ve eaten the right amount of food. In fact, most of us possess the biology that ensures that we over-eat at every possible opportunity.

We don’t have immediate feedback from our bodies telling us we’ve eaten enough. It takes about 20 minutes for food to be digested enough that glucose gets into the bloodstream and the hormones start working.

20 minutes is just long enough for us to eat about twice as much as we need to so it would appear that we’ve evolved to TRY to get fat. This is fine and good when there isn’t a surplus of food and we need to gorge every chance we get. But there’s no shortage of food in our modern world to this system gets in the way of eating appropriately.

Lesson – eat a small to medium sized meal and wait for 20 minutes before eating a second helping. If you are still hungry, eat a little more. If you aren’t, you made the right call stopping.

… secretaries ate more chocolates when they were easily within reach, and they ate more when they were visible instead of covered. And the kicker here is that they usually didn’t realize they were consuming more calories from closely-placed foods.
This is pretty amazing when you think about it: If a human being sees food within reach, he’ll eat it, even if he’s not hungry. If that same food is a few feet away and/or hidden from view, he’s less likely to eat it.

So seeing food makes us want the food. Great mechanism in a world where there isn’t a lot of food because we’ll eat EVERY chance we get, but this doesn’t make sense now given that we have an abundance of food.

Lesson – make sure you do not have easy access to any food that you don’t want to eat or know you shouldn’t be eating.

Think High Volume, Low Energy. By “energy” I mean calories. Some foods are calorically dense; others aren’t. The idea here is to have low-density foods with every meal so you’ll feel full without adding tons of calories. Basically, you’re taking up space in your stomach so you don’t eat so damn much.

The stomach will send stop eating signals to the brain when it gets physically full. This is a secondary and less accurate method for determining satiation but the outcome is the same, we stop eating.

Lesson – if you want to eat less overall, eat high volume, low calorie yield foods.

New Challenges – Moving In With Rachel – Month 3

November has started so Rachel and I have been living together for more than 3 months. October had a couple of significant events so I learned a lot about Rachel, our relationship and about myself. Here are a few of the things I took out of October:

It can end at any moment so enjoy all of it. Rachel’s flat tire on the Gardiner Expressway served as a wake-up call for us to get rid of any complacency that had developed in the relationship.
The English language is a robust and often entertaining way to communicate. There are subtle regional differences that make for some funny conversations. I had never heard the term “pig house” before I moved in with Rachel and when she said that she didn’t want to live in one, I laughed as loud as I could because of the mental picture it creates. She didn’t find it nearly as funny as I did when I asked her if she called a barn a cow house.
We both sleep better when we go to bed at the same time. Rachel was staying up later because she had midterms in the middle of October and I had to leave for work earlier, so I was going to bed a few hours before her. During these nights we never really got in sync and comfortable with each other being in the same bed.
Most of the time our role is not to solve problems, it is to listen to problems. Most of us know the solution, we just need to talk our way to it.

Check out part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Be Careful What You Read – Comment On An Editorial Conclusion

The skinny on fat by The Telegram is an editorial comment that is based on a study released by the American Institute for Cancer Research. The full report is available at http://www.dietandcancerreport.org/?p=ER if you want to read it. It is an average read and confirms a lot of what people have been saying about cancer and environmental influences. It contains a really nice break down on the impact of specific environmental influences on specific cancer rates. It is worth checking out.

I do not believe, however, the author of the Telegram editorial article took the time to read anything OTHER than the summary of the report. It wouldn’t normally be a big deal but they drew a conclusion that I wasn’t able to find in the report:

But whatever mysteries remain, the study stresses there’s no question that fat fuels cancer rates, to the point that the AICR believes poor diet causes as much cancer as smoking.

The study does not stress that there is no question that fat fuels cancer rates. The study doesn’t say much about fat at all. It reports a lot of findings about BEING fat, or over-weight as determined by BMI, as it relates to cancer but it doesn’t make any statements about actual fat. There is a very good reason for that – no one eats a diet of just fat.

The cited report is an epidemiological and meta analysis study that correlates dietary factors to the incident rates of various cancers. It is NOT a experiemental study that controls any dietary variables. These types of studies have a good track record in science but cannot be used to draw any causal conclusions as the author of the editorial has done.

I think this is an important point to make for a number of reasons:

It is irresponsible for an author to attribute their claim to another person or group
It is irresponsible to report feelings as facts
Misinformation is rarely helpful because it moves one away from facts

In a more general sense, unprocessed fat is NOT harmful to an individual when consumed in the right combination with other macro-nutrients. Eating fat with high glycemic index carbohydrates will result in greater fat storage but eating it with protein will not. For example, eating a large steak with a salad will result in less fat storage potential than eating a small muffin with butter. The stake may have more fat calories than the muffin and butter combination, but since it and the salad do not contain any carbohydrates that rapidly increase blood sugar, there is a lower chance that the body will go into fat storage mode.

I don’t blame the author for drawing the conclusion that they do because fat = bad is something that has been said so often that it understood to be a fact. However, to attribute this understanding to the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research is just wrong. They haven’t made that claim in their report and it is unlikely that they will ever make this claim. Their conclusion is that being OVERLY fat WILL increase your likelihood for developing certain types of cancers.

Mistakes Young People Make That Cost Them Careers

I have spent about half of my working life managing other people. I am liberally minded, engaging and an effective sales person, so owners and key decision makers have had little difficulty trusting me with leadership roles. During this time, I have noticed that young people with a lot of potential tend to do some things that make managing them extremely difficult and often lead to their early departure from solid organizations.

Here are some behaviors that I have noticed in young workers that indicate that they won’t be working with me for very long.

1) Mistaking rules for reality. Rules are just agreements on how something is to be. They describe appropriate behavior from what isn’t. One of the biggest staff complaints that I have had to listen to concerns parking. Regardless of where I have worked, staff is always told to park as far away from the door as possible to make it easier for the members or customers to get access to the building. This always made sense to me because the business depends on the customer spending their money and there is a correlation between time in the building and money spend. The staff are not less than the customers in the worth sense, they just don’t buy as much as the customers so they are asked to walk further to get in the door. Rules are not value judgments, they are just there to make something a particular way so everyone knows how to behave. You don’t need to agree with them, you just need to follow them.

2) Speaking for others. When you speak for others, you are only speaking for them if there is nothing to lose. As soon as there are consequences to what you say, they will deny their feelings and claim, accurately, that they didn’t say anything about it. The best thing you can do is NOT speak for others.

3) Knowing more than everyone else. There’s a chance that you will be asked to do stuff that doesn’t make a lot of practical sense, to you. If it makes sense for the organization then that is how it is going to be. Pointing out how stupid you think it is does only one thing, demonstrate the need to get rid of you.

4) Mistaking unique for only. Each of us have a unique view of the world but each view is only ONE view of the world. If there are 25 people in an organization there are 25 unique views of the world. The chances that any one view is the best and most accurate view in all business situations are pretty slight. If I let one worker go today and hire a new one tomorrow, the organization still has 25 unique views of the world and the chances that I have brought on the one view that is the best and most accurate are pretty low. Your uniqueness will be called upon when it is what is needed to solve a problem or move the business forward. Until it is called upon do the job that you were hired and agreed to do.

5) Thinking people care about why. If you choose not to follow the organizations rules, do not expect anyone to listen to your reasons why. The police don’t care that you were speeding because you believe that you can control your car better than most people, the judge won’t care either. If you make the choice to not follow the rules be smart keep your rational to yourself. The time to explain why is BEFORE you do something and it comes in the form of “here is an alternative solutions, should we change the process?” If the answer is no, follow the rules.

6) Taking things personally. It’s work and you are paid for your behavior, actions and time. Your boss probably hopes that you are happy and that you find your time at work rewarding. But when it gets right down to it, if they have to choose between you doing your job or you being happy, they will select you doing your job every time. Don’t take it personally when they don’t seem to care that you have a hot date, birthday party or tickets for a big game and they make you finish your shift because, lets face it, you don’t make it a personal thing when they pay you for the hours you work.

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