The focused approach to health, fitness, and strength.
What’s the worst that can happen if you train intensely? You might be uncomfortable for a brief period of time. There is always a risk of injury with everything.
But you are better for it. You are stronger, healthier, fitter, and more disciplined.
Continue reading “Meditations | The Misery of Exercise”Lately if you follow any “science backed” fitness coach or influencer they’re all saying that time under tension for muscle hypertrophy is outdated and you’re an idiot if you still believe in it.
But is it really fake? No. But, yeah it kind of is. It’s a bit complicated but since no one actually explains anything past their condescending POVs, I’ll do it here.
If you prefer to watch and listen to a video, here is everything in this article in this YouTube video:
Getting better at anything usually requires you to do more of the thing. I wanted to test out this theory and see how many pounds I can add to my squat if I squatted every training session for 100 days.
To be clear, I’m not squatting everyday for 100 days. I’m squatting every time I train, which is typically 3 or 4 days per week depending on the program.
Getting strong typically requires 3 things:
Show me your habits, and I’ll show you your future.”
Or so the saying goes. It begs an urgent question:
Are your daily lifestyle habits giving you more life, leaving you stagnant, or are they slowly killing you?
You are the product of your daily habits. Your entire life is the result of the thousands of decisions you’ve made, but none more so than what you do everyday. These small changes to your lifestyle can help improve every aspect of your life.
Continue reading “3 More Lifestyle Habits to Give You New Life”I don’t know when it became the norm to do dozens of exercises each time you go to the gym. Back day has you doing 6 different variations of rows, leg day has you doing 8 kinds of lunges… What on earth is the point? Let’s take a moment to learn from minimalism. You don’t need to do that many different exercises.
You should only need 1-2 exercises per muscle group/plane of movement per workout.
“But that’s not enough! How am I going to get enough volume??”
It’s simple. You do more volume.
Continue reading “Minimalism in Fitness: Do Less to Do More”Being fit, strong, and healthy is hard work. You work hard at the gym, lift heavy, and run hard.
It would be such a shame to have the gains from all of that hard work robbed from you.
And you might be doing just that with these bad habits. Here are 3 things that could be killing your gains at the gym.
Continue reading “3 Bad Habits That Are Killing Your Gains”She struggled to stand up from her chair. Once on my exam table, it took all of her strength to roll from her side to her stomach. She needed help to return back to her side, then back to a sitting position. During our initial chat, she informed me that she fell a few nights ago next to her bed and couldn’t pull herself back up. She had to wait on the floor until morning when her son in law heard her calling for help.
Her diagnosis? Nothing in particular. I was initially called a few weeks prior to help with her low back pain, which we had resolved, and now I was asked to help with balance and strengthening.
An endless number of pathologies and problems can plague our elder years, but none more commonly degrades day to day living of the elderly as fragility and weakness.
Sarcopenia is age-related loss of muscle mass (sarco: muscle, penia: little) that can start in our 40s. By the time we are 80, we can potentially have lost 50% of our muscle mass. It’s a much bigger problem than we think.
Age-related frailty cause elderly individuals to be less steady, unbalanced, and unconfident in their ability to go out and navigate the world. It can cause people to fall more often. Secondary issues to sarcopenia often can include osteoporosis, metabolic syndrome, sleep disruptions, and greater chances of all-cause mortality.
Add on a sedentary lifestyle that often leads to sarcopenia, and you may end up with sarcopenic obesity, characterized by high body fat percentages combined with low levels of muscle mass. The result is an individual who has an even harder time moving because of the extra weight on their frame.
All of this creates the perfect storm of difficulty standing up from a chair (or the floor, god forbid if they fall), difficulty navigating stairs, recovering from a stumble, and an increased risk of falling. Sarcopenia is a known major contributor to falling, and falling can cause serious medical complications.
So what do we do? If sarcopenia is the culprit and root cause of many of these problems, we must aim to slow or reverse this process.
If there is one exercise I can prescribe for the above patient vignette, it is the squat or sit to stand. It is the exercise that addresses as many problems as possible with a single movement.
The gut reaction may be to overhaul this individual’s entire lifestyle, but we know that drastic changes are not sustainable unless they are on board. Most people will not be agreeable to a full lifestyle change.
Tests that involve the sit to stand have been shown to effectively measure global muscle strength of the legs, hips, and trunk. It is almost the perfect exercise.
The sit to stand is excellent because it is simple and easily scalable. If it gets too easy, you either hold a weight in your hands or progress to staggered stance, single leg, or free standing squat variations.
To perform the sit to stand, sit in a chair where your knees are bent to at least 90 degrees. Scoot towards the front of the chair and bring your heels back behind the knees. Lean forward, and stand upwards by pushing your feet straight into the floor. Preferably, your hands should be held in front of you for balance or crossed in front of your chest.
The most common mistake with the sit to stand is sitting too far back and having the heels too far forward. This will cause you to swing your torso forward, using momentum to stand. The sit to stand should purely be a vertical movement, not a forward movement.
If the basic sit to stand is too difficult, sit on top of a pillow or use a taller chair to decrease the range of motion. Once you are able to perform at least 3 sets of 10 repetitions, decrease the height of the chair.
There are numerous ways to progress the sit to stand. My preferred way is to have the individual hold a weight close to their chest like a goblet squat.
Another way is to stagger the stance, effectively turning the exercise into a 1.5 legged sit to stand.
The natural progression from here is a single legged sit to stand.
From here, you can progress to the free standing squat
Stand with a shoulder-width stance. Apply a slight external rotation force through the feet (as if you are trying to rotate your feet outwards but don’t let your feet actually move). This will engage the glute (buttock) musculature. Initiate the movement by pushing your hips slightly back, bend through the knees, and squat down over your feet. You will likely be leaning forward to some degree. If you have long legs, you will probably be leaning forward to a greater degree. This is fine.
Maintaining the external rotation force through your legs, push yourself back up into the starting position. Note that if you have uninjured knees, it is perfectly safe to allow your knees to travel past your toes.
Ideally, the sit to stand or squat will be a part of a larger, more comprehensive strength program. However, we already know that large changes to a lifestyle unfamiliar with exercise are unsustainable.
Most of my patients don’t want dozens of exercises to choose from. They want to be shown a few things they can do to maintain their strength and balance. The sit to stand or squat is almost always one of them.
Following the inclusion of this exercise, every single one of my patients and clients score better in strength and functional testing. They also report being able to walk faster, having better balance, navigating stairs easier, and being more confident in their day to day movements.
It is no coincidence that people from certain areas of the world live longer. Individuals from Okinawa, Japan, historically have always sat on the floor. As a result, they need to perform a full range squat numerous times a day. These people regularly live past 90 and 100, all the while staying active and mobile.
Studies have shown that strength training alone decreases all-cause mortality. One specific study showed that grip strength is a reliable predictor of longevity. The problem of elderly frailty is huge, and strength training is the main weapon that we must utilize to combat it.
As the population grows older each year, this problem is only going to get worse. We can start by just doing one exercise.
Porto JM, Peres-Ueno MJ, de Matos Brunelli Braghin R, Scudilio GM, de Abreu DCC. Diagnostic accuracy of the five times stand-to-sit test for the screening of global muscle weakness in community-dwelling older women. Exp Gerontol. 2023;171:112027. doi:10.1016/j.exger.2022.112027
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0531556522003369
López-Bueno R, Andersen LL, Koyanagi A, et al. Thresholds of handgrip strength for all-cause, cancer, and cardiovascular mortality: A systematic review with dose-response meta-analysis. Ageing Res Rev. 2022;82:101778. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2022.101778
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1568163722002203?via%3Dihub
García-Hermoso A, Cavero-Redondo I, Ramírez-Vélez R, et al. Muscular Strength as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality in an Apparently Healthy Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Data From Approximately 2 Million Men and Women. Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2018;99(10):2100-2113.e5. doi:10.1016/j.apmr.2018.01.008
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29425700/
Donini LM, Busetto L, Bischoff SC, et al. Definition and Diagnostic Criteria for Sarcopenic Obesity: ESPEN and EASO Consensus Statement. Obes Facts. 2022;15(3):321-335. doi:10.1159/000521241
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9210010/#:~:text=Sarcopenic%20obesity%20is%20characterized%20by,from%20obesity%20or%20sarcopenia%20alone.
My wife and I often let friends and budding gym goers lift with us. I don’t mind. I enjoy having a good community of lifters and I love teaching others about lifting. One friend got into lifting about a year ago and loves it. He is still a relative novice but you can’t beat his enthusiasm.
He tends to come over on leg days. He’s obsessed with the squat.
“I hit 295 on the squat a two days ago. I’m going to try and hit that again today,” he said.
Continue reading “I Forbid You To Max Out During Every Workout”Are you living, staying stagnant, or dying? Before you answer, take a hard look at your daily habits. If you want to see your future, you can disregard your beliefs, values, and pointless platitudes you recite to sound deep. If you want to see your future, look at your habits. Does your day to day give you more life, or does it suck away at your life? It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.
What if you changed a few things in your daily life that pushes you towards your goals a little bit each day? Simple things can make drastic improvements to your health and outlook on life. Here are 3 high-impact lifestyle habits that will give you new life.
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
There is no argument about the evidence. Physical activity is essential for optimal health. Poor fitness and strength will plague your elder years if you don’t address them early. Exercise, particularly intense strength training, will improve the health of your musculoskeletal system, joints, and essentially every organ system.
But let’s set aside the “scientific” benefits for now. How will it affect your day to day life?
Regularly exercising at high intensities will give you more energy. It will make everything feel easier. It will teach you discipline.
Intense physical training will show you what your body is capable of. We often never learn what our body’s full potential is. How strong can you get? How fast can you really run? What are you actually capable of achieving if you learn to stick with an exercise program?
How long can you play with your kids? 5 minutes? 30? 60? What about for the next 10 years? How happy and full of life and energy can you really get?
These are things we often value but completely neglect when it comes to taking action. It’s hard to fully embrace living when it takes multiple attempts to stand up from a chair or having to sit out from running around with your kids, and it’s scary how quickly these situations creep up on us.
Get outside. Run hard. Jump. Lift heavy weights. Learn to live.
Recent inflation numbers aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when we have abundant and affordable access to good food. Even the run-of-the-mill, non-organic foods that Hacky-sack John scoffs at is miles better than what was regularly available a couple hundred years ago.
Unfortunately, with the boom in the food industry came a boom in highly processed foods.
These foods have much of their nutritional value stripped away in favor of texture and flavor.
I won’t lie. I love me good bowl of cereal, some chips, or chicken finger from time to time, but we need to exercise caution so these foods don’t make up the vast majority of our nutritional intake. It is easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and it’s hard to get the right combination of macro and micronutrients from these highly processed foods. What is more, we tend to lose a lot of food variety when eating a high volume of processed foods.
We tend to fare better when we eat a large variety of real, whole, and unprocessed foods. An easy way to add more variety is substituting certain portions of your current meals with items such as sweet potatoes, rice, salads (the possibilities with salads are endless), fruits, vegetables, good meats, and fish.
All of that being said, remember that the most important tenet of changing your body composition is still caloric balance.
Everything will get better or worse with sleep. When you sleep better, literally everything about your health improves.
Sleep impacts every system in the body. Disruptions to sleep can severely impact cognitive abilities, hormonal profile, emotional regulation, and physical performance. For gym rats, sleep deprivation will destroy your recovery and degrade your gym performance. Some studies cite a 20% reduction in cardiovascular capacity following a night of poor sleep.
If you neglect your sleep, no amount of bandaid interventions during the waking hours will reverse the damage done. There is no exercise program, nutrition plan, or supplement that will fix a lack of sleep.
Just go to bed on time. Here are some guidelines to get you started.
You will be pleasantly surprised at how much better everything becomes when you regularly sleep well.
A better life is only a few habits away. Think about how different things can potentially be if you spend a little bit of time everyday to move towards your goals. Where can you be in a week? Month? Year?
If you want to see your future, just take a look at your daily habits and the group of friends you hang out with.
Another week, another set of fantastic, info-packed literature!
Sorry about the ridiculous stock photo for the article pic…
