Month: October 2017

That’s it.  No special exercises or exercise tricks.  Just increase your physical activity and you will transform your body.

Now, I could end here, but I’ll give a little more wisdom.  There are exercises and/or activities that you might do that are better than others, but “transform” is pretty broad.  Honestly, there is no list of “5 simple exercises”.  There are, however, thousands of lists of “5 simple exercises”.  Each may (or may not) have some merit.

The first question to ask is “how do I want to transform my body?”  Do I want to build muscle?  Do I want to lose fat?  Do I want to run a marathon?  What are the goals?  None of the lists of 5 I see are specific to any one goal.  Doing anything above what you may or may not be doing now will affect change.  So, do something.

Ideally, pick five exercises that will meet a specific goal, but pick five activities to do for the next two months.  It doesn’t have to be anything grand.  Just pick five exercise that fit the categories of health-related physical fitness—cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle endurance, muscle strength, flexibility, and body composition—and do them 3-6 days a week for two month and see the transformation.

Maximize the transformation by supplementing these five exercises with five diet changes.  Together these will transform your body.  It is all pretty simple.  You just gotta start.

Be your best today; be better tomorrow.

Carpe momento!

If you have been reading this blog regularly, you are aware of my love for the sport of wrestling.  I was not a great wrestler—probably could not even be considered good—but I wrestled three years of high school varsity and learned more from the sport than any other.  I am proud that my son has determined that he, too, is a “wrestler”.  He is in a wonderful program locally (All-Phase) and coached by some incredible coaches led by Kevin Keeney, who can bark like a pit bull and encourage the kids in a single breath.  He is also in a very good middle school program heading toward an equally good high school program.

I would love for my daughter to wrestle, as well.  She has opted for basketball, but I keep hoping for a change (though I support her in whatever she does).  My son has several girls on his team who are quite impressive.  They work hard (sometimes harder than the boys) and they deserve every opportunity afforded my son and the rest of the boys.

My friend, Sally Walczyk Roberts (former USA Woman’s Wrestler and three-time world medalist), has started Wrestle Like a Girl to draw attention to the opportunity to include women in the sports and the benefits of women’s participation.  I am excited to watch the success of the USA women and the growing support among American colleges and universities.  I am hopeful that it soon becomes a varsity sport at the high school level. The following is a short video I would like to share that features Sally and USA Women’s Coach Terry Steiner.

Carpe momento!

Too often, in my view of Spiritual well-centeredness, the Spiritual dimension is defined as religion and one’s perceptions of God.  I don’t think this is the case.  Spiritual wellness is defined as an understanding of something greater than self.  I have frequently said that religion can get in the way of true Spiritual well-centeredness.  In my view, God, rather, encompasses all of the dimensions of well-centeredness (Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Social, as well as Spiritual).  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, can God be anything less.

Our Spiritual struggles are not, then, in our faith (or lack of faith) in God.  They are not with religious tradition or practice.  Rather, our Spiritual struggles are with people.  People are irritating, and we are self-centered.  People regularly fall short of our expectations, and it is upsetting.  Thus, we battle less with the concept as “love your God, and love your neighbor as yourself” and more with “how do I love that neighbor.”

When I struggle, as I frequently do, with the attitudes and behaviors of others, I am the problem.  It can be relatively easy for someone to love God when our life is good.  It is harder when life becomes more challenging.  (And I believe in a God who allows us time to be angry with him.)  But what separates me from Spiritual well-centeredness is me.  It is this position of “self” in our lives that most affects us Physically, Intellectually, Emotionally (Oh, especially, Emotionally), Socially, and Spiritually.

It is no surprise that my wife doesn’t do everything “right”.  She loads the dishwasher “wrong”.  She folds the laundry “wrong”.  She squeezes the toothpaste from the neck for Pete’s sake!

It is also no surprise that every other driver on the road during my morning commute “can’t drive”.  Or that nobody parks as well as me.

Surely, I can’t always be right.  Right?  So, just maybe (certainly) I am wrong—or at least I have different ideas of how things should be done—how I want them to be done.  When we don’t get our way, we take it personally.  Sounds like a Spiritual problem, no?

So, maybe, the old break-up line—“It’s not you.  It’s me.”—is correct.  Our Spiritual well-centeredness is predicated on the reality that I or you are not the center of the Universe.  It requires the understanding that we are all uniquely made and purposed for lives that are infinitely tied to the lives of everyone else.  Spiritual well-centeredness begins with the deflation of self.

Be your best today; be better tomorrow!

Carpe momento!

I am having my students watch “My Diet is Better than Yours”.  It full of good and bad examples for the students’ educational experience. 

So, after class on Monday, one of my students sent me a link to exercise videos by one of the fitness “experts”, Carolyn Barnes, creator of the “cLean Momma diet” and “taskercise”.  Taskercise is involving exercise in our day-to-day activities, like doing lunges as you push the cart through the grocery store (yes, she had her client do this!).  Now, I am all about getting more physical activity into one’s day, but….

Several of the videos are promoted as “Tabata”.  (Now, in Ms. Barnes’ defense, she does say “Tabata-like” in at least one of the videos.)  However, nothing could be farther from the IE1 protocol original tested in the Izumi Tabata et al. study.  After all, to get the benefit of “Tabata training” (4-minutes of high-intensity intervals—8 cycles of 20 seconds of cycling at approximately 170% of VO2max followed by 10 seconds of recovery), one has to be exercise at very high intensities.  One is not going to be anywhere near maximal (let alone supramaximal) intensities doing household chores (or any of the activities currently labeled as “Tabata”).

I have issues (as I have mentioned several times before) with the misuse of the “Tabata” label.  Even if I yield to the argument that it is just another name for “high-intensity interval training” (or “HIIT”), taskercise can barely hit the mark.  Such HIIT will not provide any significant cardiorespiratory endurance adaptation.  True, there is some calorie burn, but the benefit is in body composition not cardiorespiratory endurance and/or muscle strength and endurance.  Labeling “Taskercise” as “Tabata” is about as bad as the fitness marketing gets.  It sounds great and trendy, but….  There is exercise for everyone.  Some may actually enjoy Taskercise.  If this is you, go for it.  Be your best today; be better tomorrow.  If it is not you, do what you enjoy and will do regularly.  Just don’t expect miracle results in 4 minutes, unless the intensity is enough to leave you a pool on the ground.  To be “Tabata” (i.e., the IE1 protocol) it has to be beyond intense (remember: 170% of VO2max)!

Carpe momento!

Image: http://www.cleanmomma.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/rag-drag-web.jpg

I caught a video of wrestling legend, Dan Gable, using a Bulgarian bag (Suples.com) in training.  (Yes, he turns 69 on October 25th, and he still works out like a beast!)  I love Bulgarian bag training and this video both reinforces my interest and motivates my desire.

The Bulgarian bag, in my most humble opinion, is a must have.  It is more versatile than kettlebells and gives a darn good cardio/muscle endurance workout.  If you like “HIIT”, then check them out.

In addition to the cardio/muscle endurance and fat-burning benefits, I think there is no better way to strengthen an athletic core.  The movements are explosive and involve an acceleration/deceleration component that is essential for all sports.  Agility, after all, is driven by the hips and core.  In order to change directions, an athlete must first stop movement in the direction of travel (decelerate) and accelerate in the opposite direction.  Remember, an object in motion tends to stay in motion until acted on by another force.  Most “core” training is done for “six-pack abs” not function.  The Bulgarian bag allows for both (but, truth be told, diet is the real key to a six pack).

I have developed a routine that I use regularly.  I call it the “core 550” because it involves 5 sets of 5 movements that are performed for 10 repetitions.  Depending on speed and rest periods, it takes less than 10 minutes.  The movements are the hip thrust (which is much like a kettlebell swing), toss left, toss right, spin right, and spin left.  These are not much different than the movements performed by Dan Gable in the video below.  I use a bigger hip hinge (i.e., swinging between the legs to just above horizontal with the arms), but there are other variations.  The key to the hip hinge is that the hips drive the movement, not the lower back.  I also prefer a wider range in the side tosses—incorporating the hips by beginning in a slight squat and rotating the trunk to bring the arms slightly above shoulder height.

There are endless possibilities with the Bulgarian bag.  I am inspired by my old wrestling coaches’ “Russian Conditioning Program” and driven by my creative imagination.  Try it.  I am confident you will become hooked!

Be your best today; be better tomorrow!

Carpe momento!

 

If you want to be “fit”, know your goals (you must have goals) and know how your workouts will help (or not) you attain your goals.  It is all about specificity.

It is important to realize that there are five distinct health-related components to physical fitness: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle strength, muscle endurance, flexibility, and body composition.  There is no single exercise program that will maximize all of these simultaneously.  In my opinion, there is a trend in the fitness industry to sell body composition training on the myth that it will (significantly) affect cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle strength, muscle endurance.  Lean with six-pack abs is sold as “fit”.  If you buy this, you have to believe that the packaging is more important than the function.

The craze in fitness, today, is short, body-weight, “high-intensity” circuits (labeled as “HIIT”).   These workouts are, indeed, calorie burners.  More specifically, these appear to have a much greater and longer post-exercise energy expenditure (I can’t quite get the acronym to catch on for some reason) than traditional cardiorespiratory and muscle strength exercise.  There may be some benefit in improved muscle endurance, but referring to this training as “strength training” is way off.  This training, combined with a sensible, calorie deficient, diet, will promote fat loss.  The loss of fat will cause the appearance of muscle hypertrophy, but the gains in muscle mass will be small at best.  Likewise, the improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness (i.e., maximal oxygen consumption or VO2max) will be negligible.  For a general fitness, these workouts are fine, but are probably best suited for alternative workout sessions.

Cardiorespiratory training must emphasize the overloading (i.e., doing a bit more than that to which the exerciser is accustomed) of the heart and circulatory system.  In exercise physiology, it is well-established that cardiorespiratory function is affected by the ability to deliver oxygen to the working muscle (cardiac output = heart rate x stroke volume) and the ability to exchange gases (oxygen and carbon dioxide) and waste at the cellular level.  The adaptable components to oxygen consumption are stroke volume (the amount of blood that is ejected from the heart with each beat) and arterio-venous oxygen difference (the amount of oxygen that can be extracted by the muscle as it passes through the tissue—this is largely impacted by the number of mitochondria in the muscle cell and the number of capillaries surrounding the muscle).  I’ll avoid the extended exercise physiology lecture here and suffice it to say that to improve cardiac function, the heart has to be pushed to the intensities necessary to stimulate these adaptations.

Cardiorespiratory HIIT is quite different from muscle endurance HIIT.  Exercise that is popularly called “Tabata” by trainers is not the IE1 protocol proposed by Dr. Izumi Tabata and colleagues in the 1996 paper.  (Few of us can handle the IE1 protocol on a stationary cycle, let alone do bodyweight exercises to the prescribed intensity.)  So, be sure that your HIIT matches your goals!

Likewise, the popular “Tabata” or “HIIT” training cannot be prescribed for muscle strength.  Muscle strength, by definition, is the amount of force that can maximally be produced (measured as the one-repetition maximum, 1-RM).  As such, strength is built with high-intensity and low repetitions (usually 1-5 repetitions).  There is much to debate on the ideal repetitions, sets, volumes, and intensities for muscle strength training, but it is clear that high repetitions (greater than the 8-12 range) will not promote great gains in strength (there will, of course, be some residual gains as more weight is lifted in any repetition range).

The adaptions to exercise are specific to the imposed demands.  If the training does not match the intended goals, well….

Give careful thought to what you do for exercise.  There is no WOD (“workout of the day”) that is suitable for everyone.  There is no WOD that can possibly meet the physiological demands to promote adaptation in all of the health-related components of fitness (and we haven’t even mentioned the motor skill-related components) simultaneously.

Determine your goals and plan your exercise accordingly.  Don’t buy into the marketing myth that you can have it all in a matter of a few minutes a day.  It takes careful planning and execution.  It takes substantial effort.

Be your best today; be better tomorrow!

Carpe momento!

A friend posted a live video on wrestling conditioning that took me back to my high school coach, David Kling.  Coach Kling was the head wrestling coach at Keystone Oaks High School (Pittsburgh, PA) from 1973 to 2003 and retired as the fourth-winningest coach in WPIAL history, compiling a record of 381-152-2.  Sadly, Coach passed away in December 2012.

Our high school practices were highly structured.  Coach Kling even published an article in 1983 in Athletic Journal about these workouts.  (I came across the article quite by accident when working on a paper for my Master’s degree in 1985.)  There was a reason we were one of the best conditioned wrestling teams in the WPIAL at the time.

One of the components of the practice was the “Russian Conditioning Program”.  This was about 15 minutes of what today might be labeled as “HIIT”.  We did all crazy combinations of push-ups, hand-walks, squats, lunges, and other movements using sandbags.  It is perhaps this conditioning that ultimately turned me on to the Bulgarian bag.  It was certainly effective.

This was not the only conditioning we did.  We also ran a lot of steps in the school, did “partner carries” down the hallway near the gym, lifted weights, and, among other creative conditioning drills, ran the pool deck (my personal favorite—think: steps meet track meet sauna!).  We worked our tails off.

These memories prompted me to Google “Russian conditioning” and I came across the following:

Apparently, CrossFit and HIIT aren’t as new as your trainer will tell you.

I am inspired watching this and remembering back to those workouts where my t-shirt would be drenched and losing 9-lb of water between 3 and 5 PM was a regular occurrence.  I am appreciating the evenings when my son comes home from wrestling practice with a story about how Coach Keeney worked him.  I am inspired to ramp up my Bulgarian bag training!

Be your best today; be better tomorrow!

Carpe momento!

 

I was introduced to stroboscopic training just before I took the leap and opened our sports performance training center in 2012.  Nike was rolling out its Vapor Strobes—really cool sensory training glasses designed by Dr. Alan Reichow and his team at Pacific University and Nike Sports Sensory Training.  Sadly, Nike shut down the SST division just as we were opening, but not before I purchased a dozen units to use with our athletes.

This week, I had lunch with my friend, Tony, who was with Nike SST on the Vapor Strobe project and is now with Vima.  Vima is nearing the launch of the Rev Sport and Rev Tactical (www.vima.com).  These promise to be even more exciting than the original Strobes, which are available with some minor upgrades through Senaptec (www.senaptec.com).

I rarely sing the praises of any fitness trend or product, so, when I do, one can be sure that I am a believer and the science backs it up.  I see tremendous benefit in stroboscopic training across multiple populations.  We saw near immediate improvements in focus, object tracking, and movement response.  For the athlete, it was always a fun finish to an intense training session to do any of the numerous drills we developed.

Tony once summarized the goal of the Strobes to me as “ESP” (i.e., extra-sensory perception).  In other words, to remove vision almost entirely from the sports activity and allow the other senses to take over.  Now, of course, the strobes won’t turn someone into Matt Murdock (i.e., “Daredevil”), but….

Think of stroboscopic training as learning to watch a movie with fewer and fewer frames.  The brain learns to infer the missing information.  This, in turn, allows the brain to process other potentially relevant information.  Think of the benefits for, say, a football wide-receiver.  If the receiver doesn’t have to watch the ball all the way into the hands, the brain is free to see more of the field—other players, the sidelines, the goal line, etc.  Following a session with the strobes, an athlete often perceives the ball as bigger and/or slower—easier to follow.

Athletes benefit, but I have long seen the benefits for older adults (e.g., developing balance, peripheral vision, etc.) and tactical athletes, such as Special Forces, police, etc.  Imaging how much more effective those who are charged with our safety can be, if they can more quickly process information and make the appropriate decision.

I am excited to see stroboscopic glasses coming back on the market.  They are a valuable tool for coaches, trainers, physical therapists, and anyone seeking to improve sensory performance.  I’ve continued to use my personal stash.  (My son is a lacrosse goalie, and they are great for practice.)  I have many friends who have young athletes who can benefit from the training.  As well, I trust these will find their way into rehabilitation centers and begin to benefit senior adults.  These are beyond cool and trendy.  They are something that work for a great variety of people.

Check ‘em out!

Carpe momento!

It is already coming up on test time for my students.  Personally, I don’t like giving tests.  I need something upon which to base my grades for the term, but if I can avoid using tests, I will.  It is not that I want to make my courses easy or avoid that work of writing exams and grading.  I prefer not to give tests because they don’t really accomplish what I want them to do.

I don’t want my students to do well on tests.  No, I am not on an ego trip, nor do I take pleasure in failing students.  I am simply less interested in knowing what my students know as much as what they don’t know.  Instead of using tests as an assessment tool, I want tests to be a teaching tool.  Let’s face it, as students, we look at our score first and then what we got wrong.  We rarely go back to look at the questions we got correct.  If, however, we missed a question, we want to know what is the correct answer.  It challenges us to think.  As a teacher, I am tricking the student into reviewing the material again—after the test.

Tests reveal our weaknesses.  They challenge us to grow.  Whether in school or life, we learn the most when we are forced to leave our comfort-zone.

We are often taught to avoid failure.  In school, we want an ‘A’ on the exam.  Anything less and we are underperforming.  Some teachers prefer a nice bell-curve.  Me?  I don’t care what grades my students get on the exam.  I am more concerned with whether that have mastered the material by the end of the term.  I want them to fail so that they can ultimately succeed.

In graduate school, I studied Anatomy with Dr. Dennis Morse at the (then) Medical College of Ohio.  We would spend time dissecting the cadavers through the week and study what we could from our Anatomy textbooks.  There were no study guides.  There were no lectures.  Dr. Morse would come in once a week and proceed in asking us questions.  Invariable, he would ask my peers questions to which I knew the answers.  To me, however, he would ask questions that seemed to come out of left field.  (The case was the same for my friends, as well.)  I wondered how I was getting A’s each term when I seemingly knew nothing.  Somehow, Dr. Morse seemed to know what each of us didn’t know.  Surely, he could have asked me easier questions—or at least some that I actually knew—but he knew better.  He challenged me to think about Anatomy (a course for which memorization is the typical path to success).  In the end, when I sat for my oral comprehensive exams, Dr. Morse started with questions that I knew he would ask and moved to increasingly challenging questions—questions that were outside the limits of what I had studied.  When my comprehensive exam concluded, I had not missed a single question.  Now, one could conclude that I am just brilliant—and I wish that were true—but what it demonstrated was that I had actually learned anatomy.  It was a valuable experience that I continue to carry now into my 20th year of teaching.

In all areas of life, we need to be challenged to fail.  We need to stretch beyond our comfort zone and beyond our experience.  We need to practice beyond our current abilities and allow ourselves face challenges that cause us to grow.

Life is not meant to be easy.  Life is meant to make us better people.  We are meant for growth.  Let’s remember what Nietzsche said: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Be your best today; be better tomorrow!

Carpe momento!

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”—William Arthur Ward

From time to time, we just need to stop and just be grateful.  Gratitude is fragile. If we don’t tend to it daily, it dies.  Every day is an opportunity to start fresh and leave our past, our negativity, our frustrations, our anger, our disappointment, our…, and anything that robs us of our joy and happiness behind.

Today is a short post.  I just want to stop and consider all that I get to do today.

Carpe momento!