Fitness 2014

[crazy canuck]

Had an awesome workout of squats, deadlifts, standing rows with a bunch of ladder work and core in between sets.

Thanks again Otto 

[Josquius]

I cycled about 30-40 km today. It was over 30 degrees. Ouch.

[mongers]

I cycled about 30-40 km today. It was over 30 degrees. Ouch.

and not so  , I can't take the heat either.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Very interesting article:

Link

How the Other Half Lifts: What Your Workout Says About Your Social Class

BY DANIEL DUANE • July 23, 2014 • 6:00 AM

Why can't triathletes and weightlifters get along?

I first heard the term strength sports—referring to football, weightlifting, and any other sport dependent upon sheer muscular force—in my early 40s. I'd spent half a lifetime dedicated to athletics more common among urban liberals like myself—jogging, cycling, swimming, pursuing cardiovascular fitness instead of brute force. But then somebody told me that these so-called endurance sports do little to counter the muscle-wasting sarcopenia and bone loss we all suffer in middle age.

One way to slow that slip into frailty, it turns out, is by lifting weights, forcing your body to increase bone density and muscle fiber. So I bought a book by a Texas gym owner named Mark Rippetoe titled Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training. I learned to squat, deadlift, and bench press. I came to love the emotional catharsis of channeling aggression into the bar. I made new friends: A former Force Recon marine chatted with me between lifts, describing the first Gulf War and how he'd nearly died falling from a helicopter; a massively muscled, bald kickboxer, who happened also to be a handsome gay biotech lawyer, stood behind me during bench press sessions, fingers under the bar, making sure I didn't hurt myself.

I adored lifting with these men. It was the happiest I had ever been in a gym. A faster runner abandons you; a stronger lifter hangs out, kindly critiques your form, and waits his turn. My strength numbers shot upward, and so did my body weight: 190 pounds, 200, 210, 215. I bought baggy pants and shirts. Walking down the sidewalk, I felt confident. At parties with my wife, I saw men who ran marathons, and they looked gaunt and weak. I could have squashed them.

Soon, however, I suffered a creeping insecurity. Looking into the eyes of a banker with soft hands, I imagined him thinking, You deluded moron, what does muscle have to do with anything?

One day, a skinny triathlete jogged past our house: visor, fancy sunglasses, GPS watch. I caught a look of yearning in my wife's eyes. That night, we fought and she confessed: She couldn't help it, she liked me better slender.

Friends came for dinner. A public-interest lawyer, noticing I was bigger, asked what I'd been up to.

"I'm really into lifting weights right now," I said. "Trying to get strong."

The lawyer's wife, a marathoner and family therapist, appeared startled, as if concerned about my emotional state. She looked me in the eye and said, "Why?"

Sociologists, it turns out, have studied these covert athletic biases. Carl Stempel, for example, writing in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, argues that upper middle class Americans avoid "excessive displays of strength," viewing the bodybuilder look as vulgar overcompensation for wounded manhood. The so-called dominant classes, Stempel writes—especially those like my friends and myself, richer in fancy degrees than in actual dollars—tend to express dominance through strenuous aerobic sports that display moral character, self-control, and self-development, rather than physical dominance. By chasing pure strength, in other words, packing on all that muscle, I had violated the unspoken prejudices—and dearly held self-definitions—of my social group.

For a while I fought back, cursing the moronic snobbery that, at some self-hating level, I shared. I thought of doubling down by entering a powerlifting competition.

Rippetoe visited my gym one day. I liked him immensely—funny, eccentric, a brilliant technique coach. He told me that to become competitive, I would have to get vastly bigger—to something like 275 pounds. But I didn't want to be 275 pounds. I love my wife dearly. I didn't want to become less attractive to her, and I was already too heavy for the running, biking, and swimming that I'd long enjoyed and now missed. For a short time I tried to have it both ways: I signed up for the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon; bought a visor, fancy sunglasses, and a GPS watch; and told myself I would somehow maintain my hard-won muscular strength throughout triathlon training.

Jogging up our block, however, for that first run, I discovered that heavy weightlifting makes endurance workouts deeply unpleasant. My legs felt like dead tree trunks. The next day, when I tried to do squats, I learned that running undermines strength gains. It turns out that these two physical adaptations—like liberal and conservative political leanings, or elitist and working class cultural affinities—do not easily cohabit inside one human being (despite the excellent exception embodied by my kickboxing, bodybuilding, tech-lawyering gay friend).

I mentioned this to a legendary strength coach named Dan John, who'd once deadlifted 628 pounds. "I trained for a triathlon once," John said over lunch. "I'll never do that again." He shook his head as if still emotionally traumatized by the loss of muscle and strength he'd suffered during all that cardio work.

In the end I made the same basic decision that Dan John had made, defaulting to the familiar sports I'd grown up with. In my case, that meant adopting what Stempel calls "the most class exclusive approach to strength-building," one that "moderately incorporates strength into a sporting lifestyle." Backing off the weights and ramping up the running, biking, and swimming, I lost 30 pounds of muscle in three months. I loved Escape From Alcatraz so much that I'm still doing triathlons three years later. My wife does seem to like me a little better, and sometimes I think our friends even respect me more. But I can't stop thinking I've betrayed Rippetoe, and I dearly miss the Force Recon marine. I miss the biotech lawyer, too, and no matter what I'm supposed to feel about physical dominance or moral character, I dearly miss feeling huge walking down the street.

Now, here's what I have to say about this. Firstly, the tldr is, "Liberal weenie got into weight lifting and got big and strong, but his wife wanted a little waifish twink marathon runner so he let all his muscle atrophy away and started doing immense amounts of cardio again."

This guy is doing it wrong. Firstly, while I personally am familiar with Rippetoe's system, Rippetoe is slightly overrated and also has an ego larger than the State of Texas. Rippetoe's book and his system is primarily a rip off of Bill Starr's 1970s 5x5 program (of which a modified / reduced version I recommended upthread), but I use "rip off" lightly because Rippetoe actually says in his book "this is just a new take on Bill Starr's 5x5." Where Rippetoe, and really it's not strictly Rippetoe but the people who are in the Rippetoe/Starting Strength "sphere" goes too far is in thinking his program is for everyone, it really isn't.

His program is ideally for a 15 year old, underweight kid, who wants to go out for football. It'll take that kid and turn him into a big 15 year old kid who is very, very strong. But to get there, all they can do is Rippetoe's program for 6-8 months. It's a novice strength training program, designed to take advantage of the ease with which novices can increase strength progressively. Rippetoe strongly advocates doing no cardio, and no real exertion during the novice period. Dan Duane (author of this article) took that to heart, and got very good results. However, Duane missed some key details. Namely, that Rippetoe even says in his book if you're into sports, then once you're done with novice progression you need to figure out how to use the strength you've built along with participating/practicing for your sport.

Dan Duane on the other hand felt he couldn't lift weights and do anything else for the rest of his life. This is simply not true, once he was done with his initial strength building, he should have left the novice program (which overworks you anyway once you are adapted to lifting) and probably gone to a system where he lifts every 48 hours, but only 1 out of every 2 is a "heavy" day. He also would reduce the amount of lifting done in each session, but still kept the weight up. This will be possible for him because as an "adapted" lifter, he needs more layoffs and less volume anyway to continue maintain his strength. Instead he basically tried to maintain a novice lifting program while also doing heavy involvement in other stuff, and sure enough it was deleterious to both.

It's not either or, if it was, then no football or basketball player could lift weights and be strong but also play their sport, and we know that is not the way things work.

[alfred russel]

It's not either or, if it was, then no football or basketball player could lift weights and be strong but also play their sport, and we know that is not the way things work.

I was giving some thought to this; why in the strength vs. cardio so many people gravitate to cardio.

This is my theory. There aren't many ways to do things, or have achievements, through strength alone. You can't go to work and announce "hey I benched 250!" without looking like a prick. Middle aged guys tend not to play tackle football or similar sports, so I'm not sure where you deploy that ability.

That isn't the case with cardio. There are fundraisers around people running marathons, half marathons, or triathlons. Plus you can catalog those achievements. You ran in the Boston Marathon? People will tell you that is awesome, even if the current day version of you couldn't sniff the qualification time. I'm not sure that you get the same cache telling people that 10 years ago you used to be able to bench 1.5 times your weight, but now can't get up half that. Also, cardio is very transferable to other achievements. Want to tackle the Inca Trail, Kilimanjaro, Annapurna, Mount Ranier, Everest Base Camp, etc? Those things are all about cardio. (a guy I know did an advanced version of the Annapurna circuit, and loves to tell the story of a body builder that signed up and washed out in two days because he basically never did cardio)

For my money, the most impressive feats require a lot of strength and cardio. For example, McKinley usually requires a person to move 100+ pounds of gear between a pack and sled. That is a brutal way to go up a mountain. I have more respect for the guys that do that than the ones that climb everest (who generally have sherpas to carry most of the gear). I don't know anyone that has made it to the top of mckinley though. On a lot of mountains in the third world, you can hire people to carry the gear for basically nothing, and in the first world, there are often hut systems that are resupplied by helicopter so you can replenish supplies without carrying them yourself.

[alfred russel]

I cycled about 30-40 km today. It was over 30 degrees. Ouch.

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

[Sheilbh]

Weirdly I was at my fittest when I had an office job a few years back. I used to go to the gym more or less every night after work.

Planning to start getting back into that routine this week now I'm back at an office job. I'll be going to one nearby I can use (a recently renovated 19th century Turkish Baths!) rather than our company gym.

I'm not sure I'm ready (or fit enough - in all ways) to be entirely comfortable in various states of sweaty undress with colleagues/superiors.

But it does look amazing

[OttoVonBismarck]

I was giving some thought to this; why in the strength vs. cardio so many people gravitate to cardio.

This is my theory. There aren't many ways to do things, or have achievements, through strength alone. You can't go to work and announce "hey I benched 250!" without looking like a prick. Middle aged guys tend not to play tackle football or similar sports, so I'm not sure where you deploy that ability.

That isn't the case with cardio. There are fundraisers around people running marathons, half marathons, or triathlons. Plus you can catalog those achievements. You ran in the Boston Marathon? People will tell you that is awesome, even if the current day version of you couldn't sniff the qualification time. I'm not sure that you get the same cache telling people that 10 years ago you used to be able to bench 1.5 times your weight, but now can't get up half that. Also, cardio is very transferable to other achievements. Want to tackle the Inca Trail, Kilimanjaro, Annapurna, Mount Ranier, Everest Base Camp, etc? Those things are all about cardio. (a guy I know did an advanced version of the Annapurna circuit, and loves to tell the story of a body builder that signed up and washed out in two days because he basically never did cardio)

For my money, the most impressive feats require a lot of strength and cardio. For example, McKinley usually requires a person to move 100+ pounds of gear between a pack and sled. That is a brutal way to go up a mountain. I have more respect for the guys that do that than the ones that climb everest (who generally have sherpas to carry most of the gear). I don't know anyone that has made it to the top of mckinley though. On a lot of mountains in the third world, you can hire people to carry the gear for basically nothing, and in the first world, there are often hut systems that are resupplied by helicopter so you can replenish supplies without carrying them yourself.

Yes, but marathons are stupid. They are literally the least impressive human achievement because they require almost no strength whatsoever, just the ability to repeat something. They're very easy. Anyone who can walk can complete a marathon. Only progressive training gets you to deadlift 2.5x body weight. Moreover, lifting requires finely tuned technique, completing a marathon does not necessarily involve any technique at all. What's odd is that people have chosen to put so much in to things that are so unimpressive.

Mountain climbing is much more impressive than marathoning because it requires actual skill in mountaineering on any truly challenging peak. Mountain climbing is also a different adaptation than marathon running, and the fact that you do not believe strength training translates into all the activities you named above shows grave ignorance. Strength training absolutely translates into swimming, cycling, climbing etc. Strength training contributes to essentially everything except for extreme endurance activities like triathlons or marathons, but those are not activities people should actually be doing, because they are stupid, cause sarcopenia and late life weakness and infirmity. Excessive running is a good way to transition into old age as a weak person that can barely move. Strength training on the other hand reduces morbidity and increases quality of life. Endurance training actually has no proven ability to decrease morbidity while strength training does. So quite literally since being stronger makes you live longer, it contributes to a lot of things other than nonsense activities, but how many years you get to spend here versus in the grave.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

Hiking fairly approximates natural long distance movement over rough terrain and I have no real issue with it. It's also aided by strength training if you're hiking a difficult trail. The great thing about strength training is it's about what you do on average throughout the week, not about single days here or there. Lots of serious lifters hike, but none marathon run--that should tell you something.

[mongers]

I cycled about 30-40 km today. It was over 30 degrees. Ouch.

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

I've done similar, sometimes with a large moderately heavy bergen, once even on our 2nd hottest ever day we've had in Blighty, but I can guarantee none of those occasions were in the humidity you probably have to routinely deal with, so not a fair comparison.

[mongers]

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

Hiking fairly approximates natural long distance movement over rough terrain and I have no real issue with it. It's also aided by strength training if you're hiking a difficult trail. The great thing about strength training is it's about what you do on average throughout the week, not about single days here or there. Lots of serious lifters hike, but none marathon run--that should tell you something.

It's near suicidal to try and move and an extra 20kgs up and down 6 inches 20,000-25,000 times over 3-4 hours ?

[alfred russel]

Yes, but marathons are stupid. They are literally the least impressive human achievement because they require almost no strength whatsoever, just the ability to repeat something. They're very easy. Anyone who can walk can complete a marathon. Only progressive training gets you to deadlift 2.5x body weight. Moreover, lifting requires finely tuned technique, completing a marathon does not necessarily involve any technique at all. What's odd is that people have chosen to put so much in to things that are so unimpressive.

Mountain climbing is much more impressive than marathoning because it requires actual skill in mountaineering on any truly challenging peak. Mountain climbing is also a different adaptation than marathon running, and the fact that you do not believe strength training translates into all the activities you named above shows grave ignorance. Strength training absolutely translates into swimming, cycling, climbing etc. Strength training contributes to essentially everything except for extreme endurance activities like triathlons or marathons, but those are not activities people should actually be doing, because they are stupid, cause sarcopenia and late life weakness and infirmity. Excessive running is a good way to transition into old age as a weak person that can barely move. Strength training on the other hand reduces morbidity and increases quality of life. Endurance training actually has no proven ability to decrease morbidity while strength training does. So quite literally since being stronger makes you live longer, it contributes to a lot of things other than nonsense activities, but how many years you get to spend here versus in the grave.

Otto, first of all, walking 26.2 miles for some people is an achievement. Also, I'm sort of training for a marathon, with a time target of 3:47 ("sort of training" because I'm really waiting for winter to extend my runs, and planning to run one or two next spring). I think for almost everyone hitting such a time target is an accomplishment.

Second, I absolutely agree that strength training contributes to things like mountain climbing. Or marathon running for that matter. However, the main peak I'm targeting is Mont Blanc. One of the guides I've seen has a requirement that clients be able to complete a half marathon in 1:45; I've seen others with a requirement for 2:00. I haven't seen anyone with a squat requirement. My guide told me that at a minimum I need to be doing 3 10ks a week to get ready. For more aggressive peaks (like those in the himalayas), I've seen fitness targets referencing marathon times ~3:30. I recently climbed Kilimanjaro: one of our guides was an Olympic caliber marathon runner, and our group included 2 recent sub 2 hr half marathoners and an ultra marathoner. I didn't meet anyone that was more focused on strength training than cardio.

You are right that this is something of a false dichotomy. Cardio and strength training compliment each other. My point is that if you show me two people: one does cardio 90% of the time and strength trains 10%, and one has the percentages reversed, I would expect the cardio heavy guy to be generally better adopted to most basic hiking and mountaineering.

[alfred russel]

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

Hiking fairly approximates natural long distance movement over rough terrain and I have no real issue with it. It's also aided by strength training if you're hiking a difficult trail. The great thing about strength training is it's about what you do on average throughout the week, not about single days here or there. Lots of serious lifters hike, but none marathon run--that should tell you something.

I'm not trying to be confrontational on the posts. I actually posted my original question because I've gotten the impression that you are quite knowledgeable on this stuff and was hoping for a response.

A problem that I have though is that I'm generally not comfortable with freeweights beyond basic dumbbell exercises. I really need to get a personal trainer to help with this before doing anything.

I do know freeweights are better than using machines. But at my gym no one is doing deadlifts and squats, and I'm not sure they are allowed. There also isn't a machine for back extensions.

[alfred russel]

I cycled about 30-40 km today. It was over 30 degrees. Ouch.

I know ovb will disapprove, but I just finished a 7 hour hike and at the end the temperature was 95F/35C (it was much cooler at the start). I'm not sure how safe that is. Winter can't get here fast enough.

I've done similar, sometimes with a large moderately heavy bergen, once even on our 2nd hottest ever day we've had in Blighty, but I can guarantee none of those occasions were in the humidity you probably have to routinely deal with, so not a fair comparison.

It wasn't that hot for the duration: just at the end. If it was, I probably would have ended up in the hospital.

[OttoVonBismarck]

You can't do complex barbell movements without coaching. I know some serious mountain climbers because I was heavy into it enough to meet some years ago, I've also hiked parts of the AT. I don't know any serious climber who has set marathon times they feel the need to hit before climbing.

As for barbell training you obviously are using an experienced guide for your other activities. I'm not sure why you'd expect something that involves a complex skill based movement like squatting or dead lifting wouldn't require a similarly experienced professional to show you how to do it. I mean a real strength coach too, not a guy who works at the Y. A good one will charge $500 or so for a series of sessions designed to get you proficient enough to lift safely solo, or $40/session or so for a long term coaching relationship.