July 2007 - No Myth Fitness

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Before I return to discussing various nuances of weight training in coming entries, I must fully vent my spleen on sugar and it abuse. In my last offering I implored anyone who is interested in limiting sugar intake to look at the labels of various foods in the grocery, because sugar is added to all kinds of things. What should send up a red flag for any person who would like to maintain a normal bodyweight and a blood profile that is not prediabetic is that all kinds of so called sports drinks are loaded with sugar or its proxies.If you use the run of the mill sports drink to help you through your workout, you are taking from Peter to pay Paul.

Stop by the sports drink shelf the next time you do your shopping and make sure you have your reading glasses. Start reading the nutrition labels. Yes, these drinks are filled with electrolytes etc,which are quite beneficial to restore the body's balances during exercise. The problem is that no matter how salutary these drinks are, the manufacturer knows that they are trying to sell their drink to a market of sugar addicts. What does this mean? It means that, no matter how valid the drink's restorative profile is, sugar addicts will not drink it,if it doesn't taste sweet enough. Selling bland sports drinks to sugar addicts goes over about as well as offering cabbage to trick-or-treaters on American Halloween!

If you are half way up the Tourmalet in the Tour de France, you can pour sugary sports drinks into your system all you want. You will burn any glucose your body produces and probably still be at a deficit. If you are headed for a recumbent bike at your gym,where you will maintain a maximum of 75 rpms for 20 minutes, you will never burn the sugar you are drinking down in your sports drink. Further you are simply engaging in self-defeating behavior. You are trying to burn fat etc and you are simultaneously predisposing your body to create fat from excess glucose.

I think I dispaired on this issue when I saw that a vitamin-water drink had hit the market and the label indicated that whatever vitamins it contained it was high on sugar. Its sad but the fact is that that product without the sugar would be doomed. The same thing is true when the manufacturer trumpets protein in his drink. Look at the label.Its got sugar too.

If you need to have all of your drinks sweetened welcome to sugar addiction. You are a sugar addict and that is it. You will never quite get over it, but for fitness' sake, taking a sugar drink with you to the gym is just the saddest thing. Your servant, as always.

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Lets Not Sugar Coat It

July 30th 2007 19:33

I would like to return today to the recent study that linked cola drinks to increased obesity. If you don't understand how drinking regular colas can contribute weight gain, you have been in a cave for 20 years. Decades ago the cola companies discovered that they could produce their drinks more cheaply with high fructose corn syrup than sugar. The fact is that sugar is a horrible substance to take into the body, but high fructose corn syrup is worse. If you would like proof, compare the two on a glycemic index chart. If you have to have sugar or corn syrup once in awhile, I suggest you eat something sugary and get the maximum enjoyment out of it. Drinking high glycemic products seems to me to be too quick a fix and just as damaging as a big piece of cake.

While I am on the sugar topic, I would like to offer the official NMF position on sugar: it is an addictive product and should be treated like every other such substance. Unlike tobacco and alcohol, sugar can be clandestinely inserted into products of all kinds. That makes it insidious in a way they are tobacco and alcohol are not. Pick up the items you buy and look at the labels. Sugar is often present.What is more, you are probably addicted to sugar to the point that these products will seem flat if you buy the version that is sugar free or artificially sweetened. The damage of a lifetime of sugar is evident all around.Where would the obesity epidemic be without it?What about the diabetes epidemic?

The damage that sugar does is one of the reasons that the low carb-high protein diet is successful for adherents(at least, until they have a sugar breakdown and revert to their sugary ways). Restrict yourself to protein and vegetables and what have you done? You have made it impossible to get a large amount of sugar. Eat a diet of carbs that is free of sugar and you will find that many of your favorite carb foods are no longer as satifying. I remember that the sauce I liked on my spaghetti seemed flat tasting until I... well, you guessed it.

The way to deal with such an addiction is one day at a time. You are well served to consider yourself a sugarholic and treat it just like an alcoholic treats alcohol. That means you are in a daily struggle to keep away from it. If you succumb(and you will) you must recommit to the struggle and go on. If you think that you will just cut back, you will not succeed. You are better off going cold turkey and repenting your breakdowns than trying to compromise with sugar.As always, your servant.

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Today and Tomorrow

July 27th 2007 16:34

Well, we have to review the news this week. American astronauts are now reported to have piloted certain high velocity vehicles while essentially drunk. An actress barely left rehab before she was caught in near proximity of cocaine,claiming it was someone else's. A very high profile rider in the Tour de France decided,apparently, to inject someone else's blood into his system in order to increase performance, even though the professional cyclist has to be the most tested athlete in the world. In the US the great home run record in baseball is about to belong to someone who is repeatedly linked to stories of steroid abuse. Chis Benoit was reported to have had testosterone in his system up to 10 times the norm and has already been joined in death by another pro wrestler. And...some expert has speculated that three quarters of the American people will be obese by the year 2020. Is there a pattern here?

This is a blog about fitness,so let me explain how not to be fit: Keep exposing yourself to substances that addict or provide some short turn plus that everyone knows will eventually turn into a much larger minus.

If you cannot think long term you are doomed individual. How many issues in life revolve around the suspension of the present for the future? In Frank McCourt's stunning memoir Angela's Ashes the father repeatedly blows the family's meager dole money on a drunken night at the pub and his family is left to literally starve. I recently saw an interview with a professional wrestler who had made literally millions and had used it all for steroids etc. Now he is virtually homeless. Statistics indicate that the average American has what is essentially no money with which to retire after a lifetime of often lucrative pay. A series of interviews with students at an expensive college demonstrated that few undertook to do any of the reading assigned by their professors, yet had time for partying etc. How long I could keep adding to this list I do not know.

Here is the no myth angle on this. If you cannot control your todays, your tomorrows are not something to anticipate. If you control today you will have advantages tomorrow that cannot be obtained any other way. This is especially true in fitness. If you asked me what I want to do today I probably don't want to sweat it out in the gym. If I consistently do just that, my tomorrows will be just that much better. This axiom is even more apropos for dieting. The problem with dieting is even more about today over tomorrow. If you want to lose weight,controlling today is really all that you ever want to think about.

All the tales of immorality and short sightedness above are an indicator that the pursuit of fitness or any other goal that involves delayed gratification is not going to be mainstream. You will be doing your thing pretty much alone. Your servant, as always.

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Real Toning

July 24th 2007 14:25

Most weight training newbys express as their chief objective to tone their muscles. I assume that in that context tone means that the muscles show and the fat doesn't. If you are in the gym to tone,please read the below. First my normal caveats:

If you are not dieting you can do weight training until the cows come home and you will not look toned. You will look solid, if you work hard in the gym, but you will not look toned. You will have a layer of fat over your muscles.If you try to wear off the fat with cardio, you will look smaller, if you succeed, but you will not look toned. That is because aerobics prompts your body to rid itself of muscle. Look at a picture of an off season bodybuilder and compare it to one from his contest portfolio. When he uses aerobics in his contest preparation period, he loses muscle. Looks great, yes, but has smaller muscles.Toned muscles show and when you cause the body to get rid of them they cannot show. That is what happens to "aerobics only" people

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Notes

July 19th 2007 18:02

A recent study has finally made the point that needs to be made: drinking drinks with high fructose corn syrup is a really bad idea. They raise blood sugar worse than practically anything. It amazes me that the shelves are loaded with these drinks. Unless you are in perfect shape and plan to be that way well into the future you are making a big mistake by drinking these drinks. If you wish to prepare the way for adult onset diabetes, you are on the right track with these drinks. If you like the ones that taut their vitamin content and the label says they have fructose in them, you are wiping out the value of the vitamins. They are often called "sports drinks," which they may be. They are not "health drinks".

Arnold was recently asked in one of those retrospective interviews what it was that gave him such huge baseball sized biceps. His answer was that he considered supination the key.Supination? Its from a Latin word that means flat on the back. What that means for your biceps is that turning the wrist as you do a curl until it is facing the shoulder(flat) at the top is the key to a bigger biceps. That is what NMF was trying to tell you in the last post(Biceps of Intermediates

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Biceps For Intermediates

July 16th 2007 12:10

I assume that beginners who enter the gym are almost always either given a workout plan by the gym or are taken under the arm of an aquaintance who shows them a certain amount about how to train. At some point,however, they are left to their own devices and (to be honest) that point is the point at which effective training either begins or the newcomer disappears. I refer to this person at the crux of training as an intermediate. Today a few principles of arm training for these intermediates.

You are no doubt aware that the arm is actually two muscle groups-biceps and triceps or front and back. The triceps is a pushing muscle and the biceps a pulling muscle. That is important. It means that back work is powerfully stimulative for the biceps and the chest is the same for the triceps. So you want to train the back and biceps together and triceps with chest

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Reading Can Be Depressing

July 11th 2007 12:30

I've really got to stop reading. You can get very depressed sometimes when you read the facts and the myths that have been planted in your mind start to totter. Here are a couple of items I read just this week:

Some researchers had the idea to MRI the bodies of people who did not appear obese. What they found was that many people who appear to the naked eye as of a healthy weight have significant fat deposits distributed throughout their bodies. In other words some of those who are not obese on the surface are perilously close to it and are not immune to the bad effects of body fat. I would venture to guess that the 20's and 30's crowd who do not have anything like fat looking bodies are steadily adding to these internal deposits and as their metabolism slowly with age they will fatten up externally pretty rapidly. I would also speculate that those who look fine and do not exercise are prime members of this inside fat crowd.Even if you sit all day and seriously watch what you are eating you may be not be doing enough

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Hamstrings?

July 10th 2007 17:27

I recently was discussing his training with a high school football(American)player. When I asked him what kind of weight movements he was doing the footballer said that the "gym" at his school did not have any machines and that didn't matter, because the coach wanted players to do only basic,explosive movements like squats etc. Now, far be it from NMF to ever discourage anyone from doing squats,but the last time I attended a high school football game I was told that several of the injured players loitering the sidelines in street clothes were out because of hamstring problems. Yes, if you don't train and stretch them, hamstrings will not hold up, especially if they are underdeveloped compared to the quadriceps. Today a few comments on training hamstrings-the most neglected but easiest to train of the whole body.

There is really not much to know about training hamstrings. They are essentially worked by only two movements: the leg curl and the stiff-legged deadlift. That is it. What is more, these two exercises are pretty hard to screw up. My gym has four different machines for leg curls. If you find one uncomfortable, there are three others to serve you. Yet I almost never have to wait to use any of these machine because they are pretty lonely. Last week I saw a smart trainer doing his stiff legged deadlifts and as I watched I tried to remember when I'd seen anyone else working the movement

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Repetion Patterns For Maximum Fitness

July 8th 2007 12:09

Let's talk a little theory.Today you pick up a weight so heavy that you can only do three repetitions of your chosen exercise. The next day you do the exercise you pick a weight that allows you to do 8-10 repetitions. Later you select a weight that allows you to do 15 repetitions. Which is the best for building the muscle you are focused on? The answer is that each is the best for building an aspect of the muscle's strength. It is important to understand how this is true and how to train with it in mind.

When you use a weight that brings failure at a very low repetitions you are building pure strength, the kind of conditioning that should allow you to increase the weight you are using in a fairly regular basis. You are telling your body to recruit tissue for a single all out lift. If you ramp up the repetitions to 10 or so you will,of course, have to lower the weight you are using. At that number of reps you are forcing your body to improve its capacity to handle a sub maximal weight for a considerable work load. That kind of work is useful for tasks that involve several of the same movements- like pounding with a sledge hammer. If you add 5 more repetitions that recruitment pattern changes to one of the long term. This last pattern is for things like riding a bicycle on a flat terrain or the kind of tasks that assembly line workers endure

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I Shoulder A Question

July 4th 2007 15:04

The following question has crossed the NMF desk:
"Are there any specific exercises that we should be doing to condition our shoulders to prevent lifting injuries?"

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Inexperienced Trainers' Most Common Mistake

July 2nd 2007 15:30

While I move from movement to movement in the gym I am constantly looking around to see what others are doing. Sometimes I see some intriguing innovations on standard exercises that I want to try. Sometimes I see some really silly movements being diligently pursued. What is the most common error I see from what appear to be novice or inexperienced trainers? Failure to isolate.

Isolation is what it sounds like. It is forcing a muscle group to work by itself on an exercise. When this is properly done the muscle has no choice but to adapt and that means increased strength and/or endurance. The problem is that the pattern of doing work that the mind of a normal person follows under normal conditions is one that combines as many muscle groups as possible to complete a task. By this I mean that the imperative sent to the brain by the body is to evolve methods for doing work that put the least stress on the individual parts and the body as a whole. Its just natural to do work in this manner

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Intermediate Quad Training

July 1st 2007 15:06

At some point the dedicated beginner in weight training will have to move into more sophisticated workout routines in order to have any hope of making progress in overall fitness. It is profoundly easy to fall into a pattern of workouts that no longer challenge the body although the mind is satisfied that it has done what it is supposed to do. One transition that the beginner must undergo on his way to intermediate is to begin to work a much more limited number of body parts in an individual session. From maybe doing some sets for every body part during every workout the progressing trainer will need to confine each workout to two or three body parts. Today a discussion of how to train legs within this system of limited parts per workout.

To properly train legs at an intermediate level it is vital to train the quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves on different days. You cannot properly focus intensity on any of these parts if it is trained after one of the others. I continually see people who train hamstrings after a vicious quad session. There is no way that anyone can give hamstrings the intense focus they need to grow if the body's energy has been exhausted by work on the quads. It is a better policy to link each leg muscle group with an upper body part that has nothing to do with legs. I train hams with chest, quads with shoulders, and calves with back

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June 2008

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