Over the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of thoughts piling up in my head that I figured would make a quick little post.

1.  I am so blessed.

Having had my daughter only 17 weeks ago I can only say that this has been one of the most exciting times in my life.  Despite the 2am diaper blowouts and the sleep deprivation, every morning I get to wake up to this beautiful face.

2.  My wife is incredible

Lest you think I’m one of those guys who falls in love with his children only to forget the rest of his family, I really do have to give credit to my wife for becoming an outstanding mother.  As I said, I am blessed.

3.  The Body Saw is sick!

Last week Nick Tumminello posted this  exercise on his site which I think is an incredible anterior core progression.

4.  How do you determine success?

If you’re a trainer and you’re working with a person that came to you to lose weight and they weren’t losing weight would you consider them a success?  Your damn right you wouldn’t!  In fact, it isn’t all that common for busy trainers to consider “firing” that client in order to accomodate someone who was more “dedicated”.  To be honest, up until a while ago I might honestly have done the same thing.

Then recently I had the good fortune to attend a journal club meeting at which exercise researcher Dr. Bob Ross was presenting.  Throughout the course of his brilliant lecture, he presented study after study that demonstrated waist circumference and cardiorespiratory fitness are much bigger predictors of mortality than body weight.  In fact, a fit person who is obese has less of a mortality risk than an unfit person who is of normal body weight.  And both cardiorespiratory fitness and waist circumference can improve without ANY weight loss as long as they are physically active.

While the ideal situation would be to have our client lose weight, reduce waist circumference, AND increase their level of fitness, is it not still acceptable to help them become healthier an extend their life even if they aren’t as dedicated to their nutrition as they should be?  Or are we so vain that the only thing worth accepting money for is the change in physical appearance?

Personally, I’ve decided that I’d rather have them reframe their goals from weight goals to health goals so that they’re not expecting results that are never going to happen given their current level of dedication.  In this way, I’m not promising something for their money that I can’t deliver, but I’m not discouraging someone from physical activity (which is something I don’t think anyone should do given the state of affairs in North America).

Check out a 27 minute presentation by Dr. Ross HERE and let me know what you think.  He’s a great speaker and the time flies when you hear him talk.

5.  High Fructose Hype?

Last week a study released by researchers at Princeton University suggested that High Fructose Corn Syrup may contribute to obesity more than normal sugar.  But is the evidence convincing enough to suggest that we should entirely avoid HFCS?

A while back I read a blog by Alan Aragon suggesting differently and saying it generated a lot of discussion is an understatement.  It has 371 responses as I write this!  But if you want to go toe to toe with Alan you’d better come equipped with studies because he’ll take you to school (which he does with those who oppose his views in the comments).

If you’re deathly afraid of high fructose corn syrup check out the blog.  It is worth reading.

6.  Crush It…Should be Crushed

A while ago I heard a lot of hype about Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It so I picked it up and read it in a little under two hours.  If you know nothing at all about social networking and internet promotions this book might be valuable to you, but I found it a little bit more like a rah rah motivational speech than anything else.

Gary suggests working until three in the morning and really “crushing it”.  To me, the whole idea of working countless hours and leaving comments on every blog possible to drive traffic to your own blog is working hard, not working smart.  Granted, Gary is a millionaire and I am not so he’s obviously done something right.  I guess I just expected more information and less of a cheering squad.

Oh…he did mention something useful in the book.  If you distribute videos you may want to check out Tube Mogul so you can share them with various video sharing sites at the same time.  Mind you, it took Mike Boyle to point this out to me because I probably just glazed over this part when I was bored.

7.  Lottery tickets are God’s punishment for people who are bad at math.

Consequently, they are also my punishment because I always seem to get stuck behind people who are buying them.

8.  What if you won 50 million dollars?

A couple weeks ago while I was waiting behind a lottery ticket picker (do they really need to select their specific tickets?) I wondered exactly what most people in the fitness industry would do if they won the 50 million dollars that was offered that week.

I realized that I would definitely travel and I certainly wouldn’t work nearly as often, but I’d still train people because this is my passion.  If you wouldn’t, perhaps you’re in the wrong job.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Leave ‘em below.

Hey You!

Yes…YOU!

Put up your hands and step away from the journals.

It may be no surprise to anyone who frequents this blog that I am an information addict.  As such, I scour blogs all over the place to find useful thoughts and ideas relating to training, nutrition, and overall health.  However, over the past few months I’ve noticed something I’ve never really noticed before.  Everyone seems to be quoting studies regarding training, nutrition, and supplements!

Excellent…or maybe not?

As a complete science geek you might think I’d be happy about this, but truthfully, it all has me a little annoyed.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled the study mentioned in an article or blog post only to find that the study design was completely inappropriate or the statistics used by the authors were a hot mess.

While I appreciate the intentions of well meaning coaches and trainers, I’m concerned that the information being presented is often a little incomplete.  With free access to places like Pubmed finding scientific abstracts is easy.  But reading the actual studies and understanding them is a different matter.   

Here are a few things you should note when reading a journal:

1.  Impact

Impact is basically a measure of how frequently an average article in a journal is cited in a given period of time.  Higher impact journals tend to be the most reliable in terms of quality of research.

Journals like Nature, Science, and Cell are very high impact journals.  The journal of “How Much Hyooge Muscles I Can Get by Takin’ Dem Supplements” is probably not a journal I’d bother reading.

2.  Alpha

Although I’m simplifying a bit here, alpha is a statistical figure that scientists set to determine if their research is considered significant or not.  (Stats experts please don’t crucify me here.  I’m trying to simplify without losing the message.)

If alpha is set at 0.05 and the researcher confirms his or her hypothesis that training program X is better than training program Y, there is a 95% chance that this is true.  This is good news.

Unfortunately, there is also a 5% chance that this happened due to random influences or other sources of variation.  If this happens it is called a Type 1 error and journals tend to hate when this happens.  This is bad news.

If alpha is set lower (at 0.01), there is a 99% chance that the result is true and is less likely due to random influences.  If a study has reached significance at a lower alpha level you can be more sure that this type of error has been avoided.  Good news.

On the downside, because you’re being so careful to avoid saying something is true when it is not, you might miss a training effect that is actually there.  This is called a type 2 error.  This is bad news.

Generally speaking, journals tend to like a certain level to be met so the authors sometimes have no say where they set alpha.  Setting it in one place says a protocol is significant while setting it elsewhere might suggest it is not.

If a study says that a certain protocol wasn’t significant you sometimes have to look at alpha to see if it is set at 0.01 because they may have missed an effect that they would have deemed significant if they’d set it at 0.05.  Sometimes you’ll even see a researcher sneak in an alpha value of 0.06 just to make their results significant.

3.  Study Design

Generally speaking this is probably one of the most important things to consider and this is where I think many studies fall short.  Simple flaws in nutrition studies can often be as small as not getting subjects to record their food intake and relying on subject reporting that their intake has remained the same.

A bigger flaw (mentioned recently in Alan Aragon’s Research Review) was that a study examining the effects of branched chain amino acid supplementation used a control group who got 64 grams of protein for the day and a BCAA group who got 109 grams of protein for the day (and an additional 90 grams of carbs).  Obviously they found that the BCAA group was superior, but if you didn’t look closely you’d probably assume that this is because of the BCAAs instead of just total protein intake or carb intake.

Even things seemingly as trival as whether you use the same subjects for both protocols are important.  For example, if you were looking at the differences between one type of contraction or another on hypertrophy you might be inclined to assign one group to train with concentric contractions and another group to do purely eccentric contractions.

However, when you go to do your statistics (you’d probably run something called an ANOVA), you might miss something because there is usually more variability between two people than might be introduced by the training protocol.  Instead, your study would have more power to detect a difference in training type if you did one type of contraction with one arm and a different type with the other arm.

What’s that?  You think it would be hard to get trained people to train each arm differently?  You bet your ass it is!  And that is part of the reason why you don’t see a lot of studies being done on trained individuals.  Well…that and the fact that most training study participants are university students who are living on Kraft Dinner and beer because they’re the only ones who will let you do 16 muscle biopsies and train each arm differently for 12 weeks for $300.

There are so many possible issues here that I can’t even come close to touching on all of them, but I think you get the idea.

4.  Funding Source

Personally I think there is a lot less to make of this than most people suggest, but it is still worth mentioning.  In my experience, when a researcher is seeking private funding for a study they’ll design a study first, create a hypothesis AND THEN contact a company for sponsorship.

Obviously the researcher is going to reach out to a company who serves to benefit if the project proves correct (which it usually does if the researcher has done his or her reading of previous literature and knows what outcome is most likely).  Of course, a company is also only likely to sponsor a study it thinks will serve to benfit them.  Why on earth would they sponsor something that would disprove their product???

However, all if this has little to do with the study itself which is usually run by a grad student in pursuit of their Masters or Ph.D. and they have little dealing with the funding agency in the first place.  They are not “hired” by the agency to produce outcomes.

In the end, the researcher expects a certain outcome, they ask a company for money to demonstrate this, and then they publish it.  I’m sure there are some shady dealings out there, but I don’t think they’re as common as you might expect.

Summary

Utimately, I think what I’m trying to say is that unless you understand things like post-hoc analyses, calculation of statistical power, and the specific protocols used during the studies (and their assumptions) please leave the summarizing of studies to those who do.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Questions?  Please post them below.

If you’ve been to enough social gatherings you’ve inevitably met one of those people who, when talking to you about fitness, firmly pats his large, rock solid belly and says “It’s all muscle”.

In fact, you too might be looking at your stomach in the mirror and thinking “Wow, this is pretty solid and I can hardly grab any fat.  If I crank up the training and diet hard for 12 weeks I’ll be ready for the beach”.  Or maybe you’re not worried too much about it at all because you’re going to smash a new total at your next meet and being a little thick through the middle isn’t really your biggest concern.

Whatever the case, I feel it is my duty to tell you that you and your friend from the party are freaking ticking time bombs!  Abdominal obesity is a killer and you can only ignore this fact for so long before it comes up to bite you in the ass.

In the photo below you can see a cross section of the abdominal cavity of a person who has low levels of visceral fat (left) and a person who has a high level of visceral fat (right).  The white stuff inside of the abdominal wall is the fat and you can see clearly that it has essentially surrounded each and every organ in that cavity.

 If you’re thinking “shit, that can’t be good”, you’re right.  Take a look at the liver of a normal healthy person (left) and someone with a fatty liver (right).  Keep in mind, of course, that the liver plays a role in the elimination of insulin in the body and if it is not functioning properly because it is encapsulated in fat, you’re on an express trip to a date with type 2 Diabetes. 

Of course, if your liver is covered in fat, your heart is probably affected too right?  You’re damn right it is!  Take a gander at the two hearts below.  Notice that the heart on the top (front and back views) is smaller and has few fat deposits.  The heart on the bottom, on the other hand, is hypertrophied and is covered in fat.

Interestingly, but probably not surprisingly, liposuction can only remove the fat beneath the skin.  It can’t remove the fat inside of the abdominal wall so even if you look better and manage to reduce your waist circumference, you’re still just as dead as you were before.  In the picture below you can see the reduction in the subcutaneous fat (below the skin), but the visceral fat is the same.

It seems that now, the only plus side to liposuction (for men at least) is that about 34% of women who have liposuction in the abdominal or hip region experience an increase in breast tissue amounting to approximately one cup size.  I’m not even kidding.  You can check out the abstract HERE.

Basically what I’m getting at here is that if you’re the typical off-season bodybuilder who just gets fat and calls it “bulking” or you’re one of those guys who espouses the get big (i.e., fat) to get strong mentality you might want to change your game plan.  Otherwise you might end up pushing up daisies instead of barbells.

As usual, drop me a comments below to let me know your thoughts.  More importantly, please share this with those you feel could benefit from this information whether they train or not.  Obesity is an epidemic that affects all of us.

Recently my friend Mike Scott sent a group of fitness professionals and rehabilitation specialists a question:

“In 4 (FOUR!) sentences or less, name your favorite resource for strengthening, conditioning, health, OR rehabilitation information. This can include books, journals, seminars, websites (NOT GOOGLE), or anything else you can think of. You can only include ONE resource my friends, so make sure it is your favorite.”

Now THAT is a tough question.  Check out the list of answers HERE and then swing back by to let me know what your favourite resource is in the comments section below.

PS: Don’t come back and tell me your site is the best site on the internet you arrogant buggers.   

Let’s face facts for a second here.  The vast majority of people that lift weights do so for primarily aesthetic reasons.  Sure, many of us want to be stronger, faster, and healthier.  And there are certainly those who train exclusively to improve their sports performance, but in the end I’d be willing to bet that training to simply look better is the single biggest motivation for the average trainee.

So why do many strength coaches crap all over bodybuilding?  I could speculate that it has something to do with the rampant steroid use among high level competitors or the fact that some of them have more oil in their muscles than I do in my car.  Or it could be the mental image of a bunch of oiled up, tanned, men and women posing on a stage in their bathing suits.  I can’t really say for sure.

But what about people who aren’t interested in competing?  What about those who are purely interested in gaining the leanest, most muscular physique possible within their own biomechanical and physiologial framework while keeping an eye on structural balance and joint health?  Is bodybuilding training really so bad for the body that we need to crap all over their methods?

I guess the question I’m really asking is whether it is possible to create a lean and exceptionally muscular physique without sacrificing structural balance and joint health.

And in line with that question, is there room for exercises that are deemed my many coaches as unfriendly for the joints (such as the guillotine bench press) or useless (direct arm training)?

As with everything, I think it comes down to assessment.  If you’ve read my blog you’re probably aware that I am a big fan of movement based testing with such as Assess and Correct, but beyond that I feel that it is really important to use the appropriate assessments to inform your decisions for each individual goal.

For dealing with obesity I use the Edmonton Obesity Staging System, for performance I look at the demands of the sport, and when training for aesthetics I like to do a true visual assessment to direct training.  I should note here that I don’t care much for body fat testing in leaner individuals as this is less important than the physical appearance changes.  I could care less what the number says if a client’s appearance doesn’t reflect it.

Here is a sample of a simple client assessment I use for evaluating a physique in which I can comment on muscle size or relative proportion:

- Upper traps:
- Front delts:
- Lateral delts:
- Rear delts:
- Biceps:
- Tricep long head:
- Tricep lateral head:
- Forearms
- Lower chest:
- Upper chest
- Upper back width:
- Upper back thickness:
- Lower/Mid back erectors:
- Abdominals:
- Obliques:
- Quads:
- Glutes:
- Hamstrings:
- Calves:
 
Highlights:
 
Needs Work:

General Impression & Plan:

Combining this with the movement based screen I should now know what muscles need to be worked (yes, I sometimes work muscles not movements…I know…blasphemy) and which movements should be contraindicated for that person.  If arm training is warranted, I’ll do arm training because I’m not in the business of sticking to a “training arms is for wussies” paradigm because it is popular.  I’m in the business of getting results.

Would I use the guillotine bench press, sissy squats, or upright rows?  Probably not.  But this is primarily because these are not the most effective movements in the first place and I can find exercises to hit the same muscle groups with less risk.

Are joint health and building a muscular physique mutually exclusive?  I would have to say no.  Do you agree?  Feel free to share your thoughts below!

And thanks to my blog reader Rob for putting the idea for this post in my head.  I hope I answered your question.