I’m not going to talk about SMART goal setting or the usual “new year, new me” bullshit. Like you, I have seen it every year for a long time. In fact, 2020 marks my 22nd year in the fitness industry. Personally I am not one for New Year’s resolutions. I do believe the end of the year and start of another is a great time for reflection, introspection and time to plan for a better future, but I also believe any time is a great time for doing self-reflection and the like. It doesn’t have to be at the beginning of the year.

If we look at most people’s resolutions they revolve around getting healthier or fitter, earning more money, having a better social life, better relationships and so on. In order to have any of these things we have to change our behavior; and in order to do that, we inevitably have to make an internal shift.

Personally I am a very goal orientated person, but goal setting, just like resolutions, has been pushed down our throats for over 20 years by self-help and fitness industries alike. If resolutions worked for everybody we would see people realize their goals every year. The truth is that some goals simply don’t work.

The power of our thoughts and the quality of them will lead our decisions, habits, and behavior. This will ultimately lead to us achieving (or not achieving) our resolutions in 2020. So, here are some points to consider when setting your resolutions for 2020.

Connect With Your Internal View of Yourself

Call it storytelling, internal dialogue, self-talk or the unconscious dialogue that goes on in your head (whether you are aware of it or not). The things you say to yourself about yourself has a massive influence on your behavior.

Most of our decision-making is based on self-stories. You unconsciously make decisions that match your idea of who you are and your identity. When you make a decision or act in a way that fits your self-story, the decision or action will feel right.

In contrast, when you make a decision or act in a way that doesn’t fit your self-story you feel uncomfortable. If you want to change your behavior and make the change stick, then you need to first change the underlying narrative that is operating.

If you want to be healthy, then you have to have an operating story you tell yourself that you are a healthy or healthier person.

As author Stephen R. Covey said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

When we think a thought, it elicits an emotion. We often deal with any uncomfortable feelings with addiction or unhealthy obsession—using food, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, drugs, gambling, religion, even sex and exercise to help us feel better.

Initially, these things can make us feel better, but in the long term overuse of these things is often unhealthy. Relying on comfort food, for example, doesn’t help us work on the root cause of our emotions.

In an emotional eating cycle, we eat “bad” food, then often judge ourselves harshly. Next, we feel guilty and shameful for eating said “bad” food and for falling off the wagon with our diet.

Finally, we have catastrophic thinking where we self-sabotage and create more self-loathing and, as a result, self-medicate with more “bad” food. Rinse and repeat. These thoughts, the emotions, and behaviors that follow hurt us.

If your self-story is one of self-flagellation and self-loathing then you are operating from a place that will never help your resolutions of being healthier become a reality. Self-soothing with forgiveness, acceptance, and self-love can be a powerful antidote to this destructive cycle of shame.

Understanding this process and acknowledging the root problem can be the first step in breaking the unconscious circuit of unhealthy habits. Understanding your emotions will be the number one thing to work on if your resolutions in 2020 are to become a reality.

Don’t Make Your Resolutions Out of Obligation

Your why for your resolutions is crucial to your success in achieving them. I believe doing things for others can be a very strong extrinsic motivator—getting fitter so you can run around with your kids, honoring a passed or living family member or looking good for the opposite sex.

Yet, time and time again I find that when the going really gets tough when plateaus are reached when there are setbacks and failures, those who are doing things for reasons outside of themselves are often the first to quit.

Instead, when you have a big internal and intrinsic why and when you are doing things that align with your purpose and your highest values, you will find you have a bigger yes burning inside of you. This will allow you to say no to all other things that get in the way and will help you overcome obstacles in your way.

Operating from a place of purpose and values trumps motivation anytime. Motivation comes and goes. The driving force that is left behind will help set up the habits and discipline required to soldier on. We can waffle on about discipline as much as we want, but habits are underpinned with a deep drive that comes from an internal shift.

Have you ever thought about what would make you happy? What do you want? Many of the resolutions we set are not necessarily what we genuinely want. Have you ever filtered out what everybody else thinks, what everybody else wants and ignored everybody else’s judgment and criticism?

So much of the time we are worrying about what other people think of us to gain validation, external gratification, and acceptance—the very things that we have forgotten to give to ourselves. We often make our resolutions due to obligation rather than a genuine burning desire and passion to make them happen for ourselves.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature”

– Marcus Aurelius

Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient (EQ), is one of the things I wish I had learned about at school and wrapped my head around at a much earlier age. How we feel about things determines, for the most part, the choices we make and our behavior.

Regardless of whether it is becoming more financially literate, getting healthier and fitter, or being better at relationships, all of these resolutions require one thing: you must work through any preconceived ideas, beliefs or thoughts that are not working for you or are harmful.

If you continue to bring along your baggage, the thoughts and beliefs that are not working for you currently (whether you are consciously aware of them or not), you will continue to have the same results.

Sometimes EQ can come in the form of taking control of our environment so it leads us closer to our resolutions. What we know from research is that your environment and the systems you have in place are far more important than willpower and grit.

We forget that often our environment creates and controls us, not the other way around. A classic example of this is avoiding certain people or coping with the saboteurs and hecklers on your health and fitness journey.

This group can include friends, family members or even partners. It is navigating the rough sea of sensations, emotions, people or locations that trigger poor choices.

It can be impatience with your results, trying to be perfect, testing yourself too early with particular food situations or being overconfident and thinking that you don’t have any more to learn, only to not have a strategy for difficult situations or a contingency plan for a bad day.

Maybe you are too proud to ask for a hand on your journey to keep you accountable or to track your progress—two of the main reasons why most resolutions fail.

It might also be how you view setbacks and failures. If we look at our success and failures in the same way, as a victory in feedback, all of a sudden our perspective on things and our self-story can change.

All successes are just a string of failures. And, in fact, our failures give us the opportunity to simply tweak what it is we are doing in order to learn. If more people viewed setbacks in this way, we would see a lot more people sticking with their resolutions.

Maybe it’s being self-aware of procrastination, the little voice inside the head that is scared of the resolution, maybe it’s saying we aren’t good enough.

Maybe your goals are too big and unrealistic and you underestimate the difficulty of changing what is normal for you. Sometimes we forget action begets more action and if we don’t change something in our daily routine, no matter how small, nothing else changes.

EQ also comes in the form of falling in love with the journey, the habits, and the process. It is easy to fall in love with the destination, the results, and the outcome. But falling in love with the habits required to get there is far more important, otherwise, we will simply never get there.

The realization of goals does not change a person. Instead, the thinking that changes along the journey and the internal shift to realizing a goal, is what ultimately changes a person, not the destination. Placing value on what is learned along the way rather than the goal itself is emotionally intelligent.

Change the Way You Think in 2020

There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be better off financially, wanting to be ripped, to have better sex and relationships, or whatever your resolution is. They are, however, resolutions that lie outside of ourselves.

Maybe this year it is time for a different approach if you have been unsuccessful in the past. There is no doubt these things will improve our lives, but often we think that these external things will bring us happiness.

In fact, however, the quality of our thinking will dictate how we behave, influence the decisions and choices we make, and determine how happy we actually are. When the quality of our thinking is better, we naturally gravitate toward the things that are better for us.

Just remember that changing the way you think is just as important, if not more important, than trying to change what you do.

The post Nothing Will Change This Year If You Don’t appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I would argue that the front squat provides:

• Great gains in various areas including posture, glute activation, and huge quads.
• Better crossover into real life and athletic endeavors.
• It is often a whole lot safer.

Let’s face it, it is a hell of a lot easier for the average gym goer to do the usual leg press, leg curl, leg extension, smith machine squat—and my favorite, the half-assed, half-rep back squat for their Facebook or Insta account—than it is to get under a heavy front squat.

The front squat allows the lifter to go much deeper (so there goes your half rep back squat bragging rights), but this, in turn, allows better glute activation due to the depth, The front squat requires considerable postural and core strength to stay more upright. There is also that pesky rack position which most people simply do not understand, and as a result, they think they have a wrist or mobility restriction. Most of the time people just don’t have the technique right. And because the bar usually sits up against the throat a little, it can be uncomfortable. So, unfortunately, front squats often get thrown in the “too hard” basket.

So what variations of the front squat are there? What is a great way to progress to one? And if you don’t want to do a front squat with a barbell in the rack position and wanted the same benefits, what could you do instead?

Well, I am glad you asked.

Regain Your Resting Body Weight Squat

As human beings, we learned how to squat from a very young age—and usually from the bottom up as part of our developmental patterns. Children often spend lots of time in this position and as a species, we spent a lot of time shooting the breeze hanging around fires and making things here, too.

Many grown adults have lost the ability to do something that they could do as children. We stopped moving, started sitting on chairs and toilets, and lost a fundamental movement pattern. The reality is many of us, due to our sedentary lifestyle, have lost the ability to squat well, so the first step to me in learning any loaded squat is to regain a relaxed flat foot squat that we could do as a child.

In many countries, people still go to the toilet and spend long periods of time resting in this position. It is often called the third world country squat for this reason. I remember on a trip to Vietnam a few years ago, an elderly lady was waiting for a train alongside us for an hour or so.

If we cannot rest comfortably and breathe easily in this position, for at least a few minutes, then we probably haven’t yet earned the right to squat with load under a bar yet. If you can get to this step and can relax, then congrats, you’ve reclaimed the movement you had a kid. Isn’t that cool?

Work on Your Thoracic and Ankle Mobility

Two areas that should be mobile, but often are not, are your thoracic spine and your ankles. When it comes to the front squat or squatting in general, in my humble opinion most people struggle more with ankle mobility (and more specifically with dorsiflexion) than they do with hip mobility. The ankles and feet get no love, and we take what they do for granted.

With modern footwear often taking the need for our feet and ankles to functional optimally out of the picture by doing all the work for us, and doing all sorts of nasty things to our feet and toes, it is often a surprise for many to learn how bad their feet and ankles are when it comes to mobility, especially as they get older.

Combine this with one of most common injuries being inversion sprains of the ankle, then the ankle joint often has very little of the 3.5-4 inches of ankle dorsiflexion that it should. If you are struggling with an ankle ROM challenge, then all you have to do is Google or YouTube ankle dorsiflexion or ankle mobility to find a vast amount of material on this.

Another prerequisite for the front squat is that the torso needs to stay very upright on the lift. This great for lower back health compared to the back squat which often is more a lower back exercise, and often why it is prescribed to athletes that require a thick back like rugby league and union players.

As a result of this upright positioning, many struggle with the thoracic mobility required to do so. Tight lats play a huge role in making the front rack position harder than it needs to be with keeping the upper arm parallel to the ground and the elbows high, so look for any thoracic extension, lat mobility, and thoracic mobility material that will help you stay upright.

Learn How to Goblet Squat

Popularized by Master RKC Dan John, proficiency with the goblet squat should be obtained before progressing on to pretty much any other squat progression; it is that good. Whether it is holding onto a medball, dumbbell, kettlebell, or whatever you have lying around, learning how to goblet squat well, like they are taught on an HKC or RKC certification, should be your next go to.

The goblet squat will start to teach the body to remain upright while holding a weight in front of the body up around the chest connected to the sternum and midsection so it starts to mimic the same movement pattern and requirements of a good barbell front squat. Sometimes chocking the heels up on some weight plates will help the pattern by giving added ankle dorsiflexion or a band around the knees to engage the glutes and hips properly may also help make your goblet squat awesome.

Learn Variations of the Kettlebell Front Squat

The next step in working to your barbell front squat or taking your kettlebell practice to the next level is with the kettlebell front or rack squat, held in one hand (which can sometimes be supported by the other hand).

Yes, this is an asymmetrically loaded squat that really starts to test keeping the elbow up and thoracic spine upright in the squat as you rest the kettlebell in the “v” between your chest, forearm, and bicep—and is a more challenging version than the goblet squat from a positioning perspective. Add another kettlebell to the picture and you have the double kettlebell front squat—a staple of double kettlebell lifting and probably the best way of getting someone strong with two bells.

With the kettlebells in the rack position connected to the body (and up high), it really emphasizes the quads and tends to force you to lean back to counteract the weight, keeping you more upright. I would argue that in many ways this is much harder and often feels heavier than its barbell cousin with the same weight. Don’t take my word for it. Grab two 32kg or two 36kg kettlebells and squat them for reps. It is the master of kettlebell grinds and an essential exercise to master for any double kettlebell work.

Learn the Zombie Squat

When I first saw the Frankenstein squat, the name didn’t resonate so much to me. It looked more like a zombie from The Walking Dead or Night of the Living Dead with the arms outstretched. This variation of the front squat utilizes the bar only, resting on the upper chest/shoulders and up against the throat as the regular front squat will, so it’s an awesome variation for building confidence and getting used the bar up against the throat.

It helps to continue to develop the understanding for the position of both arms in relation to the floor and if the chest pitches forward and/or the elbows drop too low, descending into the squat, the barbell will roll off the arms and drop to the ground. So it is a great place to start with the barbell.

Learn the Front Squat Properly

Finally, to the front squat. By now with the previous progressions, you already have plenty of squatting practice. You have the prerequisite mobility and stability and have a great squat pattern going. You are acutely aware of how important the positioning of the upper arms and the torso are, particularly at the bottom of the squat as to not drop the bar. You’ve also done some zombie squats so you are also comfortable with the bar on your throat.

The last piece of the puzzle is the rack position. This position is always the bain for most beginner lifters who often feel that their elbows and wrists are going to snap under the load. The reason is simple—they often don’t understand the position. While some people may genuinely have some limitations and restrictions doing this lift, if you have 90 degrees of extension in the wrist, just like in a push-up, then you are good to go.

Some of the key points with the rack position are:

• Make sure the bar is racked about an inch or two below the clavicles while standing for safe racking and un-racking.
• Keep the elbows up and in, wrists out.
• Don’t grab or fully grip the bar. Yep, you read correctly, this is the biggest flaw. The bar is rested/hooked on the fingertips.
• Bar up against the throat, upper chest, and shoulders.

The Zercher Squat

As a bonus, I had to mention the Zercher squat in this article as a barbell alternative, simply because it is my favorite squat with a barbell, and it usually has me feeling like I can walk through walls afterward. This variation is done with a barbell in the crook of the elbows, palms facing you like a bicep curl. Initially, it can be uncomfortable with the bar in the elbows, but this is easily remedied with a pair of fat grips, a towel, or some foam.

The Zercher squat can be an amazing alternative for those with shoulder issues or genuine wrist restrictions. The added bonus is that with the bar further out in front of you, the more core and posture control you need to maintain in order for you not to fall flat on your face. It teaches you to compress the abdomen and sit between your legs.

Because the bar placement is closer to the floor and further from the body, more recruitment of the hip and lower back musculature is required than that of two kettlebells. So, the Zercher, in fact, can often be a substitute for both the barbell back and front squat.

Get Front Squatting

As the saying often goes, “if it was easy everyone would be doing it,” but sometimes it’s only “not easy” for us because we simply don’t understand how to do things. And as a result, we underestimate the value.

Don’t fear the front squat in its various forms. If your goal is to move well, improve your core and posture, and get strong, this may be the best exercise you are not doing at the moment. There is a front squat for almost everybody.

The post Front and Center: The Best Exercise You Are Not Doing appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The Fad of Sport Specific Training

Sports specific training is where specific movements or actions that are done in a given sport are mimicked or replicated in the gym with resistance or using cool props.

For example, it is usually done with resistance bands, on Bosu balls, cable machines, sprinters using treadmills for speed training, and agility ladders. It also ranges from baseball players throwing weighted balls or using weighted bats not to mention my favorite for looking hardcore, the elevation training mask. Not only are there a lot of gimmicky and flashy exercises and products on the market, trainers and martial arts coaches are cashing in on it, too.

There are a number of trainers and strength and conditioning coaches who have made a living off their marketing as being “sports specific” coaches to athletes of all levels. The claim is that these sports specific exercises will transfer to the ring, octagon, oval, field, or game-time performance.

But, they rarely do. In fact the sexier they usually are, the lesser the likelihood is of them having a direct transfer to the athlete’s chosen sport.

When an S&C coach works with an athlete, there is a lot of thought and planning that goes into sessions and programming. The main focus is actually quite simple. To make the martial artist, fighter, or athlete stronger and better conditioned for their sport while keeping them as fresh as possible and injury free. Typically, four main areas need to be addressed—strength and power, energy systems (for the sport, their position, and style of play), recovery, and injury reduction.

The primary strength qualities for most sports are maximal, starting, explosive, reactive, rotational, rate of force development, acceleration and deceleration, stability, and strength endurance. A combination of these will allow the athlete to perform general athletic movements demanded by their particular sport. The sports can be cyclic, like running or rowing, or acyclic, like throwing or jumping. There is no one right way to train these strength qualities but there are definitely some methods much better than others.

The Trouble with Sports Specific Training

The problem we see now, just like the commercial fitness industry, is that S&C coaches and trainers are now ignoring exercises and methods that have stood the test of time, and instead are choosing instead the flashy stuff with bands, balls, masks, and other “sexy” tools and methods. They are ignoring proven training methods to focus on what looks cool—and this is done at their athlete’s expense.

S&C coaches get contacted for “advanced programming” often when an athlete should be focused on getting health parameters in check. This could include things like improving sleep, hydration, reducing stress, or mastering movement literacy and quality with basic movement patterns. In reality, most people that contact me or other coaches don’t need advanced programming whatsoever. They need something that is simple, they can stick to, and that gets results.

The truth is that nothing is going to give you the sports specific results that actually playing your sport will. Most sport specific exercises screw up motor patterns and often create bad habits. True sports specific training is done within the sport and should be left to the sports coaches—the striking coach, wrestling or BJJ coach, a batting coach, tackling coach, golf coach, etc. These are the people to help improve your technical sports specific abilities.

When discussing specificity in training Dr. Mel C. Siff (author of Supertraining) explains:

“While simulation of a sporting movement with small added resistance over the full range of movement or with larger resistance over a restricted part of the movement range may be appropriate at certain stages of training, simulation of any movement with significant resistance is inadvisable since it can confuse the neuromuscular programs which determine the specificity of the above factors.“

You cannot duplicate sports skills and game-like scenarios effectively in the gym. Most of the stuff I see on social media is not only silly and dangerous but has no impact on things that contribute to improved athletic performance. When improvements are gained despite this gimmicky training it’s by default, not by design.

So, What Can Be Done?

Most of the time the last thing you will want to do is mimic the same movements off the field or out of the ring that you do while performing the sport itself. Due to specialization (and especially early on with children and the studies showing its detriment), the majority of injuries stem from the same repetitive movements being done over and over. You must give athletes an opportunity to develop by creating balance and undoing the damage from over-specialization.

Athletes need to address weaknesses while keeping their strengths. If you are strong but lack endurance then that is the weak link you must address. If you have great endurance but lack adequate strength in comparison, then you need to work toward more strength. Many S&C coaches miss the point of correct strength training programming. Getting strong is also about becoming more resilient and injury-proofing the body. Call it “pre-hab” if you will. Who cares how strong you get if you are always broken and can never compete? Strength training is about balancing the body from repetitive movements, dysfunction, and compensations that arrive from thousands of repetitions moving the same way all the time. Removing asymmetries to an acceptable level, improving weaknesses in particular areas, and re-establishing neuromuscular balance and control, along with becoming more resilient, should be the goal of a good S&C coach.

S&C coaches need to identify what are the basic qualities of the sport and work on those qualities in the gym. Athletes generally need to stick to developing pristine fundamental movement literacy and strength development that can be consistently repeated.

Multi-joint, multi-planar, double-leg, single-leg exercises—like the squat, deadlift, pull, push, lunge, twist, carry, and gait—are the main patterns to strengthen using progressive overload. This might not be sexy or cool but it is effective and gets results. What is sexier than looking cool in the gym, you ask? How about winning?

The Role of Strength Training

Strength training is supplementary. The thing is, while having big numbers is the gym is good for your ego, no one cares about your bench press, squat, deadlift, or whatever numbers you get in the gym if you are stagnant at your art or sport. Strength should never be developed at the expense of other attributes.

In other words, if you are a coach and your athletes get stronger in the gym but then their movement, reaction time, flexibility, coordination, motor control, and technique take a step backward then you aren’t doing your job. You must convert their strength into great technique and movement. You aren’t going to get that championship belt around their waist or be named as a good S&C coach while they are getting whooped in the ring.

Time is a precious commodity for most athletes, and fatigue is the enemy—fatigue makes cowards of men. Good S&C coaches look at what they can strip away from programs, rather than adding, so their athletes can focus on the sport.

If you take a closer look at the world’s most dynamic and explosive athletes you will not see a lot of gimmicky, flashy sport specific BS. Instead, you will usually see old-school tried and true methods that have stood the test of time for their effectiveness and results. While sexy, gimmicky, and flashy might sell, they rarely get the results.

The post Do You Need Sport Specific Training? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then there’s a whole lot of crazy going on out there in sport and the health and fitness industry. If we were to look at the progress of a lot of athletes and gym-goers we would see fast gains, injury, a big lay off, then rinse and repeat.

I was fortunate to be one of the first Aussies to do the Functional Movement Screen back in 2010 with Gray Cook. At the time, the workshop was called the Certified Kettlebell-Functional Movement Screen (CK-FMS), which was a course for qualified RKC’s. I learned that the biggest predictor of injury is previous injury followed by asymmetry, a lack of neuromuscular balance and control, a higher BMI, and—wait for it—stupidity.

It occurred to me that a lot of our rehabilitation, physiotherapy, and strategies to come back to sport, exercise, and training aren’t very successful. The reasons why are complex and multi-factorial, and certainly not only physical. In my experience, those with a positive mental attitude (PMA), not only rebound from injuries, but they also rebound faster.

Let’s face it when we have a layoff we just want to get back into things. It seems to me that all too often physical therapists and coaches are pressured to get an athlete back to their sport or training as soon as possible. But by rushing this process the athlete gets set up for failure. Getting athletes back to where they were prior to injury just isn’t good enough and this thinking is flawed. We must work to get our athletes (or ourselves) back to an even better place than where they were pre-injury—both mentally and physically.

Get to the Root

Make sure you get to the root cause of the problem and fix it—don’t just address the site of the pain. This is because the absence of pain does not mean that you are ready to get back into the swing of things. It just means you aren’t in pain anymore, and that’s it. If the injury wasn’t a contact injury, then you need to evaluate things that may have contributed to the injury, even if it isn’t obvious.

Really investigate the postural strain (poor posture) when sitting, standing, and lying during regular day to day activities. What does the technique in the gym look like? Is there unbalanced programming, poor exercise selection, repetitive movements, an overload of areas, gaping asymmetries? What about a lack of mobility, stability, or strength? Perhaps stress or poor recovery strategies are involved and combined with a lack of sleep. Maybe it’s a problem with alignment? For example, a shoulder problem could actually be a neck problem in disguise or perhaps a hip problem is causing knee misalignment.

Schedule an appointment with a professional and also self-assess. If you don’t get to the root cause of why you are injured and fix it, welcome to the hamster wheel of fast gains, injury, and recovery with a side dish of zero long-term progress. Many of us build our training around our strengths when in reality we need to build it around our weaknesses. You must treat your injury as an opportunity to learn.

Be the Tortoise

I get it. You are super excited about getting back to training. There is no pain. You have been given the all clear by your doc or health professional. But it is a crazy idea to pick it up exactly where you left off. While it may be tough on the ego to do a less sophisticated exercise, or put less weight on the bar, spar as hard, or roll and tap earlier, you absolutely must—even if you don’t feel pain.

Try working on areas of your game you wouldn’t have usually considered. Whatever it is, you need to see regression as a way forward instead of a way back. Regressing to progress is the sign of a professional rather than an amateur. Understand that rebuilding slowly is a better option than going too hard out of the gates then ending up back on the sidelines again. Just because you feel that you can, doesn’t mean that you should. Everybody wants to be the hare, not the tortoise. Be the tortoise; remember you are playing the long game. Remind yourself you want to be in this for years, not weeks.

Pursue Self-Care and Maintenance

Re-training movement and recruitment patterns, remodeling tissue, fixing alignment, removing asymmetries, improving mobility, working stabilizers, or improving strength deficits all take time—a lot of time. Spending a few weeks following a strategy to get back to your sport or training then casting it aside once the pain disappears will get you a return ticket to your injury. Again, the absence of pain does not mean that you are out of the jungle. Get help from your osteopath or chiropractor, and update your rehab program from your coach or physio to one that is preventative. Balance what you do in your sport.

Increase Your Emotional IQ

An often missing component in returning from injury is the psychological component. Playing sport and training effect us mentally in so many ways. If you have been training or have been a serious athlete for long, then you will soon come to see yourself defined in terms of your sport—it’s who you are and what you do. With your long-term investment and commitment of time, energy, money, and pain over the years, your training has become an integral part of who you are. It’s how you see yourself and how others see you. It is also a major source of self-esteem and provides you with a continual source of positive reinforcement and feedback.

There is enjoyment and self-satisfaction in mastering new skills, overcoming challenging obstacles, and progressively getting better. Having a great bout, game or race feels fantastic and provides feedback that your hard work is paying off, especially when there is external validation coming your way. We also all know that it is a great way to deal with stress. Many trainees discover that their involvement in their practice is a constructive way to escape from the stress of family and work-related problems. Their sport offers them a safe and constructive way to channel their frustrations and aggression. Along these same lines, your sport can provide you as an athlete with a vehicle to a better life, which has been especially so for a number of the fighters I have trained. So, what happens psychologically when all this comes to a grinding halt due to injury?

If you want to speed up the rehab process as much as possible, then you need to expect certain feelings and behaviors to emerge as a result of your injury, especially if it serious or career ending. These feelings and behaviors are absolutely okay and normal. With any kinds of loss, the athlete may go through a number of stages directly related to mourning. Some professionals feel that these stages parallel Kubler-Ross’s five stages of death and dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Many athletes first meet their injury with outright denial. They may downplay or ignore the seriousness of the injury, falsely believing that everything’s alright. They may continue to train through the injury which only makes things worse (and them very angry). The athlete may adopt a “why me” attitude and act hostile and resentful to coaches, teammates, etc. At some point in the process, depression may set in as the athlete comes to directly realize the nature and seriousness of the injury. At the end of this stage, the athlete finally comes to accept the situation and hopefully makes the best of it.

So what is the best way to handle things so that the mental anguish is minimized? You should allow yourself to be sad or feel whatever loss you are experiencing. Burying or hiding your feelings in this situation may interfere with effective coping and recovery. Your emotions are an important part of the healing process. Feeling is part of healing. Spending too much time and energy on the past or the future will take away from you successfully moving through the recovery process. Yes, your injury has sidetracked you. Unfortunately, this is your reality right now and you have to allow yourself to deal with it.

As difficult as this all will be, try to stay as positive as possible. Your attitude and outlook is absolutely everything. When positive, your attitude can speed up the healing process and lessen the emotional pain that you have to go through. It’s all up to you and the quality of your thinking. Monitor your internal dialogue, self-talk, and your internal storytelling.

You must continue to practice or train. If your injury allows you to still continue any part of your training, do so. Try some cross-training. If you are unable to practice physically, instead practice mentally. Use mental rehearsal on a daily basis to see, hear, and feel yourself performing in your practice, executing flawlessly and with perfect timing. Take this time to also mentally work on your weaknesses. You might even want to show up for some of the regular training and mentally rehearse what the team is doing while they’re working out. Regular mental rehearsal of your skills will keep the neuromuscular connections activated so that when you are able to actually begin physical practice, you will not have lost as much.

I used mental training on my first Expert Level 1 test for Krav Maga in Israel. On day two of the camp, I landed on some unsteady ground after kicking in a forest in Haifa and was sidelined for the remainder of the camp until testing day. I trained mentally for the days leading up to the test and kept on a steady diet of pain killers and anti-inflammatories. On testing day, I went on to not only successfully test, but topped the testing with a colleague of mine from KMG Switzerland.

The worst thing for you to do when you’re in a vulnerable state is to separate yourself from your group. Make a serious effort to reach out rather than pull in. And if you are really depressed for an extended period of time, have lost interest in things that used to excite you, have noticed that your sleep and eating patterns have changed, and/or you are having self-harming thoughts, seek professional help immediately. Seeking out the help of a professional therapist or counselor is not a sign of weakness—on the contrary, it’s a sign of strength.

Give Yourself Room to Rehab

If you’re a serious trainee and have ever had an experience with an injury, then you know that the physical hurt you feel is only a small part of the overall discomfort that you have to go through during the rehab process. Some people will have their first serious injury and never rebound back. It is imperative that as coaches, health professionals, trainers, and teammates that we address the mental component of rehab with our athletes while closely monitoring the physical component, especially when it comes to serious injury or injuries that end careers. Regardless if you are the one injured, just remember you’ve got this.

The post Bounce Back from Injury Mentally and Physically appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Where is the breakdown? What are we getting wrong? And why the hell haven’t I written about it, so I can send the next person who asks an article, rather than a long-ass Facebook message or email?

When it comes to diagnosing the cause of pain in a sophisticated joint like the shoulder, it’s complicated. If you have painful shoulders, it’s worth going to see a professional. But what I’ll bring you today are some out-of-the-box strategies that I’ve used to get myself and others out of chronic shoulder pain.

Just Stop It

It all starts with removing the negatives. As I mentioned in my knee pain article, people often just need to stop doing what is hurting them. When your health professional says to rest, do it. But there may be more to consider than just what you do in the gym. Renowned physical therapist Dr. Shirley Sahrmann tells us:

“The real reason behind a painful pattern is daily, everyday activities. It’s actually not the way you stretch before a workout. It’s not the way you let your elbows flare in the bench press or how you do your crunches. None of those things are good choices, but they may not be as harmful as simpler, non-training tasks.”

Many people think only about adding things to their programming to fix shoulder pain, or to avoid it. I am a big fan of corrective shoulder programs, but truth be told, a lot of them aren’t working for people. We need an approach that helps us stop doing the things that are creating pain in the first place, rather than a whole heap of stuff to prehab, rehab, or treat it after it already happened. No amount of rehab or prehab can possibly undo the damage you are doing to your body daily if you are not mindful and willing to stop doing the things that hurt it.

Postural Strain and Movement Quality

Scientists and practitioners love to argue about whether there is such a thing as poor posture, or one correct posture. It’s true that there is limited evidence to suggest that shoulder injuries are caused by poor posture, mainly because there are way too many variables to consider in studies. But I strongly believe that many people are doing considerable damage to their bodies every day just by how they sit, stand, sleep, and do daily activities.

Regardless of whether you define it as postural strain (a term I prefer over “poor posture”) or not, there are millions of people in non-industrialized countries who sit and stand for extended periods of time, and do hard manual labor, and have no neck, back, or shoulder pain. It is how they sit, stand, sleep, and work that is the game changer. The way they position their body keeps them out of pain.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs I have seen have happened after I helped people to stand, sit, sleep, and do mundane daily tasks (i.e., move) better. I have alleviated shoulder pain (and back pain) with some clients by having them avoid

• One-sided dominance: driving, using their computer mouse, brushing their teeth, using their phone with the same hand all the time
• Sleeping on their painful side, or sleeping on their stomach with their arm overhead
• Carrying a heavy bag over one shoulder
• Sitting rotated in one direction in an office environment
• Sitting in bed cross-legged, hunched over a computer for hours
• Vacuuming, lifting furniture, and twisting in a flexed position
• Sitting on their wallet in the back pocket

If you are in pain, take a long look at what your day-to-day movement habits are like. This is where the damage is done. Esther Gokhale’s book “8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back” is a great reference for position and posture.

Your Program or Technique Need Work

Check your exercise selection, order, load, volume, and technique. My article Advanced Programming Principles For Shoulder And Knee Health covered this very thing for balancing the scapula and improving shoulder health, and the quads and hamstrings for knee health.

If you have shoulder problems and train regularly, I can say with little hesitation that there is probably something amiss in your programming that is putting your shoulder into pain. For instance, if you spend a lot of time in flexion and do a lot of overhead work and pressing in general, this is a recipe for disaster. Check your technique and specifically look at the position of your setup for your exercises. Eliminate those exercises that take you into pain or are painful after training.

Mix It Up

If you cannot stop doing what is causing you pain, for example if it’s your work, your only other option is to try and vary what you are doing. Move from a seated to a standing workstation from time to time. Try some walking meetings.

If you have to hold pads as a trainer and that is hurting you, try some foam sticks instead. If BJJ is hurting your shoulder, try to avoid always being hunched up in your guard on one shoulder defending a guard pass, and instead try working your takedowns, your top-position game, and your guard-passing game. If you train as an orthodox fighter, train as a southpaw for a while. Try some cross training. Try a different sport or hobby.

Most joint problems are from overuse, repetitive movements and patterns, and over-specialization. Most people need to move more, but moving differently, with more variety can be a real key to improving your pain. Once you have removed the negatives,” it’s time to look at adding something new or changing some things up.

Get In Line

What comes first in corrective exercise: mobility, stability, or strength? Trick question! The answer is alignment. We often damage our joints from the way they are loaded or stressed, and alignment can be a big player in how these stresses are distributed through the joint.

Neck problems can be shoulder pain in disguise. The thoracic area or rib cage being twisted or out of whack can play havoc for the shoulders. Even the pelvis plays a role. It is all connected. Some people abhor the idea of manipulations or adjustments, but sometimes they are necessary. You can torque, pull, and stretch on a particular area, but if the joint needs to be manipulated and put back into place, you might not be able to get it done on your own.

Should You Even Be Doing That?

Movement screens and baselines can be amazing tools for judging whether any movement, stretch, or exercise is good for you. Otherwise, how do you know something is actually good for you?

Lots of people tell me that yoga, or Pilates, or their shoulder rehab program is working for them, without being able to explain why, or even show me what’s improved. When pressed, they’ll regurgitate the dogma that they’ve read or been told. Then the very same individuals will complain in the next breath about how much pain they are in, or that their symptoms are worsening.

If what you are doing shuts down your body for days, it’s hard to argue that it’s working. Think objectively about whether what you are doing is working for you, or whether you just think that it is.

Use a baseline test, like a shoulder s-pattern, arm raise against the wall, active straight leg raise, toe touch, neck turn, etc. Try any corrective exercise, and then retest against your movement baseline. Simply put, if your body likes it, your ROM or symmetry will be the same or preferably better. If it doesn’t, then it will be worse. This is a highly beneficial strategy, but one I seldom see used or taught.

With a little bit of body awareness, you can determine whether things are good for you. You can both see and feel whether your movement is better as a result of what you are doing.

Not Everything Works for Everybody

If I had a dollar for everyone I know who has gone to a physio for a shoulder problem, with their only take-home being to rest and do some resistance band external rotations, I’d probably be a millionaire. This one-size-fits-all approach hasn’t worked for most people I know, and it doesn’t address the underlying cause of why the rotator cuff isn’t doing its job (hint: it’s not the rotator cuff).

I’ve seen online fitness “experts” push the band pull-apart as the be-all and end-all for shoulders, and movement culturists such as Ido Portal pushing passive hanging as the cure for shoulder problems. But I have found that my own shoulders, as well as those of some of my clients and peers, are actually worse after passive hanging.

The point is that not all things are for all people, so be careful of cookie-cutter programs or cure-alls for shoulders. They don’t always work. Check it with a movement baseline as described above, and pay attention to how your shoulders feel the next day or two to find if it’s the right thing for you.

Get After It

Often, people will say “I did something to my shoulder in the gym today.” Here is the truth: It’s unlikely you hurt your shoulder that day. That session was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Tissue damage and dysfunction take time. You’ve been hurting your shoulder for some time, with your posture, your movement habits and your training.

And it will take time to change all that. You need to be aggressive (within limits) to change how your body works. When I ask people how their rehabilitation is going, I often get a negative answer. They’ll admit that they aren’t doing the exercises at all, or not enough to affect a positive outcome. People can complain about their physiotherapy not working, but in my experience, it is often nothing to do with the physiotherapist, but with patient adherence to the program.

The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) uses the following flow: 

Applying that framework to shoulder care might look something like this:

1. Diaphragmatic breathing progressions from prone or supine to various positions
2. Soft tissue work: Foam rolling of t-spine, rhomboids, lats, and some gentle extension over roller. Massage ball of pec minor, 1st rib, erector spinae
3. Mobility and flexibility: Cat/cow, wall dog, chest to floor stretches, rib pulls, Bretzel variations, thoracic windmill, FMS t-drill, lateral flexion and side bending, side-to-side lat stretch from child pose, side reaching from various positions, pec and lat stretching, posterior capsule stretches, seated and standing shoulder extension stretches
4. Motor control: Wall slides, reach, roll and lifts, kettlebell arm bar, T’s, Y’s and W’s, band pull-aparts, 3-way band pull aparts, side lying dumbbell external rotations, standing band external rotations, dumbbell t-raise
5. Strength: Deadlift variations (yes, they connect the shoulder to the torso), rowing variations, reverse flys, loaded carries, crawling, and creeping

The missing ingredients in a lot of shoulder programs are motor control (i.e., stability) and strength work. Motor control cements and integrates gains in mobility into movement patterns, and strength locks them in. The order in which things are done matters, and so does doing all the steps of the protocol outlined in the FMS.

Get It in Your Warm Up and Cool Down

Resetting the body before or after a workout will help reverse the damage done from the work day or training itself, and is a great way to prevent issues before they come up. Try doing the opposite of what you did in your workout or at work. If you did a big overhead press session, try some hangs or loaded carries to decompress the spine or the shoulders by putting them into traction. Just finished a BJJ session, spent on your back defending the guard pass in flexion on one side? Then try some gentle extension and lateral flexion to open up that side. Just finished a super-heavy, high-threshold deadlift or back squat session? Try 7-10 minutes of shaking, vibration, and oscillation of the body to change the tonus, relax the nervous system, and loosen up.

If you suffer from shoulder pain, try these protocols. They can change your life and help solve your pain for good. If you follow this and get an outcome, please drop me a line and let me know how you got on. Remember, pain and injuries don’t have to be a curse, they are just feedback, and an opportunity to learn. If you are training hard at anything, injuries are almost guaranteed to happen. But if you are smart, you can limit your time away from the thing you love.

The post Holistic Strategies to End Shoulder Pain appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

What many people lack in their programming is balance. There is a bias toward training the “mirror muscles,” and general overuse. Repetitive motions or positions like excessive overhead work, pressing, or squats can lead to shoulder and knee injuries, something that we currently have an abundance of.

Programming for Balance

It is of critical importance for strength development and injury prevention to balance the shoulders by balancing pushing and pulling in the vertical (frontal) and horizontal (sagittal) planes. Likewise, you must balance the lower body between quad- and hip-dominant pushing and pulling.

Typical hypertrophy-based programs can be very anterior-chain dominant. The body never works in isolation. Even on “arms day,” we are working the anterior shoulder and chest as well. On “back day,” lat pulldowns and pull ups still overload the anterior shoulder, utilize shoulder internal rotation, and the chest musculature. They do not balance out all the pushing and chest exercises, unlike the row and its variations such as face pulls, which are often last in the order of exercises, if included at all.

I like to break my upper body programs into horizontal push and pull exercises, and vertical push and pull exercises. These distinctions help to create balance, and allow us to even up the load and volume. Looking at the lower body, it would be easy to just separate things into lower body push or pull. It would also be easy to put all squat and lunge variations into the quad-dominant realm. But it doesn’t actually work out that way.

Mike Robertson proposed a better way of thinking about it:

• Angled Torso + Vertical Tibia = Hip Dominant
• Vertical Torso + Angled Tibia = Quad Dominant

The thing is, even this isn’t black and white. If you start any of your deadlifts with your knees more forward, like in a trap bar deadlift, it becomes more quad dominant. If you take a long lunge and keep the tibia vertical, drive off the lead foot heel and angle the torso forward (it’s a pretty cool pistol progression) it becomes more hip dominant. How you perform an exercise can often determine whether something is more hip or quad dominant.

Muscle Balance and Injury Prevention

Why balance the quads and hips? The functional hamstring-to-quad ratio refers to the ability of the hamstrings while lengthening (eccentrically) to brake the quads shortening (concentrically). This is important because if the ratio isn’t 1:1, you could be setting yourself up for injury. Let’s put this into simpler terms.

Say you’re running. As your knee straightens, your quads shorten or contract, and your hamstring lengthens. If your hamstrings are too weak, then your quads pull your hamstring faster than it can lengthen, so you end up “pulling your hammy.”

When you injure your knee—specifically the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)—the likely cause is relatively weaker hamstrings. When you are running and stop or change direction suddenly, the femur (thigh bone) wants to continue travelling forward over your tibia (shin bone). Your hamstrings help your ACL stabilize the knee by stopping the forward movement of the femur on the tibia. If your quads are too strong compared to your hamstrings, a sudden change in direction or awkward landing can cause the knee to slide forward, and cause an ACL tear. This is particularly important to female athletes, as they are more susceptible to ACL tears.

Did  You Really Balance Your Push and Pull?

Now that we have a basic understanding of upper body pushing and pulling, and lower body pushing and pulling, some additional things to consider when programming are:

1. Type of exercise matching
2. Order of the exercises
3. Load
4. Volume

Let’s look at an example of how all of this is important to building balance and health in the shoulders.

Say today is your “chest” day, and you do 3 sets of 10 reps on bench press at 100kg. That’s 3000kg of total volume. Let’s say tomorrow is back day. What is your first exercise? For most people, it’s pull ups or lat pull downs, which are not the functional opposite of the bench press. But of course you know that, so let’s say you do a bench-supported, wide grip row, or a wide grip seated pulley row, or a bent over row, which are as close as you are going to get to the functional opposite of a bench press. You do 3 x 10 x 70kg, which is 2100kg of total volume.

If you chose a narrow grip seated pulley row, it isn’t really the functional opposite of the bench press. Just as likely, the row is not first in your program, so it doesn’t get the same focus or effort as your bench press. That aside, the load is not as high, because you are you not able to pull as much as you can push, and you end up with a 900kg difference in volume!

We haven’t even touched your accessory work yet. Most chest days have incline and decline bench press variations, as well as pec flys or crossovers, and pullovers. Back days usually have only one to two row variations, later in the order of exercises, and at a lesser load and volume. When all’s said and done, it is very easy to see how shoulders start to get banged up and we lose balance through the body.

The problems are the same on leg days; lots of squatting and lunging, and not a lot of hip-dominant pulling variations. Most people will squat or leg press considerably more volume than they can deadlift or pull from the ground. Even professional athletes with big squat or leg press numbers have disproportionately low Romanian deadlift (RDL) numbers.

The Outline of a Balanced Program

Overall, considering most people are desk-bound most of their day, it is evident we need to see a lot more horizontal pulling in our programming. Secondly, as most people are quite strong already in the quads and literally sit on their butts, they develop what has been called gluteal amnesia. What we need is more hamstring- and glute-dominant pulling exercises to balance the hips and get that functional hamstring-to-quad ratio back to 1:1.

With all that in mind, a rough example of some smart programming might look like this:

2-day Full-Body Program: Workout A

A1: Activation

A2: Power work/skill work

B1: Mobility/activation (active recovery)

B2: Horizontal pull

B3: Quad-dominant double-leg push

C1: Mobility/activation (active recovery)

C2: Horizontal push

C3: Hip-dominant single-leg pull

D: Conditioning/finisher/core

2-day Full-Body Program: Workout B

A1: Activation

A2: Power/skill work

B1: Mobility/activation (active recovery)

B2: Vertical push

B3: Hip-dominant double-leg pull

C1: Mobility/activation (active recovery)

C2: Vertical pull

C3: Quad-dominant single-leg push

D: Conditioning/finisher/core

Exercises listed as “A” are done in a superset, or tri-set for “B,” and so on. Some activation work to light up the body is followed by the highest skill, balance, or power demand work, which should come first while the athlete is fresh. I also like to use mobility or activation exercises as active recovery in between sets, rather than looking at my phone or the TV in between my main exercises. Conditioning work or a finisher is done at the end, depending on time remaining energy levels.

The Best Program Is the One Written for You

It is important to remember that injury prevention and resilience is part of performance, not separate from it. Becoming well-balanced should be every athlete’s goal. Programming needs to focus on addressing weaknesses, such as the functional quad-to-hamstring ratio and shoulder health. Strength work should, first and foremost, serve to balance out all the sport-specific training to prevent injury.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how to program this way. Rather than follow a cookie-cutter program which may not be suitable for your goals or limitations, try to integrate these principles and concepts to design your own, based on your own needs.

The post Advanced Programming Principles for Shoulder and Knee Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Training in self-defense and martial arts in general can not only be a very practical and pragmatic tool to avoid and deal with violence, but it can also be a vehicle for self-discovery and healing for many after a violent assault.

Assume the Worst

With spring upon us in Australia, unfortunately so is the higher likelihood of violence. Assault is seasonal. The number of assaults here peaks in the spring and summer months of October to February, and is lowest from April to July. Criminals are opportunistic, so when people are more out and about, so are they.

Many people who are assaulted ask, “why me?” In realistic situations, there doesn’t need to be a reason for violence. The person can simply be having a bad day and you are now their target. It’s irrelevant. You are in wrong place and at the wrong time, and getting caught up emotionally in the situation or taking it personally isn’t going to help, nor is it the right internal dialogue. Our number one priority is to survive and to remove ourselves from the situation.

Everyone has read the clichés about assumptions. But I can safely say when it comes to self-defense training, there are some safe ones to make. Most people assume that “it won’t happen to me,” but the statistics on violence in Australia show another story. Survey data from 2012 shows that both men and women in Australia experience substantial levels of violence.

• 1 in 5 women and 1 in 22 men had experienced sexual violence
• 1 in 6 women and 1 in 19 men had experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner
• 1 in 3 women and 1 in 2 men had experienced physical violence

Assumptions aren’t a bad thing when it comes to personal protection, either. In training, I tell my students, “if you prepare for the worst, only the best can happen.” Research indicates that when women partake in effective self-defense training, they end up stopping violence brought to them more often than those that don’t.

If you ever find yourself presented with a threat situation, here are some other pretty safe assumptions that might save your life.

It Will Feel Sudden

In many real-life situations there is a build-up, whether it be verbal abuse, someone following you home from the bus stop, or muggers silently stalking their prey near an ATM. When the victims are interviewed about the lead up to their assault, they generally mention that there were signals displayed, or an “interview” prior to the assault, and often those signals were missed or ignored.

What many people underestimate is that the transition from non-violent to violent is usually very sudden and explosive. Most are caught unawares by the ferociousness of the assault. This is very different from movies or tournaments where two martial artists bow to each other, then take fighting stances before they trade blows and duel within a set of predefined rules and with preparatory training. This is why sport fighting isn’t self-defense.

Training for situational awareness can help prepare people for real world violence. The use of role playing, scenarios, and timelines can help them learn to detect threats, look for and recognize non-verbal and verbal cues, and the signals attackers display when selecting and interviewing victims. Effective training includes preemptive strategies to deal with the situation before it becomes physical, and how and when to choose to make it physical on our terms, rather than the aggressor’s. Training needs to address fear, surprise, and pain, in ways that emulate real life. An absence of this in training is setting people up for failure with false confidence.

One of the biggest erroneous assumptions that is repeatedly taught in self-defense schools is that you must wait until you are attacked or assaulted before you can respond. This is a dangerous and utterly stupid way to train. Most technique training has us wait until we are assaulted before we respond. In essence, you get good at being assaulted over and over, instead of being proactive from the very beginning. The point is to avoid being a victim, and that means responding verbally or physically before it happens.

They Will Have a Weapon

It is a potentially fatal error to assume your assailant is not armed. When you speak to people who have been assaulted with a weapon, in many instances they state that they didn’t even realize their attacker was armed until sometime into the assault, or even afterward. Some stabbing victims, in the heat of the moment, just felt like they were being punched. They didn’t even know that there was a sharp object involved and that they were, in fact, being punctured.

This leads me to one of the biggest flaws in a lot of self-defense training: having two different techniques for the same threat. Intelligent self-defense systems such as Krav Maga have just one technique to deal with a number of similar attacks. Take a straight punch and straight stab. The action is basically the same so why not treat it in the same way? If a victim is surprised with a weapon, instead of the punch they were expecting, are they going to be able to change from one technique to another in the blink of an eye? Heard of Hick’s Law? Too many choices equal freezing and poor decision-making time.

Intelligent systems have a hand and a body defense and deal with the stimulus in the same way. That way, regardless if the attacker is armed or not, your chances of survival are higher. In high-stress situations, gross motor skills take over, critical thought and fine motor skills are lost.

They Are Not Alone

I don’t care how good your training is. If you’re confronted by a group of 7-foot-tall bikers built like brick shit houses who are intent on ripping your head off, your line of thinking needs to be “how am I going to get out of this one?” The choreographed rubbish you see in most movies, where everyone attacks the defender one at a time, and the defender miraculously knocks everyone out with just one strike, is unrealistic to say the least, and again feeds false confidence.

In the real world, you can safely assume that honor has gone out the window, and the mob rules. Assuming that your assailant is not alone is important in your decision-making process. If you assume that the person you are confronted by is alone and you decide to act with a strong physical response, unaware that a table of their friends is a few feet away, you are probably in for a bad night. Assuming they are not alone puts you in a better position, should things go physical and you are caught up in the chaos of dealing with more than one attacker.

Multiple opponent awareness and high-pressure training drills are crucial in your practice, and active scanning for further threats (including weapons, exits, and common objects to use to assist) should also be a part of completing a scenario/role play or technique in your training.

They Are Under the Influence

Sometimes, regardless of your best attempts to logically, calmly, and rationally talk your way out of a situation, your violent offender isn’t going to respond the way you would like. This is far worse if they are under the effects of drugs or alcohol. At a high level of excitation and arousal, logic and rationale have already gone out of the window for most people, let alone someone who isn’t sober. 

De-escalation, defusing, or even compliance is possible in some situations, but in others, it won’t be. Unlike sport fighting or martial arts practice, your goal is not to “win” but to survive. Assume that your attacker might be irrational or incoherent, so you can plan your next step if your attempts at a peaceful resolution fail.

Smile for the Camera

In the age of ubiquitous mobile phones and CCTV, you can safely assume that your actions will be caught on camera. Why is this important? If things go legal after an incident, you may have to justify your behavior and use of force in front of an investigator or a judge. If you are a tactical operator, you will need to justify your actions according to the use of force continuum guidelines and operational procedures.

Remember, the first rule of self-defense is avoidance. If you chose the art of not fighting as your first response by fleeing, complying, posturing, de-escalating, and negotiating, then you will find that besides being able to avoid violence in the first place, if you show this on footage, even if things do go physical and then legal afterwards, the ramifications will be few because you took the steps to avoid the situation before things kicked off.

Many self-defense experts teach that the only solution is to strike the offender. This is socially and legally irresponsible. Would you really belt a slightly drunk family member or friend being an ass hat at a party? Context is everything. Sometimes a “soft” option is required to deal with a lower-level violent threat than the false bravado offered by egotistical instructors.

On the flip side, many people also think that self-defense is a passive act; or that it is primarily defensive or non-aggressive. All the magical and superstitious clichés such as “using your attacker’s force to overcome them,” or “using a minimum amount of force” come to mind. But as those who have experienced it and fought to save their lives or the lives of others will testify, violence is ugly, stressful, and desperate. There is no fairy tale in this pressure cooker.

Self-Defense Training Needs More Than Drills

Training tactically is crucial to survival. Techniques are fine, but training should also include role playing, scenarios, timelines that include hard and soft options, practicing situational awareness, training assertiveness and boundary setting, stress inoculation, and contact work. Training should always cover preventative and pre-emptive material, along with active scanning to find exits and further threats. It should create automatic assumptions while remaining adaptable to the situation.

Learning how to outwit, rather than just outfight predators is part of any realistic self-defense training. Self-defense starts long before any one touches you. Experience is something you get after you needed it, so maybe assumption isn’t the mother of all fuck-ups after all.

The post Safe Assumptions in an Unsafe World appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Even coaches who I used to respect are jumping on the HIT bandwagon to get followers. It has become trendy for authors trying to be popular to bash aerobic training by making claims that you will get fat and lose strength, power, and muscle. By reading this rubbish, you would be under the impression that the only people that need aerobic training are triathletes and marathoners, or people who want a body like one. Or that standard aerobic training requires you to run or cycle for hours on end. And you would be completely wrong.

Not only does the crusade against aerobic training show a lack of understanding of energy systems and athletic performance, it also is detrimental to those who need the right kind of aerobic exercise, and struggle to enjoy other types of fitness.

Mr. Ace was my PE teacher in high school. He had a big mustache, wore white tight shorts, and was something of a ladies’ man. But the one thing he knew about was health and fitness. He was a big advocate of early nights, lots of veggies, and aerobic training, Mr. Ace had it right. Aerobic exercise is where it is at.

The Skinny on Energy Systems

Many people incorrectly consider sports like MMA or boxing to be “anaerobic,” despite the fact that they can last for well over 30 minutes. But with that misconception, it’s easy to see how many coaches and fighters could become disciples of the church of HIT. This is reinforced by the marketing for HIT, which would have you think that aerobic exercise is best left for Jane-Fonda-style aerobics classes. But if you have had the good fortune of reading Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning or any of his online material, you would know that training the aerobic system is the most important, as it underpins everything else.

The fuel that your body uses to supply your muscles is called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which could be thought of an energy currency for your body. Through a chemical reaction that breaks down ATP into smaller molecules (ADP +P), energy is released.

There are two anaerobic systems that your body uses to produce ATP without the use of oxygen:

1. Alactic – 10-12s of powerful energy production
2. Lactic – 60-90s of powerful energy production

The downside of the anaerobic systems is they can only do this for a short period of time before fatigue kicks in. The use of this high-powered system comes at a high price, and the more you rely on it, the faster you will start to gas.

The aerobic energy system, on the other hand, relies on oxygen for ATP regeneration. It is not capable of the same swift energy production as the anaerobic systems, but it can produce energy for long periods of time without too much fatigue. This means any sport that lasts more than a few minutes (read: nearly all of them) relies on aerobic energy production. It is also the system you rely on to fuel your muscles and vital organs in everyday activities and at rest.

Here’s the clincher: Aside from providing the majority of the ATP that your muscles need (even through a typical MMA fight), the aerobic system also refuels the anaerobic systems so that they can fire up again. That’s right—the better you train the aerobic system, the quicker your alactic and lactic systems can recover. The more you use the anaerobic systems the more metabolic byproducts you also produce, and the faster you “gas out.” The body relies on the aerobic system to remove these products and restock ATP. So without a well-developed aerobic system, the body’s anaerobic systems are also limited, because it takes it much longer to produce energy again.

The Aerobic System and Sport

If we are looking to improve aerobic power for sports and get better conditioning, we need to raise the threshold at which the body begins to fatigue, when anaerobic processes start to come increasingly into play. The longer you can delay this from happening, the less likely you will be to gas out. If we train the aerobic system more effectively, we can delay this onset, effectively raising what is called your anaerobic threshold. To put it simply, the better your aerobic system, the higher your anaerobic threshold.

Endurance athletes rarely have to tap into their anaerobic system to generate the energy they need. Much less energy needs to come from the anaerobic system if the aerobic system is producing more power. Many pugilists or athletes in general lack conditioning because their aerobic system has never been developed well, and it’s just not capable of generating enough energy or power. They are left to rely on the anaerobic systems too much. The irony is, when we look specifically at the great fighters over the years, they have always organically known this and have been doing road work since the beginning.

HIT, Aerobic Training, and the Heart Health Crisis

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer worldwide. As the fitness industry continues to worship at the church of high intensity training, fewer people invest the time and effort in steady state training. This is disastrous, as it is one of the things that can really make a big impact on cardiovascular health. In fact, some studies showed that moderate intensity continuous training (MICT) led to greater reductions in bodyweight and heart rate than HIT, which is vitally important for cardiovascular disease sufferers.

Higher intensity training is advantageous for more athletic individuals who have a smaller adaptive response window, but present research suggests that there is little unique advantage to HIIT protocols with minimally trained individuals. Further, given that the enjoyment of the highest intensity protocols is lower, it seems reasonable to suggest that long-term adherence to this form of training may not be great. The only training that works is the one you stick to.

When you do low intensity work (often noted as 120-150 beats per minute), you allow a maximal amount of blood to profuse into the left ventricle of your heart. As you force blood into that left ventricle, it’s in there just long enough to stretch the heart walls. Over time, this creates an adaptation: your left ventricle stretches and gets wider. This is called eccentric cardiac hypertrophy, and it differs immensely from concentric cardiac hypertrophy, where the walls of the heart increase in size and get thicker from the higher blood pressure of strength training, wrestling, etc.

When you stretch that heart wall as in ECH, you can get more blood in and out with each heartbeat. The technical term for this is stroke volume (SV), or the amount of blood you’re moving with each beat. All this makes your heart more efficient. If you can move more blood with each heartbeat, your heart doesn’t have to beat as fast. Training at lower intensities increases stroke volume and decreases resting heart rate.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that if they work harder and faster for shorter, it will have the same effect. It doesn’t. Once your heart goes above a certain threshold, the contractions become too fast for the chambers of the heart to fill all the way. The result is that you don’t get the same adaptation.

The development of an endurance-trained heart and a strength-trained heart should not be considered an absolute concept. Both strength training and endurance training cause left ventricular hypertrophy, but left ventricular wall thickness is found to be higher in strength training, while dilatation of the left ventricle is a prominent feature of endurance-trained hearts.

Don’t Forget the Nervous System

Heart rate variability (HRV) can be an amazing tool not only to measure recovery, but also overall heart health. HRV is very closely tied into the ANS. The two branches of the ANS are the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems. As you can appreciate, it’s not healthy to be in either one of those states all the time. Some stress is healthy, too much is not.

You tap into your sympathetic nervous system while you’re training or doing HIT, but you shouldn’t be living in that system all the time. Every workout you do shouldn’t place you in flight or fight mode because it so hard. Doing so will hinder recovery and affect your ability to sleep, and maybe steer you in the direction of overtraining or even adrenal fatigue. Considering so many people have health problems associated with a lack of sleep, hormonal imbalances, chronic stress, and inflammation, you can see why doing a heap of HIT isn’t such a great idea. There needs to be balance.

How to Do Aerobic Training Right

One of the best ways to train for these adaptations is cardiac output training (CO). If your resting heart rate is in the 60s or 70s, if you are new to fitness or short on time, then CO training is where you should look to focus. Look to train at between 120-150 beats per minute (yes, that low), a few times per week, for a minimum of 30 minutes, preferably 45-90 minutes. Some ways to do this are jogging, swimming, rowing, cycling, basic calisthenics, drills, footwork, shadow boxing, and basic MA and MMA techniques, so you can keep your heart rate in the right zone.

Like all fads and trends in the fitness industry, hopefully, the anti-aerobic training one will disappear soon. Aerobic exercise isn’t the devil. For most sports, you must invest considerably in your aerobic development (while training the others systems too) if you want to perform well. And if you want to reduce your chances of cardiovascular disease to stay on this planet a little longer, I’d seriously reconsider your use of time and prioritize your aerobic health first.

The post Steady State Aerobic Training Isn’t the Devil appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Most commonly, patellar subluxations cause discomfort with activity and pain around the sides of the kneecap, called patellofemoral pain syndrome, or PFPS. Many people with symptoms of kneecap pain are diagnosed with patella subluxation or maltracking. There are dozens of factors that can lead to these conditions.

Closely tied in with all of this is the iliotibial (IT) band, which is deep fascia (connective tissue) that runs down the outside of the thigh. It begins in the iliac crest in the pelvis, passes through the hip and knee joints, and ends at the tibia (shin bone). To put it simply, IT band syndrome occurs when the IT band gets stretched thin and rubs against the knee (lateral femoral condyle), causing swelling and pain on the outside of the knee.

What Makes the Knee Work?

Several muscles in the leg actuate and create stability in the knee. A few of them are relevant to our discussion here:

• One of your quadriceps, the vastus medialis oblique (VMO), is a teardrop-shaped muscle just above the knee. It is one of the key muscles that stabilizes the knee and ensures your kneecap tracks in the trochlear groove.
• The gluteus medius is situated on the outside of your hip. This muscle is also known as a hip abductor, meaning it’s responsible for moving the leg out and away from the body. The body uses hip abduction to give stability to the knee when running or walking.
• The tensor fascia latae (TFL), situated at front and side of the hip joint, works with the gluteus medius, and is attached to the IT band.

While there seems to be a lack of research on the subject, many physios and specialists believe that when the sequencing of the muscles around the knee isn’t working so well, that this can cause havoc for the tracking of the kneecap. A weak or inactivated VMO allows the other quadriceps muscles to pull the patella off-center.

Similarly, the gluteus medius (and minimus and maximus) are commonly under-conditioned. As a result, when working out or running, the body has to use the TFL as a plan B for pelvic stability, instead of the glutes. But the TFL can’t handle the burden of stability on its own, so it calls upon the IT band for extra assistance.

If we combine a lack of VMO activation with dominant outer quads, a lack of glute activation, and a dominant TFL and IT band, you can see the poor old knee is in for a for a bad time. The leg often ends up internally rotated and usually adducted (legs together).

Knee Problems Aren’t Usually Knee Problems

I read about an interesting lawsuit years ago where a physiotherapist had been taken to court on allegations of lewd conduct. A female patient had come in with a knee problem, and he had asked her to take her pants down to look at her lower back and pelvis alignment. While it is somewhat humorous, it made it quite evident that many people think the site of their pain is also the location of the root cause.

Problems with the ankle or foot can lead to knee problems, as can the hip, pelvis, sacroiliac joint, and lumber spine. All of these influence positioning of the body as a whole, and hence the load and stresses placed on the knee. The end result is that most chronic knee problems aren’t knee problems; they are the symptom, but not the cause. More often than not, it is an alignment issue that places a load and stress on the knee in such a way that eventually leads to pain.

The main culprit is the alignment of the pelvis and lower back. Incorrect alignment of the lumbar spine and pelvis leads to internal femoral rotation and hip adduction, which are often responsible for patellofemoral and IT band pain.

How to Handle Your Knee Pain

So if you’re already in pain, what can you do about it?

Rest and control your pain and swelling.

Take a tip from Bob Newhart. Just stop it! Do not train in pain, and don’t do the activities that cause pain. Ice and anti-inflammatory medications may help.

Get to an osteopath, physiotherapist or a chiropractor.

Ask them to look at your lumbo-pelvic alignment. This is the most important and yet overlooked part in treatment. A good practitioner will look to abate symptoms like pain and inflammation in the knee to aid the healing process, but will also take a deeper look at what is causing the problem.

Understand your injury.

Take ownership and be proactive with your injury, rather than passing the torch entirely to your health professional. Is your issue acute, or is it chronic? Was there an event that triggered it, like hard contact, falling, or landing badly? Does it hurt when you do particular things or after doing particular things? Do you only hurt when you train, or does it hurt all the time? Is it a dull ache or sharp pain? Where do you feel restricted or tight?

By gaining a better understanding of your injury, you will have a better idea of how to address it moving forward. Get online and read about it, buy books, and talk to other people who have the same complaints. Seek out several practitioners to get different opinions. Remember, most practitioners see things in a pretty myopic way, based on their training and study. As the saying goes, if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Osteopaths see things differently than a physiotherapist, or a chiropractor, or a knee surgeon, and so on.

Take Control of Your Knee Health

Once you have your pain under control and have a grasp of what caused it, it’s time to take some steps to make sure it doesn’t return.

Mind Your Mobility and Soft Tissue Work

While massage, trigger pointing, and foam rolling won’t fix the issue, they can certainly help to give relief and abate some of the symptoms. Most people look only to do soft tissue work on the IT band itself, but releasing the whole lateral chain can help. I would suggest releasing the TFL and the whole glute complex as well. I also found rolling the quads effective, particularly the vastus lateralis, along with the groin and adductors. Try foam rolling these areas instead of just torturing your already-stressed IT band.

In addition to rolling, I have a number of go-to stretches that helped release that overworking chain:

• Standing IT band stretch: If your right IT band is the concern, step your right leg behind your left, and arch over to your left with your right arm. Use a wall if you need to.
• Half kneeling hip flexor and IT band stretch: Same as a standard kneeling hip flexor stretch, but you’ll grab the back ankle with the opposite hand. It can also be done standing in a regular quad stretch.
• Lying piriformis stretch: Lie on your back with your left leg bent and close to your hips. Place your right ankle on top of your left knee so it forms a figure 4. Gently pulse by pressing on the knee for 20 reps to mobilize, then hold the end position by pushing on your right knee or reaching through and grabbing behind the back of your left thigh and pulling it to your chest. You should feel this in the butt.

Fix Your Programming and Technique

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. When I look back at my training, it broke most of the rules of my current training philosophy. I was specializing and overtraining, doing Muay Thai pretty much daily, and teaching it and Krav Maga around 15 times per week. My weight training program lacked balance and enough posterior chain work.

Stabilize Your Pelvis

Lack of pelvic stability is a major cause of knee problems. By having a stability strategy, it may help us avoid having to go back to a practitioner to manipulate us back into alignment, or it may fix the problem completely. The goal is to try and reduce internal femoral rotation and hip adduction by inhibiting the hip adductors and hip internal rotators. We also want to activate the external rotators and hip abductors.

Activate Those Sleeping Muscles

Not all glute exercises are the same. We want the ones that will leave out the already overworked and overstressed TFL and IT band, and exclusively work the glutes. Exercise selection is crucial to correct these muscle imbalances, and most get it wrong. This study showed that gluteal-to-TFL muscle activation was highest for the side lying clam, sidestep/shuffle with a band, unilateral bridge, and both quadruped hip extension exercises with the knee bent or in extension.

All these exercises can be readily found online. Look to do 10-15 reps for multiple sets. Furthermore, ensure that your pelvis is set and you have some pelvic floor activation while doing the exercises. This will again ensure correct alignment so you aren’t doing your corrective exercises from a poor position. Look to avoid lunges, hip hikes, and squats, which all had the lowest glute-to-TFL activation ratios.

It is important to progress to standing exercises, besides that’s where we operate in most sports and real life. Doing the mat exercises above is important, but we also need to integrate them and restore normal movement patterns. Standing lateral stability exercises are your go-to.

• Stand sideways against a wall with the pelvis level and the knee closest to the wall bent. Push the bent knee into the wall and feel the muscle contract on the opposite buttock. Do 4 reps of 30 seconds.
• Stand inside a TheraBand sling sideways. Keep the pelvis level and pelvic floor pre-set. Raise the inside leg, bending at the knee, and stand only on outside leg. Feel the outer buttock (glute medius) work. Again, do 4 reps of 30 seconds.
• Set up the same as above, then lift the outside leg, balancing only on inner leg. Feel the adductor work. Hold 4 times for 30 seconds.

Get Stronger

Training up those glute muscles will make them more likely to fire when they’re needed. Physio ball hamstring curls, deadlifts, kettlebell swings, and other posterior chain exercises are your new best friends. For VMO activation, don’t discount simple lying straight leg raises, along with the step ups and steps downs that are staples in many rehab programs for knee surgery.

I have also discovered an unusual VMO developer: leopard crawling (think baby crawl with the knees a fraction of an inch off the ground). Not only does leopard crawling work the core like a moving plank, it also helps improve foot function, and I’ve found it to be a surprising VMO developer.

Injuries are just feedback. When I first was hurt, I genuinely thought it was the end of my career in this field. Many people are dismayed about training after their first serious injury, but in hindsight, my injury taught me not only a lot about my mindset and mental approach, but also a lot about my own body, which has helped me help others in turn. Injuries are just a setback. Make sure you turn yours into an opportunity to learn. 

The post Take Control of Your Knee Pain: PFP and Your IT Band appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It is easy to find research that will support, or that can be manipulated to support any ridiculous claim. If you try hard enough, you can draw conclusions from a lot of research to sell something and people will buy into it.

What Is Broscience?

“Broscience” is the misrepresentation of actual research. It is cherry picking tiny portions of research to support ideas while ignoring the data that doesn’t support it. It is the opposite of science. And we are falling for it all the time. We all have our instincts, our own subjective experiences, logical reasoning, and anecdotal evidence when it comes to the area of health and fitness. There are also ancient pearls of wisdom and alternative treatments that have been passed down through the ages through trial and error that, only now, science is starting to either confirm, deny, or has yet to examine. Health and fitness is still partly art and partly science.

Science doesn’t always get it right, but it still seems to be our most reliable method to determine which direction to take.

With all the information out there and with all the experts out there, it is hard to know what to look for—especially when it comes to our health and fitness. I asked my friend and client Nada Cvijanovic PhD—you know, a legit scientist doing research in laboratories—for a little help for we fitness laypeople.

The Nutshell of the Scientific Method

There are many definitions of the scientific method, and it has evolved significantly over time from the days of Aristotle, who was one of the first to propose the necessity of empirical evidence, not just abstract logical reasoning, in acquiring knowledge. But in a nutshell, the scientific method is exactly that: a method. It provides a framework for observing phenomena in the world, using existing knowledge to formulate testable questions (hypotheses) to explain new observations, and then testing these questions (hypotheses) by using systematic approaches to reach a conclusion that either supports, or doesn’t support, the original hypothesis. Only once enough information has been collected from many, many tested hypotheses can an observation be accepted as a scientific theory.

Pros to the scientific method:

• Involves logical reasoning backed up by empirical observation—meaning it can be measured and verified
• Systematic
• Objective
• Can be replicated
• Controlled (i.e., independent variable is the thing that changes, from which you observe the effect this has on your dependent variable, the thing you are interested in, and try to establish a causal link between the two)

Cons:

• Outcomes may not be generalizable because often things in the lab cannot be replicated in the “real world.”
• Not everything observed can be tested (e.g., astronomical events can be speculated but only indirectly measured).
• Although it has measures to control bias, it is not immune to it (and thus objectivity is sometimes questionable).
• The rigor involved in testing, particularly human testing, and the “gold standard” randomized controlled trials, means that unfortunately progress can be slow, and many people may miss out on potentially lifesaving interventions because the science hasn’t caught up yet.

As I have mentioned in other articles, what you need to be asking yourself these days is: What isn’t bullshit? Considering whether the views presented are facts or opinions should play a big part in trying to make better decisions about our health and fitness. The thing is that few people take the time to read up and follow up on the actual research in claims, articles, and books.

Know What to Look For

Because the majority of people are not going to read the original source material of studies, you need to know what to look for when reading about science especially in “mainstream” media.

Sensationalism happens in almost every piece of news these days. It’s like the saying “sex sells” except in this case its “sensationalism” sells. Nobody wants to hear a news story saying, “Breaking news, study shows that we now know slightly more about something, but it’s going to take another 10 years or so just to be sure.” So be wary of grand, sweeping exaggerations like “new study shows that eating KFC improves heart health in the morbidly obese.” As a general rule, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. Realistically, the fact is that science is a slow and methodical process. Big discoveries take time, as mentioned above, because they must be built on existing knowledge, so really, they don’t happen overnight. Most science is small incremental steps that build up to a wealth of knowledge. So look for an authority and material that is verifiable from other sources.

Look at what was studied. Was it humans? Or was it animals? Or cells? The latter two are valid research models and necessary for developing our understanding of basic science, but you must be careful in drawing conclusions about what would happen in humans based on studies not performed on humans. As Andrew Lock rightly points out in an old article on lower back rehab and functional training, using a study based on the soleus muscle of a cat with brain damage probably isn’t enough evidence to site to support a particular level of transverse abdominus activation for humans when it comes to lower back rehab.

Was the study peer-reviewed? Any valid, legitimate study would be peer-reviewed by two or more scientists generally within the field (although not always) and goes through checkpoints before being accepted for publication. The “impact factor” of a journal reflects how widely it is read and gives an idea of the journal’s credibility. For example, Nature is a well-known science based journal. However, a small impact factor can also reflect a highly-specialized field, which by default would have a select few readers. Check also to see whether there is a date stamp that suggests the information being used is current.

Look for who sponsored the studies, or where the money came from. This information is easy to find and must be declared in any legitimate publication. While it is easy to dismiss findings based on who is paying for the research, and we see most people demonize pharmaceutically sponsored studies all the time, there are many legitimate companies sponsoring important research.

Given the dire state of government funded research, particularly in Australia, this is often the only option many scientists have to study and be paid to do so. Most people don’t realize that scientists spend most of their time applying for grants, from which comes their salaries. Which means no grants equals no job. Or you could have money for your project, but no salary, or vice versa. It can get quite complicated. It pays (pun intended) to look at who is sponsoring the research because it can sometimes give you an idea of vested interests and bias in relation to the findings of the studies. Consider the author’s reasons for posting the information.

Negative results are important, too. Don’t neglect the studies that don’t show anything. What do I mean? There is a bias towards positive results (e.g., something happened or changed because of an intervention). Negative results are just as important because they still add to existing knowledge. Often people miss the data that doesn’t support the idea being put forward and authors choose to ignore that data, and instead put forward only that data that appeared to support their beliefs. If you read the research quoted deeper sometimes it contradicts the recommendations. Check to see that the information is complete, comprehensive, and verifiable through other resources.

Does the study have appropriate research design? For those who want to head further down the science geek rabbit hole, appropriate research design is the most critical factor in determining the validity and integrity of a study. Sometimes the studies are also terribly difficult to understand unless you are in the field. If the study design is flawed, then the results generated from such studies are also inherently flawed and must be interpreted (if they can be at all) with much greater caution.

Approach Information with Care

A lot of what I see people sharing on Facebook is not from what I would consider a reliable source, but rather emotional pieces written by somebody with no authority, which when researched further show a misunderstanding of the facts as reported by other, more credible sources. This is usually done to sell something, including a particular point of view.

Not only that but now everyone can contribute to published information and this reduces the integrity of the information being made available. I could write a big article on the benefits of an all-bread diet based on no real facts at all and guaranteed there will be someone out there in the world who, with their own confirmation biases, will cling onto it and tout it as proof. We need to be increasingly more careful of what information we trust, given that the distribution of information comes so easily these days.

The post Do You Even Science Bro? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Remember those days where you could train hard, go out and party all night, get next to no sleep, eat a heap of junk food, and then crush your workout in the gym the next day? Yeah, me too, but those days are behind me. At some point around the age of 40, some things became more noticeable for me. Maybe I was more sore than I thought I should be from a workout. Sometimes I found I was still tired after workouts that didn’t appear that hard at the time. Aches and pains started to be a little more consistent. Injuries took a lot longer to bounce back from. I generally started to feel stiffer in my body, and, what I call the “old man groan,” became more audible getting up or sitting down. Maybe I was just more aware of my body and trying to keep up with the young bulls in training was just getting harder. Sound familiar?

Aging doesn’t have be a death sentence to the art of expressing the human body. It is just a number. Just like Riggs and Murtaugh used to say, “We’re not too old for this shit.” By making some intelligent changes to the way we think about our training, we can keep training until a ripe, old age. Training intelligently as you get older doesn’t have to be rocket science if you follow these five key concepts.

1. Health Before Fitness and Performance

In previous articles, I have written about the importance of getting both healthy on the inside and out before getting fit.

So many people are worried about fitness and performance, but have forgotten the basic health premises of:

• Getting enough restful sleep
• Eating enough vegetables and having a healthy whole food diet
• Getting enough sunlight and fresh air
• Moving often enough, especially just walking
• Drinking enough clean water
• Keeping stress levels low
• Staying out of pain (addressing injuries)

If you haven’t got these things in place first, then this is where you need to start. At 44, I know of very few people my age or younger that actually have got this under control. If in doubt, start here. The affects will be resounding and noticeable straight away.

2. Look After Your Heart

The most important muscle in the body is the heart, especially when the leading cause of death in many countries, including Australia, is cardiovascular disease. Especially as the industry currently worships in the church of high intensity training, it sees few people investing the time and effort to undertake what is called cardiac output training.

Cardiac output work is a form of aerobic training that improves the amount of blood that can be pumped by the left ventricle of the heart on a per minute basis. The increased blood being pumped out per minute creates pressure on the ventricular walls from the inside. This pressure results in left ventricular eccentric hypertrophy, which is increased size of the ventricle by stretching it from the inside out. This is different than concentric ventricular hypertrophy, which is an actual increase in ventricular thickness that results from higher intensity conditioning methods. The more blood you can pump out on a per minute basis, the more oxygen and nutrients you will deliver throughout your vascular system and to your working muscles. This type of training results in decreased resting and working heart rates, and it is proven to be more beneficial than high intensity methods for cardiovascular disease. It is also great for recovery, and takes us more into our parasympathetic nervous system state (“feed and digest” or more relaxed).

Look to train at 120-150 beats per minute, a few times per week for 30-90 minutes. Based on some recent studies, running may be one of your best bets to stay on the planet a little longer.

3. You Must Build Muscle

A study from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that the more muscle mass you have as you get older, the less likely you are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition is a better predictor of mortality than body mass index (BMI) alone.

BMI simply measures height to weight ratio and can be misleading. Total body mass includes fat and muscle which have different metabolic effects. The study was designed to test the hypothesis that greater muscle mass in older adults will be associated with lower mortality. What they found was that in fact there was an inverse relationship. So while this is good news for those that like to get “swole,” it still doesn’t mean that taking steroids, chugging multiple pre and post workout chemical shit storms, and eating a kilogram of red meat per day gets given a green light.

4. Risk Versus Benefit

When it comes to your exercise selection, weigh the risk of doing the exercise versus the benefit derived from doing it. Instead of getting caught up in the “which exercise is better” debate, what we need to be doing is asking what exercise is best for the individual based on injury history, limitations and restrictions, technique, and movement quality.

I don’t like to demonize exercises. More often than not, it is not the exercise that is the problem when it comes to exercise selection. It is often someone’s poor movement quality and technique, along with the load, volume, and density that is the problem.

Let’s take the good morning as an example. This very exercise humbled Bruce Lee and put him in hospital for many months, which is where he wrote a number of his books. With a dowel or broomstick, or a light barbell, this exercise can be a reasonable posterior chain exercise but loaded to the hilt, and with poor form, can be an absolute back breaker. In this instance, I can think of a number of double leg bilateral (trap bar deadlift, sumo deadlift) or single leg (single leg deadlift ) options that would be a better exercise selection and put far less stress on the lower back. If you start doing an exercise that puts you into pain, or if you are in pain after a session from a particular exercise, it should be obvious that you need to:

1. Address your injury
2. Improve or change your movement quality and technique
3. Remove or change the exercise so you can train pain free

Just remember that not all things are for all people so, if in doubt, do something that you know your body responds well to.

5. Movement Variety Is the Spice of Life

Specialization, or doing the same thing over and over, is generally a recipe for injury. If you only do a lot of strength training, you probably need to do aerobic activity and more mobility or movement work. If all you do is aerobic work, you need to strength train and do some mobility and movement work. And if all you do is mobility and movement work, then you need to strength train and do some aerobic work.

From my personal experience, many people conform to a system or methodology—a dogma they follow that appears to use them, rather than the other way around. Not surprisingly in my classes, the most injured people are those that have rigidly followed one methodology or system of training, to the exclusion of all others. I find this interesting when these systems promote “balance.” The reality is that we all tend to gravitate to the things we are good at. Not surprisingly, some of my clients who are hypermobile have gravitated to yoga, and only yoga. This has unfortunately proven injurious for them. Now, they do strength and stability work, look for more movement variety and aerobic activity, and are more healthy and more injury free, as a result.

The same could be said for other clients who have naturally gravitated to strength work, and have only done heavy strength work. Their bodies are banged up from repetitive high threshold, high tension techniques and lifting. Upon improving their mobility and flexibility, picking up some aerobic work, and looking for opportunities to move differently have helped them to be healthier, aerobically fitter, more flexible, and injury free. The bottom line is this: The body likes movement variety.

Get Some Balance

In the last few months, I have had a number of students of some years ago contact me with injury woes. At the time I was training them, I was, and I still am, a big advocate of the health before fitness paradigm, training for longevity, and injury proofing. But it was lost on them. Being young, indestructible, and bulletproof, they blew it off and underestimated its value. Years later, with the body now riddled with aches, pains, and showing the scars of hard training, they had come back to me looking for a solution to their injury woes. They now valued something they hadn’t at the time. The thing is that if you are active, playing competitive and contact sports, and training hard, injuries are almost a rite of passage. But I would argue that they don’t always have to be.

And remember, you’re not too old for this shit.

The post A Conceptual Blueprint for Training in Your 40s and Beyond appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

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Welcome to the health and fitness industry.

The Health Industry Is Snake Oil

After 17 years in the industry this is essentially what I see, day in and day out. Something no better than what was seen in the US in the 19th century. Every old-time snake oil or miracle-elixir-medicine show was run by a man posing as a doctor who drew the crowd in with a monologue. Entertainers, such as acrobats, musclemen, magicians, dancers, ventriloquists, exotic performers, and trick shots, kept the audience engaged until the salesman sold his medicine.

Does this look and sound similar to the way the supplements, cleanses, and detoxes are marketed and endorsed today?

There has been a recent trend in popular culture of promoting pseudo-science and healthcare as entertainment. This is just a modern reincarnation of the medicine show and its essence, and we are still falling for it. History has a habit of repeating itself.

What Happened with Dr. Oz?

I used to watch the health consultant, Dr. Oz, who was featured regularly on the Oprah Winfrey show when I was early on in my PT career. I even bought his book “You on a Diet” and thought it was quite good. He is known for promoting a more holistic approach to healthcare and recommends more natural, herbal type remedies and espouses his belief in working on the harmony between mind, body, and spirit as a path to better health.

Dr. Oz then got his own television program, and after that things got a little out of hand, even to the point that where he has been criticized strongly and even had been sued for peddling pseudoscience. At the bottom of the show’s own website now, it clearly states: “This website is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.” Of course, his show and website aren’t substitutes for healthcare, nor should they be, but it could be interpreted as a little strange considering the show promotes itself as a healthcare and medical advice program. Where did it all go wrong?

The Search for the Quick Fix

We now have the likes of David “Avocado” Wolfe, Dr. Joesph Mercola, Food Babe, our own Pete Evans, and others that all have followings in the millions on social media. It is no wonder people are confused with all the information out there. What’s worse is that we are now often being lied to and misled by what were considered trustworthy sources of information, like doctors, back in the day. But it is our fault—the “sheeple” have given them the platform and the audience.

Why this is happening is simple. We are constantly looking for the easy, quick fix and the magic potion or pill. Just like the medicine shows of old, we are still being suckered into buying things that we don’t need or that simply don’t work. We want the convenience and the instant gratification of a result without putting in the work. This is all whilst reeking of self-entitlement because we “deserve” it.

The real question you need to be asking yourself these days now is: What isn’t bullshit?

Detoxes and Cleanses

The premise behind most of these detoxes and cleanses is that there is a build-up of toxins in your body, generally from diet, alcohol, and poor lifestyle choices. For a cost, you can drastically improve your health by cleansing your body of all these toxins by drinking organic juice, taking supplements or, you know, having an enema.

These “toxins” that you’re allegedly flushing out of your system are rarely defined by the companies pushing the cleanse, and detoxes are certainly not designed to help with the symptoms of actual poisoning or toxicity. The only thing they appear to do is cleanse your wallet.

Despite all the promotion, marketing does not make something true or real. But it is cleverly designed to make you feel better about what you are doing or not doing. The underlying message in all marketing is this: You aren’t enough or good enough. You aren’t big enough, ripped enough, sexy enough, healthy enough, manly enough, and so on. You just aren’t enough.

There is no doubt, anecdotally, that lots of people say they feel better after detoxing. During cleanses and detoxes, the websites claim that you’ll experience a myriad of symptoms and possible side effects of detoxing and cleansing, including but not limited to: headache, fatigue, nausea, dizziness, and bad breath. The claim is that you will feel all this because you’re detoxing.

The reality is the bad breath is possibly because you’re undergoing ketosis from the lack of carbohydrates and calories in your diet, a similar symptom occurs in people on a ketogenic diet. Headache can be from a myriad of reasons, and it is more than likely caffeine withdrawal for most people. Other symptoms, such as nausea and fatigue, are simply down to one thing: caloric deprivation.

Most of these diets restrict you to around 1,200 calories per day or lower, which is irresponsibly low for people who are exercising. Most of them also tell you to continue to workout. Yep, they say the feeling like you are going to pass out is just the “toxins leaving the body.” The reality is that you just need to go and eat a friggin meal. Of course, when the cleanse is over and you come out the other side, you are going to feel much better.

Oh and the weight loss? If you drastically reduce your caloric intake, you are going to lose some weight, it’s a no brainer. Very low calories diets (VLCD) aren’t a new thing. But losing weight doesn’t equal losing fat. What you will observe is that weight lost quickly comes straight back on again, no different than any other lose weight fast yo-yo diet plan.

The stark reality is that these things do nothing for getting toxins out of your system. You have a liver, kidneys, and other organs that do just fine for that on their own. How do you know this? You use a toilet don’t you?

The notion that you can somehow undo all the poor food, alcohol, drug, and lifestyle choices by doing a cleanse, detox, or, even worse, some sort of enema is just ludicrous. Your body has absorbed all this crap and has actually used it to build your body at a cellular level. Yes, you are what you eat. You can’t undo it. But handing over your hard earned dollars in the form of a stupid tax might make you feel better about yourself.

Supplements, Multi-Level Marketing, and other BS

I want to make one thing clear. Selling any sort of weight loss shake or pyramid scheme “nutritional” supplement, (ahem, cough) sorry, I meant to say MLM health supplement, does not make you a nutritionist, nutrition coach, health and wellness coach, or anything else. It just makes you sound like a douchebag.

Personally, I know a number of people making a very good income on these schemes. However, no matter how many amazing stories you hear or read online about people making thousands, their spouses retiring, and sending their kids to private school, I promise you, statistically, most people do not make money from these companies. For example, Dr. Jon Taylor, a pyramid scheme scholar, estimates that 99.92 percent of Herbalife’s participants lose money. Yep. All MLM companies bait people with the potential of life changing wealth and the switch, as they call it, with the reality of an improbable financial opportunity that is never realized. It is a 30 billion dollar a year industry, with an estimated 20 million people worldwide estimated to be involved in MLM.

Even worse, every review I’ve read from notable academics, doctors, and professors about these products says that the products being sold are ineffective. The classic weight loss shake supplement diet is not a revelation. Very low calorie diets have been around forever. People often feel euphoric when they consume VLCD meal replacements due to the rapid weight loss, which is usually never sustained. Losing weight makes you feel like you have more energy, because you have less weight to carry around, but that sensation has very little to do with the actual quality of the product being consumed. All you need to do is follow the dollar signs.

When it comes to the average gym goers misguided attempts to pack on muscle, protein powders and their partners are right up there, too. The reality is that protein powders are good for one thing: convenience. In my time as a Fitness Director in gyms such as World Gym and the like, I lost count of the number of young men, in particular, who would approach me about how to put on size and muscle, whilst coming to the counter with literally hundreds and hundreds of dollars of supplements in their hands. Of course, trying to assist them with their goals of getting swole, apart from following an effective training program and recovery, I always asked them about their nutritional habits and the amount of food they were eating. Every single time I was met with an answer of little to no nutritional planning, eating a lot of processed crap and junk food, or simply not eating enough food at all. The actual concept of supplementation is for supplements to be in addition to, not instead of, a nutritious diet. This type of mentality is what I have encountered for my whole career as a trainer. People look to take supplements as a fix for a crap diet, and that isn’t it.

Go For Whole Foods First

According to most research, the US recommended dietary intake for most people is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, and for those working out it could be even up to double that, according to some studies. This figure of 1.4-1.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is still far less than most protein powder manufacturer’s marketing claims that people need to be eating 2-3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.

For people looking to get as huge as bodybuilders, it makes sense, but so does taking steroids. For those of us who just want to actually be healthy, perform well, and look good, the reality is they are probably unnecessary. And for the “clean eating advocates” on social media chugging away on their pre-workout and supplement chemical shit storms whilst promoting health and fitness I am sorry, but you guys are part of the problem. How about promoting a whole food first philosophy like trying to help your clients plan and write a menu, shop intelligently, and learn how to cook healthily? Or to establish a healthy relationship with food?

Teaching your clients lifelong skills and habits that may change their lives sounds like real personal training to me.

Once you spend some time looking at the protein content in real food, it is quite easy to see a chicken breast and a glass of milk (or equivalents) will meet half your needs even if you are a serious recreational lifter. Protein supplements do not offer and never will offer, just like any other supplement, the complete package of health and protective nutrients that natural, whole, real food does.

Use Your Common Sense

We need to go back to a time where we trusted ourselves a little more, used more common sense in our decision making, relinquished the challenges of hard work, patience and consistency, and developed a keen eye for BS. This article doesn’t have the scope to cover in detail just one of these scams, but I think you get my drift that you are better off spending your time, effort, and money on an intelligent training plan, a natural whole food first philosophy, and an adequate recovery plan more than anything else. If you do decide to head down the “give me convenience or give me death” path then make sure you ask yourself these four things: Is it safe? Is it legal? Is it healthy? Is it effective? 9 times out of 10 your answer will be a resounding no.

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