Category: Exercise

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Exercise Ideas

Crouching

I think saying crouching sounds better than squatting. But since most people say squatting I’ll stick with that.

Most adults in the first world rarely, if ever, crouch or squat down with their bums close to their heels and their feet flat on the ground. You can see little kids squatting down all the time instead of standing or sitting and sometime just to get lower. After their first few years, most kids in the West become sitters too.

It’s still a common way to sit in many parts of the world. We were squatters for a long time before we became chronic sitters. It turns out that squatting is good for many parts of our bodies. Squatting increases the range of motion for your hips, knees, and ankles. Kelly Starrett is a well thought of and entertaining Doctor of physical therapy who insists on a 10 minute squat test every month.

Learning to squat isn’t a paleolithic reenactment for its own sake. Squatting lets us take back what chairs and sofas have robbed us of, namely a stronger core and more flexible hips, by crouching down until the thighs rest against the calves while the feet are flat on the floor.

I’ve been doing it a little bit every day for a couple of years and have gotten a better range of motion in lots of joints. It’s helped my surfing and Brazilian jiu  jitsu by enabling me to  bring my knees up to my chest in some situations more easily than before I started squatting down.

Be careful though, after you start squatting, the next thing you know is that you may have urges to go barefoot sometimes too.

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Exercise

The Kettlebell

The kettlebell is an iron weight to exercise with; it looks like a small bowling ball with a thick “tea kettle” type of handle on top. It’s a workout tool that’s been popular in Russia for a long time. I first heard about kettlebells about ten years ago via a Russian sport specialist who’d moved to the US and was promoting them.

The most basic exercise is the “swing.” You stand with a medium wide stance, holding the kettlebell in front of yourself with both hands. Then hinging at the hip, you swing the kettlebell up, like a pendulum, arcing until your outstretched arms are at face level and then arcing back down to crotch level, swinging through your spread legs. Then repeat. Most of the movement is accomplished snapping the hips and it works lots of muscles. It builds strength and endurance while burning fat. Pretty much what most people are looking for.

A kettlebell can weigh anywhere from 15  to over 100 pounds. But the standard one is about 36 pounds. There’s a size for everyone.

You can do most kettlebell exercises with a dumbbell instead. Which is what I’ve been doing because kettlebells were too expensive when they first arrived in the US. But the prices have come down. So, I finally bought one and had it shipped to a friend’s house in California who’s driving down to Mexico this week. I’m flying to Phoenix to meet him so he doesn’t have to drive for two days through Mexico by himself.

There’s going to be a visible display of globalization in action this week. If you know where to look, you might be able to see two Americans, wearing clothes made in South East Asia, parked on the side of a Mexican highway, standing next to a Japanese car, while doing a Russian exercise with equipment made in China.

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Exercise

Dan John’s Advice

I’ve been training a couple of people for a two months and we’ve had good results. We do the five exercises below along with push-ups and overhead presses.
 
Dan John is a successful trainer who’s been around for a long time. I excerpted much of what’s below from an article he wrote called “Things That Are Good For You.” In it, he has some good advice on how to do the five exercises he thinks are important: the squat, the deadlift, good mornings, bent over rows, and the plank.

 

The Squat – Squats can do more for mass and strength than probably all other lifts combined. But, doing them wrong can do more damage than probably all the other moves, too.

First, find a place where no one is watching and squat down. At the “bottom,” the deepest you can go, push your knees out with your elbows. Relax and go a bit deeper. Your feet should be flat on the floor. For most people, driving your knees out with your elbows will simplify squatting forever.

Next, try this. Stand arms length from a door knob. Grab the knob with both hands and get your chest “up.” The lats naturally spread a bit and the shoulders come back “a little.” Now, lower yourself down. What people discover at this moment is a basic physiological fact: the legs are not like stilts under the torso. Rather, the torso is slung between the legs. As you go down, leaning back with arms straight, you will discover one of the true keys of lifting: you squat “between your legs.” You do not fold and unfold like an accordion; you sink between your legs.

Now, you are ready to learn the single best lifting movement of all time: the Goblet Squat. Grab a dumbbell and hold it against your chest. Hold it vertically by the one end, like you are holding a goblet against your chest. Now with the weight cradled against your chest, squat down with the goal of having your elbows (pointed down because you are cradling the dumbbell) slide past the inside of your knees. It’s okay to have the elbows push the knees out as you descend. I’m not sure I should tell you this, but I think Goblet Squats is all the squatting that most people need.

The Deadlift – Keep that dumbbell at hand. The biggest problem I see with most people’s deadlift is that they simply have forgotten how to pick things up off the floor.

Stand tall and hold the one end of the dumbbell at arm’s length pointing it straight down at the ground. The dumbbell should be slung right between your legs. These are called “Potato Sack Squats” and are a great reminder of how to deadlift. Let the dumbbell descend to a point between your feet. Keep your head up and chest proud and simply lower the bell touch and return. Simple.

Now, why don’t you deadlift like that? It’s the world’s simplest lift!

When using a barbell, always make sure when you use plates that leave the bar at the same height as with 45 pound plates. A couple of key hints:

  1. Keep the weight on the heels. I insist on teaching my athletes to “Push your heels to China.”
  2. Use the standard “opposite hands” grip from day one in the Deadlift. I do suggest, though, that you switch your grip often until you find which way allows the most weight.
  3. Your arms are steel rods in the Deadlift. Lock ‘em out and leave ‘em.
  4. Keep your head up. Many of my athletes upped their Deadlift in one workout by having the chin lead to the ceiling.

Good Mornings – Before you begin, two things. First, stand up and place your hands in the “V” that is formed where your torso meets your legs. You know what I’m talking about.

Now push your hands into the “V” and push your butt back as your hands sink into the “V.” That’s the movement of a good morning. Yes, keep your head up, shoulder blades pinched back, and hold a big chest, but the movement is simply increasing the “V.”  If you do it right, even with no weight, you’ll feel the hamstrings stretching. This is good.

I strongly suggest learning the movement with a broomstick first. A nice little adjustment is to stand with your back against the wall and push your butt BACK into the wall. Then, scoot out a few inches and push back again. Keep moving away until you literally can’t touch the wall any more. That’s the position that I recommend you go into on the good morning. Don’t make this a Yoga exercise by trying to go as deep forward as possible.

Bent Over Rows – Before you go any further with Rows, I want you to do a few sets of “Bat Wings.” Lay face down on a standard bench with two dumbbells on the floor. Now, here is where it gets confusing, I don’t care at all about your range of movement. All I want you to do is squeeze those dumbbells as high as you can and cram your shoulder blades together. Don’t bounce, swing, hop or do any of the stuff that most guys rowing do. The next day, that really cramped feeling muscle in your upper back is called the rhomboids. The development of the rhomboids will save your shoulders.

When you row, get into that good morning “V” Position and strive to touch the chest. Focus on the last four inches “at the top.” A great Rowing exercise is the “Two Part Row.” Rep one comes up to the belly button and rep two comes up to the nipples. Really strive to feel how much more your elbows have to come up to make the lift.

Planks – Here’s the one minute plank. The first twenty seconds, the right leg is raised as high as it can be raised towards the ceiling. Without leaving the plank position, do the next twenty seconds with the left leg up. Finally, do twenty seconds of the plank.

That’s it. You could even start out with a light dumbbell and buy a heavier one when you get too strong for the one you have.

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Exercise Ideas

Iron Wisdom

There’re really only two things I miss living in a Mexican village. One is riding a bike around – the roads are cobbled with stones. And the other thing is a gym – there isn’t one.

Working out in a gym,  you get used to hearing a certain type of banter, at least between guys. This probably happens in big franchise gyms too, once you’re a regular.

Mark Rippetoe is a well-known strength coach with a good system and a few books. Here’re some of his barbs and wisdom that I like and you might too if you’ve spent much time in a gym. I distilled these from a longer list if you want more. If you’re politically correct or hyper-sensitive stop here, otherwise enjoy:

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.

You can’t make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

Does a bigger motor slow the car down? No. But a bunch of junk in the trunk does.

People at the Division One and pro level rarely know what the hell they are doing, their athletes are pre-sorted. They are already strong or they would not be on the Dallas Cowboys.

If you can’t train and work in a warehouse at the same time, you probably have ovarian cancer. Consult your gynecologist.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

Ask Old Santa for a squat rack. Preferably one that won’t fit down the chimney. You can’t do the program without it, and that would leave you forever an elf.

… when brain surgery, or string theory, or the NFL draft, or women’s dress sizes, or white wine is being discussed, I remain quiet, odd though that may seem. But seldom is this the case when orthopedic surgeons, athletic trainers, physical therapists, or nurses are asked about full squats.

A guy asks if hack squat is useful since his college does not have any squat racks only squat machines  “I recommend that you change colleges.”

During the last few reps of a true 20RM squat, just do what Jesus tells you. Trust me, if you do an honest 20 rep program, at some point Jesus will talk to you. On the last day of the program, he asked if he could work in.

Your muscles cannot get “longer” without some rather radical orthopedic surgery.

The vast majority of women cannot get large, masculine muscles from barbell training. If it were that easy, I would have them.

Muscles don’t get leaner—you do.

There is no such thing as “firming and toning.” There is only stronger and weaker.

Women who do look like men have taken some rather drastic steps in that direction that have little to do with their exercise program.

I don’t read around the web much, because I’m old and busy, and just haven’t got time. If I’m on the Internet, I’d rather be looking at porn.

We don’t wear singlets because A…one…they’re gay.

Baby mammals drink milk, and you sir, are a baby mammal.

I’m not interested in what’s been done in the past. I’m interested in what should be done.

The sooner everybody—both halves of the population—accepts the fact that effective exercise is more like training for athletics and less like lying around on the floor, more about performance and less about appearance, the sooner it will be understood that women really don’t need their own figure salon.

Any idiot can get on a treadmill and watch TV and then take great pride in the fact they’ve “exercised.”

A 2 pound weight gain doesn’t count, since it is the size of an average turd.

If you want to look like a bodybuilder, that’s fine with me. That is a matter for you to discuss with your God and your psychologist.

There are few things graven in stone, except that you have to squat or you’re a pussy.

To a bicyclist saying that riding was similar to squats since they both made your legs hurt: Yes they both hurt, but so do burning your hand and burying your bulldog. The differences are actually quite significant.

Milk is quite literally better than steroids for a novice lifter to grow on, and no supplement produces the same effect.

Soy milk is essentially Coffee-Mate laced with estrogen, and is best left to vegans and other socialist vegetarian types that can’t bring themselves to eat the completely natural-for-humans flesh of our friends the Animals but who have no trouble with slaughtering trillions of our other friends the Plants and processing — in gigantic factories run by multinational corporations with shareholders that eat meat themselves…

Pierre, if you are eating 5500 calories a day, then I am a female kangaroo with a Sonic Drive-In franchise and a heroin habit.

In response to a guy complaining that his leg curl weight hasn’t increased since he started dead lifting: “That’s like bitching about masturbation not being fun anymore since you started dating a porn star”

On a respectable number of pull-ups: Well, I can do 16, and I’m 51 and I weigh 210. So you have to beat me or you’re a pussy. And if you do beat me, you’re probably using drugs.

Never ask a question that you may not be prepared to have answered.

Like it or not, we are the product of a very long process of adaptation to a harsh physical existence, and the past couple centuries of comparative ease and plenty are not enough time to change our genome. We humans are at our best when our existence mirrors, or at least simulates, the one we are still genetically adapted to live. And that is the purpose of exercise.

The deadlift is more functional in that it’s very hard to imagine a more useful application of strength than picking heavy shit up off the ground.

There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy. Let me be clear here: if you’d rather take steroids than do your squats heavy and drink enough milk, then you are a fucking Pussy. I have no time or patience for fucking Pussies. Please tell everyone you know that I said this.

I recommend against a wooden squat rack, for much the same reason that I recommend against a wooden car.

It is important to always stay within your comfort zone. This prevents having to subject oneself to the inconvenience of learning something new and potentially useful.

If you insist on wearing gloves, make sure they match your purse.

Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd.

The full squat is a perfectly natural position for the leg to occupy. That’s why there’s a joint in the middle of it, and why humans have been occupying this position, both unloaded and loaded, for millions of years. Much longer, in fact, than quasi-intellectual morons have been telling us that it’s “bad” for the knees.

There is no substitute for milk. Sorry.

Rip: You need to drink one gallon of full fat milk everyday. It’s almost mandatory. Somebody from audience: I’m lactose intolerant, could I substitute yogurt for milk?     Rip: Gallon of yogurt.

On drinking not 1, but 2 gallons of milk/day: But you would be shitting primarily cheese. Are you ready for this?

In response to someone who hit himself in the testicles when deadlifting: “You either have very short arms or very long nuts.”

“Thanks for the kind words, but if “Starting Strength” is the most interesting book you’ve ever read, you must have just started reading a couple of weeks ago.”

 

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Enough Exercise Ideas

Beer and Sprinting

How much is enough? And what are the priorities? Sometimes contrarian ideas produce great results.

Here’s a contrarian idea: Do as little as needed rather than as much as possible. Here’re two examples.

One of the best beers in the world is brewed by Belgian monks at the Westvleteren Brewery.

The list of what they don’t do is long: no advertising, no marketing, no labels, no brewery tours, you can’t buy more than two cases, there’s no delivery, and you have to pick up your cases there after placing your order by phone.

The list of what they do is short: they try to brew the best beer.

Their beer sells out and they could sell lots more; but as the abbot says “We brew beer to afford being monks.”

The second example is one of the best track coaches around, Barry Ross. In 2003, one of his athletes, Allyson Felix, became the first track star to go directly from high school into pro track. She also had the fastest 200 meter sprint that year.

The list of what this coach doesn’t do is long: no long hours in the weight room, no long hours on the track, no gizmos like sleds and parachutes, no squats, no training to failure, and no attempt to gain weight.

The list of what he does is short: a few heavy deadlifts, sprinting, and resting between sets.

In a nutshell, Barry Ross aims to make faster sprinters by building  stronger sprinters without adding extra body weight . He found the key exercises are running fast sprints and doing heavy deadlifts. To avoid gaining body weight the reps are kept low (2-5) with a timed 5 minute rest between just a few sets and his athletes never train to muscular failure. The number of sprints in his workouts never exceed 10. Ross thinks the biggest mistake coaches make is overtraining their athletes.

Barry Ross has pared down training to the essential and trainable. He’s arrived at a minimal workout with maximum results. Research shows athletes are better off lifting heavy weights for strength and then refining their sport’s skills by performing the actions of their sport.

Barry Ross’ athletes are runners who lift weights  rather than  weightlifters who run.

Establishing priorities and doing only enough instead of as much as you can, works.

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Exercise Health Ideas Time Savers

EVERYTHING I KNOW I LEARNED IN PRISON

That’s what it said on a bumper sticker on the car in front of me. I’ve never been in prison and hope I can always say that. But it’s a funny sticker.

I’m sure there’re some clever people locked up, and they have lots of time to kill. And prisons seem like they have a “survival of the fittest” thing going, right?

If you were in a restricted space with no access to a gym, eventually the best exercise for those circumstances bubbles up to the surface. The knowledge would be passed along from prisoner to prisoner and refined along the way. So workouts would have been through many iterations of lots of different exercises to arrive at something that’s the most effective. I can’t be sure it’s true; but there’s an exercise that supposedly comes out of the prison experience.

The exercise is called a Burpee pushup. It’s an exercise I do and like. With Burpee pushups you’ll really get the most bang for your buck. It’s an especially effective exercise to do if (unlike a prisoner) you don’t have much time or (like a prisoner) have a limited space. Say you’re traveling, staying in a hotel room and don’t have much time before a meeting. Do some Burpee pushups in your room, take a shower, and scoot off to your meeting, all in a very short time. Of course, they’re great to do at home too.

Here’s how they’re done. Drop down into the starting position for a pushup. Do a pushup. At the top of the pushup when your arms are straightening, jump your feet forward so your knees are at your chest and you’re in a crouching position. Then leap up, reaching for the ceiling with you hands. As you land, bend over, put your hands on the floor and pop your feet back so you’re in the starting  position for a pushup again. That’s one rep.

If you’d like, you can find videos of Burpee pushups on YouTube. Here’s one I like.

How many to do? Well, this is what I’d recommend and how many I do. Usually twenty one. But not all at once. I do only one at first; then I wait one minute; and then I do two; wait one minute then do three … and follow this pattern. I usually stop after the sixth minute/sixth set, which would at this point, have me doing six Burpee pushups during the last set. Adding up all six sets we have: 1+2+3+4+5+6=21. Twenty one reps of a hard exercise in six minutes and I’m done!

The other nice thing about doing it this way is you get a warm-up in there too. Sure, you can do more than one, but start with just one and go through adding a rep to each set.

This pattern of the rep number equaling the set number is called a “ladder.”  You can scale it up or down to suit your situation; and you can use it for other exercises too.

I have a feel for the time now but I usually use a cool little interval timer called the Gym Boss. It’s cheap, $20, easy to use, and keeps you honest. Of course you can use a watch or maybe a kitchen timer. The GymBoss is just easy and you can set any interval time you wish to use. Plus, it counts the number of intervals for you too. Just do your workout and listen for the beeps (it has a vibrate mode too in case you’re stealthy or in a loud area). Side note: An interval timer is handy for other exercises too because you can work out for timed sets, which is a more effective method.

At first, start out doing a couple of minutes worth and work up to six (or more) minutes. Don’t over do it and you’ll keep it up. Burpee pushups are a really good, quick, and surprisingly effective exercise.

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Exercise Food Food and Drink Health Ideas Opinion People

George Clooney Spans A Lot of Time

This is going to be tough, to distill “paleo” into a short pithy post, but I’ll try.

Take George Clooney. If he spread his arms out wide, they’d span about six feet. Now, imagine his outstretched  arms representing the two or so million years humans have been around. With that in mind, the time since we started farming is represented by less than the length of his middle fingernail. So most of his six foot arm span is the time we were foraging for food. We’ve been hunter-gathers for most of our time since leaving the trees.

It’s estimated we’ve changed (genetically speaking) less than one percent since farming started around ten thousand years ago. That’s not much change. During all that time before farming started our bodies became fine tuned to what was provided by living as hunter-gathers.

For food, we would have sought out but rarely found much in the way of sweets, instead we ate animals, fish, leafy vegetable, berries and some fare like bugs and grubs that grosses most of us out . We aren’t adapted yet to thrive on our current diet of simple sugars, grains and dairy.

Currently, with our incredible successes as farmers, grains and simple sugars are cheap and widespread, fueling humans around the world. We’re like diesel engines supplied by fuel tanks of gasoline. We might occasionally add a quart of oil to the gasoline to make the fuel a little more compatible, but the little diesel engines aren’t running too well.

Apparently, preagricultural humans were felled by childbirth, infection and traumatic injury. And the ones who dodged those bullets, were taller, stronger and longer lived than our more recent ancestors who became farmers. Hunter-gathers didn’t suffer much from the diseases of civilization like obesity, heart problems and the cancers affecting us now.

Every account I’ve seen of healthy native populations encountering and then embracing a western style diet soon fell prey to the same constellation of ailments associated with the more technologically advanced population who introduced the refined diet to them.

This is a broad area to look at. But there’s good reason to do so. And most people looking at how our ancestors lived come away with insights on how to improve their lives today, and not by picking up a spear and eating grubs.

This is about the clues to the environment humans adapted to over the millenia. Look at “The Black Swan” author, Nassim Taleb, he’s erudite and urbane, spending his time (away from the outdoors) in cities around the world. But by paying attention to these clues from our ancestors he’s able to better live in his modern world. Wealthy enough to do as he pleases and travel often, he says “I was able to re-create 90 percent of the benefits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with minimal effort, without compromising a modern lifestyle, in the aesthetics of an urban setting.”

This is a broad area for investigation. Humans are tool users and seem to not like rules. So here are a some of the take-away tools I think are useful:

Avoid sugars and grains and embrace meat, fish, leafy vegetables, berries and nuts. Skip meals sometimes. Sleep longer, in complete darkness. Become an occasional sprinter instead of jogging regularly. Get a little sun. Walk a lot. And finally, randomly do some brief but very intense exercise.

Here’re a few places to start looking if you want more information:

PaNu –  the site of a board certified MD with his thoughts about Paleolithic nutrition and modern life, a very good source to start with. He’s a busy guy, so his site is not updated very often but that’s ok.

Mark’s Daily Apple – this site serves up good solid information, but with distracting contests and self promotions.

Evfit – an old school website layout but chock full of good information.

This is a big subject I’ll revisit in later posts, I hope this was a useful introduction for you.

Categories
Exercise Health Ideas Simplifing Sites tools

Useful Exercise

This is my first post about exercise. I’m only going to be presenting exercises I do and have found to be worthwhile.

But here’s the thing – the best exercise is, really, the one you like to do and that you’ll do (consistently). I’m starting out with an exercise that I think is useful and fun.

OK, there’re people exclusively doing  just this exercise and getting good results. I like it because it’s easy, quick, cheap, and leaves you prepared for real world activities like shoveling your driveway. All you really need is a sledgehammer. That’s right, a sledgehammer.

If you don’t have one, you can buy one easily enough. Better, borrow one from a neighbor who has lots of tools. A sledgehammer is a tool most people don’t use very often and so your neighbor probably won’t mind lending it to you to try this out.

Commonly, sledgehammers have heads ranging from eight to twelve pounds. Err on the light side. Eight or ten pounds is plenty. The ten pounder I use is pictured above. I painted bands on the handle so I could easily put my hands in the same position when switching sides.

Before I get to the particulars, I want to say I also like the way sledgehammers look and since they stand on their head with the handle up – they have a small footprint. So, in your office, spare bedroom, or garage it can be set in the corner when not in use; it looks cool and is easy to grab for a little workout. Of course it easily lives in a closet too.

The site shovelglove is the site I credit with putting me onto using a sledgehammer for exercise. Shovelglove’s Reinhard Engels says the genesis of using a sledgehammer workout began with this memory: “I remembered reading something in some French novel about coal shovelers having the best abdominal muscles of anyone the author had ever seen.”

His workouts consist of a 14 minute (timed) session Monday through Friday during which he uses his sledgehammer to mimic shoveling, paddling, hammering, and butter churning motions to name a few. You can make up your own motions. Do it on both right and left sides. And you’re done in less than 15 minutes which he sees as the shortest normally scheduled chunk of time. Checkout the shovelglove site to see videos.

You can listen to music, watch TV, wear whatever you like, and you’re done in a short time.

I use the sledgehammer this way too. But I enjoy other types of exercise (Engels doesn’t) so to be transparent, I want to say I use a sledgehammer workout to augment other exercises. For me, it’s part of a mix. But I think as a stand alone routine it’s great.

You might ask, what about actually beating on things with a sledgehammer, that’d be fun? You can and people do. Get an old tire and get medieval on it. But you’re going to need more room, have to do it outside and since it’s a faster motion you run a risk of injury.

And soon when the time arises that you need to shovel your driveway or drive a stake into the ground for the big top you’ll be ready.