Size Matters

I recall a conversation while watching an old training video of Ben Moon and Jerry Moffat that went something like this.

PERSON ONE

Makes me feel like training.

PERSON TWO

Makes me feel like not eating.

In gravity sports weight is key and there’s no way to beat around the bush about it. Sure, there’s an occasional mutant who climbs hard without a totally lithe frame (see most of the WFH pics as examples) but it’s far from the norm. Gravity ensures that no amount of muscle strength can offset the power and endurance increases that you make when you lose weight. We see a more telling example in linear sports such as cycling where technique is not as varied. When roads are flat heavier riders rule. But as they turn upward weight becomes more and more of an issue to the point where the fastest times up mountains are from men who often resemble elves. There’s a simple reason why no one wins the Tour weighing more than about 150 pounds and it’s the same as why no one could keep up with Legolas on a three day run: size matters.

In any training program for climbing weight should come into play at some point. Like cyclists, runners, boxers, and wrestlers, most of us don’t walk around at fighting weight. And it’s not just because we like to drink beer and eat ribs in the offseason. These sports require us, at our best, to weigh less than our bodies naturally would.

The strategy for how to lose this weight is tricky. When doing high volume training it’s easy to lose weight but, if you are trying to increase muscle mass at all, it’s impractical to under eat because you risk not recovering from exercise and, thus, wasting the time you’ve been training. Therefore, I always target weight loss while I’m power training.

Overview note: this is only if you are already at your natural weight. If you have excessive weight to lose it should be done during all phases of your program, as far away from your actual competition dates as possible. This type of weight loss should be slow, steady, and accomplished by eating clean and exercising. Today’s example is how to get down to fighting weight only.



Anyways, so why during the power phase? Because power training is lower volume and higher intensity than any other phase. This means that you aren’t as hungry as when your body is altering its amount of muscle mass. Thus carbohydrate consumption can drop without your brain going into full revolt (your brain functions primarily on glycogen). In short, the power phase is the best time to streamline your diet to recover from exercise and feel good.

I began the WFH at 173. After the hypertrophy phase I’d creeped up to 178. After three weeks of power I’m at 165. I accomplished this without a lot of suffering or going into nutrient bonk. My technique is a combination of the Shakeology Cleanse, zig zag dieting, and an old trick we used to call the egg diet.

The egg diet was a ridiculous Atkins-stage-one-type of thing where we’d eat a ton of eggs (for protein) and little else to boost our metabolisms. My current plan used only used one aspect: eggs for breakfast (3 eggs with some diced veggies). My next meals are Shakeology, sometimes with some added fruit. Shakeology shines here because it’s so nutrient dense, or high in nutrients while low in calories. Dinner, also a-la the Shakeology cleanse is a salad or something similar, like a veggie dish. I allow any healthy additives: nuts, seeds (always chia for me), legumes, more eggs, balsamic/olive oil (no meat). Overall calories for me on these days is low. I don’t count but they’re in the 1000-1500 range.



Finally, I enact zig zag principles, eating one to three days per above (three to four days per week total) and normal on the other days. This way I stay strong and energized and can continue this diet for as long as it takes to get to where I want to be. Each week I tweak it slightly, based on the prior week’s success, until I’m ready to rumble.

vids: another option for weight loss is to simply watch vision quest, exercise like a madman, and not eat. “why do you want to get smaller and wrestle a small guy?”

WFH: Back On The Board

Moving into the final phases of the Workout From Hell consists of, finally, doing a lot of climbing. No matter how you train for climbing it’s never going to be effective without doing a lot of climbing. It’s such a subtle sport that nothing prepares you for it like doing it, and doing it a lot. Because without climbing regularly not only does you kinesthetic movement suffer but more simple factors, like having ample skin thickness for hanging sharp holds and pain tolerance and wearing tight boots will keep you from applying the strength gains you’ve made.

On Saturday I warmed up at a cliff then came home and got on the board (home boulder wall) for the first time since last winter. I went through my training circuits and easily did each problem. Then did some of my harder problems, most of which went fairly easily. I stopped prior pushing myself too hard as my skin and fingers aren’t up to intense movements yet.

Two things were clear: one that my base fitness is stronger than it’s been in years and the other is that I feel so awkward that I may have left this final phase a little late. It takes a while to transfer fitness onto the rock and my schedule is hectic right now, meaning I get out less than normal so I can’t spend whole days climbing and the transition will be a bit slower than normal. This isn’t a huge deal as I can always push the season a little longer. When our weather gets bad there are generally climbable windows well into December.

Here’s the overview plan to put the WTH to use in the climbing season:

Part I is two to three (or even four if it’s going well) weeks of climbing hard three days per week. For me this means trying to onsight and redpoint at my limit so that I finish each day tired. If climbing two days on, like on a weekend, I like to work routes at or above my limit on day one and then do mileage on day two.

One full body (but not climbing specific) PAP workout per week (probably on Monday). This is cross training to keep preparing for next year’s agenda (more on this specifically later).

The mid week climbing day will also have some training around it. I’m experimenting with PAP as a part of actual climbing performance and will post what this consists of if I find that it works.

One or two days of running, riding, adventuring each week. Two if they are shorter days, maybe only one if it’s a long outing. This is moderate exercise that serves a threefold purpose: prepare for next year, help lose weight for climbing, have fun (since this stuff is kind of what I live for).

A few yoga sessions per week.

During this period I’ll pick a few projects that seem doable this fall. Part II will then be to concoct a short training cycle (similar to this one) and finish my season by trying them.

pic: peter croft ropeless on the rostrum. he calls is mileage, more call it adventure, most call it madness.

The Truth

This week’s psyche is a no brainer: it’s Jack LaLanne’s 96th birthday. Yeah, yeah, the guy from the juicer commercials, as all you pop-culture-ites now know him, was—and still is—the MAN in the world of fitness. He almost single handedly invented the fitness movement and practiced what he preached in the most profound way. His birthday challenge accomplishment are not only legendary but were so far ahead of their time that none have been repeated. At his 95th birthday party (I was lucky to be able to attend) Arnold Schwarzenegger summed him up pretty well:

“Come to the beach and do some chin-ups with me, Arnold,” he’d say to me. “He didn’t tell me that we were going to do chin-ups for one hour straight without stopping!”

Here are a series of posts I wrote on Jack last year, in order:

Join the Jack LaLanne Challenge (great quotes!)

Preaching the Here and Now (more great quotes!)

Happy Birthday Jack! (includes a list of his birthday challenges--you won't believe them)



Now that I just re-read them I can no longer sit still. I wish I had a 50 degree pool to strap myself into but, instead, I’ll just head out to my gym.

"I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest." Then he segued into a mantra I'm sure I heard dozens of times as a very young boy: "How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years." - Jack LaLanne

Mr. Daikeler Goes To Washington

Actually, it’s Mr. Congdon and Mr. Daikeler go to Philadelphia but riffing on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia just doesn’t carry the same Capra-esque American Dream type of feeling. So anyway my bosses, Carl and Jon, met the President (yes of the United States) the other day. I got wind the meeting from my wife, via Facebook, and given I’d just spent the last week with them and had heard nothing of it I was incredulous that it was as exalted a meeting as advertised, which was along the lines of “because of the success of P90X on American health the Prez wants a meeting.”

Nevertheless this didn’t stop me from crafting a quick email with my personal agenda. This was, essentially, if you do manage to get some face time could you mention that we could be a big help to his wife’s childhood obesity initiative? As some of you know my next birthday challenge will be centered around publicizing childhood obesity. If we solve this we WILL solve the obesity epidemic. No question. And, frankly, if we can sell grownups on P90X and Insanity getting kids to exercise will be a piece of cake. We just need a forum to do it.

Of course I didn’t expect this to happen. I expected more along the lines of the Lebowskian “um, well, the first lady is pretty cool” photo op sorta deal. Mr. Smith never really did get to Washington or, if he did, he probably turned into Charley Wilson. Heroes are often made in strange and serendipitous ways but grass roots campaigns going huge is generally a thing of lore. But Jon and Carl had a dream....

My Dinner With Obama

Bravo for an incredible piece of maneuvering and pitching. It probably encapsulates why we’re successful as a company. People laughed when we first tried to sell legitimate fitness and nutrition on an infomercial. And they thought we were insane when we first pitched P90X. But not too many people out there could turn a glad-handing opportunity into this:

Then the President interrupts me and says "I totally agree. We definitely want to hear more about what you are doing - and I mean that." He turns to his entourage and says "Let's make sure of that, ok guys? I want to make sure we follow up and connect with them to hear what these guys are doing."

Let’s send Mr. Daikeler to Washington!

Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties. And, uh, if that's what the grownups have done with this world that was given to them, then we'd better get those boys' camps started fast and see what the kids can do. And it's not too late, because this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you, or me, or anything else. Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!

The Gluten Hoax

For some reason we love to find scapegoats for our problems. Instead of admitting that we need to re-focus on total image we prefer to allow obtuse minutia to sidetrack us. Perhaps it’s because we feel better if something we don’t understand is causing our health problems instead of the obvious, like we’re eating bad and not exercising. Whatever the reason, society is always on the lookout for the next thing to blame, bringing me to our latest victim: gluten.

Gluten is basically protein found in grains like wheat, rye, barley. Two decades ago it was championed as a superfood and was the mainstay on the menus of most organic hippie restaurants. Now it’s a vilified to the point where consumers look for “no gluten” labels like they’re the key to eternal happiness. Given the latest research shows between .5 and 1% of wheat eating populations suffer from gluten sensitivity one wouldn’t think the market would be so invigorated. But it all comes down to one thing:

$

We (both marketers and consumers) are always looking for the latest buzz word to make/spend money on and gluten, and by extension all grains, is the latest craze. .5 to 1% just ain’t big enough to capture shareholder imaginations. In America, it’s go big or go home, and thus the spin games begin. This is nothing new. For those of your paying attention we’ve had the same love/hate relationships with many foods over the years. From macro nutrient groups like proteins, fats, and carbs, to more obscure items like coconut, margarine, grapefruit, Space Food sticks, and blue-green algae; we are schizophrenic consumers. Each has spent its time in the limelight as well as in super market purgatory. Study after study (not to mention the success of Beachbody) shows that living a natural balanced lifestyle, where you eat a lot of natural food and get some exercise every day, will keep the human body healthy and running smoothly. Yet we’re always on the lookout for that ever-elusive “a-ha” moment where all our ails are cured by changing one simple (“extremely simple” – marketing dept ED) thing in our behavior.

“You mean cortisol is not causing my belly fat!” exclaimed someone in one of my recent chats. “But I was told that by my doctor and have been spending $70 a month on supplements to fix it,” which of course are not working because you regulate cortisol by—there I go again—eating well and exercising. Money is going to continue to drive us to do silly things and, unless you’re part of the .5-1% who suffer from Celiac Disease, eliminating gluten from your diet is not going to help you unless your entire diet improves along with it.

My anecdotal case for the day revolves around professional cyclist Christian Vande Velde, who went gluten free. After finishing 4th in the Tour de France Vande Velde became his team’s leader for the next season. Now privy to more means, he hired a chef so he and some teammates could go gluten free. When asked if it was helping he stated “I think so. I feel like I’m breathing better.” Yet his stats never backed this up. He fell to 8th in the Tour and never produced the same numbers on the bike that he did while he was eating heaps of gluten (cyclists traditionally live on pasta). Of course there are other reasons that can explain his drop in performance but there is no evidence that gluten free helped him either. In fact, given the chef was his wife you might even chalk up his positive comment to family civility. What is clear is that at the top end of human performance—the place we generally rate how food affects the body—eliminating gluten from one’s diet who is not gluten sensitive presents little, if any, benefit. This means that 99+% of you can now relax and enjoy your pasta, bread, and/or beer and keep scanning Yahoo Health to see what you should cut out of your diet next.

pic: title could mean IS for dummies for some of us.

Feelin’ Springy

Here’s the workout I put our test group through on Friday. It’s a combo for the upper and lower body, similar to what I’ll be doing when I move into “on-season” maintenance training next week. When I told Marcus he commented, “Beautiful. In a couple of weeks they should start feeling springy, loose.” This is how I feel right now, kind of like when I was a sprinter back in high school. I bounce around and feel like jumping on stuff.

I’ve been asked about how this will work into MC2 and the answer is that I’m not sure yet. You don’t want to train PAP only. It shines as a way to focus your strength into movement. It’s also not effective if you aren’t already fit because the contraction already causes all the stress a deconditioned person can handle. It will probably be introduced in the second block of training and never exceed two workouts per week, at least at this point: MC2. It will then move front and center as we build upon this toward sports specific training.

Warm-up

10 reps: heel walk, toe walk
Huggers, Shakers
10 salutation plank (P90X +)
10 forward lunges, reverse lunges, side lunges (5 each side)
10 Hindu (dive bomber) push-ups (one way, under, like in P90X+)
Speed skip (high knee skip) and crossovers (running sideways but 4 steps out, 4 back)
Sumo squat (Groucho walk) 4 out, 4 back, X 4
Scorpion (90X+), Fire hydrants (like a dog), 10 each side
Leg swings, front and side, 10 each

The warm-up is like a workout because we’re training power (1oo%) so you want to be WARM. It’s shorter when concentrating on only upper or lower body.

Warm-up II

3 X below series. Use bands for weight to create constant pull.

Side hops (over a line) .20, lat pull downs 10, forward/back hops .20, band military press 10, side jumps 6 (leap to the side, not quite 100%), busdrivers 10 each side (overhead ban, rotate and pull to each side using core)

Group was pretty sweaty after this warm-up, which you should be. Short water break.

Complex I

Bulgarians (weighted if possible) 8 each legs, Split jumps 6 at 100% explosion, side arm balance with leg raised .30, Wall slide .30 (hard to explain this movement, you’ll have to wait for video)

4 times without rest. Not rushing either. Each movement done to 100%. WAY harder than it looks on paper. Group was dying.

Water break.

Complex II

Curl to Press 5 reps max weight, Clap push-up 6 100% explosion, Towel pull-ups 5, Push press 8-10 or fail (an explosive military press using legs/core), wall clock 8 pumps each hand (focus on tendon inside of arm/elbow).

4 times without rest. Not rushing either. Each movement done to 100%.

Water break.

Physio ball complex (we skipped this but…)
2 sets of 10 reps all done on a physio (Swiss) ball: Pikes, side raise (both sides), roll outs (like an ab roller), extensions.

Cool down

A upper and lower body PNF stretching session using a band instead of a partner. More on this later.

How much the MC2 workouts mirror this is still up for debate, otherwise why have test groups? But as a first crack at something it went about as well as could be. Just wait until we get it dialed.

I Hate It! But I Love It!

Friday’s psyche post is teaser for P90X: next. I just put our in-house MC2 (that’s Muscle Confusion 2) test group through their first PAP (postactivation potentiation) workout and they are absolutely destroyed, but in the best possible way. Along the lines of Tony’s “I hate it, but I love it” ARX description I was getting various quotes of conflicted praise from our (very fit) group. By the time I cut their workout a bit short of what I had planned these statements evolved into “Insanity (commonly thought of as our most intense program) has got nothing on this!” Yet these were not disparaging words. They were affectations of love and the group was pining for more. Not today, mind you, but in the future.

What this style of training does if take all of the fitness gains you’ve been making using 90X, Insanity, or whatever your advanced fitness training program has been and turn it into performance. In other words, you will: run faster, jump higher, be stronger. I know, you’re doing that already. Now we bring you into focus even more.

The workouts don’t look like much on paper. In fact they don’t look too hard when you observe them. But your weaknesses will get exploited, and by following the scientific principles of PAP each repetition of each set is done at your maximum and the cumulative result is devastating, in an oh-so painful yet blissful way. You will hate it. But I guarantee you will be in love in what your body will be able to do.

vid: an example of what some focused power training can do for you. this guy wasn’t meant to be a high draft choice until this video came out. now he’s about to be rich.