This is a common complaint and it represents a typical misunderstanding of muscular strength. Let's say you are able to do 200 X 5 X 5 on your bench press. Something comes up and you are forced to layoff training for several weeks, maybe a month. During that time you are then "detraining."

Once you get back to training, of course, the first thing you do is jump on the bench, 200 loaded on the bar. But, to your dismay, you have a hard time getting your reps. You can only manage 2 to 3 per set and that is pushing it. Oh, no! You've lost so much strength!

But you haven't. You haven't truly lost any strength at all, at least judging by this performance. Your performance has changed, but what you've really lost is "strength endurance" or "muscular endurance." See, you could bench press 200lbs before your layoff. If, after resuming training, you can still bench press 200lbs, you cannot take that as strong evidence that you've lost a lot of absolute strength. You've lost endurance but you can still "lift" what you lifted before.

Sometimes people equate their 'strength' to a particular rep maximum that is more than one. So if your 5RM changes, you've lost strength. But the absolute force required to move the bar each time is the same, so you haven't lost your overall ability to apply that absolute force, you've just lost some ability to continue to apply it for up to five reps.

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Other times, though, trainees are not talking about losing the reps, they are talking about their supposed 1RM (maximum strength) as represented by this particular 5RM or any other RM. Well, sure, a lot of misinformed 'trainers' still think estimated maxes are useful. In fact, some of them say that's all that should ever be done for a max: Estimate it! But in reality, estimates are only a tiny bit useful and an estimate about anything is only as good as what information you use to guess it with! You know what they say: A guess is only as good as the person making it.

See, if you lose some weight off your 5RM, or to put it more simply, you drop some reps during a layoff, you really have no way of knowing if and how that affected your maximum strength. The bar speed, etc. during your performance, may give you a clue that you lost some maximum ability but this is all imaginary. In other words, in this instance, you are worried about losing strength that you have never actually displayed. That's like worrying about getting your car stolen and then remembering you don't own a car.

As I've said so many times, to the point I sound quite pedantic, I'm sure, your max is the most you can actually lift and do lift; not what you think you can lift.

Given the above scenario, where you've dropped some reps off your 5x5 with 200 pounds, you should be able to regain that lost endurance fairly quickly and easily. Really, the quickest way to add back in reps, is to perform sets to failure. Next workout, do so again, and before you know it you'll have you're old reps back. The only problem with this is it may compromise form somewhat because you may get in too much of a hurry and be caught up in counting reps instead of paying attention to how badly you are lifting. So, there are more conservative but sounder ways to recapture that performance while still paying attention to what the heck you are doing.

This might consist of an easy build up of sets of 2 to 3, with good rest in between so that performance stays consistent. Build up to a place close to or exceeding your working weight from before, if you can.

Then, the next workout, you can do a similar thing, except that you tend toward sets of three and four in your build up. The next time, you could build up to your working range and hit the 5 reppers and see if you feel on solid enough ground to go ahead and start back where you left off. This can be generally applied to other types of sets, not just 5 reppers, of course! You just have to build up to it over fewer or more sessions, depending on the rep number you were looking to regain. This method assures that quality is maintained while getting your reps back. Once you have done that, you will want to reduce your rest periods back down to where they were before, approximately, if you need to.

by EricT

You got stung by a bee, put some baking soda and vinegar on it, and ten minutes later the pain was gone! It worked. OR, maybe there is another explanation. Maybe you are not allergic to bee stings, had a minor local reaction, and the pain simply went away on its on. I personally seldom have the pain from a bee sting last longer than 10 or 20 minutes and I forget all about it. Yep.

So you can see why I am not overly impressed when someone claims that such and such made the bee sting boo-boo all better in ten minutes. Ten minutes? So what? I would have been impressed with 20 seconds. Moral, pain often goes away on it's own. Even a minor headache, unless the relief from a pill is almost instantaneous, you can never be quite sure that your headache medicine did any good. Heck, it could have been a placebo effect, which wields it's power most obviously in the realm of pain.

But let's say someone else told you they tried another remedy for bee stings. Raw onion. They grated up the onion, applied it to the stung area, and applied a bandage. The relief was "immediate" and the swelling went down. You might think, 'wow, that works better than my baking soda and vinegar…which took ten whole minutes'. Well, before you jump to conclusions, you might want to ask what your fried means by "immediate". Maybe his idea of immediate is different than yours. A scientific inquiry would not use such a word without giving it a concrete definition. And then, of course, a whole lot more people would have to get this immediate relief.

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Alas, it is not immediate to many people, but it is too others. If you can't abide any physical discomfort far longer than a few seconds without slathering on a salve or popping a pill, nothing short of a nano-second may be mean immediate relief to you. However, if you are more stoic and bravely wait for the pain to resolve on it's own, maybe for hours, ten minutes may seem to be more immediate to your way of thinking. So be aware of the language and it's meaning. What is your criteria for naming an event which follows another event "immediate?" Is it the same as 'instantaneous'?

The point is that different people feel and deal with pain in different ways. The experience of pain is subjective. So, to actually test these remedies, although it is not likely anyone would, you'd need a lot more than one test subject. You'd need many. And you'd need a control group, that does nothing to treat the bee stings. And you'd need a placebo group. And perhaps a statistician to tie it all up with a nice bow. But, you can't really administer to bee stings to people from an ethical standpoint, which is often what gives those who sell anecdotal evidence as real evidence an ace in the hole, as they see it. How do we counter this? Well it's pretty easy. Even without well controlled clinical studies, science still has better information. That is because any study with a decent number of subjects is still better than some dude, his kitchen, and his blog.

Therefore, for instance, consider studies such as this Randomized Controlled Trial of Topical Aspirin in the Treatment of Bee and Wasp Stings. There are lots and lots of things wrong with conducting a study by recruiting people who call a poison information center after being stung by a bee. But hey, it's loads better than NO STUDY AT ALL. The study did garner some interesting results, after all. Topical aspirin didn't work, plus significantly increased the duration of the redness. And the control treatment, traditional ice application, well that seemed to do the trick fairly quickly. We could probably say that ice has more evidence for being a good choice than baking soda or onion, then.

But wait a minute. Do we really need a 'treatment' for minor bee or wasp sting reactions? I mean, do we need a treatment other than something to dull the discomfort? What all the self-help gurus with their one million home remedies don't get is that so many of the things they have treatments for don't really need to be treated! When it comes to bee and wasp stings, most of them cause minor local reactions, and as I hope I've made abundantly clear, they resolve themselves fairly quickly, regardless if you treat them. A healthy body doesn't need any help to deal with this on its own, providing there is not a severe reaction. So any treatment that you choose, really only needs to be palliative. That is, it helps control the discomfort or pain, if you really need it. A topical analgesic from the drug store will work. And if you think big pharma is evil and a little ointment will kill you, slap some ice on it and it'll numb right up. OR, you could just buck it up and stop being such a cry baby. It could be MUCH worse, you could have suffered a large local reaction or a systemic reaction, requiring emergency medical care.

I don't mean to make a big deal out of baking soda. The above examples are, to me, silly, but not exactly harmful. When it comes to bee stings, as long as you understand how to recognize and deal with a large systemic reaction, messing around with a common local reaction will probably not harm you much, unless you dispense with 'common sense' altogether and put caustic substances on it. Pouring hot sauce on a bee sting would not be a great idea, and yet, I wouldn't be surprised if some self-help medical book touted it.

But what about something that really needs to be dealt with in a decisive way, lest it turn into a bigger problem. What if your kid has head lice? You pick up your handy copy of "Clean It! Fix It! Eat It!" and you are advised to use mayonnaise to get rid of the lice. So now, you have a kid with a greasy head and head lice, and next thing you know, the whole family has it. There is a danger in calling forth the slippery slope argument. Just because you believe one claim about bee sting treatments does not mean you'll believe every other similar claim you read. I know that. But when such thinking represents a pattern, and it normally does, it is quite possible for legitimate medical care could be sidestepped in favor of home brew alternative treatments at the wrong time, putting you or your loved ones in needless danger.

If you came to this page looking for first aid information for bee and wasp stings, please see How to Recognize and What to Do About Allergic Reactions to Bee and Wasp Stings.

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by EricT

You may have noticed that it can be difficult to get a good deep breath in between reps of the front squat. Not everybody has this problem to the same extent, but most everybody would have noticed that the front squat makes breathing a bit restricted. The position of the elbows, combined with the heavy load on the shoulders, restricts the chest. It is easy to simulate this effect right now as you read this: simply raise your arms up over your head and try to take a deep breath into your upper chest. You should notice that the chest wall is restricted and it is close to impossible to take a full breath this way.

Now, many of you should right now be saying, but Eric, dammit, you're not supposed to breathe into your upper chest. Bingo! This means that those trainees who are upper chest breathers will have more difficulty during the front squat than those who are diaphragmatic breathers. For the purpose of this explanation, we will assume two general groups of trainees:

• Habitual upper chest breathers (you breath this way all the time)
• Stress chest breathers (you breathe this was when your are out of breath, anxious, etc.)

Each group, to some extent, must be able to take proper diaphragmatic breaths during the front squat in order to get that precious air. This means each group may need to practice diaphragmatic breathing on a fundamental level. Therefore, the first thing to do to begin solving this problem is to read Paradoxical Versus Diaphragmatic Breathing, see where you stand and follow the steps in the article accordingly.

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Even some of us who a good diaphragmatic breathers during normal, quiet breathing may switch to upper chest breathing when we a exerting ourselves and are out of breath.

During the front squat itself, beyond the trouble getting a good breath between reps, there are a couple of other associated problems. When you front squat, your core is braced. Now, your core "braces" automatically in response to you loading a heavy bar on your shoulders and trying to maintain equilibrium. Also, you probably would have used an "abdominal brace" which is the conscious act of tightening the core muscles to get ready for a heavy lift, which would serve to reinforce the natural contraction that is already happening intermittently as you hold the bar, because you are about to initiate a rep. What some people may find is that they are unable to maintain this core brace while breathing, which may lead to breath holding, either consciously or unconsciously. If you are a chest breather you will notice that this actually perturbs you and causes your upper body to actually move posteriorly and anteriorly. just slightly, but enough to cause further perturbation down the chain so that it is harder to maintain your front squat setup.

Also, some who do breathe correctly into through the diaphragm may find that they have a hard time maintaining a brace while using diaphragmatic breathing. In other words, they cannot maintain and abdominal brace without holding their breath. If you have this problem, and you have also been told that you have to suck in a big breath and hold it in order to brace the core, then you'll have a hard time ever learning to breath freely during front squats.

All that breath holding, both during the lift itself and in between when you don't know you're doing it, can end up making you dizzy, subject to exertional headaches, or even brief but dangerous blackouts. Now, you know me, I am no fear monger. These things are possible, not likely. One thing is clear, though, if you can't breathe you are going to be missing an essential ingredient in your lifting, so that's enough reason to solve this problem. However, if you are subject to dizzy spells or exertional headaches, the ability to take diaphragmatic breaths without feeling like you need to dump the bar can help you a great deal. Many lifters take a series of short panting breaths between reps of a very heavy lift, and although some of them do it for no reason other than to get ready to take an even bigger breath, others due it to "clear the cobwebs" for lack of a better phrase. Breaths like this may help to regulate elevating blood pressure between repetitions of a lift.

The Front Squat Breathing Drill

The first thing to do, as mentioned above, is to learn about proper diaphragmatic breathing and then to learn to do it. Depending on the depth of your problem with chest breathing, this may take a long while or just a couple of days or weeks. There is no point in engaging in a breathing drill that uses diaphragmatic breathing if you have never taken a diaphragmatic breath! You have a more fundamental problem and it is quite important that you fix it, as the article will explain: Fix Your Upper Chest Breathing.

Once you have become somewhat "adept" at correct breathing, you can begin to use the front squat breathing drill. The first part uses a concept invented by Stuart McGill, which he calls developing and "athletic diaphragm." For this purpose, he tells us to get ourselves good and out of breath, in some way, and then do front planks for time. The front planks force you to brace your core, through co-contraction of the abdominal, back, and glute muscles and being out of breath forces you to have to breathe while maintaining that core brace. For McGill, the purpose of this was not heavy lifting, but dynamic and multi-directional athletic movements that require core activation while continually breathing. As you can see, certain lifts cause similar needs, as they force us to maintain an activated core while still being able to catch our breath, and the front squat makes breathing more difficult for chest breathers.

So, the front planks are very useful for this, and I use them in this drill, but while they make diaphragmatic breathing more likely to be the breathing pattern used, they do not absolutely force you not to breathe correctly. This makes the front planks a good fit for those who are already habitual diaphragmatic breathers and just need to learn to maintain a core brace while breathing but not as useful for those that are having trouble during the front squat because they are chest breathers. Remember, you should have already learned about diaphragmatic breathing before starting this drill, but I do not expect you to be a master and do it under periods of stress.

For that reason, I have also included supine or 'glute' bridges. Bridges actually force you to breathe through the abdomen much better than planks. You will find, although you may have never noticed, that they restrict the chest in a similar way to the front squat. Once you combine that with being short of breath, it is a good trainer and reinforcer for maintaining correct breathing under stress. Still, the bridge does not require the core to be braced as vigorously as the front plank, so we use both. The bridge comes first, to remind us, activate, and reinforce proper breathing, and the front plank comes second to train it more effectively. So the first phase of this drill should last for several weeks, as long as you need it to feel thoroughly masterful of breathing in this way. Here are the steps, although they are so simple, listing them out is probably overkill.

So this is Phase One:

1. Do some kind of vigorous movement to get out of breath. You want to be panting and needing to "catch your breath." Hint: Larger muscles groups used through a large ROM will work quicker than something like the treadmill. Do body weight squats or something like that for ver quick repetitions. It is really your choice though, as long as get the job done.

2. As soon as you are out of breath, get into a supine bridge position and hold it for 15 to 30 seconds.

3. If you need to, get out of breath again.

4. Do another supine bridge, hold for 15 to 30 seconds.

5. If you need to, get out of breath again.

6. Get into a front plank position. If you are very tired you can do it on your elbows. Hold for 15 to 30 seconds.

7. Repeat. (I shouldn't have to tell you to get out of breath again if you need to, right.)

Continue phase one for at least three weeks or as long as you feel you need to. Then go to phase two. Phase two will involve Heavy Barbell Walkouts. A walkout is nothing more than loading a heavy bar on your shoulders and "walking out" as if you are about to do squats, but instead you only stand there with the bar for a while, forcing you to maintain position (it's a core thing).

This is phase two:

1. Set up the squat rack for a front squat and load the bar with your about ten pounds below your current heaviest working weight, or UP TO 10 to 20 lbs beyond it, if you are comfortable supporting it. Remember, you are going to be compromised and having trouble catching your breath, so act accordingly.

2. Get out of breath, just like in phase one.

3. Load the bar onto your shoulders in a front squat position and perform a front squat walkout. Hold for 15 to 30 seconds. You should be forced to catch your breath by breathing through your belly instead of your chest while also needed to maintain enough core brace to keep steady.

4. Put the bar back on the rack (I can't believe I wrote that out).

5. Rest a little then get out of breath again and repeat steps two and three.

6. Repeat step four.

As you move along, you can load the bar heavier and heavier. Normally you should always be able to do a heavy bar walkout with a heavier weight than you actually squat with but you do not normally do aerobics and get all panty before a walkout, so tread carefully and build up when you feel comfortable with it. Continue practice should make breathing during front squats second nature to you.

Breathing for Overhead Press (Military Press)

The same breathing difficulties are common during overhead press, if not even even more. More intrathoracic pressure is created during the press. The drill is used in the same way for the press as the beginning position for the press is similar to the front squat. See comments below for further explanation.

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by EricT

Why? I've always wondered about this? Are you such an Adonis but at the same time so weak that you need to work your butt off so that you can become as strong as you look? Even pro bodybuilders are pretty darn strong compared to the average Joe. But let's just stick with the average Joe, not the pro. Let me ask again, why would you want to get strong without adding any muscle?

I wonder this because at least once a month I see a new article explaining how to do this. Why is this concept so popular? Is it because:

You Don't Want to Get Bulky

Well, that won't happen. I know that you may have read articles that tell you that doing strength training will turn you into Arnold faster than Arnold himself became Arnold with bodybuilding, but those articles are, pardon me, full of crap. It will take years of dedicated strength training for you to get all huge. And as I have pointed out again and again, those big old bulky strength dudes who you THINK got their quasi-bodybuilder look from pure strength training, have likely done their fair share of work in bodybuilding parameters, as well as plenty of biceps curls and chest flyes. If you don't want to get bulky you will not, unless you are a muscle gaining freak, what is typically referred to as an "easy-gainer".

You Think Big Muscles will Slow you Down

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See point one, above. Nope. High force strength training increases speed. Even if you don't train for speed it increases rate of force production. Strength training has become a very important part of athlete's training for speed. Likely you will read that high repetition bodybuilding training will bloat you with big "empty" muscles, decrease your ROM, and slow you down. Well, Flash, if you are so concerned about speed, why are you into bodybuilding? Stick to strength training and you can have your speed and eat it..I mean you can have your speed and your muscular strength. Obviously, those training for speed should have most of their training dedicated to that skill.

You Want Dense Muscles, Not Big Ones

I take it you've been reading Pavel. This goal, nowadays, seems to be the most popular one. To bad it is utterly meaningless. Muscle density is not a clearly defined concept. Some people think that muscle density is something similar to muscle tone, or tonus. I.E. it is how hard your muscles are and is related to…

Wait a minute. Let's start from the beginning. Some think that the word tone refers to the shape and definition of muscles. This is the origin of "toning exercise" and toning routines. This is an incorrect usage of the word tone.

More correctly, the term muscle tone or "tonus" refers to the tension in the muscles. You can think of it as a state of partial contraction (very slight) in which the muscles are kept, kinda like the muscle is always "ready for action." More specifically, it refers to the slight tension that can always be felt in a relaxed muscle, which is called the muscle's resting tone. Strength trainees, athletes, and active individuals will tend to have increased resting tone. That is the technical explanation.

Problem is, even within this technical arena, it's used differently by different experts and authors (common problem), so that some people may only consider tone by looking at the muscle's resistance to passive stretch and others might only press the muscle (palpation) to test its tone, which is a way of judging its stiffness and consistency. These two different methods do not measure the same property but are both looking for "tone". Different pathological states may change these features relative to one another, making tone an ambiguous term.

Not only does tone lack an exact definition (or true understanding), other words related to it are also ambiguous, like firmness, stiffness, elasticity, and tension. Then comes in muscle density. It goes like this: "I want to have strong and hard muscles without being big. Therefore I want dense and toned muscles." It seems like to get dense and toned muscles you have to go for the same ambiguous firmness, stiffness, etc. to get these two different features. The guys in lab coats cannot even decide on what exactly they mean, but you can?

Density could refer to the actual density of an individual muscle fiber, which for mammalian muscles is about 1.056 g/cm³. You cannot change that.

Or it could refer to the intramuscular fat content or how closely packed together the myofibrules are. If intramuscular fat is decreased or the density of myofibrillar packing is increased, this should theoretically serve to increase muscle tension capacity. When you engage in strength training, these things happen. You don't do resistance training to have these things happen, you do it to increase the strength (tension generating capability) of the muscles. These changes in the muscle, and many others, are part of the explanation of how muscles get stronger. They are a couple of features, among several, that are side effects of the strength training process. The goal of isolating this one component of the results of strength training through a special kind of strength training simply means that you are capping off just how strong you are willing to get.

Why? Because these changes are part of the initial stages of strength training! They happen early on, along with neural change and simply help explain why there can be such a profound increase in muscular strength in the early stages of training without apparent changes in muscle mass. Eventually, to keep getting stronger, morphological changes become more and more important. You "only" want to have toned and dense, but small muscles, then you only want to get so much stronger, and no more. Period. That is easy. Strength train a little, and then maintain. There is no magic recipe, really.

I cannot imagine a more silly and boring goal than "decreasing my intramuscular fat, increasing myofibrillar and resting tone." If that is your goal, then happy training. If it seems I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole, perhaps I am. But specific measurable goals are fairly important in training. If I have correctly translated the "tone and density" hoopla into it's actual components, then I'll leave it up to you to determine whether these are goals within themselves or simply a couple of components of the outcome of increasing muscular strength.

Strength training is a fairly specific activity. Its goal is to increase the absolute force producing potential of our body. But I have to tell you, when someone starts telling people they should be careful, they don't want to get too bulky! Better train for tone! Increase density! Do body weight only training!…Some of us get a little perturbed. Because these people are implying that developing large strong muscles through strength training is a walk in the park. They are acting as if this happens because we accidentally trained too heavy and too hard. No. It takes years and years of "backbreaking" work to get "big, strong, and muscular" let alone huge and bulky. Many people who do dedicated strength training, past noticing that they seem in shape and "look strong" you would not think of as huge and bulky. It just doesn't work like that. You have to want to get huge and bulky to get truly huge and bulky.

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by EricT

Training for maximal strength is essentially training to exert maximum muscular force. So what is force? The easiest way to think of a force is as a simple push or pull. When you push or pull on a barbell or other implement you are exerting a force. The pull of the Earth's gravity on an object is a force. Friction is a force. To be more precise, then, a force is something that causes or tends to cause a change in the motion or the shape of an object.

When you attempt to deadlift a heavy barbell you are exerting a pulling force on the barbell. That force has a magnitude, a direction, and a point of application. By applying the force you are attempting to change the state of motion of the barbell. If your force is too weak, the barbell will not move. There is a greater force acting against your effort. In this case it is the weight of the barbell or the inertia of the barbell. The weight is the downward force of the Earth's gravity acting on the weight, which is proportional to its mass. The inertia of the object is it's tendency to maintain its state of motion, whether moving or not. Inertia is easy to understand. The more massive an object is the more it tends to maintain its present state of motion. A 300 lb barbell has a lot of inertia. Now imagine a 300 lb linebacker running at you full-tilt. To stop him, you'd have to overcome his inertia. In either case, you must change the state of motion the object or body.

The failure to move a heavy weighted implement, such as our barbell, is a source of confusion for strength trainees. This is because the application of force is thought of as the actual result of the force or more specifically, its effect. Most strength training articles concerning force simply relate the classic Newtonian law F = ma which translates to force equals mass times acceleration where m is the mass of an object in grams or kilograms, and a is the amount of change in velocity in meters per second squared, i.e. acceleration. However although this is usually reported as the absolute definition of force it is really a relationship or a means to measure the effect of force which is the resultant acceleration of an object. This is great for physics and mechanical laws but for defining force it makes force itself a mere abstraction that grows out of the change of an object's velocity. This view of force, despite it's precision, doesn't really help us train for strength as the effort we exert against a weight is NOT an abstraction.

Even if your barbell does not move your application of force to it creates a tendency for it to move. If a friend also grabbed on to lend a hand, the barbell might move. The absolute force being applied to the bar increases. Our goal, then, in training for maximal strength is to increase our ability to exert muscular force, plain and simple. Force is probably mentioned on GUS more than any other strength related word. For further reading see the many other pages concerning force or forces.

Some Technical Notes, Just for Fun

• The symbol for force is F.

• The pound is a unit of force. However, the SI unit¹ of force is the Newton, named after Isaac Newton and abbreviated as N.

• A newton of force is the force required to accelerate a 1 kg mass 1 m/s/s which is written in mathematical terms as: 1.0 N = (1.0 kg)(1.0 m/s/s). One newton equals 0.225 lb of force and one pound equals 4.448 N.

• Force must be considered in terms of it's point of application, its direction or "line of action", and whether is pushes or pulls. Since a force has magnitude (size) and direction it is a type of vector. A vector is represented by an arrow on a free body diagram. The length of the arrow represents the size of the vector, the orientation represents direction, and one end of the arrow represents its point of application. Other vector quantities are weight, pressure and torque.

• For the purposes of strength training we are not concerned with a force that deforms, or changes the shape, of another object. Instead, we are concerned with forces that either start, stop, speed up, slow down, or change the direction of an object. Since deformation is ignored or assumed not to occur this is called rigid-body mechanics.

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by EricT

Raise your hand if you have recently read a news or magazine article, on the web or elsewhere, explaining the results of one study and making concrete conclusions based on that one study. Yep, all of you. I figured as much.

A study in Australia revealed that young women fight off colds better than young men. Case closed. Not. First of all, "a study in Australia" is not an appropriate reference. No reference, no credibility. Second of all, there is no way that ONE study could possible "reveal" conclusively that young women have colds that go away quicker than young men.

I know that you probably don't care about a study that says young women have shorter colds. But what if the study reveals something you'd like to believe? What then? I know it is tough to not cling to any little tidbit that confirms our favored reality. Trust me, I do. For instance, you know those toning shoes? Sketchers Shape-Ups, Reebox EasyTone, MBT…you've seen the ads. There was one study from The American Council on Exercise which suggested that, low and behold, those shoes don't do any of the things they claim to do, such as activate the calves and hamstrings better and burn more calories. The study 1 by Porcori, et al. was divided into two trials, with 12 females each, one group for muscle activation and one for caloric expenditure. I have very little doubt that these shoes are complete and utter crap. But one study of 12 just ain't enough for me to go around saying we have conclusive proof. I'd say we have a good indication, but you won't see a front page banner on GUS proclaiming this NEW STUDY!

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And let's be fair here. Concerning the referenced study, the author of the related article 2 on the Ace Website complains that the studies performed by the manufacturers of these shoes are not peer-reviewed, failing to see the irony in the fact that neither is the Ace study, having not been published in a peer-reviewed journal! Something is amiss, is it not? In fact, according to an article by Denise Mann 3 the Skechers company president actually called out the study based on this fact. Man, you've got a problem when the company guilty of BS in-house "studies" proving their products effectiveness actually call you out on your study not being peer-reviewed. Could Ace be biased as an organization? Sure, it's possible. Should we take Ace funded studies as seriously as other studies funded by independent sources? Maybe not. After all, Ace is about producing fitness professionals who make a living helping people get fit. Still, this does not mean that the study is completely bogus. It's just not enough and questionable, as all studies are. And before you ask, Mann is pretty good at reporting on these things and yes, she actually references her articles.

None of this means that I won't think you are silly for spending over 100 bucks on any of these shoes. I don't need studies, most of the time, to tell me when a fitness product is not worth the material it's made from. But I'll need to wait for some confirming evidence before I start referencing research to support my opinion. Right now, it's just an opinion backed up by one small study, which may have it's flaws, including it's lack of scholarly publication. If you want to know, you go read it; I actually referenced it! Boy was that tough! I want to get back on track.

From my perspective there are two problems. One is that news and magazine articles routinely fail to properly reference the research they mention. Studies absolutely must be properly listed, with a link, complete journal citation, or both. If you cannot easily go find the study and read it yourself, the article's validity is suspect. Many times, you will find, even once you search out the study in question, the conclusions of the study's authors are not anything like the conclusions of the magazine article. This happens constantly, in fact. Not just in big publications but all over the web. Usually, people look for articles that seem at a glance to support what they already believe, and have no regard for what the study's authors actually conclude!

The other problem, from my perspective, is that it is nothing more than content baiting. The public is being led to believe that huge discoveries are being made in the realm of fitness and health almost on a daily basis. Single small studies are used for no other purpose than to support a provocative headline to draw you, the reader, in. These news and magazine outfits do not care if what they report is accurate and they surely do not care if it makes a difference in your fitness pursuit. If they did, they would research the articles much more widely. The typical formula for these articles goes like this:

1. Vague reference to some study, usually only with a place named, like Austrailia, or the last name of one of the researchers

2. Vaguely related quote by an expert in the same field, usually someone who has a vested interest in confirming the conclusions of the said study

I would love to be able to have a subject for an article every time someone does a study related, in some way, to fitness. Then, all I'd have to do is check Pubmed every day looking for something juicy and write some half-ass post on it. I'd have a website filled with content and provocative headlines. I wouldn't even need to stick strictly to fitness. What about a "recent study" that shows that pregnat women who eat chocolate have healthier babies who with better temperaments. What do you think the response to that would be? Yippee, I can eat chocolate! Like a pregnant woman needs and excuse, anyway. 4

Even when it comes to reading and analyzing single studies, though, there is a particular skill and expertize required, which the average journalist does NOT posses. There are, however, many good scientific blogs related to fitness that do a much better job. So, all you need to do is skip the big headline at the top of the Google pile and look for some blog entries by people like, say, Bryan Chung, who, it just so happens, weighed in on the barefoot shoe thing recently. You know, Vibram FiveFinger shoes and all of that. Just so happens there is a study from Ace on the barefoot shoes as well, according to this article. 5

Self Plagiarism, Salami Slicing, and Publish or Perish

It is good to be aware of emerging research but don't let the horse get ahead of the cart. It takes a while for enough data to be gathered to make meaningful conclusions. Before I leave you I want to give you one more thing to watch out for, in regards to scientific research published in peer reviewed journals. It's a "dirty little secret" if you will.

The unethical and damaging practice I am talking about is sometimes referred to as "self-plagiarism". Let's say I write what is essentially the same article, with the same thesis and conclusion, and publish with different wording in several different places. Is this a big deal? Nah. These are just informal articles and if I were to follow this practice it would just be for the purpose of fitting the article to a particular audience I was aiming towards. Plus, if I had a "parent" article I would most likely acknowledge this article in some way.

But what if a scientific researcher does this? Well then it is a very damaging and, to me, quite unethical practice. The major problem is using some data, or other part of an earlier study or paper in a new paper without cross-referencing it, to make it appear as the data, study sample, etc. is completely new and original to the study or paper in question. This absolutely puts a wrench in the whole kit-n-caboodle we call science. And it is done constantly. Most studies I find, in fact, are published in several different journals with no reference made to ever being published before. The question is, is it done deceptively? Well, if no mention is made of how parts of one paper overlap with another, it is always deceptive! If we think something is new, when it is not, it completely skews our evidence base, making it hard to make informed decisions.

Usually, once an article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, it is not acceptable to re-publish it, and this could be considered copyright infringement.

Many times, you will see the same name pop up again and again in regards to a specific scientific claim and it will seem like said person is just publishing reams of research in regards to this claim. When you see this happen, consider that this person may be doing another form of self-plagiarism called salami slicing. This is when a researcher takes what is essentially one large study, that could be reported in one paper and slices it up into smaller chunks which he scatters all over the place, mostly to increase the author's number of publications. This makes the importance of the work seem greater than it actually is..call it a shotgun effect.

Don't blame it entirely on the researchers, though. Not many want to increase their publication count just for the sake of it! It's publish or perish and, according to Nature Materials: "Much of the problem arises not from an inherent desire among researchers to maximize their publication count, but from the conditions that are set by funding and appointment bodies, which determine what gets funded and who gets tenure. In the 'publish or perish' climate that has evolved over recent decades, overemphasis on the size of an individual's (and, increasingly, entire research group's) publication record as a means of quantifying their research output inevitably rewards quantity over quality. Moreover, this has the effect of abdicating responsibility for such assessment to the journals in which they publish — a responsibility that is neither appropriate nor desired." 6, ((bibicite cicutto))

The explosion of researchers and journals is huge enough without the above practices adding to the pile. I mentioned the term "peer-reviewed' a couple of times in this post but it has started to become a joke since there are just too many papers appearing on a daily basis for most of them to be peer-reviewed.

You can bet that your average fitness article citing some research study (while not actually citing it) is completely oblivious to these problems.

by EricT

Why should you use a squat rack, or "power rack", or cage to perform squats? There are two main reasons: First, squat racks and cages comes with safety pins or cross bars that are adjustable to heights in order to catch the bar when you fail during a lift. With these safety catches, sometimes called "spotters", you can safely discard the bar and not without getting stuck underneath it because you cannot lift it off of your shoulders; an extremely dangerous situation.

The second reason is the reason squat racks were invented in the first place. The bar can be set at a height that lets the lifter to get underneath the bar and set it on his or her shoulders without having to actually lift the bar from the floor to shoulder height. This makes sense because most the squatting ability of most strength trainees will quickly surpass the weight that they are able to lift from the floor to the shoulders.

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Some "purists" consider squat racks to be cheating. They say that one should not squat a weight that one is not able to clean and overhead press or jerk. This view is based on the concept that true strength requires one to lift without any helpful devices like squat racks. These types of viewpoints have nothing to do with the reality of building muscular strength, but instead are personal value judgements. There is no technical reason for holing such a view.

To be fair, however, most do not agree with such puritanical attitudes and consider such statements to be simple sophistry. Squatting is a maximal strength exercise. Your maximal squatting strength will always outstrip your maximal clean and jerk lift. Even an absolute beginner can squat more weight than he or she can safely press overhead. To limit the weight on your squat bar to only so much as you can clean to your shoulders and then jerk or press overhead makes no sense, unless you are not interested in developing maximal strength as opposed to power, as in Olympic lifts like the clean and jerk.

Power Rack or Cage

Therefore, if you want to train the squat without a squat rack, but you do not necessarily want to do the Olympic lifts, it's still a good idea to become somewhat proficient so that you can safely clean the bar to the shoulders. The front squat only requires the bar to be cleaned to the shoulders and then "racked", at which point it is in the proper squatting position. So start with the front squat. The front squat is always a safer lift than the back squat for those without spotters.

You can add the back squat later if the Jerk lift is practiced. But remember that will require you lower the bar from overhead to behind the neck. Lowering heavy weights behind the neck, an eccentric action, can be potentially harmful to the shoulder joint, especially true for those with unconditioned shoulders. Previous overhead pressing activities can help to ready the shoulders for this duty but there is still some risk involved since the jerk can allow you to raise more weight than you can necessarily lower under control. Therefore, there is a case for using the overhead press instead of the jerk to raise the bar overhead but most will have to resort to the push press after a short period, and then on perhaps to unsafe cheating movements. Clearly, performing the back squat without a rack is not a long-term solution and may just be an accident waiting to happen. Performing the back squat alone and without safety catches is never a good scenario and sometimes sudden technical failure can occur even with relatively light weights. So always take this exercise seriously.

Now, just because you can get a heavy bar to the back of your shoulders does not guarantee that you can safely "dump" the bar. The front squat, therefore, as stated above, is always the safest alternative of the two for those who train alone without a rack or power cage.

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by EricT

Instead of listing out twenty tips in an obviously deceitful display of "yeah right you gullible fool," all I really need to say is this: Pick twenty random things from around your house that can be smeared on a burn, poured on a burn, etc. And you have your twenty home remedy tips.

Soy sauce. Mustard. Vinegar. Hey, take some chewing tobacco, chew it up real good, and spit it on your burns. I swear, it works wonders. My grandmother used to swear on it for bee stings, too. The point is it doesn't matter what I say, there is someone who will believe it.

Okay, so many people swear by using soy sauce for burns. Especially if you believe the comments in reply to articles on "The People's Pharmacy," those purveyors of crap science for the gullible and easily duped. But what you may not realize is that I can pretty much pick something out of my refrigerator or pantry and write a little article on how it works for burns and be guaranteed that some people will try it and find that it "works." And if I put it on the right kind of website, say one that speaks out against "bad science" (oh, the irony), Big Pharma, and the guvment, I can probably get plenty of testimonials, in the form of comments in response to my little home remedy article. We are losing the battle against irrational thought, that's all there is to it. But I do hope the tide turns soon.

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So does soy sauce do anything for a burn? How should I know? I have no physiological or other basis for believing it should work. I've never seen any type of study done on soy sauces for treating burns. Why? Can you imagine writing out a grant request for your big honking study on soy sauce for healing burns? No. So there is not a good well controlled study or a bad one. They don't exist. But according to some people's "home experiments," soy sauce works. It kills the pain and speeds the healing.

Okay. What does that tell us? It tells us nothing. Nothing, folks! Mustard works the same way, according to "home experiments." Can you imagine smearing such an irritant on a burn? Well people will do some very silly things. What do mustard and soy sauce have in common? Rhetorical question. What can we say about the anecdotal evidence concerning soy sauce and burns? A lot. The first thing, of course, is the fact that it is anecdotal evidence in the first place. But beyond that what about the people who report these experiences? Are they lying? Well, not exactly, or at least not always. Anecdotal reports do not have to be untrue, as far as the basic facts are concerned. They are just unreliable as a source of evidence to support a claim. In this case, the anecdotal experiences of some people who have used soy sauce to treat minor burns cannot be relied upon as a source of scientific evidence to support the claim that soy sauce helps minor burns.

And yet something must be going on, right? I mean, if a couple of people say that they used soy sauce on their burn and the pain went away, and they are not lying, then soy sauce must do something for burns. Nope. It does not follow. Seems like it follows, I know. So just why aren't these personal experiences a valid representation of the effectiveness of soy sauce as a burn remedy?

Well the main reason, in my opinion, which is really the elephant in the room, has to do with what is called a "causal inference." Causal inference is something I have mentioned again and again, in many different contexts, because so many trainees make them without knowing how very difficult they are to make!

The Oh So Inaccurate Causal Inference

Okay, so causal inference works like this: You're taking a tray of cookies out of the oven and your finger accidentally touches the hot baking sheet. For you hardcore bodybuilder types lets say it's a piping hot tray of homemade protein bars. Ouch! You run to the sink to run some cold water on your burned finger and while you're doing that you remember reading that soy sauce was just the thing to relieve the pain of a burn and make it heal fast. Matter of fact, it is apparently miraculous in its burn relieving properties! So you get out the Kikoman, pour a little in a saucer and just sort of soak your finger in it for a while.

Next thing you know, your finger doesn't really hurt at all. What's more, no blister forms and the next day, besides a little redness in the area, the burn seems to be pretty much taken care of. The soy sauce worked and as far as you're concerned you have proven it by a medical experiment. Well, before you rush out and buy Medicine for Dummies and hang out your shingle, you might want to read on.

First, since we're talking about causal inference in the context of your little experiment we will ignore the obvious: Your experiment sucked. There was only one subject, there was no control. You are not a trained scientist and know nothing at all about setting up valid research studies. Let's ignore that and just say that you have made a causal inference about your lack of pain and the use of soy sauce.

Before I lay doubts on your reasoning skills let me say that when it comes to causal inference, us humans are particularly adept. We can draw quick conclusions about why someone does a certain thing or a particular event happens and stand a very good chance of being right on the money. We don't even have to realize that we are making such a conclusion.

For instance, if you are taking your new puppy out for a walk and just as you open the front door there is a huge crack of thunder, your puppy may then associate the door with the noise, and thus become frightened of the door, at least for a little while. A dog does not rationalize or understand that it is making an inference. Door equals noise is probably the extent of his understanding. On the other hand, your four year old child, although he may initially associate the door with the thunder may quickly realize that he has heard thunder on other occasions when the door was not being opened and that he has seen the door opened many times without an accompanying clap of thunder. Or, if he does not realize these things, he may discover them later and consider that this new evidence lays doubt on his impression that the door caused the thunder. Regardless of how he comes to the conclusion that his initial impression was wrong, however, he will gather and process information regarding the incident and thus come to some conclusion. This we do constantly, even on a daily basis, whether we are scientists or not. The more experience we gain in the world, the more accurately and quick come our inferences.

So let's compare thunder to minor skin burns. What happens when lightning strikes? Thunder follows. We know this. It's not chance. You can lay a bet on it. Even if you don't see the lightning, but hear the thunder, you can attribute it to lightning and be darned confident in your assessment of the situation. So what happens when you burn your finger on a tray of cookies?

Well, let's see. It hurts. And unless there is something neurologically wrong, you snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. What else? How long does it keep hurting? Does it turn red? Does it blister? Does your finger fall off? How long does it take to heal?

You're getting the point, I know. Burns are variable. You cannot make many accurate predictions about a 'burn' in general until you see the severity of the burn. And there can be a broad difference between two MINOR burns depending on the temperature of the object giving the burn, the time of contact, and the speed of your response…such as how quick you run cold water over it.

So I want you to think back. You do a lot of cooking, right? How many times have you burned yourself in the last year? Hurry up, I'm waiting. Three times? Ten times? More? You don't know, do you? You don't remember exactly. You may be thinking, BS, Eric, I remember. About five times.

I'll bet you're wrong in your guess. I don't think there is much chance you remember every little burn you got. Because they are little. They stopped hurting within a half hour at most..maybe just a dull pain left at most and you forgot all about them. They just weren't dramatic enough or significant enough to make a lasting impression. You remember the blisters. The big ones. The dramatic ones. But not every one.

Some burns are just not a big deal and they pass away quietly..becoming a "non event." Some burns form a blister and take a few weeks to fully heal. Some are even worse. But when you burn your finger and reach for the soy sauce, you do not take any of that into account when you make your causal inference. You do not take into account that this ONE instance of the pain going away quickly does not give you enough data to make an accurate inference, based on the "natural history" of a burn. You quickly connect soy sauce to burn healer. I guarantee that if you mapped out your burns for a year (not burning yourself on purpose of course) and used soy sauce on half of them and nothing but a cold water rinse on the other half you would find that the same thing happens to both sets. Some burns are minor and the pain goes away quickly. And some burns last. Regardless of soy sauce. What's more, I think you'd find this to be true even if your monitoring system wasn't very good.

So, what I want you, the reader, to realize, is that the way we think causes us to accept such claims and to rationalize the validity of those claims even though our own personal evidence is so flimsy. We do not need a bunch of high-brow talk of statistics and studies to understand that we just don't know as much as we think we know, much of the time.

So Do We Need a Soy Sauce Burn Study? NO! Absolutely not. Because there is absolutely no reason to think that soy sauce has any efficacy for burns and research dollars would be better spent on things that have at least a modicum of physiological basis. I do have my mind open to the possibility that there is a basis for the efficacy of soy sauce, and other things, for burn treatment, and that it may turn out to be a working treatment. But that does not mean I keep my mind so open I completely misplace it.

In case you actually came to this article looking for information on treating minor burns, please see How To Treat Minor Burns: Basic First Aid.

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by EricT

One big problem that trainees have in designing strength training templates is the Exercise List. These tend to be lists of 35 to 40 exercises that the trainee is attached to for some reason and if he or she is not working hard on all of them then the program is just not right. But that is wrong.

Strength training is not like owning an ice cream truck. You don't need all the flavors and push-ups too. It's true that there may be a whole lot of different movements you want to get better at down the line. No, you do not have to restrict yourself to just the back squat, deadlift, and bench press to do "strength training." Right now, in fact, one of the prevailing questions on strength training boards is why would someone put the front squat up front? What does it do for you? Are you doing that for your quads?

Nobody asks this about the back squat. The answer? It's okay to like what you like and be good at what you want to be good at. If the front squat thrills you and you want to put super heavy barbells on the front of your shoulders, then put the front squat up front and prioritize it. There is no better reason to do it than simply because you love it. You can count yourself "strong" from having a big front squat just as you can with the back squat.

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So, it's not about what you are allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. It's about not acting like a kid in a candy store, wanting some of everything and all RIGHT NOW!

The trick to strength training is only having a handful of "absolutely essential" exercises at any one time. Sure, there are certain things you will always do and that are there to achieve "balance" but even those things can be sprinkled in or left off some of the time without too much trouble. For instance, while most strength trainees should always be doing some type of upper body pulling exercise, like rows and pullups, you won't fall apart on account of a row session here or there.

Now that leads us to a very important question? How do you pick those exercises which are priority and those exercises which are just, well, exercises? What if I want to do very heavy rows? Ah, that's where we get into trouble. See, some weight training exercises just aren't conducive to hauling very heavy weights with. That doesn't mean it can't and shouldn't be done, just that it is the sort of exercise, using smaller muscle groups, that tends to lead to compensations that will quickly get you injured if you pile on the weight too fast. If you want to be a unilateral dumbbell row champion, you might want to cool your jets and think really hard about what we call a "risk benefit analysis."

While you may have seen certain people who can curl a gargantuan barbell, like some Strongmen, for instance, isolated elbow flexion is not something that is conducive to sustained and upward progression in muscular strength. For all the "deadlift will kill your back" stuff out there, you would find it much easier to kill your biceps tendon because you went all wild on heavy curling then you would to kill your back, even if both exercises, the deadlift and the barbell curl, were trained in the same relative way. Therefore, realistically, the most important exercises are those that carry the biggest bang for their buck and they just so happen to be those which use the largest and most muscle groups. Pretty simple and straight forward. Given that, if you are a really smart person, and you think you can mitigate the risk involved and train in a way that can be sustained without injury, sure, be a barbell curling champion or a dumbbell row champion.

Out of Two Similar Exercises, Which is the Most Important?

Before I answer that let me explain what I mean by "important." That is a shorthand way of saying "the exercise that is given the most attention in terms of priorities and being up front in the template."

I'll bet, if you really think about it, you can answer the question for yourself. What types of exercises, in a list of similar exercises, will tend to need the most of our "attention" in order to progress? Easy. The ones you've been doing the longest.

So you want to know if you can progress at both the front squat and the back squat at the same time? Well, who knows? It depends on how you train them at the same time. But how do you decide how to train them since they seem to be two sides of the same coin? You just have to realize that regardless of their similarities, you have probably been doing one longer than the other and you will have different needs related to each of them. Chances are, you've been doing the back squat the longest. If both the back and the front squat held the same importance for you, and you've been doing back squat the longest, would it make sense to put front squat up front in your training template? Probably not.

Chances are, you can progress in the front squat with a lower relative intensity (read median intensity) than on the back squat. That means you can lift a bit lighter and with higher volume on the front squat while still getting "stronger" at it. Being as fresh as possible for the back squat and being able to sustain the highest force possible for the greatest number of reps possible on any given day will make it easier to progress on the back squat. Therefore the back squat would be prioritized: placed up front in the week and up front on the given training day. Heck, some people may be able to place front squats right after back squats on the same day and still progress on front squats. Regardless, the work done on front squats will still be cross-training for back squats, to some extent.

The first thing to do, then, is to take that list of 40 exercises you have in front of you and separate out all the "fluff". No, it makes no sense for upright rows to be second on your list. Pick the handful of things that you really want to haul some heavy weights with. Maybe that's about four exercises. Now pick, if you can, two that are your absolute priority at this time. Three at most. Those exercises are the ones you will build your template around. They are like the King holding court on his throne. Anyone else who is in that court, they are there because the King suffers them to be there. Long live the King. Get it?

The Front Squat and the Quads

Since I brought up the front squat, I should clear up a little misconception. If I haven't already, that is. Remember I said above that people ask whether the front squat is done "for the quads". For some reason the front squats bit of emphasis on the quadriceps, relative the back squat, gets trainees all caught up in the thighs and they forget they are strength trainees, not bodybuilders.

The inevitable concern is that if you do more front squatting then back squatting, you will run the risk of not "hitting your hams" enough. How the back squat suddenly becomes a hamstring exercise is hard to say but it is probably because of the frequent dichotomies created in strength training and bodybuilding, which most trainees have almost been hardwired to address.

To answer the concerns about the hamstrings, any good strength training program should contain plenty of posterior chain exercises. These movements, like the deadlift and its variations, cable pullthroughs (hip pulls), dumbbell or kettlebell swings, etc. are more than enough to ensure your hamstrings, and glutes are happy and strong. It simply does not matter what specific kind of squat you do, in terms of general strength.

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by EricT

This post is meant to discuss three basic propositions about training the deadlift. The first concerns a statement that we frequently read or hear concerning the development of supporting grip strength for deadlifts: Deadlifting is all you need to train your grip for deadlifts. I'm going to explain to you why this false assumption is made and how it is not true for everyone. The second has to do with the correct way to grip the bar. I am not sure that many people even know there is a correct method to grip the bar that results in a more secure grip and more protection against ripping the skin, and ripping off calluses. The third concerns calluses themselves. So here goes.

The Deadlift is All You Need for Supporting Grip Strength

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Now, it should be a bit self-explanatory. Do you really expect your grip, controlled by small muscles, to progress right in line with much larger and coordinated muscles like your thighs, hips, and back? Do you expect the strength in your hands to progress in a way that corresponds with the strength in your entire body? A bit naive, don't you think? So why do people say it so much?

Assuming they are not being defensive about their own lackluster grip strength, it's probably because they have never pulled above 300 to 325. It could be a little less or a little more. You see, an average male, with average grip strength can pretty much support at least 300 on the bar. Yep. Average grip strength is much stronger than you thought, I'll bet. Hey, you may be below that. Nobody falls perfectly at the top of the graph. That's not the point. The point is, a guy who worked his deadlift up from 150 to say, 325, may think that the deadlift has been training his grip and so think that this means that "all you need for grip strength is the deadlift." What he didn't realize is that his grip just hasn't been that challenged yet. If anything, he trained and built up endurance, but not necessarily absolute gripping strength. At some point he will have to augment his grip with alternated or hook grip; or use straps; or do some grip training on the side to keep his grip in line with the weight on the bar. Probably he will have to do both. That is, he will have to use an augmented grip or straps and yet still need to do dedicated grip training.

Proper Way to Grip the Bar

Most articles and explanation get this wrong. Dead wrong. Good one right? There are two opposite viewpoints: One says you should "grip the bar with the palm." That confuses most trainees. How the heck do I grip with my palm? I use my fingers to grip things. Well, you are correct, sir. You can't grip anything "with your palm," as such. What people mean by this is that you should seat the bar in the palm of your hand first, between the thumb and forefinger, and then wrap the fingers around. This will bunch and pinch the skin at the base of the metacarpophalangeals (base of fingers), pulling at the calluses if they are there and/or causing them to develop as ridges which are more easily torn off in the future. They may also press on the underlying tissue and bone while lifting, causing pain.

The second viewpoint says you should "grip with your fingers." As if there was any other way. But what they mean is that you should hook the bar with your fingers and then squeeze it in, thus allowing the bar to pull at the skin at the base of the fingers, which results in ripped calluses for some lifters, some of the time. Wrong again. This results in a less than secure grip and may actually cause large calluses to develop in places that are more uncomfortable, such as the proximal interphalangeal joints of the fingers.

The best way to grip the bar is actually what comes out of these two incorrect instructions. That is, those who give the first two methods are just repeating something they heard without understanding the steps involved and you will see how it can be misconstrued as "grip with your palm" or "with your fingers." So here is how to do it:

1. Seat the bar on the part of your palm just underneath base of your fingers, the place where the biggest calluses tend to form. Press the skin against the bar firmly.

2. Maintain this contact with the bar while pushing your hand forward, away from you, so that the skin under your fingers is dragged slightly backwards, toward the base of your palm. This will cause your hand to start to bend around the bar.

3. Keep pushing forward, maintaining pressure, and bring the palm of your hand onto the bar by placing the webbing between the thumb and index finger around the bar. So now, you are "palming" the bar. Your fingers should have naturally wrapped around the bar and your thumb should come to rest near, or over, your index finger, depending on your inclination.

4. Rotate the bar away from you until your wrist is straight.

Although I wrote this out in steps, it's all done at the same time. If you can use it, gym chalk will help a great deal. Chalk does more than just provide more friction for you grip, it helps to facilitate getting a better grip in the first place. Although there are only subtle differences between this and the way most people would "naturally" grip the bar, the skin under the fingers is not snagged nearly as much. You may have a slight bit of discomfort in your hand, as you may be palming the bar correctly for the first time. Your hand will relax more over time and this should feel normal to you with practice.

Obviously, we are assuming that you do not think that the 'correct' way to grip the bar is to use a hook grip. The hook grip is an augmented grip and is not something most lifters would turn to right off the bat so this post assumes that you are gripping the bar according to most people's natural inclination, which would be in a "power grip" where the thumb comes around the bar to buttress the grip. Using the method above for an alternated grip, is a bit more tricky, but the steps are the same.

Whether to use the hook grip to augment your grip, when needed, or to use an alternated grip is up to you to decide. This article, Hook Grip Versus Alternated Grip For Deadlifts, contains the most thorough breakdown of the the issue that you will find, whether in a book or on the internet, and it gives my conclusion as to the best course of action.

Myths and Facts about Calluses from Deadlifting

Myth: You must care for you calluses or they will tear off. You must shave them down with an emory board or some other implement regularly. You must keep your hands moisturized, etc.

The reality is that some people have their calluses over-grow and feel very uncomfortable when lifting. They may also have them frequently rip off during deadlifting, severely impacting their training ability until the skin heels. And other people rarely think about their calluses except to be thankful they are there to protect their skin..and to display as a badge of lifting honor. So, remember that this is a case of 'speak for yourself.' It is difficult to be sure why some people have problematic calluses and some don't. Part of it is incorrectly gripping the bar, so hopefully we've got that sorted out. But the rest of it we may be able to tease out by understanding a bit more about callus formation.

Calluses are caused by the same thing that blisters are caused by: repeated mechanical trauma to the skin in the form of pressure and friction resulting in a heat buildup. If the trauma comes too often and is too severe, a blister will form. A blister is a raised separation of the dermal and epidermal skin layers. These raised skin sacs (vesicles) are filled with a clear or serous fluid. They form to act as a sort of padding to protect the underlying tissue from further damage.

Although many experts write about how to get rid of calluses or care for them, most athletes would rather have a callus form than a blister. Well, when the mechanical trauma is repeated, but not for too long or too severely, a callus will likely form instead of a blister. So, a callus can be thought of as a more permanent and positive adaptation to the stress on the tissues. They are usually asymptomatic except for pain caused by large calluses pressing on underlying or adjacent tissues. Sometimes calluses are problematic but this can usually be prevented. For instance, over-large calluses on the feet in painful areas are usually caused by poor fitting shoes. The moral, if there is one, is that even good things can sometimes come with a cost.

If you develop overly large calluses on your hands from lifting, and this causes pain, you can gently file them down with a file or pumice stone. But if your calluses don't give you any problems, by all means, leave them alone. Calluses are actually toughened areas of skin and they don't just automatically rip off every time a breeze blows, which is what some lifters seem to think. They are, however, more susceptible to tears because the area of skin that forms the callus is thicker and less elastic than the surrounding skin, moving as a unit. When tears happen, it is not the callus, of course that is tearing, but this large unit being pulled away from the surrounding skin. It is more likely that heightened activity or friction (perhaps because of frequent failing of grip) causes a blister to form underneath the callus. Yes, a blister can form under a callus. This weakens the integrity of the callus, making it prone to being torn. So, trim and manage your calluses as you need to, but don't try to get rid of them. You need their protection, otherwise, you'd end up with blisters.

Comments

General References

Shultz, Sandra J., Peggy A. Houglum, and David H. Perrin. Examination of Musculoskeletal Injuries. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2010. 642.

Arndt, Kenneth A., and Jeffrey T. S. Hsu. Manual of Dermatologic Therapeutics. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007. 46-48.

by EricT

I wanted to make a quick post about the review, The Role Of Soy In Vegetarian Diets. After reading this, what I want everyone to notice is just WHAT the concerns about soy are centered on and what they are not. The concerns about soy have been centered on its isoflavone content as you can read about in the article. Mercola and many others seem to want to "shift" the debate to organic versus non-organic soy crops. This is called a "red herring" and is a signal that these writers want to deflect our attention. It's misdirection.

You see, if someone says, for instance, that soy consumption causes breast cancer, then they need to defend that claim with primary published evidence. In fact, it will be much easier for you to debunk than for them to defend. Now, if soy has implications in breast cancer (read the breast cancer section in the paper) it is because breast cancer tumors are estrogen sensitive and because soy genistein, which has estrogenic properties, stimulate the growth of these tumors. But the evidence that gave rise to this concern is without much merit…giving mice mega concentrated doses of genistein….

This evidence has nothing to do with organic soy versus GMO soy. Nothing. Yet, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that the "evidence" that soy causes breast cancer is not very convincing. The charges are trumped up. Since we can't really defend that claim based on the evidence how do we hold up our house of cards and get others to lend their cards to it? We deflect and we draw on emotive and symbolic issues. Thus enters the "natural goodness" of organic versus the evil Frankenstein manipulations of "GMO". The red herring excuses us from presenting evidence to support our claim because most people are easily deflected and confused by this kind of misdirection. Don't buy it. Some other keys to this kind of "bad science" writing that wields influence over the public are the following:

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The topics focus on things that will provoke an emotional response

The reason guys like Mercola will always be infinitely more popular and "authoritative" than sites like this or lots of other very good science blogs, etc., is that they are able to avoid an intellectual response from their readers. For something like soy, scientific talk about isoflavones and the like will not do the trick. If you think something is bad, shift the focus to an aspect of it that will SCARE people FIRST, before they start thinking. Once you've done that, the accuracy of your "reporting" will not be scrutinized. It's a hook. For soy, you don't talk about genistein, etc, you talk about genetic modification even though this has nothing to do with the specific charges against soy, which centers on it's estrogenic properties; present regardless of whether it is GMO or organic. You may be able to imply or at least to get your readers to infer that genetically modified soy has "more bad stuff" without actually saying it…if so that's a good trick. The secret is in choosing the right subject matter or making the subject matter amendable to your needs.

Make a really huge deal out of little things

Nobody cares about day to day science. But most science is day to day and not revolutionary. The secrets of the universe do not get discovered and the laws of physics do not get overturned. The same is true of nutrition and health related science. I can write a million blog posts about how nutrition works but ONE big deal article about even the most insignificant thing will beat them all. Even if I publish a million at once.

To do this you have to break a cardinal rule of science. You have to be certain and positive about your assertions. In fact you have to make assertions quite often, although real science doesn't. So, although the data about soy simply says that soy's health benefits and it's harmful effects are questionable you have to say soy is unhealthy and dangerous! And the slightest evidence that speaks to this you must TRUMPET even though the evidence is singular and flawed.

You've almost got to make the readers think that before you combed the evidence all the scientist were sitting on their thumbs going "soy? duhhhh….". It's all so obvious to YOU.

That brings us to one of the most important secrets: The headline

Look at the name of this review I am discussing: "The Role of Soy in Vegetarian Diets". It does something the cranks and zealots would never do. It does not attempt to pre-influence the reader. It is, in fact, boring, and many many readers will skip the article because of it. Because for every reader that wants information there are five who want to be persuaded and told what to think. Anyway, there is nothing in the title which proclaims soy to be evil, dangerous or that hints at a conspiracy against the public health. Likewise there is nothing to say the opposite, that soy is the fountain of youth in a bean and will cure cancer, and that, again, there is a misinformation campaign in place against poor old soy!

Whatever you are against, make sure to represent it as part of an entrenched establishment who are bent on silencing you, the underdog

Same thing for the things you are for. The establishment wants to oppress information on those things you think are good, and they want to propagandize the things you think are bad. For nutrition and health the establishment is the government and big medicine. If you can, mention the food pyramid a lot! Food pyramid..blah blah blah…bad…blah blah blah…food pyramid government bad…blah blah blah. I like that, it sells.

If you talk about studies, never ever let the reader in on the methods of the study or the conclusions of it's authors

Focus on YOU and what you think of the research. Or at least what it suits you to think of the research. Most of what the lay public knows about science is based on the interpretation of other lay people, such as journalists. Remember that to persuade your readers all science must be represented as absolute. Even though it almost never is.

The end of this review advises moderation in all dietetic areas. It advices keeping soy down to a minimum of four servings (from presumable mixed sources of soy protein) a day. You will never be a Mercola if you speak about moderation in those terms. Soy is either all bad or all good. OR, here is the real key, it is good when you want to sell it and bad when others sell it! For this, again, we have to refer back to the red herring and shifting the focus of the debate. You see, it is even smarter to shift the debate to something like GMO versus Organic than it is to misrepresent the data about the estrogenic and health giving effects of soy foods. You hook the readers emotional response and then you leave open to yourself opportunities. We could also call this post "why Eric Troy will never be rich" for that matter.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER provide links, or citations for any papers you claim to be talking about

Just don't do it! The last thing you want is for the readers to be able to read the fact that you have come to conclusions about research that the researchers themselves have not! Make them look for the obscure little study in the obscure little journal that nobody ever heard of.

Pull in the fringers

You've got to make it look like some guy writing up stuff from his living room while watching MASH reruns (me, baby!) is as important a part of the scientific debate as a bunch of people collaborating on science with University support. For those of us who've been treated to scientific rebuttals in the form of links to posts on bodybuilding forums by guys named something like "RippedFreak," you know what I mean.

When I say fringers, however, I am not talking about non-scientists. This has nothing to do with credentials. The fringers are those people who espouse scientific conclusions that differ from the large majority but who refuse to see the gaps in their own understanding. These are the people who actually think they have overturned the laws of physics and that kind of thing. They shout loudly and make it seem like there is a huge debate around their "discoveries" or conclusions, when in fact there is no debate at all.

But it goes further than that because what guys like Mercola want to do is create the illusion that they are "more objective" than true science because they do not discount those fringe elements. Even if ONE guy says different than the whole of the scientific community you've got to make it seem like there is a raging controversy! An example can be found on my review of tryptophan and tryptophan supplements. In that report I mentioned some scattered work, here and there, that differed from the consensus on the issue of the contaminated tryptophan products. Here, again, much of the focus was on the use of genetically modified bacteria to produce the tryptophan products in question.

If I had wanted to really suck people in, I should have been more "fair" to those people and acted like they were a huge shout rather than a little whimper. I could have done this in the interest of "objectivity" and "balance," when in fact it would be "bullshitivity" since the preponderance of peer-reviewed evidence is clear.

Instead, however, I tried to point out, without being downright insulting, that the reader should not over-weigh these few dissenter's views. One of the fallacies inherent in "internet science" is that all views must be represented even when some of the views are just silly if not downright ludicrous and nonscientific. I talked about this in my short post, All Opinions Are Not Equally Valid. This is a big problem with Wikipedia, in fact, since the writers are so intent on being "complete" they bring in unimportant fringe elements to subjects that simply confuse and distort them.

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by EricT

As a continuance of my assault on the misleading ideas about "natural" food, this is yet another follow-up to a series of blog posts where I discuss chemicals in foods and the concept of natural. In the last one I talked about the difference between chemicals as nutrients and chemicals as pharmacologic agents. I explained that some chemicals in food do have a physiological affect beyond their basic biological functions. Others, such as compounds in herbals used for medicinal purposes simply have no function as a "nutrient." All of these, though, have one thing in common and that is summed up by saying that "The poison OR the remedy is in the DOSE." This is important in helping us recognize the difference between nutrition information and alternative medicine information.

There are a number of very successful "food" blogs on the internet. The majority of them seem to be of the 'concerned parent' variety. They are, to put it bluntly, a reaction, not a revelation. Oh, things are so bad! There are chemicals in our food! Oh my, and lions and tigers and bears, too!

Anybody can react. But when the public takes it's cues from reactionary viewpoints that have little or no background, the culture's view of food becomes warped. People, more and more want to know what's in their food. More and more there are complaints about how inadequate and misleading food labels are. It is actually a bit ironic when you understand why food labels are designed the way they are designed. Would you buy the folllowing food product after reading its ingredients list?

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ethonoic acid
a-D-glucopyranosyl-(1.2)-ß-D-fructofuranose
p-hydroxybenzyl and indolymethyl glucosinolates
S-propenyl and other S-alkyl cysteine sulfoxides
ß-carotene and other carotenoids
phosphatidylcholine

Most people would think that was a chemical soup with some good stuff thrown in for balance. The good stuff would be the stuff they recognized as being sold in pill form as dietary supplements. The rest is poison!

Actually, though, that's the active ingredients in coleslaw, according to Tom P. Coultate, a food biochemist and author of "Food: The Chemistry of Its Components." It's healthy. At least it is not "unhealthy". You know the saying, "never eat what you can't pronounce." Can you pronounce coleslaw?

What amazes me, though, is how easy marketing undoes the negative connotations of those big scientific sounding chemical names. You want the public to change its opinion of an organic chemical? Stick it in a bottle, claim it does this or that for the body, and put it on the natural health store shelf. These chemicals may not be bad for you per se. In fact, they may not have any action whatsoever in the human body. Yet, in pill or liquid form under the guise of "dietary supplement" they are gobbled up by a health concerned public who would run away screaming from the same chemical (name) found on a food label.

One of those chemicals is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is used as a colorant in foods. But chlorophyll is very unstable and there are a great many complex things to be considered in the extraction and production of chlorophyll colorants. The chemical that ends up in foods is not the chemical that was originally found in the living plant materials. Most often it is Sodium Copper Chlorophyllin.

According to the FDA, sodium copper chlorophyllin is "a green to black powder prepared from chlorophyll by saponification and replacement of magnesium by copper. Chlorophyll is extracted from alfalfa (Medicago sativa ) using any one or a combination of the solvents acetone, ethanol, and hexane…Sodium copper chlorophyllin may be safely used to color citrus-based dry beverage mixes in an amount not exceeding 0.2 percent in the dry mix." 4

I have no trouble imagining some of those concerned food bloggers crying foul over this "chemical" on their food label. Many reactionaries are too busy reacting to ever have heard of chlorophyll in the first place. But they may have some cause for asking questions because it is a natural chemical that has been heated, chemicially extracted, adulterated, etc. It has to be, otherwise you would not get that great green color. Because the chemical is, as I said, too unstable. You want green, not brown.

Yet chlorophyll as a dietary supplement is proclaimed by some manufacturers to be equivalent to the snake oil remedies of old. I also have no trouble imaging some of those very same zealots drinking down their chlorophyll supplement after reading from Mercola or somebody how very bad the sodium copper chlorophyllin found in foods is but how very good his chlorophyll supplement is¹

They may be surprised to find out, then, should they bother to read the ingredients on the supplement label, that their supplement is, you guessed it, sodium copper chlorophyllin. Do you think I'm wrong about this? I don't think so. I'll bet you anything that the same chemical on a food label will cause "grave concern" when it is happily consumed in the form of a supplement. Now, a little investigation would make anyone realize that the supplement industry is subject to the same constraints as the food industry. They cannot pull stable chlorophyll out of their as..hats, after all.

So, what is this chlorophyll supposed to do for your body? That is, what does it do when you take it in a supplement? Well it "promotes cleansing" and it is an "internal deodorizer." That sounds good to me. I want my insides to be clean and I do not want them to stink. I'm in.

But it doesn't stop there. You see, chlorophyll, even though it is not seen as "anything special" by biochemists and nutritionists, is converted to BLOOD in the body! I'll bet you did not know that when you ate a nice salad the chlorophyll in the leaves was converted into blood! I must have a lot of extra blood because I like a good salad.

According to Ann Wigmore, author of the "Wheatgrass Book," chlorophyll is a "living battery." "An animal's body also stores and produces heat and energy: the difference is that plants can get their energy directly from the sun, whereas animals and humans cannot. IN essence, the same life force in nature that explodes into greenery every spring can be transferred into the human body via the consumption of wheatgrass juice. The body can then use this super-nutritious, vital energy to heal and repair itself as needed." 2

This is a great example of how to write a good book. When in doubt, make shit up! This is one of the most popular assertions about chlorophyll, that it is very similar to hemoglobin, which is the compound that carries oxygen to our blood. The idea is that the body can take chlorophyll, as it is, and turn it into hemoglobin. You know, because it's similar. It's just a bit of alchemy. Let's not bother with nutrition.

What about the science behind chlorophyll as a nutraceutical? Well there has been some research into chlorophyll's (chlorophyllin's) antimutagenic and anticarcinogenic properties. The idea is that it may protect DNA against ionizing radiation and that it may be an anti-tumor and also protect against side effects from anti-cancer drugs. The problem is that this is in vitro, meaning in a petri dish. There is no reason to think that ingesting chlorophyll will protect you from cancer and radiation.

Chlorophyll, once you ingest it, is subject to the same harsh digestive environment as everything else you eat. There is no evidence that chlorophyll has any nutritional value, in itself. It contains magnesium, so that's good. In fact, 15 to 30% of the magnesium in plants may be associated with the chlorophyll. And it may have copper if it's the stabilized kind. Beyond this, though, even if chlorophyll could do something great in your body, the stuff would never make it into your body in it's whole form. Yes, it is used as an internal "deodorant" but lots of things are used for lots of purposes that make no sense.

Another thing that the FDA says about sodium copper chlorophyllin is that it is exempt from certification. "Certification of this color additive is not necessary for the protection of the public health, and therefore batches thereof are exempt from the certification requirements of section 721(c) of the act." 4

Won't the "government is bad supplements are good" crowd be confused by all this? If the FDA says that something is not considered to be harmful to human health..that, essentially, they aren't concerned about it, it MUST be bad! Big brother, after all is in league with everything evil in order to ruin our health and get our money. But the supplement companies, they are out to help us. They wouldn't lie to us. They aren't evil like big food and big government. They want to save mankind. Shoot. Isn't this a pickle? Cognitive dissonance, oh, it hurts!

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by EricT

My post on rest periods for strength training makes fun of that old bodybuilding forum question "what's your stats?" You know the one when you ask any question and you always get the same response asking you your weight and how much you can squat, deadlift, and bench press. The idea is that the respondent is doing some quick and dirty calculations based on your "stats" and this will lead them to the correct answer to your particular question. In reality they don't know what the hell they are doing and are just trying to sound like they are about to give you 'individualized' answers.

What you may not realize, however, is the questions themselves are not really enough to give even seasoned professionals any indication of what you should do in your training. Just knowing how much someone weighs and how much they can squat and bench will not allow me to magically produce a training answer for them. The notion is absurd. But why?

Well "stats" are based on measurements. Measurements are quantitative. Quantitative measurements are only one small part of making an evaluation of a trainee in order to come up with a strength training or other training plan for them.

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What many people claim is that how much someone can bench press, for instance, will give them an idea of that person's "training" age and that they determine this by strength training charts that separate various weight ranges into beginner, intermediate, and advanced based on body weight. However, these charts say nothing of any one individual, that person's particular strengths or weaknesses, any injuries or history that may have affected their strength development; and of course it says nothing of how well they perform from a qualitative, rather than quantitative, standpoint.

Let me give you an easy example. When you see someone lift a very heavy barbell and you look at how many plates are on the bar, add the weight of the bar itself, and realize that they lifted 200lbs, you are making a measurement. But when you say, "Dude, good lift!" You are making an evaluation. The problem in strength training is that "quantity" has become, for many, the sole means by which evaluations are made! In other words, evaluations have become the simple act of measuring.

It may be that this person has been lifting 200lbs for a year now. It may be also, that a year ago this person could lift this for 5 reps in a row and that his or her amplitude and overall form was better. Maybe even the bar speed has decreased. So was it a "good lift"? If you are impressed by someone lifting 200lbs it was a good lift but if you actually make an evaluation it was not.

So we see that evaluations are based on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data but that the resultant evaluations are always qualitative in themselves. When we make an evaluation we are not just looking at a number, such as weight on the bar. We are also placing a value on that number based on other performance criteria as well as how it relates to some mean base value.

How does this affect you, the strength trainee? Well the problem is not the "stats" guys alone. And it is not the concept of quality alone. It is the inability of many trainers to understand how integrative "performance" really is.

The thing to remember is that your ability, in sheer numbers, tells you about your maximum ability right now. But it does not tell you about your ability to progress in the future. This is where an actual evaluation comes in. The moral is, then, if some guy on a forum or blog pretends to construct a program for you based on a few numbers you throw at him, he is actually doing you a disservice. By pretending to use measurements to construct a course of training while failing to perform any type of evaluations, based on present performance and past history, he is probably setting you up for failure, if not injury. And in reality, of course, such individuals are usually only pulling out whatever their favorite one-size-fits-all training program is, or whatever type of thing they are personally into at the moment, or both. Many trainees might be better off training by instinct than by following the advise of some deluded bodybuilding guru.

The fact that entire web sites exist that are built upon one simple training program for all trainees almost boggles the mind. And yet, these sites and their programs are ten times more successful, in terms of ravenous fans and sheer traffic, than any site that honestly attempts to build a resource concerning strength and human performance. Some of the reasons for this success can be read in my article "Why Fitness, Diet, Bodybuilding, and Strength Training Programs Work." I will go into more of my opinions on this in a later post.

For now, I will give a specific example of how failing to actually monitor performance versus just monitoring numbers set us up for failure or injury, which of course is its own type of failure.

Many trainees are led to think, for example, that if they are able to make apparent progress then they must be fully recovered from an earlier workload. The idea is that more weight on the bar equals no fatigue. This is a simplistic and wholly ignorant idea and it does not describe adaptation and performance.

I speak of "apparent progress" often. If that lead you to believe that I mean something a bit different than "actual progress" then you are correct. Apparent progress is that which has a superficial appearance of progress but does not really represent a large and sustainable change in underlying fitness. In English that means that a couple more pounds on the bar does not always mean that you have actually achieved any real long-term progress. Actual progress would also mean that performance has been MAINTAINED. People talk about form and technique all the time. They say, your form is going down the tubes..you need to work on technique, stuff like that. Many times, what they are really seeing is a decline in PERFORMANCE even when plates are being added to the barbell.

Okay, so, numbers are only measurements. A full look at our training does not only consider numbers, the quantitative measures, but performance in terms of qualitative evaluations.

When it comes to maximum strength, your goal is more weight on the bar. So let me be clear that a bigger number is ultimately your goal. However, ever higher numbers alone are not the way to get there.

All that being said, I want to be abundantly clear on the point of this post, which is to underscore the difference between measurements and evaluations. In some circles, however, I have seen ideas that seem to indicate a complete disregard of measurements! Some have gone off the deep end and begun to think that strength training is all about quality, quantity be damned. Nothing of the sort.

I have seen trainees put all their training eggs into a basket that tells them if they could just master this one tiny technique tweak their numbers would sky-rocket. Except for grossly incorrect exercise technique, this is hardly ever the case. Rarely does one tiny tweak in technique equal to a bunch of new PR's in the weight room. If you consider the bench press, you'll find that the majority of articles on the subject, however, are concerned with "technique tips that will skyrocket your bench press." The same is true to a lesser extent for all other exercises. Well, I may be bursting your bubble, but it probably ain't gonna happen. At best, you'll add a pound or two and then go back to your previous rate of progress.

In summary, then, our goal is to increase our numbers while maintaining performance over time. So that we can lift big heavy weights. But in order to lift big heavy weights you have to lift a lot of big heavy weights!

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by EricT

In my post Homeopathy Is Not a Drug and Other Babbles I had quite a rant, albeit a very informative one, about some idiotic things a NaturalHealth.com article said about homeopathy and about homeopathy quackery in general. If you read that you will be more in flow with what is to follow. Cuz I'm not done!

Much of that post concerned chemicals. The food faddist or the homeopathic zealot, when he hears the word chemical, cries "POISON!" Yet, chemicals are what our food is made of and the term toxic chemical, taken by itself is meaningless.

In my response to a reader of Jamie Hale's article Organic Food: The Real Story I had quite a lot to say about the idea of toxins. The reader tried to draw some vague distinction between "natural toxins" and "toxins developed in the last 100 years":

"There is one very important point that must be considered when speaking of ANY toxins, whether natural toxins we can expect to find in organic foods or "synthetic" toxins.

But before I bring up that point I'd like to talk about the word toxin itself. It's always a good idea to define our terms. Colloquially, we use the word toxin to describe any bad chemical that gets into your body and interacts with the body's cells in a negative way, causing damage. A poison could be thought up as a very bad toxin that does a great deal of damage very quickly or kills you outright very quickly. So lets assume by the word toxin we mean chemicals that cause slow damage.

Most people are probably not aware that in biology a toxin is a bit more specific. That is, they are damaging chemicals or poisons that are produced IN NATURE BY BIOLOGICAL MEANS.

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Even in the case of insecticides like DDT, which the article mentioned, we are still talking about organic chemicals. DDT for instance, is an organochloride. So even though we talk about these things being synthesized or isolated they are still produced via chemical reactions involving organic compounds that…happen in nature. We just ramp it up and produce chemicals in large quantities that only happen very rarely "by themselves". There are many examples of these types of toxins.

The biological toxins that plants produce to defend themselves or for whatever reason and the organic pollutants that we "produce" and then introduce into the environment artificially…they are all NATURAL."

So, what is an example of a natural chemical found in plants that we are all familiar with? Salicylic acid is a very good example. A chemical called salicin is found in abundance in the willow tree. That is used to make salycylic acid, what we all know as aspirin. 1 It is an analgesic, good for pain. It is good to fight inflammation, as a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID). It can reduce fevers, as an antipyretic. It is a prophylactic measure against heart attack and stroke for those at risk. It is the active ingredient in many anti-acne skin-care products and an antiseptic in some toothpastes. It's a pretty useful chemical. When I was growing up, baby aspirin was a pretty regular thing for aches, pains, and headaches. That was before we were aware of how toxic aspirin is to children.

In children, aspirin is associated with Reye's syndrome. It is a condition of acute encephalopathy and fatty change in the viscera. Although the syndrome has been recognized since 1963, it took a while for it to be associated with aspirin. In 1980, 556 children with Reye's syndrome were reported. After 1987, when aspirin was identified as a culprit, very few cases have been identified. 2

If you take enough salicylic acid, it will be toxic to you as well. As I painstakingly pointed out in the first post linked here, it is all about the dose. As I also pointed out, anything, if you were able to consume enough of it, could become a poison. This was recognized as long as 500 years ago by a guy by the unwieldy name of Theophrastus Phillipus Auroleus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, who said: "Alle Dinge sind Gift und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist." Yes, we have Latin in this blog. That means, basically, that everything is a poison and nothing is a poison and only the dose makes a thing a poison or a remedy. Or, like I said earlier, the word toxin, taken by itself, is meaningless. Today, we usually sum that quote up as "The dose makes the poison." Tell a homeopathic zealot, a "natural food" snake oil artist, or other assorted crank that and he may want to kill you for it, just as Paracelsus's enemies were rumored to have done to him! 3

Salicylic acid is found in varying quantities in all fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices. It plays an important role in how plants protect themselves from pathogenic infection. 4 According to Hayat, et al., it is a phenolic derivative plant hormone that is distributed in a wide variety of plant species. It is involved in plant growth, thermogenesis, flower induction, uptake of ions, ethylene biosynthesis¹, stomatal movement, reversal of ABA effect on leaf abscission, enhancement of chlorophyll and carotenoid pigments, photosynthetic rate, and more. 6

Plants make salicylic acid, in particular after exposure to a pathogen, and use it as a key regulator of SAR and expression of defense genes. In fact, as early as the 1930's a phenomenon called systemic acquired resistance (SAR) has been known whereby spraying salicylic acid on plant crops "snaps them to attention and puts their defenses on high-alert against future attacks." 7 Clearly this chemical is a bit important to plants, as are a great many other chemicals that plants produce. Lots of these chemicals could be harmful in large enough doses. And many of them could be helpful at the right dose as well.

So we understand that the plant foods we eat contain chemicals that could be toxic. But rarely does a plant food contain enough of any one chemical to be toxic. The plants that do contain such large amounts…we do not eat. For instance, we do not eat willow, we use it as a medicine. Willow then is a "herbal" rather than a food plant. Even though it contains some of the same nutrients as the plants we do eat (which may also be called herbs sometimes but let's avoid that semantic quagmire). Certain plant nutrients, therefore, when functioning in large doses as a drug can be considered pharmacologic agents. Single plants that we eat rarely, if at all, contain a large enough dose of such pharmacologic agents to have an impact on disease treatment or even prevention that falls beyond the physiologic functions of the specific nutrients.

Salicylic acid (SA) has no important nutritional role for humans. In fact, it interferes with the transport and excretion of certain nutrients, such as folate, thiamin, vitamins C and K. 8 Obviously it has a other effects. As became apparent in the earlier post, there is an interesting dose-dependent paradox involved. One medicinal use of the chemical is as an antipyretic (fever reducer). At low doses it is an effective agent for this. As I stated earlier it is highly toxic at large enough doses. In fact, one of it's effects at high doses is the opposite of it's fever reducing effect at low doses. It raises body temperature to dangerous levels, called hyperpyrexia.

There is evidence that suggests that consumption of fruit and vegetables has a protective role in the development of chronic degenerative diseases such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer. We know that aspirin therapy, with SA being the major metabolite, is used as a prophylactic in those at risk for heart attack and stroke. There is some evidence that chronic low-dose aspirin therapy may be a helpful preventative against cholorectal cancer, as well. Is it reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the SA in fruits and vegetables plays a role in the protective nature of these foods? Could it be that chronic consumption of these foods means that we take in very low does of SA but enough to raise circulating levels to the point where it contributes to this protection, similar to how aspirin therapy does? Yes. This is a reasonable question that has in fact been asked. 4

However, it is important to know the difference between what science asks and what we should take as food being medicine. If you've wondered what the point of this expansive essay on SA is, you've now encountered it. See, while there are many nutritional reasons to eat lots of fruit and vegetables, a reasonable one is not so you can get your salicylic acid! If SA plays a part in the protective nature of FV consumption, no scientist would tell you to abandon the aspirin therapy that your doctor prescribed for you. FV consumption would simply be seen as a potentially helpful adjunct to that therapy. And of course there are a great many other interesting chemicals that may be important such as ellagic acid and other phenolic phytochemicals. Right now there are still as many questions as answer about these compounds.

Certainly it is true that some nutrients, even vitamins, can have physiologic effects beyond their functional role in the body. High dose niacin (nicotinic acid), for instance is used as a cholesterol lowering agent. Using niacin this way is no longer using it for nutrition. We do not "use" or "take" nutrients, after all. Using niacin this way is using it as a drug. The doses go well beyond the amount of the vitamin needed for biological functions. The amounts used for cholesterol lowering, in fact, must far exceed the requirements of nutrition and the recommended daily amounts. This comes with clear-cut dangers and such therapy must be monitored. Yet, I can assure you that you will find many "nutrition experts" to tell you that some supplementary Niacin in your diet is "all you need to lower your cholesterol." We must be aware that a nutrient to be used as a pharmocologic agent is no longer being used as a mere dietary supplement!5

Conduct a search such as "salicylic acid in human nutrition" and you will doubtless get many "nutrition" articles telling you about all the SA in fruits and vegetables and hinting that this will have some effect on your health that makes it worth your while to eat those fruits and vegetables. A "medicinal" affect will be implied. Here we get to the gist. There is a difference between information about nutrition and information about alternative medicine, or mainstream medicine. If a certain food chemical featured in a "nutrition" article is not an actual nutrient, then you are not looking at a nutrition article. Most likely, unless you are reading a good scientific journal, you are looking at an alternative medicine article.

The problem is that, at present, most nutrition information is, in fact, actually alternative medicine information. Chemicals like SA are the fodder for these articles. This is dangerous and irresponsible, to say the least. A person who replaced his aspirin therapy with large amounts of fruit and vegetables because some silly article suggested to him that it's the same difference could be putting themselves at grave risk. The act of trying to cure disease by a careful manipulation of the foods we eat is NOT nutrition. It is fallacy, at best, and as Shwartz and Swhartz point out in "An apple a day: the myths, misconceptions, and truths about the foods we eat," we must view it with skepticism.

On the cover of that book is the picture of an apple that is labeled with some of the apples constituents. Among these are vitamin C, water, sugar, polyphenols, acetone, and formaldehyde. The book goes on to explain that one apple contains over 300 different compounds. Are we getting the idea here?

Clearly, trying to cure a disease by close manipulation of thousands of compounds, of which even the lowly apple has 300, is a bit silly. Yet a healthy diet can certainly play a role in preventing disease. However, we must go on what we know and consider the net diet, not individual compounds whose properties are just now beginning to be unraveled. Most of the quack nutrition articles I have been mentioning tend to focus on one or two "superfoods" which are miracles of prevention by virtue of one antioxidant or another. Most of these articles tend to ignore the fact that a hundred other fruits or vegetables rather than the one they focused on could have contained much higher levels of anti-oxidants. As I've pointed out in the past, picking the best food is not such a clear cut proposition.

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by EricT

Bench press, bench press, bench press. I'm amazed at how many bench press warriors I come across. No, I'm not talking about the guys who just love to bench press and like to see those numbers go up, but they try to keep their training balanced. I'm talking about people who only train upper body and actually consider bench press (and curls) to be a good measure of "strength".

Now, I have said on numerous occasions that strength has many different definitions for many different people. But diplomacy can turn into hypocrisy after a while. There has to be at least some bench marks (pardon the pun). Some objective measures that we can always turn to to say…that there is strong. Well, one very general benchmark of mine is that having bodily strength should help keep you healthy and injury free. I do NOT mean in the currently fashionable "corrective exercise" way. I don't even really mean the functional fitness way since the best way to function is to do the thing you wish to function well at, with other training being supportive to that goal. No, I mean, if you take the trouble to get strong then you should be able to do activities that require muscular strength without blowing out your back or pulling something.

To be more blunt and more specific, if you want to claim to me you train for strength, then you should at least be able to help your buddy move his furniture without "straining yourself". No, no, I don't mean you're superman and can block bullets with your eyeballs. I mean you are at least moderately prepared for a good days physical labor. Which is an accomplishment in itself this day and age! Can I get an amen?

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So somebody made a comment to me the other day that is pretty much the epitome of the bench press warrior and a classic example of how people misunderstand the mechanics of carrying heavy stuff.

"I can curl my weight, and bench twice it… I could care a less how my legs look. I have no need in real life to be able to leg press massive amounts of weight…I'm fine if my legs can carry the weight my arms can lift".

Now the day I say anything about leg press and how a guy's legs look is, well, not a warm day in hell, if you catch my drift. But who among you thinks that carrying stuff is all about your arms and legs? There are not many reasonably healthy people with arms that can support more than their legs can carry. This in itself is hardly a "goal".

Most of us strength people, when we talk about "lower body work" it is a term of convenience. We aren't really "working the quads and hams". We know that our legs are rarely a limiting factor in getting a weight up. Rarely. Not never but rarely. But what about everyday people and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby?

We usually think of our body in one of two ways: either as a collection of parts or as "all of a piece". Which version we choose tends to depend on what task we are involved in. For instance, for a bodybuilder, the body suddenly becomes a collection of parts. For a dancer, it is suddenly all of a piece.

Biomechanics, however, sees the body as a system composed of various segments. I don't need to tell you that those segments are all connected. So…yeah, there are parts in between the legs and arms. And those parts are part of the system that is carrying the heavy thing around.

Any system has something called a center of gravity (CG or COG). Although gravity of course acts downwards on all of the body's segments it's effect is as if all that downward force were concentrated at a single point. There are more technical definitions than that, but trust me, unless you already know about such things, they will not help you understand this any better. The important thing to know is that a body weight is balanced in all directions around this point.

The CG of an object determines it's behavior because it is as if all of it's masses concentrate at that area. when you pick up or carry something very heavy that center of gravity is altered slightly. The body must be able to stabilize itself to be able to support the weight without tipping over. To be stable means to maintain the center of gravity over the base of support. So this entails the trunk being able to alter and maintain an adjustment in a position that allows the the center of gravity to be "re-balanced".

You carry a box full of books you lean back slightly. Now you understand why. The muscular system that does this is the so-called "core" musculature. It doesn't matter how much you can curl or bench press if you cannot stabilize the load. It is not about having big legs. Or leg pressing a lot…which most anybody can do, really. The other day I was carrying a huge window air conditioner. The weight of one of those is very off center. The side where the compressor is being much heavier than the other side. At first I grabbed it with the heavy side away from my body. Felt like it weighed a ton. Duh. I turned it around. Suddenly it's a peanut.

You see, the heavy side of the A/C being carried forward of my body by about two feet caused my center of gravity to be shifted heavily forward. Actually I should not say "my" center of gravity but the center of gravity of the "system" I was a part of. My body was the stable base for this system and it had to work much harder to balance a load that was carried in front of me. When I turned the A/C around so that the heavy side was against my body, the center of gravity was shifted closer to the base thus making a more stable system. And that's why it was easier to carry. It still weighed the same.

Well all lifting and carrying is dependent upon you being able to stabilize this COG. Lifting weights prepares you for this. And when I say lifting weights I mean lifting heavy things from a standing position so that your stability is actually challenged. You may have heard people say that things like the leg press do not make you strong. Well, now you know why. All that quad strength cannot be expressed in anything resembling a realistic way if you cannot stabilize a heavy load. And if you fail to stabilize a load…you will "fail" to lift it, either through outright failure or through injury. The same thing goes for the bench press.

However although there must be some objective definition of strength, I am not really talking about what strength training, and strength itself, is or is not. I am talking about the attitude that suggests strength resides in one's arms and legs. Remember, we are talking about a whole system of moving parts here. No matter how strong your arms and legs are, their force must be effectively transferred through the rest of that system. So, strength is related to the task at hand.

While strong arms and shoulders from bench pressing help you bench press more, they will not help you carry a heavy window air conditioner. And while strong legs from the leg press will help you leg press more, they will not help you squat more or carry a heavy load around on your shoulders. So here we get to another thing about strength. It is specific. What you should see emerging here is that the best way to get "stronger" at a certain lift is to practice that lift. Everything else related to training for that lift is entirely secondary to that. There is nothing that is essential but the lift itself.

I may be surprising some readers here. We've heard so much about he importance of core stability work, after all. Am I saying that even this is secondary? Yes. I believe wholeheartedly in core stability work. Supposing we are talking about the non-injured trainee, however, core stability is part of the baseline fitness that prepares you to be able to train those heavy lifts. They therefore are a part of maintaining the general physical system that is needed to train aggressively for maximal strength. But the lift is the most important part of training the stability needed to do the lift!

The greatest strength effect of any weight lifting exercise will be towards that exercise itself. It just so happens that certain lifts carry over to helping your buddy move his furniture more than others and if you believe there is such a thing as "real world" strength then basic kinesiology should tell you that those exercises that involve exerting muscular force from a standing position are superior in this regard.

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by EricT

The front squat exercise is beginning to get more and more love. It's really about time. True, the back squat is still called the King by many but the front squat is coming into it's own. It's a daunting thing to master. Uncomfortable at first and just so downright weird for those used to the back squat. Heck, throw the overhead squat into the mix and it's like a whole new world.

The front squat is just as good as the back squat as a mass builder. In fact, though I cannot prove it, I tend to think it is better. Well, lest you shout sacrilege let me remind you that mass is not my "specialty."

The commonly held virtues of the front squat are that it lets the body to stay upright therefore diminishing shear and bending compressive stress on the spine, making it more manageable for those with some kinds of back injury and pain. It can be a great alternative to the traditional back squat or a good addition to a trainee's program. However, as I mentioned, this exercise can be very daunting to master. The barbell tends to be very painful on the shoulders, etc.

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Then there is the thing which is most often discussed regarding the lift. The clean grip, which is the preferred grip, is hard to get used to because it requires good wrist, triceps, and shoulder flexibility. But those with the patience to see it through and get used to the exercise tend to be converts, quick to enthusiastically recommend the lift. Unfortunately, as is usually the case in strength training, a number of myths and fallacies have popped up around the lift.

Since lighter weights tend to be used and the body stays more upright than in the back squat this lift can be easier for the back of some trainees. Let me remind you that there is a fallacy inherent in this as well. The front squat is compared to the back squat, on a trainee to trainee basis, in regards to the relative weights used. The front squat uses lighter weight! Less compression! Okay, so let's think about this for a moment. We are saying that a trainee who back squats 230 or so will have less back troubles with a front squat using 150 to 175lbs. Does this mean the front squat becomes dangerous when that trainee progresses to 230lbs on it? Flawed thinking even to the simple minded people like me.

However, the front squat now tends to be blindly recommended for everyone with back pain. The fact is, for some people, the lift will cause more back discomfort and no lift should be universally recommended to be always appropriate for a certain condition or injury. The front squat causes a very high degree of erector spinae activity and this actually induces it's own compression on the spine. For sensitive trainees, it can be just as problematic as the back squat is for others.

A front squat benefit that is often stated is that it is easier to dump the bar in the case of a failed lifting attempt. The heavy back squat, without using spotters or safety pins, can be downright dangerous as a lifter can become stuck under the bar. Terrible accidents have occurred with careless trainees. The front squat, on the other hand is easily dumped. The bar can simply be dumped off the front of the shoulders, in front of the trainee. Thus, the lift is inherently safer for those who work out alone.

However, many have taken this to mean that the front squat cannot be performed incorrectly. The idea is that if you mess up and lean too far forward, you'll have to dump the bar and therefore the lift has a built in safety mechanism against back injuries. In reality, a heavy bar will not just conveniently pop off of your shoulders and place itself neatly on the floor in front of you and it is quite possible for a lifter to get plenty of forward torso lean at the bottom of the squat, causing the bar to roll forward off the shoulders, thereby causing more lean. The bar has to be purposefully dumped at this point but many lifters will just go ahead and perform the lift this way, which risks a back strain or more serious injury. The front squat is a safer lift but this does not mean that it cannot be done incorrectly.

Not all front squat myths have negative results, some have a more positive outcome. A belief has been propagated, by some well meaning experts, that many lifters will never be able to achieve the clean grip position because of a structural lack of wrist flexibility. This claim is not true at all. In truth, most lifters can and will be able to do the clean grip if they don't give up too early and are willing to endure a bit of discomfort while developing the required flexibility. Those with previous wrist injury may have to use the crossover or Cossack grip or straps on the bar for handles, but the majority can achieve the clean grip, given several weeks of patient work. This will make the lift much easier and comfortable in the long run and, therefore, more successful.

So, I am saying the front squat is very awesome. But not magic. It is not the answer to everyone's back pain and it will not just enable the bar to lift itself while the trainee sublimely rides underneath it enjoying the healthful benefits of the bountiful lift. Sarcasm aside, it takes work, can be problematic, but has gotten a bum steer by certain people who simply give up too easy. Perspective attained.

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by EricT

By Eric Troy

I see this all the time. Should I just call this blog the "false dichotomy" blog? However, if there is one thing I hate more than people always preaching one of two extremes in strength training it's people teaching the deadlift that don't know what they are doing.

Verbal cues become mental cues. Mental cues slowly morph into mental imagery. Mental imagery becomes a visual mental schema of the lift. What am I saying in plain language here? I am saying that the words people use will eventually affect the way you "look" at an exercise with your mind's eye. It will 'become' that word. If I say "wet" to you then you visualize water. You don't think about the concept of "wetness" in some abstract way. Well, the same thing goes for most everything, whether you wish it or not.

Some of the most confusing bits of jargon in strength training are when people talk about lifts that are pulls versus lifts that are pushes. So squats are a push and deadlifts are a pull. This brouhaha gave rise to one of the worst "splits" known to strength training: The Push-Pull Routine. Leave it for bodybuilders, it's a dumb way to organize your training.

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The problem with this method of classification is that "instructors" take it too seriously and, in all earnestness, seek to qualify these words with confusing instructions to trainees. This most often happens with deadlifts when trainees are earnestly warned to not "pull" the bar but to "push" with their heels.

But, oh, wait. You not only have to push with your heels you have to drive the hips forward. See, it's a pull but it's better to push and then drive the hips because otherwise you won't get enough power and…deadlifts are not that complicated! You don't need a long string of cues to complete a deadlift. They aren't so technical. Just don't let the "pull" thing confuse you. It matters not whether the lift is a push or a pull. Your body doesn't care. Instead be aware of the actual movements taking place and the actual goal of the lift.

It's a pretty straight-forward goal. Lifting a barbell from the floor to your waist - all in one motion. Why complicate this with cool sounding jargon? Deadlifts are the coolest anyway. They deserve a class all their own. The Deadlift class. Let Olympic lifters have their "pulls".

The big movement with a capital M in deadlifting is hip extension. We also have knee extension and ankle extension. But the hip extension part is why deadlifts are called a "hip dominant" exercise. This movement is the bread and butter part of the lift.

Drive Your Heels Into the Floor

This is the most popular verbal instruction given to would-be deadlifters. They are told that the deadlift is a pull but that they shouldn't try to pull the bar they should instead focus on driving their heels into the floor and pushing. Pushing. So is it a pull or a push? Would you find this confusing? Well it's worse than confusing. Remember what I said before about imagery and all that. I just told you that the most important part of a deadlift is the hip extension. So what do you think happens when you "focus" on driving your heels into the floor and this becomes you primary goal in the deadlift? That's right, your schema for the lift fundamentally shifts. It becomes more a push with the legs rather than a violent extension of the hips.

The reason for this drive the heels instruction makes sense on paper. You push against the floor and your body extends. Well, sort of. Really what you are doing is trying to push down the floor. The body trying to extend is simply a counter to this. The primary goal is to move the bar from the floor to waist height. But we've just made our primary goal to push down on the floor. In fact, then we've made knee extension our primary goal and hip extension just an extraneous side-effect.

Since we are primarily focused on pushing the floor rather than lifting the bar we then have to divide our focus to the hips and to the back. Instead of doing one simple movement while keeping the torso relatively stable we have shifted our purposes. It is better to think of the deadlift as two stable points and one hinge.

Yes, it is important for the heels to be planted firmly and for the weight to be over the heel/midfoot rather than the toes, with the midfoot being what more experienced lifters will tend towards. But this is one of the stable points. The other stable point is the torso from the lumbar up. The fulcrum is the hips. So we plant the heels and lift the bar by violently driving our hips forward. By doing this we shift the focus of the movement onto the prime mover, the glutes. The glutes will then be valiantly assisted by it's hip extensor assistants, such as the hamstrings. The hamstrings still must take on a greater share before the bar passes the sticking point, which is commonly from mid-shin to just below the knees, but knowing what the muscles do is not necessarily the same as efficient mental cues. We want to emphasize the most powerful muscle group but what we really should think about is the movement.

When we try to push down on the floor with our legs, on the other hand, what is the prime mover? I'll give you a hint, it's the same as in the leg press. Yes, there is more than one prime mover in a complex movement involving more than one body segment but I am talking here about the focus of the "heel drive" cue, which is pushing on the floor. Yes, you got it. The prime mover is the quads. They are trying to extend the knees and therefore move the floor. The hamstrings are braking muscles. The floor "pushes back" with an equal force. The hamstrings are the counter for this force, trying to keep the knees from flexing once more.

There is a heavy weight hanging from your hands. What is the path of least resistance, then, if you try to push down the floor? Easy. Your hips shoot up as your legs extend. And the bar? It doesn't go much anywhere. In fact, I think that this instruction has resulted in many many trainees performing the deadlift as a sequential, rather than simultaneous, lift.

The Deadlift is a Simultaneous Lift: Results Versus Intentions

Beware of wolves in lab coats. I mean the kind of wolves that analyze really big guys doing really big deadlifts but have never ever actually lifted a heavy weight nor do they have any experience in instructing others on lifting heavy weights.

There has been at least one 'study' reporting that, after observing powerlifters in competition, that the deadlift should be viewed as a sequential movement. This is the height of ignorance as any decent trainer can tell you that if you try to do the deadlift as a series of movements rather than as one continuous lift, you are much more likely to fail. What these researchers saw were the superficial results of heavy lifts. You can analyze results but you cannot analyze intentions. The idea is that since it "looked" a certain way and the lifts were successful, then this must be the best way to go about performing the lift. When, in reality, lifters are often successful, if barely, even when looking like they are having a very difficult bowel movement rather than lifting a weight. There is always something to be said for sheer brute force and determination when speaking of maximal lifting. But this does not mean that what a lifter looks like when doing their best effort corresponds to how a lift should be classified.

Record breaking lifts sometimes appear to be sequential even though the lifter had every intention of moving the bar to the waist all in one go. Having said that, record breaking lifts just as often appear to be simultaneous. At least if you don't film them with a high-speed camera and play the lift back Hollywood style.

Despite this, many trainees end up performing the deadlift as a sequential movement even when lifting light weights. They are then told they are doing it wrong but given instructions that are just as likely to reinforce these tendencies..such as "drive the heels into the floor."

The hips shoot up first. This is because the lift has become "all quad". Then the lifter has run out of quads, as I say, and they have a hard time initiating a powerful hip drive to complete the lift. The load tends to transfer to the lumbar. So there are two choices. Finish the lift with mostly lower back or do a little "scoop" whereby you slightly bend the knees while leaning back so as to put the hips and knees in a better position for "pulling". What happens then is really a hitch as the bar is rested on the thighs and then inched up to complete the lift in any way possible.

Top Down Pulling

No, I am not talking about Romanian Deadlifts, which have been called Top Down Deadlifts by others. There is no such thing as a deadlift from the "top down". The Romanian is simply a "deadlift" initiated from the rack position and technically is is not a "dead lift". It's just a name for posterior chain assistance exercise. A very good one.

What I am talking about is what happens when the "pull" part of deadlifting goes to a trainees head. Earlier I was complaining of turning the deadlift into a push. Well turning it into a pull doesn't really help much either. It is quite instinctive for many trainees to want to simply pull the barbell off the floor. They reach down and simply start hauling on the bar and instead of trying to extend the hips against the weight of the bar they are doing "top down" pulling. They are initiating the lift at the shoulders instead of the hips…simply pulling up with their upper back.

What tends to happen is the bar does not move, the back begins to round, and the hips eventually move upwards without the bar moving. Then when the pull begins the load is placed entirely onto the back, which must move from flexion to extension to move the bar.

So we have two extremes. The deadlift as a push. Which doesn't work. And the deadlift as a pull. Which also doesn't work.

One Simple Thing: Straighten UP!

The solution, as should already be clear from the rest of this article, is to view the deadlift in terms of the primary movement that is happening and to be clear on the primary goal.

I really should not have to explain that pushing down the floor is not the same as lifting up a bar. So be clear that your goal is to lift the bar from the floor to the waist.

It should also be clear that your body, or I should say brain, does what it needs to get the job done. The part of your brain that hands out work assignments does not classify lifts as push versus pull. It simply fires the muscles that can best get the job done in a given situation. The best muscle(s) to get the deadlift done is the glutes and the hip extensors as a whole. The deadlift is a "hip dominant" exercise and is a movement centered on the posterior chain.

Once you get into the proper position your real job is to simply straighten up so as to move the bar to the waist. It's all in the hips and everything else is there for support. I feel so strongly about the hips, in fact, that my article on how to do a deadlift has the word hip or hips in it 31 times.

The Reality of Heavy Deadlifts

There are very few people, and none that I have personally encountered, that can perform a truly maximal deadlift with what looks like textbook form. The kind of thing that the armchair internet experts, who seem to come out in droves on Youtube for every video of a heavy lift, if it was witnessed, would almost certainly signal that the lift was not a true maximum attempt! There will be some rounding of the thoracic spine during any truly maximal deadlift and this rounding will also translate to at least a modicum of lumber rounding. Experienced lifters can control this and keep it from rounding to end range of motion. You'll never get it until you actually start lifting heavy.

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Comments

by EricT

There is a myth out there in webernet land: You must be balanced and consider all opinions and arguments. You must weigh them all equally. If you don't you are not thinking "critically".

I deal with this all the time. "Is this program any good?," I am asked. "No," I say, "It's crap."

"Why?" They say. "Why don't you ask me why can't dogs fly?" I reply.

The point being that I do not have time to critically analyze every ridiculous program that comes up. Balance has nothing to do with critical thinking. Seeking balance for the sake of balance is NOT critical thinking. It is artificial.

Earlier, I was going to write up a piece on the "history" of homeopathy. To do so I had the displeasure of having to read books about it. As a matter of fact the displeasure was so great I had to put that post on the back burner in order to protect my fragile temper. One of these books promised a "balanced" perspective on homeopathic history.

Balanced? How can you balance legitimate scientific thought with homeopathic horseshit? It is not possible. And yet every time I turn around I am seeing some alternative medicine zealot accusing someone of not being balanced in his/her attack on homeopathy or other type of alternative hogwash. The idea is that we are supposed to consider the merits of the fantastical claims of CAM practices and other things so that we are being "fair minded". Again, critical thinking has nothing to do with being fair! There is no way to be fair about idiotic claims made by incompetent people. It is they who are being unfair. We have to use scientific thinking. They get to use magical thinking.

Opinions borne of ignorance are not valid. Opinions borne of pseudoscience such as astrology and homeopathy are not valid. Opinions borne of magical thinking and superstition are not valid. Opinions based solely on anecdotal evidence are not valid. Opinions based only on an appeal to authority are not valid. And the list goes on…

While we certainly do not want to stoop to crude hatchet-jobs where we mindlessly attach things we don't agree with the point is that it does not take reams of scientific argument to dismantle the pie-in-the-sky imaginings of homeopathy and others of the more fantastical CAM varieties. There simply is not much there to analyze once you get finished explaining that "there is nothing in it but sugar and water."

Society is awash in so-called "battles" over ridiculous notions such as vaccines cause autism, raw milk causes miracle healing, and yes, even, homeopathy "works".

I thought I would have to make my own rant on this but I realized that Dara O'Briain, who is a comedian I have quoted a couple of times in this blog, does it brilliantly and so much more funny. He talks about homeopathy in this video. "Well, science doesn't know everything," the homeopath says. Says Dara, "Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop! But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to ya!" You go Dara. Funny stuff and oh so right on.

Dara quips about the fear of dentistry and how some people are pulling out their own teeth (instead of visiting the dentist). Every opinion is equally valid? My arse! "Bloke who is a professor of dentistry for forty years does not have a debate with some idiot who removes his teeth with string and a door!" Nice.

The whole idea that all opinions are equally valid and thus deserve equal consideration shows a complete lack of understanding of what it means for a claim or opinion to be valid or invalid. In "They are Not Smarter Than You: Facts, Knowledge, and Reasoning Skills" I go into valid and invalid arguments a bit. Meanwhile, enjoy the video below.

Dara O'Briain: Science Doesn't Know Everything Video

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Member Comments

by EricT

Most people know two things about interset rest periods for strength training: you can rest shorter or you can rest longer. If you rest shorter you are training for endurance and if you rest longer you are training for strength.

That is a fairly simplistic way of viewing it and yet that is just about the level of sophistication that most trainees bring to thinking about rest periods. But wait! It makes sense on some level. To keep things simple, for our purposes we can define strength and endurance in the following way:

• Strength is the ability to produce force by muscular effort.

• Endurance is the ability to sustain that force production a given period of time, whether holding a position or performing many repetitions.

Variously referring to muscular endurance, strength endurance, or muscular strength endurance, other definitions which are a bit less precise are often proposed for muscular endurance. Such as the ability to perform work over a long period of time or the ability to sustain muscular contractions over time. These definitions are great for a general population. They would fit, for instance, the ability of a cashier in a grocery store to continually pick up products, scan them, etc. But this is just doing work so does not fit our needs for strength development. It's easy to understand why…the weight does not get any lighter as you lift it up and down. You have to exert the same amount of force to lift it on the last rep as on the first rep. So we are concerned with sustaining force production.

If you think that a key to developing muscular endurance is doing more work in less time then it is logical to work towards less rest. If you think strength is about maintaining muscular force output over time then it makes sense to rest longer and therefore be able to exert that same level of force for more reps (i.e. more work).

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But of course in reality it takes a little bit of everything, along the way, to keep getting stronger. So, if your only conception of rest is 'shorter for endurance' and 'longer for strength' how do you know how to use rest periods? The answer most of the time is "I'm building mass right now so I rest shorter" and then "I'm emphasizing strength right now so I rest longer". What this really translates to is that you are on the fence! As I've tried to make abundantly clear in most all of my writings, strength training for maximal strength is always about developing absolute force potential. Or, in plain English, it is always about getting stronger!

A bunch of time spent "emphasizing" mass means you are sacrificing force potential. You have to play catch up and "turn" that mass into force. Seems silly to even type out to me but that is how people think about it much of the time…as if it is not crazy to work your ass off to build a muscle that you then have to teach how to work! How you think about rest periods governs how you use them. There are other ways to think about rest periods and instead of using rest periods you can learn to "take advantage of them".

Rest between sets is the same as rest in general, to some extent. It is about recovery. Longer rest periods mean more time to recover and more time to recover means maintaining more strength over the course of a session. If we take longer rest periods and shorten them over time, by whatever means, we can learn to maintain a certain force with less rest. In other words we can "recover" from it quicker. But the downside to that is the point of diminishing returns. There comes a time when you are no longer doing strength training but endurance work..thus the definitions given above.

Let me give a very straight-forward, but extreme, example. If I were to do 400X5x5 reps using 5 minute rest periods I could try to increase my reps and even increase my sets in order to build up endurance. Alternatively, I could do none of that and instead decrease my rest periods over time. I could try to shorten the rest periods until I got to the point I could do the same sets except only using 2.5 minute rest, or less, between sets. This would increase the ability of my muscles to recover quickly and thus increase muscular endurance. After all that effort, however, what have I accomplished? I can "endure" the work better but does this translate to a higher 1RM? Not really. I haven't increased my force potential by very much, if at all. I've increased my endurance.

It should be a given that you cannot increase strength a great deal without increasing the load but many trainees seem to think that an increase in muscular endurance should correspond to a predictable increase in their 1RM. It doesn't.

The above scenario doesn't seem to be worth the trouble and yet I told you before that it does take a little bit of everything. Meaning that along the way you will be using all sorts of different rest periods.

Obviously, for your secondary or assistance exercises you will use shorter rest periods than for your main lifts. Both for time management and relating to the goal of those exercises. Usually, for me that means "gathering volume" (which does mean mass), staying balanced, and putting forth beneficial work towards helping your main lift. But beyond that you will use different amounts of rest even for your big lifts. Since the scenario above failed and we ended up just spinning our wheels in terms of absolute strength, what do we do?

It's Not Endurance But Work Tolerance

At first glance that seems like the same thing. But not quite. Tolerance simply has a much broader meaning than endurance. Endurance is a part of tolerance but not the whole meaning. Let's say you can run three miles in a go. This speaks to your level of endurance for running. But let's say you get terrible cramps afterwards. This speaks to your level of tolerance. So, even though you can endure the running you don't have a lot of capacity to accept it's consequences. You might say, "all things being equal I could run three miles" but all things are not equal and you probably won't be running much until your tolerance for running improves and you are not affected by it by having terrible muscle cramps.

Work tolerance, as opposed to just endurance, means that we can maintain certain levels of work without breaking down. Without sustaining injury for instance. But it also entails our ability to withstand it psychologically. We call that "fortitude". Just like endurance, tolerance is something we have to build up. We can do that by manipulating rest, and thus recovery.

A strength trainee has very little need to be able to lift heavy weights with one minute rest in between. You want to lift the heaviest weight possible. You like to lift things up and put them down. Yeah, yeah. So do I. In order to lift very heavy things, though, you have to be able to lift very heavy things a lot. How's that for technical?

Are you not feeling me? Well, maybe you've been excited when your favorite powerlifter managed to pull some super human weight. You see a guy lift 800 pounds and you go wow, I wish I could do that. What you don't think about is how many times he has lifted, say, 730 to 780 pounds and just how much work that is. To get to that 800 he had to be able to tolerate a lot of heavy pulling without pulling something! I know "corrective exercise" is big right now but if you think rotator cuff exercises are going to get you to an 800 pound deadlift, well you really don't know what work is.

Now if we just wanted to endure we could lift very very light weights for many many reps. This would be classically what we think of as endurance. One might relate this to a marathon. The intensity is very very low and such levels of aerobic work can be sustained for unbelievably long periods of time, especially if fuel is taken on board. But a middle distance runner, or a swimmer, might want to increase his capacity to run near top speed for longer periods of time. This has to do with tolerance.

Example: Lactic Acid Tolerance Training

Lactic acid threshold training was a big thing for a while. The idea was to increase the period of time you could work before reaching the "threshold" upon which time you cannot work for very much longer because of the build up of lactic acid. But then a lot of physiologists explained that there was no real "threshold" and everyone got confused and went back to twiddling their thumbs at Pubmed. For a while though "lactic acid threshold" training was big from bodybuilding to power lifting.

But lactic acid tolerance training is a real thing (sometimes called lactate tolerance). It is mentioned in Periodization Training for Sports by Tudor Bompa in the following passage:

Lactic acid tolerance training increases athletes' ability to tolerate lactic acid buildup…Very high levels of lactic acid can result from high intensity reps of 40 to 50 seconds. Lactic acid tolerance increases as a result of skeletal muscles' removal of lactic acid from the bloodstream. [According to studies] lactate transporters increase in number as a function of high-intensity training…The ability to clear lactic acid from the blood stream and transport it to slow-twitch fibers for energy usage is an adaptive response that delays fatigue and inevitably improves performance." - Bompa1

How do you "delay fatigue"? You manipulate rest and recovery, just like I've been saying. To delay fatigue you manipulate fatigue. You work with it, not against it. The same thing is needed to train for maximal strength but we really do not need to worry about the physiological details to know how to do it.

Bompa goes on to talk about the ability of an athlete to tolerate the pain of acidosis. He means to be able to tolerate "the burn" and that athletes who can tolerate this better can perform longer. Tolerance, not just endurance, see?

Consolidation is about increasing work tolerance for a certain weight range. But it really makes up a large part of what we are doing when strength training.

Working Under Fatigue

We don't need endurance but one thing we do need is the ability to work under conditions of fatigue while still maintaining a high force output. I don't just mean lift a weight up and put it down a bunch of times really fast. I mean do it with a modicum of control and without technical (and dangerous) failure. There is a very simple way to think about it. If you can pull pretty well in the 760 to 780 range while compromised then you will have a much better chance of doing that 800 while NOT compromised.

A great deal of what I do then is to have trainees learn to manipulate fatigue. That is a bit different than the seat-of-the-pants method that has been given the flowery name "Planned Over-reaching". Planned over-reaching is a fancy way of saying "get real tired, rest, and get stronger, I hope." We don't want to just get tired, we want to get tired with style.

Enter the Cluster

You've probably heard of clusters. All sorts of fancy theories are given about how clusters work. Most having to do with the nervous system and "hypoxia" and other jargon of the sort. But clusters, at their basic level, are just a way of manipulating fatigue and recovery. The goal is to lift a certain weight more times than you would normally lift it in one straight set. Clusters involve inserting little mini-rest periods between single reps of a multi-rep set. This way you recover just a little but not as much as you would if you were just to stop and take a full rest period. But why not stop and take a full rest period? You'd be able to continue to exert that force over more reps, right?

Yes, that is true. You could do the same amount of volume or much more but with less density. But the value of clusters is they do this mysterious thing to your nervous system, saturate your muscles with midi-chlorians…then a miracle occurs. No, no! Clusters increase your work tolerance! See? We're getting somewhere here.

Clusters are just one "advanced" thing you can do that helps to increase work tolerance. There are many others. A mistake that is often made, though, is to look at clusters and similar things as a standalone "method". That is almost always how these things are tackled. Clusters are much more useful when they are integrated into a full, and more clever, plan.

A Plan Involving "Speed" Work and Clusters

Man you can't combine speed work with clusters! Well, no, you can't combine them as in doing them at the same time. Wouldn't make sense at all. But you can combine them within the meaning of one building off the other. I am going to list out a plan I just gave someone. I don't usually do this as training is individual and what one person can handle or what they need can be quite stupid for another person to do. But this is a good example of how one might integrate the concepts I've discussed here.

Before I get to it, a few comments about the "speed" component of this plan. First, it is using fairly high percentages of max so it falls into the "strength-speed" spectrum of things. Second, I just call it speed work to differentiate it from percentage based routines. That is, while all trainees may benefit from it some may benefit from it more if they are actually very slow and need work in this area. However, when the weights are lighter, we always lift them with the intention of moving them as fast and as "explosively" as possible. If you want to call it speed that is fine. If you want to call it something else that is fine. I do want to differentiate it from percentage based routines because of one main component. Those types of routines usually rely on some "1RM" established at some point in the past. As I've explained many times in my writings, I do not agree with this approach whatsoever.

So, let's say you have lifted 450 pounds once. Maybe a few weeks ago. But you know you can lift 330 to 440 "any day of the week" so to speak. In that case it would be reasonable for you to choose 440lbs, 435lbs, or 440lbs as your "max" and base your percentages off of that. Being conservative is fine. You do not have to be precise as you will be working up to very high percentages, beyond speed work, and then performing clusters and there will be a great challenge in this. But if you were to choose the 450, that you've only lifted once and haven't been able to match consistently then you will likely be overshooting and be unable to handle the plan. So we want heavy enough but not too heavy.

If you just don't have a clue, however, you should work up to a relative max on the first day. This means that using appropriate warmups and acclimation sets you will work up to one single that is the best you can do that day with very good form. You're not going for a PR here. Just establishing where you are at that moment while showing good performance. It should be challenging but not crazy challenging! This plan assumes you are a very advanced lifter and that you have worked with these kinds of intensities often. You MUST be able to handle high volume with high intensities and this assumes that you are a mature lifter. So, I provide this example as an illustration of where we can take such a concept but I am not recommending that very many trainees undertake this, at least without consultation and supervision. If this constitutes a very abrupt "intensification" of training for you…then you should know better than trying it. To be clear, this is NOT for the recreational lifter!

For those able to pick their max, reasonably as described, you have the option of working up to a heavy double or triple on the first day, before the speed work. This is up to the individual. Some will find that their speed improves from doing this. Some will find it to be too much. It depends on your work tolerance (ding!) and your response to heavy lifts. If you feel unable to do this you can warm up to a weight that is about 10lbs heavier than your target working weight, or you can skip it altogether.

On the second session there should be no heavy sets. Just a proper warmup and straight to the speed work. Likewise with sessions 3 through 5. Here is the first five weeks of this eight week plan with the working sets written out, based on a max of 435 (whether relative or guesstimated) as discussed. They go from strength-speed to strength:

1. 75% = 325 x 2 x 8 to 10 sets (working on technique but fast as possible) 2 minutes or so rest periods
2. 80% = 345 x 2 x 2 x 8 to 10 (lift it like you mean it but still work on technique)
3. 85% = 370 x 2 x 6 to 8 (gettin heavy!)
4. 90% = 390 x 2 x 6 (circa-maximal)
5. 95% = 410 x 2 x 4 (is this guy crazy? Stick with 4 unless you are feeling very good about doing more)

This ends the strength-speed to strength work, covering 5 weeks. Here you have had the opportunity to reestablish some good habits while doing some very aggressive work. For some this may be the most aggressive kind of thing you've ever done. I would encourage you not to do it if you are anxious about it as that is usually a signal one isn't ready. There are other ways to get to this level and you simply need a lot of work with heavy weights prior to this. The rest periods should remain fairly constant throughout this period. This is important. Remember this is all about manipulating rest and recovery, it's not just about lifting weights as heavy as possible.

As hard as the weights may seem to some the real challenge here is attempting to maintain the short rest periods throughout. It would not be reasonable to expect the 2 minutes to be maintained all the way from 75% to 95%. The point is to make a valiant effort to do this, while keeping safety in mind. Do not take unnecessary risks. Week 6 lets you "take a break" by increasing the rest periods but maintaining the weight. In effect you will be repeating the workout of session 5 but allowing much more recovery between sets. This way you have challenged recovery and force potential and then you allow a bit more recovery while maintaining force output.

After that you will take the same sets and reps and turn them into clusters. So in this scenario you will have performed a second workout with 410 X 2 X 4, using longer rest periods, on week six. Now you will insert mini rest periods of 15 to 20 seconds between each rep within a set, hoping this allows you to turn the 2 reps into 4 reps. You will do one "cluster set", rest normally, and then perform another cluster. Etc. You can stop at 3 clusters if you are unable to continue or you can go for the whole enchilada and do 4 clusters:

6. 410 x 2 x 4 (5 to 7 minute rest periods between sets)
7. 410 x (4x1) X 3 to 4 (where the 4x1 is a cluster of 4 reps w/15 to 20 secs. rest between, a normal rest of 5 to 7, and then repeated clusters for up to 4)
8. 410 X (4x2) X 2

As you see all we've really tried to do is increase the reps over a very short additional time and without allowing full recovery between reps. Going from 8 reps to 12 to 16 was hard enough. On week 8 we double up the reps, still using the min rest between doubles. Our recovery is challenged even further and the whole time we have been maintaining the same force output..which is VERY high.

We have manipulated rest and in so doing manipulated fatigue. Remember that I defined endurance as ability to maintain force over time (whether sustained or reps). Well, fatigue could be defined as the inability to maintain force over time (for us at least). Here, we have worked under fatigue conditions while trying to only stave off fatigue a little. In other words we've tried to resist the affects of fatigue just enough to maintain force but not more than enough. "Not more than enough" is a very important component here. By manipulating recovery just enough and so resisting fatigue just enough we have worked on tolerating fatigue and thus we have developed more work tolerance.

To understand this, relate it to the lactic acid tolerance training I described above. If the rest periods used were so long that lactic acid was able to be completely cleared nothing would be accomplished! It's the same here. If we rested long enough to allow complete recovery we would not increase our work tolerance. Our ability to maintain this force in the face of fatigue says a lot about our ability to increase force output. Many will find that their actual max attempts are "easy" compared to this work with already established weight ranges.

You should have noticed that while endurance work usually involves lots of sub-maximal repetitions this used near-maximal weights. What we want then is the simple ability to withstand a lot of near maximal work. Under all sorts of conditions, not just "ideal" ones. One of the failures of "strength training theory" is that most of it uses ideas borrowed from sports that never use maximal muscular effort. The same idea about periodization for a swimmer is recycled for strength training. The problem with this is that it tends to involve ideas about monitoring performance and recovery as if you are in fear for your life if you try to lift a heavy weight when "not properly recovered." We want the opposite. We want to be able to tolerate near maximal work even when things are not ideal. Without risking injury and without compromising recovery to the extent that training is disrupted.

This plan is an extreme example that would not suit many right off the bat so you may wonder why I used such an "advanced" plan to illustrate this. Well, if I give a more basic plan it would be more difficult for you to tell the difference between this and many other ways of training that involved volume or increasing endurance. So this served to better illustrate what we are going for even though being this aggressive will not at first be necessary. The example should help you see how we think about it even if it doesn't suit you personally.

One Last Note, Defining Fatigue

Since the word fatigue is used prominently throughout this article, I think it is important to establish a working definition for it, since fatigue can mean different things to different people. Of course, by fatigue, we mean that things are going on inside your body, on a physiological and chemical level, and these things constitute what scientists might consider fatigue. Also, when you feel the physical affects of your training and other activities, you are tired, sluggish, uncoordinated, etc. that is an outward manifestation and we call that fatigue as well.

Here though, when I talk about manipulating fatigue, I am thinking of fatigue as that component, or "factor" that masks your fitness, which in this instance is your force output ability. This is important because it is different from the classic view that has fatigue as making "inroads" on your recovery ability and which would cause you to model training very differently.

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GUS Member Comments

by EricT

Bruce Lee has had a profound influence on all manner of cultural pursuits. He impacts the world of fitness as much as he does the world of martial arts. His legacy, to me, is unmatched. And one thing that Lee was, if he was anything, was an idea man. Dismissing things out of hand was not something he did, nor did he blindly keep following paths that lead to nowhere.

He trained his body in many different ways and was a voracious researcher and experimenter. Unfortunately a number of myths have sprung up about Lee's attitudes and beliefs concerning strength training. Some of these myths are used to promote certain ways of training. The leader in this is isometric strength training. In truth, Bruce Lee trained in many, many different ways. Isometrics were only one part of it.

Bruce Lee Only did Isometric Strength Training

The myth is that Bruce Lee ONLY used isometric strength training and that this was how he got all his strength and power. Hogwash. Much of Lee's "power" and quickness would have come from the actual martial arts practice. As far as strength training though? Lee did all sorts of things, including lifting weights.

Bruce Lee Grip Training. That Ain't Isometrics

Some of the ideas and methods Lee used may have been wrong and misguided. For instance he liked the idea of "weighting the limbs" such as holding dumbells and punching the air with them. He relied heavily on research and it is quite likely that Lee's training would have changed when emerging science illuminated more about training specifics, such as training for speed, versus strength or power.

From Lee myths people get such gems as isometric strength training will give you quickness and power and that he got this exclusively through isometric training. I've even read an article expressing the idea that Lee had "tendon power".

Bruce Lee One Arm Pushup.
Also not Isometrics

I Think This is Called
Weight Training.

Lee has been quoted as saying weight training increases muscle size and that this may not be desirable for a fighter but that is a far cry from saying that he was afraid of weights because he thought they would make him bulky and slow.

He sustained his back injury from doing heavy Good Mornings with a barbell, which plagued him the rest of his life. No, it was not from getting kicked in the back by a big evil Chinese kung-fu monster like in the film "Dragon - The Bruce Lee Story". Even so he reportedly decided that heavy good mornings, which even then were highly promoted, were not necessary and that light weights would suffice. Isometrics only? I don't think so! You didn't really think that Bruce Lee was so one dimensional, did you? Of course not. I would advised him to ditch the good mornings, to be honest. High risk. Low reward. But it illustrates the point.

Now, I wonder if he would have been welcome at Planet Fitness?

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by EricT