Becoming More Active – Page 9 – newstasis :: a blog about improving wellness

The Discipline High – Part One

Every now and then someone will say something that makes me laugh out loud, ask them if they actually said it, and then laugh at how profoundly important yet completely obvious the comment is.

“Discipline high” was one of those comments.

I had been talking to a friend and discussing the merits of the body building bulk that I was on. It was late winter and he was getting ready to start back to the gym to shed the extra winter weight he had gained. He does this almost every year and has become pretty good at it.

When the topic of diet came up, he mentioned that one year he ate nothing but organic food. He enjoyed the taste of the food a lot more and felt that meats were more dense. He said that he figured dollar for dollar it worked out to be close to the same price, maybe a little more for the organically grown food. But he said that during this particular year, he got more of a discipline high from eating good quality food.

I laughed, asked him if he said discipline high and then laughed again. It had never crossed my mind that someone could get a high feeling from NOT doing something. This is, of course, how it works with me. Whenever I exercise I am rewarded with a chemical high (the release of neuro transmitters and endorphins) that promote the feelings of well being along with a cerebral high that is accompanied by feelings of accomplishment. Whenever I’m eating better, there is a rapid elimination of the negative physical feelings associated with a poor diet and a similar cerebral high that comes from making better food choices. The discipline high comes from this cerebral feeling and it reflects the sense of accomplishment that following through on your desire to make a positive change in your life creates. Given my tendency to seek pleasure or avoid pain, I must be getting something out of the strict diet if I’m to follow it. I believe that the discipline high is the pleasure that allows me to continue the pain (not eating whatever I like).

I have thought a lot about the discipline high since we spoke about it and when I read JoLynn’s daily Motivation: Creating Healthy Eating Habits post it hit on me that not everyone will experience it from following a strict diet. Maybe it is a learned behavior and the lucky one’s learned how to experience it when they were younger.

It isn’t clear to me if I am gaining more than I am giving up when I will myself to eat appropriately. What is clear is that I get enough out of it to keep doing it and the longer I do it, the easier it is to find that reward in the experience.

Fake It Till You Make It

I was getting caught up with Suzanne last week and one of the topics that came up with the whole “fake it till you make it” approach to life – just do the things that someone who is what you want to be does and eventually you’ll find yourself being one of those people.

From a practical point of view, I like this approach because I tend to just jump right into things once I decide to do them. I won’t spend much time learning the back ground and theory until I can see the value of knowing them because knowing these things before I start doing something has rarely helped me in the past. I need to be immersed in the experience and work hands on prime my brain for working with experience. This is the only way to decide it you like something enough to try it again. Often it will turn out that we didn’t really want to be something we thought we did.

When you’re doing something, even just pretending to be something you may not be, you will most likely be surrounded by other people who are doing the same thing. This is a great opportunity for you to learn how to be more like something. Take bike racing as an example. Good racers do a bunch of things differently than most riders because they’ve learned how to get more out of their bodies on race day. Surrounding yourself with these people is going to teach you a lot of what you have to do to be successful “bike racer”.

Faking it does actually allow you to tap into your intention. If you really want to be something, why not just be it? It is the doing that makes the difference. Knowing a lot about a bike is very different from racing a bike. If you want to be a bike mechanic, learn about bikes. If you want to be a bike racer, race bikes. When you get right down to it, the only thing you need to do to be a bike racer is to race a bike. This approach answers the philosophical question “what does it mean to be something?”

The catchall is that even if you don’t become one of them you get to do the things you wanted to do and that isn’t so bad.

10 Things That Will Make You A Better Mountain Bike Racer

I love to race. It was tough at the beginning because I tried to beat other people. Once I realized that I couldn’t go any faster than I was able, it began to make a little more sense. If you are new to racing, you may find this “10 Things That Will Make You A Better Mountain Bike Racer” helpful.

Training:

1) Practice fixing a flat – You won’t need to do it very often, but when you do, you’ll be glad you know how. The best practice is to switch your tires – move your front tire to the back wheel and you’re back tire to the front wheel or buy a different set of tires and switch them on. Make sure you have plastic tire irons and new tubes. When you practice be sure you run your fingers along the inside of the tire to check for protrusions that would have caused a real flat. Try to make it an automatic process because when it happens during a race, don’t assume that you’ll be able to think clearly because your heart rate will be elevated. Considering hydrating during this time.
2) Train all types of terrain – hills, rocks, single / double track, if you’ll be riding it race day, make sure you know how to ride it.
3) Dedicate training time to hill climbing – probably the biggest bang for your training buck right here. If your races are 60 minutes, train hill climbing for 60 minutes once a week. Find a hill and just ride up and down focusing on seated spinning and standing climb. Mix it up because you’ll be using both during any race. Hills end 50 meters AFTER they level off so continue climbing effort until you find your top speed and then recover.
4) Learn how to identify when your thinking abilities are being impaired by the intensity of your work. Racing effectively and safely demands that you keep your wits about you. There are countless studies demonstrating the relationship between elevated heart rate and cognitive impairments. Rates of between 160-170 are associated with tunnel vision, impaired judgment, and an inability to think logically and rationally. You need to learn how to avoid this, or at least, gain the ability to remain aware that your thinking is impaired. What seems like a good pass at 165 may actually have been a concussions.

For race day:

5) Make sure your cables will make it through the race. Losing rear derailer function or rear breaks makes for a tough race. Cables wear out, change them before they break. Change damaged cable housing while your at it.
6) Make sure your gears are tuned up. “Grind it till your find it” is what happens race day. I know this because I only see broken chains on race day. Bring it to the shop if you don’t know how to do it yourself. You want crisp and precise gear changes. You need it to stay in gear until you change it.
7) Race with an empty stomach or one containing liquid only. Until you find what works for you, try not to over eat. I need to avoid fat as much as possible because it takes me longer to digest it. I eat mostly low GI carbs and whey protein powder before races. These things clear my stomach quickly and if I need to get sick, they come up pretty effortlessly and without that burning acid.
8) Be well hydrated but freshly peed right before the race begins.

During the race:

9) Try to keep your heart rate in an effective range. Everyone has a sweet spot, a level of exertion that is their best. Try to find this as early in the race as you can and hold it. Your goal is to be close to spend at the end. A heart rate monitor will be very helpful to you here.
10) Assume that all of the other racers have tunnel vision from an elevated heart rate. State your intentions of other riders and, if they won’t call you round to pass, don’t yell back at them when they call you on your aggressive riding. They are tired and not thinking clearly so if you scared them, they are going to call you an a-hole. Most people will do what you tell them because they don’t want you behind them. If you hear a rider approaching you and you want them to pass, tell them when and point to the opening you are giving them. If someone lets you by, say thank you.

What Is The Best Workout For People Over 40?

Bodybuilding.com asks the question what Is The Best Workout For People Over 40? and their members reply.

Blink41 wins a $75 store credit with is workout and nutritional recommendations, but it’s conciseness is worth more than that.

The older you get, the weaker your body becomes. An adult over age 40 should start to experience a decrease in muscle size, strength and recovery time. Bones becomes increasingly more fragile and more prone for injury.
Testosterone levels begin to decrease and the ability to build quality muscle decreases greatly. Joints begin to ache after a hard days work. However, there is an easy way to slow this aging process down. Simply follow a good diet with a good routine and you can slow down this decay on your body.
The Workout:
* Monday: Chest / Triceps
* Tuesday: Rest
* Wednesday: Back / Biceps
* Thursday: Rest
* Friday: Shoulder / Traps
* Saturday: Rest
* Sunday: Thigh / Calves / Abs
Do 5 minutes of light cardio before workouts to get the blood flowing through the body. Do 30 minute of moderate intensity cardio after workouts. Be sure to stretch before and after workouts. Allow 2 to 3 minute rest periods between each set.

“How to Make Easy Exercises More Difficult and More Effective”

In How to Make Easy Exercises More Difficult and More Effective by TC from T-nation he gives us a few ways to save time by making some exercises more difficult. I really liked:

Real-World Squats
Let me ask you a question: how often in your life do you walk up to an object hanging from a tree, carefully place it on your shoulders, and lower it to the ground?
Hunters typically don’t find dead deer hanging in trees. Generally, the thing’s lying on the ground and they have to pick it up.
What I’m trying to get at is the conventional squat is screwed up. It’s not a real-world movement. Our entire motor program, from childhood on, was developed to pick things up from the ground instead of the opposite.
That’s probably why a lot of people have trouble learning how to do the squat.
Well, I’ve adjusted the movement. I’ve made it more “real world,” but in doing so, I’ve also made it harder — and consequently, more effective.
I rarely start my squat from a standing position. Instead, I place the loaded bar onto the safety bars of the power rack and start from the ass-down position.

Guess what I’ll be doing next leg day?

10 Keys to the Lean & Sexy Look

In this first post from new T-Nation author Jen Heath 10 Keys to the Lean & Sexy Look, Part I we get keys 1 to 5. The article is geared towards women.

What most people call “toning” is actually a muscle getting a little big bigger (yes, that does mean it increases in “bulk”) and the fat cells covering a muscle getting smaller. You put those two things together and you get “tone.”
Most women I talk to would like more muscle in their arms yet don’t necessarily want behemoth guns. Whenever a woman tells me she just wants to “tone” her body with light weights, I usually end up having a conversation similar to this:
Jen: “Okay, so if I understand you right, your arms now measure 9 inches, but you wouldn’t mind getting them up to a firm and solid 12 inches. At the same time, you don’t want to get 16 inch monster arms, right?”
Client: “Yes, that’s exactly right!”
Jen: “Well, let me ask you this: Would you rather take a month or two to build that 12-inch arm or would you rather it take you forever?”
Client: “I want it now!”
Jen: “The reason I ask is because the same thing that builds the 16 inch arm the fastest will also build the 12 inch arm the fastest — lifting intensely with progressively heavier weights. Once you achieve the amount of muscle you desire you can always reduce the volume to maintain.”
Client: “Ah, I see!”

I think most trainers have a similar conversation with 90% of their new female clients. Jen’s approach just nails it.

Great article, check out the original and part two.

4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know

Tony Gentilcore’s article 4 Things Your Girlfriend Should Know on T-nation.com has ruffled a few feathers {Note – this is the link for a revised version of the original article}. He makes the statement that “Yoga Mostly Sucks” at improving the body composition. He trashes steady state cardio (low intensity long distance) in favor of high intensity interval style training for fat loss. He suggests that women train more like men and that they should be using low reps and heavy weights. He’s even got his girlfriend deadlifting.

“But I don’t want to get big and bulky.”
Newsflash, ladies: You will not get “big and bulky” just because you’re doing squats and deadlifts. That statement is akin to me saying, “Eh, I don’t want to do any sprints today because I don’t want to win the 100m gold medal next week.” Getting big and bulky isn’t easy, just like winning the 100m gold medal isn’t easy.
If anything, it’s an insult to all those people who’ve spent years in the gym to look the way they do. It didn’t happen overnight, which is what you’re assuming by saying something so absurd.
And let’s be honest, most people (men and women) won’t work hard enough to get “big and bulky” in the first place. It’s hard enough for a man to put on any significant amount of muscle, let alone a woman. Women are physiologically at a disadvantage for putting on muscle due to the fact that they have ten times less free Testosterone in their bodies compared to men.
That being said, you still need to get the most bang out of your training buck, and that includes ditching the glute-buster machine and focusing more on the compound movements. Joe Dowdell, owner of Peak Performance in NYC, trains many of the top female models in the city and their programming includes squats, deadlifts, chin-ups, bench variations, sled dragging, and tons of energy system work.
Yes, Victoria’s Secret models are doing squats and deadlifts. And yes, that’s completely hot. Guess what they’re not doing? Watching Oprah every day while walking on the treadmill for 60 minutes.

It isn’t a rant on the evils of yoga, just on the lies that some yoga teachers attempt to pass off as fact and the impact that these notions have on how women work towards their fitness goals.

What I take out of it is that people will believe anything an “expert” tells them without so much as thinking about it. Anyone who suggests that deadlifting is not as good at building back strength as yoga has NEVER performed a single deadlift with their body weight.

If you want to look a particular way, do what people who look that way do. If you desire to be lean and have toned muscles, you’re going to need to work out intensely and lift a lot of weight.

My First Bulk

I got pretty sick at the beginning of November 2006 and when I went to the doctor, their preliminary test indicated that there was protein in my urine – a bad sign and an indication of kidney dysfunction. I got a second test a week later. I went to Toronto to see my doctor and when I left his office with the “all clear”, I sort of floated along College Street to Union station in a blurry happy fog. I was going to have the time to do all the things I thought I would be going without. It was a fantastic feeling.

That night I started planning my first bulk. For those who are not familiar with a bulk, it’s a body building term use to describe a period of deliberate over eating to force the body into a more anabolic state allowing it to create more muscle. It’s an approach with a long history and it is generally accepted that you need to hold your body in a caloric surplus state to facilitate growth.

At the beginning:
Before I started, my weight was 168 pounds and my body fat level was 10.4. My weight has been around 168 for the last 3 years, basically since I started mountain bike riding. There is a seasonal fluctuation in body fat, with it bottoming out at around 9% at the end of the summer. My goal was bulk for 3 or 4 months to try and get to 190 pounds with little consideration being given to my level of leanness.

It was going to be a clean bulk, which meant that I wasn’t going to be eating everything that I wanted. A lot of lifters will treat their bulk as a period of non-stop gorging and will eat foods that are very high in calories but not very high in nutrients. The goal of a clean bulk is to limit the amount of body fat that you gain while providing enough nutrients and energy to build dry lean body mass (actual muscle vs. water and glycogen stores).
I needed to create and maintain a caloric surplus. That meant that I had to drastically limit the amount of cardiovascular exercise that I did. This turned out to be the toughest part of it because I LOVE cardio – I race a mountain bike and love indoor cycling classes and find my bliss state when my heart rate hits 150. Unfortunately for me, I had to limit both the volume and intensity of my cardiovascular work. I did one or two sessions a week trying to keep my heart rate below 140 and my usual high intensity warm-up was scaled back to the same level.

The diet and food management:
I followed all of the rules that I have outline in the Newstasis.com weight management program with very few deviations. I would occasionally eat when I wasn’t hungry because I needed to ingest the calories. My daily calorie count went from about 2000 per day to about 3000 per day and my daily meal count went from 4 to 7 or 8, a meal every 2 to 3 hours usually right after my stomach emptied into my intestines.

My breakfast was always the same, 150 grams of oatmeal, 50 grams of whey protein powder, 50 grams of dextrose and 5 grams of creatine, all mixed with water and eaten within 15 minutes of waking up.

My post workout shake was always the same, 80 grams of sugar (dextrose and maltodextrin combination), 50 grams of whey protein and 5 grams of creatine, all mixed with water and I would start to drink it within 10 minutes of finishing my workout. It was the same regardless of the number of workouts I did in a day.

My first whole food meal after the gym was usually the same for my first workout of the day, whole-wheat toast with a smear of margarine, and scrambled eggs with sliced turkey. I would use 250 ml of egg whites and 1 whole egg. I would drink water with this meal.

The rest of the meals would contain either lots of carbohydrates or lots of essential fats, but NEVER both because the body will use carbohydrates for energy if they are available and, when fats are also present, the body will just store the fat. Fats consumed in the absence of carbohydrates will be utilized for immediate energy.

I drank 2-4 liters of water a day.

I consumed no alcohol for most of the bulk because alcohol suppresses growth hormone release. I was sacrificing so much that it didn’t seem to make any sense to me to slow my progress because of a couple of beers.

I would eat 150 grams of cottage cheese before bed to make sure my body had a long acting protein available throughout the night and I made Venom’s Protein bars to make sure I didn’t go to sleep hungry. I’m one of the few people I know who admits to eating in bed before falling asleep. Venom’s recipe offered a low GI carb option that tasted fairly good.

The workouts:
This was an over reaching program, one that had me doing way more volume than my normal routine. In hindsight this was too much work. It burned a lot of calories that could have gone to repair and muscle building but at the time, I didn’t feel like sacrificing workout time and enjoyment. I just replaced my cardio with resistance training. Some days have me working out three times and I was more than happy to do it most of the time although there were a couple of times when I got to the gym and knew I needed to skip the workout.

The workouts were shorter than usual, each about 45 minutes, and I did a lot of high intensity training methods to completely fatigue the muscles, like retraining a muscle group later on in the day and it was during this time that I discovered the concept of training movements and not body parts. All I all, it was an amazing program and I felt stronger and bigger with each workout – I bench pressed over 200 pounds for the first time in my life and finally broken the 20 rep mark with wide grip pull-ups (something I haven’t done since university). I learned a lot of biomechanics and how my body responds to exercise stress and movements. I also introduced plyometrics training and added skipping as a warm-up exercise.

The results:

They were fantastic! I broke the 180-pound mark on January 21^st with a body fat level of 11.4%; 50 days after starting the bulk. I gained about 9.5 pounds of lean body mass and a little over 2 pounds of body fat. I was very pleased with the results.

When I weighed myself today (March 6, 2007) I was 176 @ 10.6% body fat. That means that I have lost just less than 3 pounds of lean mass and almost 2 pounds of body fat.

Here are the numbers:

Nov 3, 06 Jan 21, 07 March 6, 07

Weight: 168.6 181 176

Body Fat: 10.5 11.4 10.6

Lean Mass: 150.9 160.3 157.3

Body Fat: 17.7 20.6 18.7

The toughest parts were not being able to do as much cardiovascular exercise as I wanted and all the extra eating I had to do. Human beings are state dependent creatures, so my body had adjusted to function effectively on ~2000 calories a day with 4 or 5 intense cardio sessions per week. When I started cramming in an extra 1000 calories of nutritionally sound foods, the body wasn’t used to them and it didn’t need them as it had found stasis with 2000 a day and some cardio, now it had to adjust to find stasis on 3000 with almost no cardio. I was forcing a caloric surplus of ~1500 calories through increased eating and decreased exercise. There were some digestive consequences to it and elimination frequency increased.

The best part of it was the feeling of gaining weight – I actually felt like there was more of me and that I was taking up more space on the planet. The workouts were awesome as well. They were both fun and all the volume I was doing meant that I needed to come up with some creative exercises to find new ways to attack the muscles. My favorite exercises to do were ISO leg press shrugs and wide grip platform dead lifts, two movements I had never done before.

I don’t think I’ll go on another bulk again because I don’t see the need for it. As a learning experience goes, I would recommend it, providing you are in good health and have your doctor’s approval. As a lifestyle, and that is what you have to make it to get the most out of it, I’d have a very hard time keeping up with it. There were times when I didn’t feel like eating and I have to force myself to eat. Plus, I missed working out the way I like, with intensity and my heart rate soaring.

25 Years, 25 Mistakes

25 Years, 25 Mistakes by Mike Boyle from T-nation

Most of the mistakes deal with weight lifting and physical training, but there are a few very good general life lessons in the list:

Mistake #14: Confusing disagree with dislike
I think it’s great to disagree. The field would be boring if we all agreed. What I realize now is that I’ve met very few people in this field I don’t like and many I disagree with. I probably enjoy life more now that I don’t feel compelled to ignore those who don’t agree with me.
Mistake #15: Confusing reading with believing
This concept came to me by way of strength coach Martin Rooney. It’s great to read. We just need to remember that in spite of the best efforts of editors, what we read may not always be true.
If the book is more than two years old, there’s a good chance even the author no longer agrees with all the information in it. Read often, but read analytically.
Mistake #16: Listening to paid experts
Early on, many of us were duped by the people from companies like Cybex or Nautilus. Their experts proclaimed their systems to be the future, but now the cam and isokinetics are the past. Just as in any other field, people will say things for money.

You don’t think his post applies to you? Read mistake 25.

6 Dumb Training Mistakes

Christian Thibaudeau from T-nation talks about 6 Dumb Training Mistakes

Dumb Thing #5: Misunderstanding “Overtraining”
If you ask me, “overtraining” is the most abused and misunderstood concept in the entire strength training community! Perform more than twelve sets for a muscle during a workout and you’ll undoubtedly be accused of overtraining. Train a muscle group more often than two times per week? Overtraining! Relying on set extending methods such as drop sets, pre or post-fatigue, or rest-pause? What are you doing? Don’t you know that’s overtraining and you’ll shrink faster than your masculine pride on a snowy Canadian winter night?!
Yes, overtraining can eventually become a problem when it comes to your training performance, injury risks, and growth. However, it’s far from being as common as most people would have you believe.
The problem stems from the term itself, which is composed of “over” and “training.” Because of that term, individuals are quick to equate it to “training too much.” So every time someone thinks that a routine has too much volume, frequency, or advanced methods, they’re quick to pull the “overtraining” trigger. When someone is tired and has a few bad workouts he’ll also automatically assume that he’s “overtraining.” In both cases this shows a misunderstanding of what overtraining really is.

In the post, he has a full description of the states of physiological fatigue associated with training too much and it includes an image outlining the type and amount of recovery time needed to return to a normal state. For this one item alone it is a fantastic article, but there are a few other mind opening ideas that make it a must read.