It's been a few hairy months, without no posts, so here's what's happening.
Breakfast on Iron Sundays. Don't judge me.
After some soul searching, mostly prompted by staring at Justin Lascek's dreamy quads on 70's Big, I had decided several things without informing my handful of readers:
1. No more rambling about Westside, 70s Big, and EliteFTS. Am I still reading them? Yes. Am I still programming my own training based on the bounty of information therein? Yes. Is re-posting all this information useful? No. The internet is already a giant echo chamber; it doesn't need me to do more of the same. You're all big kids now; you know where to go, and you can all read.
2. The only time I'm going to permit myself to post something is when it has legitimately helped myself or someone else attain a fitness goal. At present, I've got a few female trainees searching for that first pull-up, and myself and a few others are on a quest for raw totals (see below), so there are a few milestones in the wings.
3. I'm going to compete in a raw powerlifting event through 100% RAW Powerlifting Ontario next summer. This means I need at least 50lbs more on my squat, so for the foreseeable future, it's Squat City over at Oliphant's.
All three of these decisions have had an impact on my writing output. The fact that it's gone down is a good indication that my ass needs to spend more time achieving goals than writing about theoretical means of attaining them. With any luck, I'll pass some milestones soon, and you'll have a blog again.
Me: "Who the fuck uses a century-old Milo plate to replace a shitty mail-order York?"
Friend: "Uh, what?"
Me: "There's like 30 perfectly good non-irreplaceable plates stacked in a corner, and they're using the irreplaceable antiques to curl. TO CURL. I'm almost glad we don't have a squat cage, because if we did, they'd be curling in that. I swear, one of these days I'm going to walk into the bathroom and find a lost van Gogh being used as an ass rag."
Friend: "...um...that's...terrible?"
Me: "And I'm stuck restoring them. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to replicate early 1900s century rustproofing? DO YOU!? It's made out of driveway, mostly. The rest is just about equal parts of everything flammable and caustic in your garage thrown into an oven and baked for hours."
Pictured: The above conversation, 5 seconds in the future.
This has been going on for weeks.
For those that aren't aware, for the last few months, I've been working with a few dedicated individuals to restore Oliphant's Academy of Physical Culture, a historic gym in Toronto. How I came to be involved in such a project is a series of improbably coincidences that I will address in another post.
In the meanwhile, there are those damnable weights.
The gym is filthy with them.
For most of my time at Oliphant's the age of our barbells was a concern secondary to finding the weight you wanted to lift in a small sea of unorganized iron. That was until about a few weeks ago when, through correspondence with the author of The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban, I discovered the Iron History forums. Now, through correspondence with the lovely individuals of that forum (Joe, Reuben, Tim and Paul, my hat is off to you), I'm discovering that our barbells have a history that dates back to 1912.
This is a mixture of good, bad and ugly.
The Good
These barbells, dumbbells and plates are rarities, spanning from original 1912 pattern Milo barbells to the very first series of York plates ever produced. It's astonishing. Every time I bring out my handy collection of wrenches, I find a new bit of treasure.
The Bad
Until the Iron History boys identified them, no-one had any idea that this equipment was anything but old. For years, it was treated with what I imagine in my darker hours as everything short of outright contempt. The old boys brigade of the gym spent the last half century distributing antique plates throughout every set barbell and dumbbell in the gym. My morning ramble through the barbell sets has become an Easter-egg hunt fueled by my new-found obsession with historic weights and my apoplectic rage at having to uncrew, pry and sometimes chisel those antique plates from their rusty prisons.
The Ugly
I haven't seen so much rust and filth since my last trip through Buffalo. My co-conspirator in the task of restoring these weights, Stefanie, has thus far done most of the research for this (Stefanie, by the way, has a fantastic little web-store for handmade baby clothes. Visit it.). Her first major suggestion, EvapoRust, turned out to be the least horrific product in my arsenal, and possibly the most useful. If ever you need to remove lots of rust from anything without stripping away valuable metal, this stuff is utterly worth it. I've been using the same 5 liters of it for weeks now, and it steadfastly refuses to stop working. It is to rust what Jason Statham is to to un-punched faces.
This is what EvapoRust looks like to the suburbs of Buffalo.
In the future, however, I have nothing but lacquer stripper and awful, awful japanning to look forward to. Some bright mind in Oliphant's past covered many of the weights with gold spray-paint. For that, I've been using heavy-duty oven-cleaner. Here is how the process works:
Blast everything in sight with lye-based cleaner.
Put it all in a garbage bag and leave it overnight.
The next day anything that isn't iron or antique rustproofing should be a colorful mush that washes off with vinegar.
If you haven't inhaled the lye or gotten any on your skin (wear rubber gloves), congratulations! You've avoided a trip to the hospital.
The only thing the lye seems to leave untouched is the japanning, which we're going to get stuck removing with heavier solutions.
For those unfamiliar with the early 1900's, japanning was a process by which asphaltum, turpentine and a collection of other horrible substances were baked into metal to make it rust proof. Stefanie has been looking up recipes on how to do this without making either of our apartments smell like a road resurfacing project. More on that when our first package of asphaltum arrives.
So there's my angry little synopsis of my restoration work.
Go lift something.
Newly Restored Oliphant Plates
The bottle behind them contains EvapoRust,
now black with the souls of murdered rust.
I had a detailed daydream about a mountain-side monastery where everyone did Olympic lifts. It was snowing. Jon North was there, meditating, and then Glenn Pendlay walked up to him, dressed in a hooded robe and asked 'Are you having the dreams again?'.
I think this is a good time to have a deload week.
As some of you might know, I presently occupy space at Oliphant's Academy of Physical Culture, Toronto's oldest continually running gym. The gym's original founder, William Oliphant, was a very well respected mind in the weightlifting community for nearly half a century, rubbing shoulders with Joe Weider and York Barbell's Bob Hoffman.
Lately, I've gotten so wrapped up in percentages of 1RM, Prilepin's table and periodization that I feel I've neglected to mention an important part of designing a strength and conditioning program: being an asshole.
Allow me to elaborate.
Developing a program shouldn't revolve around destroying the athlete with every workout. Not that workouts should ever be easy, but there are diminishing returns for workouts of excessive volume. It's disingenuous to simply prescribe workloads that outstrip the athletes capability. Plus, once you've ground their recovery ability into the dirt, what use is an athlete that can't participate in any activity outside their strength and conditioning program?
However, every now and again, there's room to be an absolute jerk.
Today, I came across this:
That's Ido Portal, more monkey than man, teaching a troop of like-minded monkey men (and women). I was inspired. Which means that this Friday's workout is going to involve some quadrupedal movement. Forwards, backwards and sideways. Sprinting. This isn't the kind of thing that will hurt anyone, but if you've ever sprinted on all fours, you know it pretty much sucks.
Will the average participant ever need to move sideways, on all fours, at top speed? Probably not. Will this carry over to any other form of athleticism? Maybe. Kinda. I guess.
The point is, I don't care. It's going to be hard. It's going to be ridiculous and lots of participants are going to be frustrated and exhausted. The value of the exercise is precisely that.
It's easy to get comfortable doing things you're competent at. We want to get competent at things, which is why we spend the majority of our time doing things that matter, like squatting and deadlifting. However, not all of life is as predictable as a set of 45lb plates and an Olympic bar. Learning new movements, and dealing with sucking at them, is just part of life.
I've had a chance to read over 'FIT', the brainchild of Lon Kilgore, Michael Hartman, and Justin Lascek of 70's Big. Fit is a manual that attempts to cover all aspects of the fitness world, encompassing strength, conditioning, endurance and mobility. It's full of templates and explanations, and tries to tie it all in according to the individual athlete's needs.
Since it's my primary area of interest, I was happy to find a relatively coherent guide to combining strength and conditioning. Special care was indeed taken to building programs that make sense for individual athletes. Instead of lumping everyone into a single category, a la CrossFit, FIT provides programs for complete beginners, the strong but unconditioned, the conditioned but weak, the young, the old and a multitude of various combinations of physical attributes. For a guy like me, in his 30s and concerned that his conditioning is passable but his strength is stalling, it has some decent advice (have a strength program, for example, instead of an ad-hoc strength workout whenever CrossFit HQ calls for it, and maybe limit yourself to one lift per workout). There's multiple shout-outs to the Wendler 5-3-1 system that I've been using for the last six months, which of course makes me feel special and loved. Also included are good write-ups and pictorials on the major lifts, conditioning and assistance exercises, plus some added mobility work.
The Cons:
Some of the methods in the book seem a bit harder to connect, as sometimes the terminology feels inconsistent. When combining different volumes of lifting with conditioning, I feel the book takes a little more work than it should. With half a brain, you can figure out what the authors are asking you to do, but for those that need everything spelled out for them, having to cross-reference several charts to build a program might be daunting. Fortunately for those people, there are several preset programs included. What's also missing is a method of planning metabolic conditioning circuits (met-cons) that meet the recommended time requirements. How do you go about programming a five minute met-con workout? There are a few templates, but addressing issues of loading and rep schemes and how they will effect the time component is noticeably absent (more on this below).
What Now:
If reading a book hasn't changed the way you do things, reading it was probably a waste of time (it happens). So here's what has changed for me:
1. Adding max rep components for basic exercises. The 10 reps across 3 sets metric made me realize my programming was falling short for pull-ups and dips and other assorted exercises.
2. I'm still trying to find a way to program the perfect met-con. As I mentioned above, FIT calls for met-cons to be either in the 5 minute or the 10 minute range. This isn't the first time I've heard of this limitation, as both the irreverent Outlaw CrossFit and CrossFit Football both follow a similar guideline. I'm pretty good at
'guesstimating' what should fall into that range, but the scientist in me wants a concrete formula I can test against reality. Digging into 600+ posted workouts and results to gather evidence for this task gets annoying pretty fast, so I can forgive the 'FIT' crew for not having a shake-and-bake solution ready for us. In the words of Uncle Drywall: 'If you think reading the comments section makes you dumber, try mining it for data. Fuck. '
On a final note, Lascek himself just did a post on Prilepin's Chart, and I'm just going to go right ahead and tell myself I was partially responsible for that. Let me have my moment of misplaced self-importance, people. Seriously though, Lascek has been nothing but helpful with his Q&A sessions, so not only is FIT a fantastic resource, it's authors aren't sitting on their laurels; they're an active resource for anyone interested in strength and conditioning.
What part of 'backup quarterback' do you not understand?
Some of you may have come here from 'parse, dammit!', so know what this is all about. For those of you who have just arrived here out of the blue, here's what's going on:
Somehow, between my school years and now, I went from being the kid who got picked last in gym class to something of a strength and conditioning nerd. I now help run things over at Annex Fitness, a training group in downtown Toronto, where I fully intend to run horrific experiments on all involved.
This is where I will be dump all my various observations, as well as musings on all things chalk, mud and iron.
I need help collecting some data for an experiment. The goal is to predict 1 Rep Max performance for Bench Press and Squat using body weight movements. There are several studies that have already done this, but I've run my numbers through them, and have found them to be inaccurate.
Here is what I need from my participants:
Body Weight
Workout A Maximum Bench Press Weight
Workout A Maximum Squat Weight
Workout B Recorded pushups / interval
Workout B Recorded squats / interval
Body Weight
You will record your body weight. Since the workouts occur within a fairly small space of time, I don't really care when the weight was recorded during the experiment, as your weight will shift by a couple of pounds based on stuff like hydration and bowel movements.
Workouts
You will perform 4 workouts, consisting of two squat based workouts and two bench press based workouts, defined as 'Workout A' and 'Workout B'. This means you will do 'Bench Press A', 'Bench Press B', 'Squat A' and 'Squat B' to complete the whole experiment.
Workout A: Finding 1 Rep Max
You will have 3 attempts to find out the heaviest weight you can lift to completion in the respective exercise. Do not perform without a spotter. You can use whatever warm-up scheme you want. You can rest as long as you want between attempts. Aim for big weights, but don't succumb to hubris: if you've always wanted to bench 300, but never have, three failed 300s just add up to one big zero.
Workout B: Finding Bodyweight Reps / Time
This will be done at least 72 hours after Workout A, and preferably no more than 96 hours after Workout A.
You will need a partner to time and keep record of your reps.
You will be performing PERFECT unweighted squats or pushups, in the intervals listed below, by the standards listed below, for maximum reps. Go as FAST as you can for the entire minute. Don't worry so much about the total at the end: though we record for a minute, the focus is on maximal effort, and that means you go for broke from the beginning, even if this means your minute total will be lower. If you need to rest at any point, rest, especially if continuing would result in uncountable reps.
Your partner will record the number of reps completed at ten second intervals. Thus there will be 6 numbers recorded:
Total reps at 0:10
Total reps at 0:20
Total reps at 0:30
Total reps at 0:40
Total reps at 0:50
Total reps at 0:60
If your partner can't keep track of a clock and your reps, recording the whole workout with a camera or a phone might make things easier.
Like Workout A, you will get 3 attempts at this. Please note that since you are entering into muscular endurance territory, your performance will likely degrade after the first round: the other two rounds are in there in case something went wrong with the first one (timing issues, uncontrollable flatulence, etc.)
Standards
These are inviolable. I don't care what Chad/Karen at 'Body-Pump' thinks are acceptable push-ups or squats, you WILL do the motion as indicated by the standards below, or the experiment results will be USELESS. If you violate these rules, I will expose you to venomous animals at inappropriate and embarrassing times.
Squat standards
For weighted squats, only barbells, positioned on the back are permitted. No exceptions will be made for any type of machine or apparatus.
Barbell position (high bar/low bar) is left to participant discretion.
You must go past parallel. This means that the crease of your hip must be lower than the top of your knee at the bottom part of the motion. This applies to both the weighted squat and the air squat. If you regularly do 'ass to grass' squats, this is also fine.
You must fully extend your hips at the top of the motion and 'lock out' the rep.
Pushup/Bench press standards
This is a barbell exercise. No exceptions will be made for any type of machine or apparatus.
The weight/floor must touch your chest. In the bench press, the bar must touch your chest at the bottom of the motion. In the pushup, your chest must touch the floor.
You must fully extend your arms at the top of the motion and 'lock out' the rep.
In the pushup, you must maintain a full plank position: your hips, shoulders and feet should all form a straight line, and this line should not change during each rep.
If you are doing push-ups from the knee, you are to note this. In this case, the plank must ensure that your hips, shoulders and knees are in a line.
Result Submission
Post questions and results to the comments, or contact me personally.
My unhealthy fascination with the Prilepin table led me to fire off a question to Justin Lascek of 70s Big. Check out the resulting Q&A here. At the risk of sounding more Canadian: thanks Justin!
OK, so 'table' isn't a verb that makes any sense in this context and while Prilepin may be from communist Russia, he doesn't even have a wikipedia entry to his name. Why would I waste your time butchering the English language and talking about obscure communists? The reason starts with Alexander Sergeyevitch Prilepin being a furious number cruncher. This alone doesn't find a way to my heart, as I view statistics with the same less-than-quiet loathing I reserve for dubstep and Australian wildlife. What validates Prilepin's number crunching is that he presided over the junior and senior men's weightlifting teams in the USSR between 1975 and 1985, when those teams were remarkably dominant.
While he lived, none dared mock Vasily Alexseyev's choice of singlet.
If you want someone to blame for keeping the memory of the USSR's dominance in weightlifting alive, it might just be Louie Simmons, whom I mentioned in Polar Bears, who has been successfully using Prilepin's numbers to produce his own batch of hormonally-manipulated North American supermen. Theories, studies, and formulas regarding training are as easy to produce as they are to market. If they weren't, Men's Fitness wouldn't have a monthly publication cycle. Achievements like those of Westside Barbell and the USSR's weightlifting team are harder to come by. So when they share a methodology, chances are they might be on to something.
Dave Tate. Like the ubiquity of the AK-47, a terrifying example of
what happens when Russia stockpiles something horrible and then loses control of it.
What Prilepin and Louie discovered was that when it came to getting stronger, speed was king. Between two very different barbell sports, while the weight was important, it was the speed of bar in training that would dictate the difference between a made or a missed big lift. In Olympic lifts, speed makes the lifts possible: without the momentum of a fast initial pull, the bar will travel no further than the athlete's hips. In powerlifting, while the big single reps that define competition may seem slow, the Conjugate Training method employed at Westside has a definite need for speed. This method splits it's training days between max effort and dynamic effort days. On a max effort day, weights approach their one rep max and up. On a dynamic effort day, the poundage is dropped to 50-60% percent of their maximum lift, and the focus is put on moving the bar as fast as humanly possible. The sets and repetitions on either day at Westside are based on those that Prilepin outlined in the following table:
Prilepin noted that outside of the number of repetitions per set in the table, training with a particular weight would either produce substandard results by either not providing enough volume (not enough reps to produce gains) or by impacting the speed of the lifts (at too many reps, the speed of the lift would suffer).
Following the scheme produced world records in the USSR and at Westside.
So what, you ask, does that have to do with me? I'm assuming at this point that you're not an elite level powerlifter intent on cycling steroids and whey powder until you can throw around small cars, and that you don't have a closet full of chalk-infused singlets. Is Prilepin's table applicable outside the domain of people who have more neck-meat than some bears? Well, the way I actually ran into the Prilepin table is through following Justin Lascek, one of the founders of the incredible 70s Big, and his contemporary, Rudy Nielsen of Outlaw CrossFit. Justin is a Bachelor of Science, and while I can't find any info on Rudy's schooling, his methodical approach to discovering good training methodologies qualifies him as a scientist in my mind.
Pictured: Scientists
What caught my attention in particular was Rudy's definition of the Limited Conjugate Method he outlines in The Outlaw Way. This is not just a coach from one of the thousands of CrossFit franchises that put their own spin on Glassman's anarchic hopper model of fitness, this is a coach that has consistently put his athletes into the CrossFit games by not doing CrossFit. In fact, I'm now absolutely jealous that Rudy has a gym population large and trusting enough for him to experiment on, especially since he does exactly that. Case in point, he's compared populations of athletes who are doing something similar to the Wendler 5-3-1 program I'm using, to athletes doing his Limited Conjugate training. The results, by the way, went wholly towards Conjugate Method. I'd be jumping off my Wendler 5-3-1 program based on that, but you don't gain experience in a program by refusing to commit to it; for better or worse, it's Wendler for at least a few months more. While I do that, I'm glued to Rudy's blog, watching as his athletes climb into the top 40 spots in this year's CrossFit Open.
So we've now seen the Prilepin table show up across three different sports, each dedicated to different domains of fitness (or if you believe CrossFit's line, all of them). This rings some seriously loud alarm bells in my mind, and it should be doing the same for yours.
For those who will wonder about the constant 'Polar Bears' references in the text to follow, in one of my places of employment prior to graduating university, there was a room marked exactly that. There are very few people who know what it contained. You will not be one of them.
Tracy Anderson is useless.
Yesterday, I had finished the last cycle of my Wendler 5-3-1 and was feeling fairly good at having laid to bed my last deadlifts. I went home, and in the process of searching for an e-book version of 'Black Powder Red Earth', I was somehow smart-advertised into seeing Tracy Anderson's newest abomination: her 'Metamorphosis' DVDs.
I ran out of pictures of Lovecraftian horrors, so here's Tracy Anderson with current client Paltrow and ex-client Madonna.
I've seen Tracy before, and every time I do, I feel the same primal, mammoth-slaughtering rage, and I'm not alone. What I'm going to attempt to do in this blog post is to dial that rage back down into a simmer, and see if there's a silver lining to her existence.
When I set out to write this blog, one of the guidelines I gave myself was to always have something useful in every post. This would prevent me from entering the realms of self-congratulatory preening or the useless negativity that seems to inhabit a good deal of the internet. This is not meant to be an editorial blog. It is meant to provide either solutions or a transparent look into the problem solving processes.
Earlier in my career, I stumbled into a research project that resulted in a conference paper presented by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. This was a happy accident: what was meant to be a simple task in scraping HTML turned into a natural language processing problem (to the non-nerdy: I had to teach a computer how to read). Before the paper was even possible, there was a great deal of trial and error involved. The problem I was addressing remains unsolved to this day, and in the process of trying to find a 'better than nothing' solution, I powered through method after method that produced zero results. Like Thomas Edison's fabled failures with the lightbulb, I scrapped many different methods, some of them novel, and others from publications that swore up and down that they worked. Sifting through these methods, I remarked that we could have written a paper about what didn't work. What I didn't know at the time was that everyone in any field of research vocalizes that exact same thought sometime in their career. It's like the 'Aristocrats' of the science world.
But with less Gilbert Gottfried.
Unfortunately, due to publication bias, even though such journals do in fact exist, they aren't nearly on the same level as bigger players in the game. Positive results sell. Negative results get thrown into a rusted filing cabinet in the room marked 'Polar Bears'. If I was following the journal model, I wouldn't touch Tracy Anderson with your 10 foot fitness pole. But this is a blog. I can publish whatever I want, with relative impunity.
I answer to no man.
Tracy Anderson has not produced many first round draft picks for the NFL. This may seem irrelevant; her flailing, low-impact cardio program (whatever that even means) isn't designed around producing an athlete, it mostly seems to revolve around generating Gwyneth Paltrows.
I can't even fit a decent caption under this ridiculousness.
This becomes relevant because a good indicator of the quality of a training program is in the kind of people it produces. Of the fitness programs I have respect for, there are a lot of bones of contention. Take the more tattooed, stronger and scarier Simmons, Louie of Westside Barbell, for example. Louie is a regular consultant for UFC fighters, rugby players and 4 NFL teams and uses a fairly well thought-out plan called the conjugate method, which is steeped in heavy powerlifting. In the same territory Simmons, however, we find Marv Marinovich. Marv, as far as his promo material would lead me to believe, eschews the barbell altogether to train people with a combination of plyometrics, bosu balls and Voodoo. In his roster: a UFC fighter, NFL players and other national level athletes.
Both Marv and Louie produce top level athletes. Neither agrees on anything. You could either spend your days trolling internet chat-rooms, getting into arguments on whether or not Polamalu is better off for having Marinovich in his camp or just sticking to his 600lb squat...
Fun fact of the day: for several nanoseconds of every Steelers defensive play, Polamalu exists simultaneously on every point of the field.
...but you would be wasting valuable time you could be using to train. That doesn't mean you couldn't find a better better way to train. It just means that both Marv and Louie offer replicable ways to significantly increase performance. It might be that some newfangled methodology might create a frightening superhuman capable deadlifting a thousand pounds and beating Rondel Melendez in the 40-yard dash, but for the majority of athletes, the promise of being a Polamalu is beyond satisfactory.
What's helpful and somewhat comforting to remember with the top being fought over by varied theories on fitness, is that thanks to Tracy Anderson, we have a VERY good idea of what doesn't work. She has produced Gwyneth Paltrow. I could go on and on about how utterly deranged the media's idea of female proportions is, but I'll just leave it at this: Paltrow is sick. Very literally. She has been diagnosed with osteopenia and remarkably low vitamin D levels, which was discovered after a leg fracture. Considering her appalling appearance, I wouldn't be surprised if this is to be followed by a plethora of other health problems. The same way Marv and Louie produce some of the fittest athletes in the world, Tracy has succeeded in taking a healthy individual (and the vanguard of her media campaign) and has ground her into the dirt. I'm very upset at this, and very upset that I had to actually read this in Daily Mail, doubly so because it required me to read the stupidity in the article and the Daily Mail. What made it worth reading through was the content of Tracy's regime:
Daily weigh-ins
90-180 minute workouts, 6 days a week.
700 Calories a day and less than 50 grams of protein.
No lifting anything over 3lbs.
This reads like pure nightmare fuel to me (confirmation bias alert), but it's important. I could go into the medical and psychological details of what this is believed to do to one's body and mind, but I think the broken bones and sickly appearance do the talking for me: we know that this doesn't work. This is important, because it fills our 'Polar Bear' cabinet with a valuable lesson without actually having to become a hip-fracture victim. Tracy has already done that for us at the cost of her client's health.
So there's your silver lining. I haven't fired off a 1000-word vitriolic screed. As angry as I am, I can just take Tracy Anderson's awful training methodology and file it in the cabinet with Zumba and the Shake Weight.
If you don't on occasion look at something heavy and wonder 'can I lift that?' then I think a part of you is dead. As a general rule, I view most playground challenges as worthwhile endeavors. 'Can I jump over that?', 'Can I climb that?', 'Can I catch you?'. You don't outgrow those challenges: you abandon them, and you do so to your own detriment. I've come to my own conclusions about societies that allow their adults to limit their development by trading scraped knees for desk posture, but that's a screed for another time.
I'll be back for you, desk jockey.
This is about barbells. More accurately, it's about lifting heavy things, and where barbells fit into that picture.
Lifting heavy things is hardly a new development. Australopithecus Afarensis used tools 3.9 million years ago, and if our present drives and motivations have been evolutionarily conserved, shortly after wielding the first rock to make cave-burgers out of the slowest available animal, A. afarensis went looking for a bigger rock.
Old habits die hard.
Neolithic societies would erect megalithic structures such as monuments, without the benefit of Fred Flintstone's brontosaurus crane, indicating that a certain degree of brute force must have been necessary. With the forklift and crane still prohibitively non-existent for thousands of years, and with labor saving devices such as the lever and the inclined plane still requiring a liberal application of elbow grease, manual labor would be in vogue for centuries to come. The transition from moving stones as a necessity to moving stones for the purposes of exercise must have happened somewhere between then, and when the Ancient Greeks started to curiously shaped stones called Halteres to aid in training for Olympic events.
Wrap this up in pink vinyl, and you have TV retail potential.
What is interesting about these implements is that even this early in the development of the barbell, we see concessions made to accommodate the human hand. Rarely, if ever, in nature do we see objects of heavy weight with such convenient hand holds: tree branches are easy to grip, but not extremely weighty, logs are either devoid of grip or complicated by its inclusion (ever have the pointy end of a cut branch jam into your tender bits while moving a log?) and stones are, at best, huggable.
They pick things up, and then they put them down.
Why the desire to switch to something that could be easily gripped, versus something harder? Things that are harder to lift should be more challenging, and hence better for to train with, shouldn't they? If all we had to move in the ancient world was tree trunks, auroch carcasses and stones, this would be true, but our dexterous grip strength would no doubt benefit our prowess with tools like hammers, axes, swords and eventually the pinnacle of close-quarters weaponry, the chainsaw. In addition, activities such as wrestling and climbing placed a premium on that same strength.
For hundreds of years, weight training would continue with a haphazard array of implements, owing to the fact that every industry in existence was less of an industry and more of a one-of-a-kind show. Halteres-like doodads would sit alongside weighted shoes, swinging clubs and the big f--king rock.
When the industrial revolution began to make standardization a part of life, lifting implements began to follow suit and the modern barbell began to take shape. The late 19th century, barbells appeared and would be mass produced by a number of different companies, including Berg Hantel, The Milo Barbell Company and York Barbell. Early models would either have hollow spheres on either end, to be loaded with sand or shot, or plates which could be attached by various mechanisms.
You couldn't rock sandals this hard if you tried.
Eventually, the plate-loading model won out due to ease of use, and a standardizing force in the shape of the Olympic games would solidify a peculiar development: the revolving barbell. The Olympic committee would eventually come to recognize only three lifts: the press, the clean and jerk, and the snatch. Eventually, the press would be retired, only leaving two. Much later, in the 1950s, powerlifting developed as a sport in its own right, focusing on the deadlift, the squat and the bench press.
Why would this turn out to be the case? Why these lifts and these implements? Take the clean as an example:
Mock Donny's singlet, and you're mocking a Marine Corps veteran.
Good luck with that.
In a clean, the barbell travels in as close to a vertical line as it can, and this line is perpendicular to the ground, and directly aligned with your center of balance. If you do not heed this path, your lift will fail or fall short of your potential. Either way, Mark Rippetoe will yell at you.
I can see your skeleton, and it is humerus.
Failing due to not following this path is largely due to the intersection of physics and physiology. If I clean 180kg at a bodyweight of 105kg (possible, if I was Donny Shankle) basic physics and physiology says I have a limited range of weight and leverage in which to play. Outside of that range of values, pulling on the bar will result in me falling forward more than the bar leaving the ground. The barbell makes this procedure remarkably easy due to the fact that the cross-section your body deals with is minimal in size, reducing to a minimum that amount of movement needed to accommodate it. This doesn't parse easily, so it's probably best to just show Derek Poundstone lifting things:
He picks things up and then he puts them down.
The atlas stone performs roughly the same task as the clean: it brings a mass from the ground to your shoulders. The stone presents an immediate problem in that there's no convenient way to hold it. Remember the Halteres? Remember the hugging? Here it is again. Furthemore, unlike the convenient starting height of the barbell, the stone requires a grip much closer to the ground, increasing the distance needed to go from the ground to your shoulder. Ignoring the issue of grip, were Poundstone to lift it in the same manner as one would clean, several hundred pounds of concrete would stall at his crotch. In order to complete the lift, he needs to shift his body around the stone as it rises, so that it stays balanced above his feet. The same limitations stemming from human physiology and physics that govern success in the deadlift apply here as well, but the body has a much larger volume to contend with in the stone. Do you think a stone lift requires different neural firing patterns and muscular adaptation? It most certainly does. I'm not even going to go into the fact that Olympic bars have bearings in them
No, I lied. I'm going to discuss rotating barbells. If you've ever cleaned or attempted to clean a barbell that doesn't have bearings, or has bearings that are remarkably crappy, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about: in order to clean it, you're going to have to let go of it. Mid clean. Either that, or you will have to develop untold of wrist strength. The reason why is simple: the shift from the knuckle-down position you lifted the bar with from the ground, to the palm-up position you've ended up in requires you to twist the barbell 270 degrees. The rotating barbell has bearings which isolate the bar from the weights, which means you only twist 45lbs, whereas a solid barbell would have you twist the entire weight.
What I'm getting at, after discussing all the minutia of the standard barbell and the clean is that it is an intensely contrived tool, designed to lift weight. Rarely outside of a gym will you find something that wants to be lifted as much as a barbell. Many things possible with the barbell are impossible or made remarkably difficult without it. Anyone who has tried to lift a 155lb concrete-filled tube will attest that it's an entirely different experience from lifting the same weight on an Olympic bar. But who would do such a thing?
Who indeed.
And why would you do such a thing? Because rarely outside of a gym will you find something that wants to be lifted as much as a barbell. Think of any heavy piece of furniture you have ever lifted. Think of having to carry someone on your shoulders. Think of moving a pile of lumber. Though the same principles of lifting apply to these objects as they do to a barbell, the skills required to do so are different, and should be attended to in their own right. Unless the barbell is the only large heavy object you intend to lift (and this excludes the Donny Shankles of the world, who have in fact dedicated themselves to that sport) you should consider the other large heavy objects of the world and what they have to offer.
At Dana-Farber, they're injecting mice with hormones to reproduce the effects of exercise without actual exercise. "...as growing evidence implicates obesity and physical inactivity in cancer development, it’s conceivable irisin-based drugs may have value in prevention and treatment of the disease". So, they've spent countless research dollars and work hours to produce a treatment that simulates something that everyone could be doing for free.
This is a band-aid solution. The issue is not that people don't get enough exercise, it's that they already have the tools with which to fix the problem, and due to laziness or ignorance, they do not utilize them. This will be a bail-out of human health and more importantly of human character.
The good news is, for those of us with the desire to see ourselves strong and healthy, there's John Welbourn (who I got the story from), Mark Sisson and hundreds of other fitness resources for those of us who don't want or need to half-ass our lives.
Bear with me now, there's going to be talk of weights, CrossFit in-jokes, and people with necks larger than your waist. The barbell will appear, again and again, and you will come to loath it, but I promise there's science in here somewhere. Not a lot, but there needs to be a basis for things I intend to post in the future.
On September 16, 2008, I started a journey into the bewildering world of strength and conditioning.
Until that date, I lived running between a muay thai gym and places like this:
It was 2008 and if you were here, you were being saturated with untold hours of Lady Gaga.
I had always suspected that something was terribly wrong with the mainstream fitness world ('Kru Pete, why is student who looks so jacked hitting like little girl?') and unfortunately, it took the movie 300 to explain that to me. I watched that movie before it came out in theaters, in theaters and then when I bought it on DVD. During their marketing campaign, they released a video detailing the training regime of their Spartan army. I liked working out, and I loved the movie, so I watched. The actors for 300 had trained at Gym Jones, an athletic training facility run by the angry and uncompromising Mark Twight. After seeing them flipping tires and doing pullups, I started a web search that would only be equaled by the Map of Rock. A quick round of internet hopscotch landed me in the world of CrossFit, a glorious mess of functional fitness, internet trolling and board shorts.
Not shown: Wolf and Rippetoe 'Do Not Admit' poster.
My first CrossFit workout was called 'Diane', a delightful little non-stop romp of handstand push-ups and deadlifts. I did it solo, with little instruction, reduced weight for the deadlifts and a less-than-adequate idea of what it would do to me. My friend Roy, a former bodybuilder, a sparring partner and the guy who taught me my first lifts, watched me with great amusement, proclaiming gleefully 'Your ATP is depleted, man.'. Indeed it was; for at least an hour afterwards, I could describe the post-workout feelings as 'symptoms'. Ordinarily, that would have been sufficient. After all, how else do you know if a workout was great? It's all about being 'pumped', 'exhausted' and 'jacked', isn't it? Until that point, that was the way of things for me. However, prior to doing the workout, I had watched this:
That's Annie and Pat, doing the same workout. Pat finished in 3:01. My final time was somewhere in the 14 minute range, lifting less weight. He did more work in roughly a fifth of the time.
That's pretty much the definition of power: how much work you can do over a given amount of time. Greg Glassman, the founder and Steve Jobs-like architect of the CrossFit movement has even gone so far as to include the formula for power into his course materials.
This one's for my homies teaching high-school physics
Probably as accurate a measure of performance as you could ask for. It's not ideal: We're not all a convenient, homogeneous population. I could argue that Pat and I don't have the same physical size and proportions, but I might as well be complaining that the 100m dash is an invalid discipline because we don't hack off extraneous leg length.
What is important is that CrossFit had metrics, standards, and results, which they published until we all kind of got sick of them. They weren't just their results, tucked behind conveniently obfuscating graphs and massaged data points: the experiments (the workouts) could be reproduced almost anywhere where gym rats had access to the same gear. Add to that the fact that they embraced the barbell, the exercise tool that knows no death and can be found just about anywhere sweat meets the floor, and you almost have no reason to not replicate the CrossFit experiment. The choice of the barbell as a standard might be one of the smartest moves Glassman ever made.
Back to my shitty Diane time: now I had something to compare myself to. I was awash with possibilities. My time spent weight training would not be in a vacuum devoid of any indicators of progress. Of course, when I was lifting weights before, I had progress indicators, too. However, most of those involved looking in a mirror and searching for abs. Someone will likely read this and say 'I'm glad you're not taking cell-phone pictures of your abs in the bathroom, but you shouldn't compare your performance to other people either; your body is a deeply personal experience, not a number'. Well, you should take your mush-headed, Che Guevara-shirt-wearing horseshit elsewhere, hippy. Step aside for science.
Again with the digression. My shitty Diane time was single data point that got me hooked. There's data everywhere. CrossFitters aren't the only people obsessed with data, and they've come very late to the game. Thanks to the power of the internet, world records for any number of disciplines can be found online: max deadlifts (1,015 lbs), 5km runs (12:51.21), high jumps (2.38m). There's fitness requirements for countless military units (want to be an active member of JTF2? Better run 800 meters in under 2:30). What's of particular interest to me is how these different metrics interact with each other.
Do they interact? Yes they do. Many of them are at odds with each other.
Doyle Kenady lifted weights that would make your feeble god cry. His marathon finishes: not so much.
What you will quickly discover is that training to develop these numbers is not as straightforward as the pure power I mentioned above, because in the mysterious world of human performance, one plus one does not immediately appear to equal two. Power doesn't go right out the window when applied to real world disciplines, but it does take some sudden turns. Take, for example two very different athletes: Doyle Kenady and Takahiro Sunada. Kenady's world record deadlift, which moved a 405kg barbell over roughly 0.4m, resulting in 1636 N•m of work over a period of roughly 2 seconds which puts his average power over those two seconds at roughly 801 Watts. Takahiro Sunada completed the IAAF 100km running race with a world record time of 6:13:33. Since the precise details of terrain, wind resistance and runner weight are a little more difficult to ascertain, we'll use the generous upper limit of 370 Watts that can be maintained by a human being for hours at a time (S. Vogel, Comparative Biomechanics: Life's Physical World 2003) (See what happens when you don't have an accurate means to measure? Sloppy bullshit like that. Bad me). Plug that into your work formula and do some basic algebra and Sunada has done an astonishing 8,292,810 N•m of work. Kenady is the clear winner by power and I'm not a scientist (wait, yes, I am) but I'm going to take a wild guess that he's not only shitty at ultra-marathons, but that he might accidentally inhale other marathoners on the course. If you rate them by work, Sunada comes out ahead, but I'll put down money that says his deadlift isn't all that hot.
Sunada, moments after a baseball to the middle of his back. Yes, this is the best shot I could find.
Does this mean Kanady is fitter than Sunada, or vice versa? No. It means Kanady is a better powerlifter and Sunada is a better long distance runner.
The way our bodies handle different tasks is why these two athletes are remarkably different. That's because heavy lifts rely entirely on denser bones and fast twitch muscle fibers, while running is reliant on slow twitch muscle fibers and VO2 max. To top it off, believe it or not, both running and powerlifts are actually skills. That big jock deadlifting in the weight-room isn't just stronger than you: his nervous system has developed a solid-state circuit dedicated to lifting that barbell to waist height and putting it back down. That runner on the track that actually makes a hissing noise as he displaces air doesn't just burn oxygen more efficiently: his stride is a practiced clockwork mechanism (runners with crappy technique usually get weaned out by injury earlier in their careers).
So there's different domains of performance, and it's not just a case of endurance vs. strength. Some areas of performance have requirements that turn our problem space into a playground of factors. An NFL player can be expected to not only exert a tremendous amount of strength, they must do it repeatedly, in varied directions, in changing circumstances, play after play. The average play is 4 seconds long, with roughly 40 seconds of rest. May your gods help you if you're dealing with a no huddle offense. This is very different from the needs of the dedicated lifters that football players share their weight-rooms with. Powerlifters work very intensely for a few seconds but have minutes of rest between efforts. Yet, the two types of athlete undoubtedly share a great deal of training methodology.
Brian Urlacher taking a break from his fearsome Zumba schedule to see what this whole 'Olympic Lifting' thing is all about.
A track runner would seem to want to have nothing to do with weightlifting at all: they run in events that vary between 10 and 45 seconds. Yet Barry Ross built world records on top of bench presses and deadlifts, and we're suddenly in the weight room again. Even out of the weight room, the similarities don't stop: people routinely compare the 40-yard dash times of NFL players to 100-meter world records (hint: it's scary close).
What about other athletes? The Olympic training center in Lake Placid is home to scores of athletes in dozens of varied disciplines and has dedicated facilities for such esoteric pursuits as luge and bobsled starts. But every athlete still shows up for training sessions in a tiny room that looks like this:
Weights, squat cages, boxes... whoever designed this clearly doesn't understand the importance of space to Zumba.
What I'm getting at is that the lowly barbell is one of many tools that show up an uncomfortable amount in sports that are seemingly unrelated. It may not be the only way to train, or even a principal component of training: there's alternatives and compliments like plyometrics, gymnastics, whatever the hell Marv Marinovich is selling, etc., but the barbell is an attractive standard to quantify and evaluate. It provides us with replicability; the comfortable idea that a 225lb deadlift in California is the same as a 225lb deadlift in Lake Placid. All this starts to make the barbell sound an awful lot like a piece of lab equipment. Except less expensive. In a lab where scientists wear board shorts. Or singlets. So much cooler.
