Ye Olde Barbell

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.

From My Soap Box

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.

How Eerily Prescient

This just showed up on my interweb:

Moments after posting about containerization, and a mere 3 days after mentioning the standardizing effect of the barbell.

Apples, Oranges, Deadlifts and Watts

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.

More on math, and why I'm entirely wrong later...

If you're planning to get old, you'd better plan to be strong.

From the minds that brought you 'Starting Strength', here's why you need to get under a barbell before it's too late.