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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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...
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 |
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. |
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| Sunada, moments after a baseball to the middle of his back. Yes, this is the best shot I could find. |
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. |
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:
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| Weights, squat cages, boxes... whoever designed this clearly doesn't understand the importance of space to Zumba. |
More on math, and why I'm entirely wrong later...
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