I did my “Little 6” workout at around noon on Sunday. I am in the middle of a string of evening shifts at the ER and it has been very busy. As such, I made it a point to terminate each set immediately at the onset of failure. This turned out to be a good strategy as I feel fairly good today despite only 5 hours sleep.

Heel Raise
Med X abdominal
Nautilus plateloader bicep
Triceps pushdown
Formulator wrist flexion
Formulator wrist extension

Last night at work I went into our office/locker area for a mental health break and The Biggest Loser was on TV. I came in right at the introduction. I have never watched this show, as I assumed it would be ridiculous. I was shocked how much I had underestimated. I could not believe the amount and types of exercise these poor people were being put through. They even showed one contestant collapsing on a treadmill and being spit off the back of the machine by the spinning tread. Then there were multiple scenes of the contestants being screamed at by that Gillian lady in the tank-top/midriff shirt (talk about narcissistic) and some sadistic guy with tattoos all over his arms. The instructors’ contempt for the obese was obvious as they spewed insults (and saliva) in the faces of the contestants. I don’t care how fat or desperate I was, if someone did this to me I would punch them in the face and storm off the set. I checked in on the show between patients. The diet and exercise shown were prescriptive for ravenous hunger and ultimate failure. As I continued to work, I kept thinking about the importance of biologic signaling, and why it does not have to be this hard.

The key to turning around these sorts of metabolic disasters is to send the correct biologic and hormonal signals. If the correct signals are given, there is a disproportionate improvement in the metabolic state and body composition. This disproportionate response is courtesy of a second messenger system. Most hormones do not act directly on their target organ or tissue. This is usually because the hormone or chemical messenger is usually a protein that carries a charge which prevents it from being lipid soluble. Remember, cell membranes are a lipid bilayer. The fats that make up a cell membrane orient themselves so that the water soluble end of the fat faces toward the outside and the interior of the cell. The water repelling tails of these lipids face each other on the inside of the cell wall. Most hormones or chemical messengers cannot diffuse through the inner (water repelling) layer of the cell membrane. Instead, the hormone will have receptors that are fat soluble that traverse the cell membrane. These receptors bind the hormone on the exterior of the cell wall and transmit the signal to another chemical messenger inside the cell…this other chemical messenger is the second messenger. The unique thing is that the second messenger then activates a chemical cascade that multiplies the signal at the target. This way a single molecule of primary messenger can produce thousands of second messenger signals at the target.
This is why a proper signal is so important…the beneficial effect is hugely magnified. A brief, but intense workout that fatigues the musculature activates growth hormone, testosterone and adrenaline which all signal to empty glycogen and fat, both short and long-term. A hunter-gatherer diet creates a low insulin signal which triggers the body to defend a lower body fat set point. Overtraining (especially in the obese) triggers cortisol and other stress hormones. A low fat, high carbohydrate diet signals insulin release. These signals defend a high level of stored fat and drive huger…a true prescription for misery and failure. If these poor contestants could take advantage of the second messenger system they could achieve their goals without all the misery and without obnoxious fitness gurus screaming and sputtering in their face.

Post your WOW’s and your thoughts

I am feeling pleasantly sore and invigorated from my WOW performed yesterday. I again performed a Doug Holland by inserting the Leg Press in the middle of the workout. It was not as metabolically demanding as the last time, but I attribute this to more time off from the ER. I made modest improvements on all movements.

Pulldown
MedX Chest Press
MedX Leg Press
Pullover
Overhead Press

I couldn’t find any worthwhile studies to link to this week’s WOW, but I would like to continue the excellent discussions from last week’s thread on how making the stimulus more and more perfect can actually narrow the therapeutic window to a point of diminishing returns. When we reflect on the fact that we are an adaptive organism, we must acknowledge that a more and more perfect stimulus may not be the answer to continued progression. This is hard for a geek like me to accept because my interest was born out of the Arthur Jones experience and the idea that we were going to produce a more profound response by use of cams that would make the stimulus more perfect. I think we have pushed that end of the equation enough to know that we have approached a point of diminishing returns. While the response may not be that much more profound, I think what we have achieved is time efficiency. We are able to get the same response with less time commitment…sort of like tanning at the beach versus a tanning bed.

What this leaves us with is the fact that this tweaking of the stimulus actually creates an opportunity to see where we may be lacking in terms of the recovery/response side of the equation. This was driven home to me the other day when I picked up a workout journal from 2003 (which is around the time that I started experimenting with a paleo diet). At that time I weighed 176 pounds and had a body fat percentage that fluctuated between 13-15%. I was very strict with my diet up to that point (calories in-calories out) and was consuming between 1500-1800 Calories per day. I was hungry all the time. This week I weighed in at 171lbs and 8.7% body fat. Now I don’t weigh or measure anything and am never hungry. Recently, I have noted an almost steroid-like increase in my muscularity which I can only attribute to Vitamin D3 supplementation.

In conclusion, I think tweaking the stimulus is great. Heck, it is what most of us live for. However, as we tweak the stimulus side of the equation, we must be even more vigilant to tweak the recovery/response side of the equation. If, for whatever reason, we cannot make the recovery/response side as well-tuned as the stimulus, we might be well-served to let the stimulus be a little more lax as well. Remember, the perfect is the destroyer of the good.

Post your WOW’s and your thoughts

I worked out Sunday at 6am before going in to work a day shift in the ER. It was a good workout at my favorite time of day to work out. I did a “little 6” routine.

Calf Raise
MedX abdominal
Thick bar bicep curl
Nautilus Tricep extension
Thick bar wrist flexion
Thick bar wrist extension

After a busy day at the ER I had a dinner of stuffed Bell Pepper (with grass fed beef) and settled in for some channel-flipping. I came across a show on the Discovery Health Channel about the boy who was the first documented case of a spontaneous myostatin deletion in humans (the same child featured in the New England Journal of Medicine article that broke the story 3 years ago). I was particularly struck (as were the child’s parents, and the show’s producers) by how much the child enjoyed lifting weights and performing pull-ups. This activity was selected spontaneously by the child, as opposed to being pushed by the adults in his life. There were endless video clips of him lifting dumbbells, doing pull-ups, and carrying heavy objects. It was very clear that this 3 year-old was “lifting weights” because he was muscular. He was NOT muscular because he lifted weights. It struck me as a very clear representation of the cause/effect reversal that we discussed in the introduction of BBS.

After the show was over I went to the computer to peruse PubMed for an interesting article that I might post with this week’s WOW and found this:

Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010 Feb;42(2):314-25.
Resistance training at eight-repetition maximum reduces the inflammatory milieu in elderly women.
Phillips MD, Flynn MG, McFarlin BK, Stewart LK, Timmerman KL.
Texas Christian University, Exercise Physiology Laboratory, Fort Worth, TX 76123, USA. m.phillips@tcu.edu
INTRODUCTION/PURPOSE: Inflammatory cytokines are associated with age- and inactivity-related diseases. We examined the influence of moderate- to high-intensity resistance trainings (RT) on inflammatory cytokines (interleukin 6 (IL-6) and 1beta (IL-1beta) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha)) in circulation and lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated whole blood in elderly women. METHOD: Previously sedentary women (72 +/- 6.1 yr) were grouped according to their hormone replacement regimen: traditional estrogen/progesterone (HRT, n = 12), selective estrogen receptor modulator (SER, n = 7), no hormone replacement (NHR, n = 9), or nonexercise control group taking no hormone replacement (CON, n = 7). Participants in the HRT, SER, and NHR groups trained (three sets, 10 exercises at eight-repetition maximum (8RM)) 3 d x wk(-1), whereas participants in the CON group maintained their “normal” activity for 10 wk. Participants performed a bout of resistance exercise (RE at 8RM; HRT, SER, and NHR groups) or sat quietly (CON) before (BT) and after (AT) RT to assess the influence of training on the acute responses to RE. Blood samples were obtained preexercise (PR), postexercise (PO), and 2 h postexercise (2H; same time points for resting CON). RESULTS: Hormone status had no influence on dependent variables, so HRT, SER, and NHR groups were collapsed into one exercise group (EX, n = 28) and compared with CON. RT significantly reduced resting serum TNF-alpha level by 37%. RT also reduced LPS-stimulated production of IL-6, IL-1beta, and TNF-alpha at all time points (PR, PO, and 2H; per monocyte). Acute RE transiently increased plasma TNF-alpha, but blunted the circadian increase in LPS-stimulated inflammatory cytokines observed in CON. The blunting effect in EX was significantly greater AT compared with BT. RE also resulted in an increase in plasma IL-6, which was significantly reduced AT (BT: PR = 1.6 +/- 0.5, PO = 2.8 +/- 0.5; AT: PR = 1.8 +/- 0.3, PO = 2.4 +/- 0.3). CONCLUSIONS: We found that 10 wk of moderate- to high-intensity RT 1) reduced the systemic inflammatory milieu and 2) abrogated exercise-induced circulating IL-6 in previously sedentary elderly women.
This article demonstrated a very substantial decrease in the systemic inflammation of elderly women that was independent of their hormone replacement status. Here was a great demonstration of the profound benefit to be derived from high intensity strength training that is not immediately visible to the human eye.

My mind then returned to our 3 year old demonstration of cause/effect reversal. How many times do we seek advice from someone with a muscular physique who has self-selected weight training because of their muscularity? How many times have we seen someone give up strength training because they have not produced “P90-X” before and after type results? This is a very important concept that is discussed in great detail by Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan …sometimes that which is not visible to us is the most important thing. Many times we only realize the importance of something after the fact of it becoming visible (like the hassle of decanting tiny amounts of toiletries into zip lock bags, removing my shoes, and now having my underwear x-rayed and my wife ogled at by high school drop-outs), while we miss out on the more important fact that a vigilant citizenry will beat your ass down if you try to light your underwear or shoe on a plane, or that someone wearing a funny hat who checks no luggage on a transoceanic flight might be a problem. So what is the point of my rant? It is simply this: we in the field of high intensity exercise need to work hard to make the invisible visible. The people who don’t self-select for strength training are those who may stand to benefit the most. Arthur Jones was right when he said “it is too bad that bodybuilding is wasted on bodybuilders”.

Post your WOW’s…and your thoughts.

For my 48th birthday I decided to treat myself to a Doug Holland flourish to my WOW by inserting my leg press in the middle of my workout. I typically start with leg press because I like to get a big metabolic hit right out of the gate and then try to sustain it through the remainder of the workout. I thought the different approach may actually prove harder…I mean, why else would Doug Holland do it?

Pullover
Chest Press
Leg Press
Compound Row
Overhead Press

I must say that by the time I hit the Row, I was sucking wind. I traded 12 minutes of workout time for 15 minutes of carpet time. I was surprised how demanding placing the leg press mid workout was. I wonder if our metabolic adaptations are not also very specific, as this minor change in order produced a major change in metabolic effect. Perhaps it was the birthday effect, as I always want to do it better than the year before. One thing’s for certain, if you held my birthday cake in front of the compound row during this workout, I would have blown out all 48 candles.

Post your WOW’s

I did my WOW 1 day early on Saturday January 9th. I was meeting paleo blogger and BBS friend Jeff Erno at Ultimate Exercise to put him through a workout. I knocked out the following “little 6” at about 10am before Jeff showed up.

Calf Raise- Resistance increased by an unknown but significant amount. I was using the entire stack on the MedX Leg Press but the TUL was getting too long. I gapped the weight stack by 2 holes which significantly reduces the leverage of the movement arm. TUL now has plenty of room to grow.
MedX abdominal- stable weight and TUL
Nautilus plateloader bicep- stable weight and TUL
Triceps pushdown-stable weight and TUL
Formulator wrist flexion
Formulator wrist extension

It wasn’t until today (Sunday January 10th) that I realized my WOW was done on the 1 year anniversary of BBS’s release date. It has been a fantastic year. I shudder to think that I almost did not agree to John Little’s offer to collaborate on this book. At the time I had not written an article in 3 years and was hesitant to jump back in to swimming against the tide. I was also a little fearful of trying to put out our knowledge, knowing how much readers want “the truth” and how the evolution of facts and the development of new knowledge can make you look foolish or waffling. I did not want to enter into the realm of the expert (whose mascot should be a weasel sitting on a hedge eating a waffle).

The night after my WOW, Wendy and I went to dinner with friends, one of whom was a 70 year old woman who had recently lost her husband. Discussing her recent loss, she spoke to the importance of not passing up opportunities to enjoy what we love. She told of a bottle of Chanel perfume called Chance that her husband had given her as a gift. Because it was such expensive perfume, she had saved it for a long time and used it only on very special occasions. She admitted to wanting to use it more often, but remembering the cost, she would always resist the temptation. Recently, while trying to retrieve something off the shelf where she stored her treasure, she knocked it off the shelf. It fell into the sink and shattered. She watched the contents of the bottle swirl down the drain. All she had left was what was in the tube of the spritzer. As I heard the conclusion of this story, I was overcome by goose bumps. After hearing this story, I am even more glad I took John’s offer, and that I get to spray a little of my “Chance” every week with a WOW posting.

One of the elements of BBS that I am most proud of is a definition of health that John and I worked out that included “an appropriate balance between an anabolic and catabolic state”. There is an amazing technical discussion of this at www.nephropal.blogspot.com . It is a very technical discussion of the mTOR and Sirt1 receptors and how they relate to diet and exercise. If you can find some quiet time and a strong cup of coffee, I highly recommend it

Post your WOW’s

It was COLD today with temperatures in the 20’s. Ultimate Exercise is a building that was built in the 1800’s and the walls are old brick that is not insulated. Even with my high capacity air conditioning system, it took a while to get the temperature up to 61 degrees. I progressed the weight on all 5 movements today and broke even or a couple seconds down on all TUL’s. The workout was very tough from an effort and discomfort standpoint, but was only moderately hard from the metabolic standpoint. The Big 5 I did today was the following:

Leg Press
Compound Row
Chest Press
Pullover
Overhead Press

It is always fun to do the first workout of the New Year. Looking back over 2009, I am very happy with my progress. My main resolution for 2010 is to focus on form while blinding myself to my previous performance. I will project the resistance for my next workout well ahead of time and not look at my prior performance before performing the workout. Form and intensity should trump performance “on paper”. Also, I am going to try to wean off my only non-paleo indulgence…diet sodas.

I reviewed my diet DVD this morning and am happy with its content and quality. I made a few misstatements here and there, but nothing that would stop me from distributing it as-is. I have an initial run of 25 copies that I will sell through UE, and am trying to set up an Amazon store account for the remainder. I am setting the price at $45.00. If anyone is interested in getting the early copies you can leave your purchase information at UE by calling (864)886-0200 and following the prompts. I will make notification when the Amazon option is available or if we will offer additional copies through UE. For right now we are set up to process the first 25 orders.

Post your WOW’s and your resolutions

I did my little 6 workout around noon on Sunday. I forgot that I was into a new workout log, so I did not have my prior workouts for measuring benchmarks. I selected my resistance based on memory and made my focus using the most demanding form possible. This made for a very demanding workout, even for a little 6. With attention totally focused on perfect form rather than progression, TUL’s were shortened due to a more rapid rate of fatigue. I think I will continue this blinded approach for a while.

There has been some discussion of HIT and BBS on the excellent blog of Dr. Kurt Harris (www.paleonu.com). Dr. Harris was very conservative with regard to his exercise knowledge and advice citing the old adage that half of what we know is wrong…we just don’t know which half. This adage is even more true for exercise, because the human body is an adaptive organism and will make adaptations to almost any kind of exercise stressor. If we make the adaptation the measure of our success, then almost anything appears to work. This being the case, I think it is very important that we make these adaptations without damaging or destroying the organism in the process. This is why BBS has a greater emphasis on safety than many other exercise philosophies.

Another thing that I think exercise should do is augment changes that can be brought about by a proper diet that avoids Neolithic food agents. In the same blog post, Dr. Harris endorsed the concept that 80% of health and longevity is accounted for by diet, and that health benefits can be achieved with Paleolithic dietary modifications, even if someone is sedentary. I agree to some extent with this 80/20 notion (although the percentage is really just a gestalt assessment). However, exercise can slide this percentage (80%?) up or down depending on whether it is properly done or not. If you are doing a proper HIT workout, you will be aggressively emptying the largest sugar reservoir in your body and restoring insulin sensitivity. As your muscles grow larger and more metabolically capable, the size of your glucose reservoir will increase-which means you will tip into the metabolic syndrome later in the game. Proper recovery will insure that you do not produce excessive oxidative damage and systemic inflammation. These facts can diminish the necessary contribution of diet down to (for arguments sake) 60%, allowing a little more latitude for behavioral slips in our environment of constant temptation from Neolithic foods. My involvement with HIT is probably why I came out of the low fat 90’s and Entemen’s fat-free cookies with a coronary calcium score of zero.

Improper exercise can have an opposite effect. If you are doing large volumes of steady state exercise, you are rarely tapping your fast twitch muscle fibers, which will stimulate an adaptation that interprets them as “dead weight” and results in atrophy of these motor units. This results in a reduction in size of your largest sugar reservoir, which means tipping into the metabolic syndrome sooner. Combine this with an increase in oxidative damage and systemic inflammation you will now have a scenario where a proper diet becomes even more critical to good health. You will have less latitude for behavior with the temptations of the standard American diet. Instead of carrying an 80% weighting of importance, your diet may now approach a 95% level of importance. I’m not just picking on steady state exercise here. HIT done improperly (too little recovery, too much volume, and especially to many intensity extenders) can be even worse.

In conclusion, I support the idea that diet has a dominant position in health and longevity issues, but do not mistake that the type of exercise you choose is unimportant. The type of exercise you select can be very synergistic or detrimental to the contributions of a proper diet.

My WOW:

Calf Raise- I am using the entire MedX stack, I progressed the resistance by gapping out 1 hole. This really made it heavier and shifted the strength curve to load up at the mid-point.
MedX Abdominal- dropped the weight back to 70lbs, did 1 and 1/3 reps at SS cadence-ouch!
Plateloader Bicep
Tricep Pushdown
Thick Bar Wrist Flexion
Thick Bar Wrist Extension

Post Your WOW’s (and your thoughts).

I have been working some really busy shifts at the ER, so recovery may be compromised. For those that are curious, it is NOT busy because of H1N1, just garden variety ER stuff. As a matter of fact, during this “H1N1 crisis” I have admitted exactly ZERO patients with complications from this illness and have seen much less flu than I have seen in a typical flu season. Things that make you go hmmm.

This workout was somewhat frustrating and unsatisfying. All of the weights felt very heavy and difficult to manage. Failure occurred suddenly and generally sooner than I was expecting. I am glad I had to wait a day to write this post. If I had written it right afterwards I would have complained, but today I feel fantastic. A pleasant but significant degree of soreness with a great sense of well being is present upon awakening. This is a pattern that I have noted repeatedly in my workout journals. Sometimes the workouts that seem to be the worst turn out to be the best.

Leg Press – up 2lbs, TUL down 20 seconds
Pulldown- same weight and TUL
Chest Press- up 2lbs, TUL down 2 seconds
Pullover- up 2.5lbs, TUL stable
Overhead Press- up 2lbs, down 2 seconds

Post your WOWs and your thoughts

Today I did my little six routine. I keep track of my workouts in a small spiral notebook. As I went to plan and record today’s workout I noticed that I was on the last page of the notebook. I went to the first page and noticed that I began this particular notebook in October of 2007. At that time John and I were in the thick of writing BBS. I began doing the three way split similar to the one from Mike Mentzer’s writings. It was really neat to go through the record and realize that I could remember details of every single workout. It was also neat to see the gradual but steady progress over the past 2 years. It is a strange dichotomy to be bummed how quickly you have become 2 years older, yet be proud of the improvement that has occurred in those 2 years.

I have kept a journal of my workouts since I was a teenager. I also keep a personal journal detailing the events of every day. Someday if my kids want to know when they lost their first tooth, they will be able to look it up (and know how I felt about it). Anyway, I remember writing when I was a teenager that I would never fear growing older. I remember the old photo of Arthur Jones and Casey Viator both flexing their right bicep and how old Arthur’s face looked relative to his body (Arthur was about the same age in that photo as I am now). I distinctly remember as a 17 year old kid thinking I wouldn’t give a crap how craggy my faced looked when I got older if I could maintain a kick-ass body like Arthur displayed. I am happy to say that at this point I am pretty happy with how things are going with my body, but I must admit that I am more bummed about the craggy facial developments than I thought I would be.

Calf Raise- stable weight, stable TUL
Med X Ab- went back to 70lbs and will work my way up again. I did 1 and 1/3 reps style (full rep, then negative/positive through the lower 1/3, then lower through the full ROM and repeat)
Thick Bar Curl- stable weight/TUL
Tricep Pushdown- stable weight, up 2 seconds TUL
Formulator Wrist flexion-up 2.5lbs, down 4 seconds
Formulator Wrist extension-stable weight/TUL

Time to shop for another notebook.

Post your WOW’s

I got up at 5am this morning so I could work out at 6am before going in to work a day shift. It was COLD out this morning. Even with the heat on this morning, I could not get the temperature in UE above 57 degrees. Normally, we maintain a 61 degree temp. It may just be placebo effect, but 61 truly does seem optimal to me, as it was more of a struggle than usual to reach my workout benchmarks. Despite this it was a great workout.

Leg Press- up 2lbs, up a couple seconds
Pullover- stable weight, down 2 seconds- added a Rest-Pause rep in honor of John Tatore
Chest Press-stable weight, stable TUL- stuck for the 3rd time
Compound Row- up 2lbs, stable TUL
Overhead Press- up 2lbs, down 4 seconds TUL

No scientific studies this week…just a thought. I was out doing some hot laps on my BMX track this week and was feeling especially good. (For those that don’t know, I used to be a professional BMX racer and I have a practice track built on the lot next to my house). I started to think about how much more rewarding my professional career would have been back in the late 70’s and early 80’s if I had known then what I know now. At the time, I was doing the traditional M-W-F routines inspired by Nautilus philosophy and Mike Mentzer. I then raced on Saturday and Sunday. I remember frequently feeling tired and underpowered for how strong I thought I was. I think if I had worked out once a week on Sunday evenings or Monday mornings and raced on the weekends I would have risen to a much higher level in the sport. I also wish I had got onto the Paleo diet bandwagon much earlier. I can still remember vividly choking down Lean Cuisine dinners and being ravenous all the time in my attempts to maintain leanness. It hurts me to think of all the time I could have been much leaner and without hunger. If you are a follower of this blog and are a young person, consider yourself very lucky to be getting such a head start. As we go along in our discussions, keep asking what I am asking myself… “what else could I be blind to, ignoring or suppressing?”.

Post your WOW’s…and your thoughts.