I don't do this often, but I'm going to link my sister's piece from The Lookout on Yahoo today. She's responding to a cover story in Time last week about "attachment parenting," a system whereby you essentially wait on your child's every whimsical need, 24-7, for his or her entire life.

I exaggerate--slightly. I have two kids (so does Virginia) and, particularly when they were very small, went through all the doubts and fears about doing parenting "right." Like most parents, we hit a couple of snags early on (I'm not naive enough to think the snags are over, by the way) and considered extreme measures like the full-on attachment approach to get our daughter to sleep better, for instance, our son to stop hitting, and so on.

At some point along the way we got hold of a copy of a parenting magazine, however, and I remember, through my sleep-deprived stupor, looking at the cover, with its warnings about poisoning and food allergies and playground perils of every stripe, and realizing what a scam it all was. It was like the scene in They Live when Roddy Piper puts on the magic sunglasses and sees advertising for what it is.

What a brilliant marketing strategy, I thought. The magazine is both cause and the cure at the same time.

That may, in fact, be the hallmark of great advertising: terrify everyone to death about a problem you made up, and then tell everyone not to worry, because you've got the solution right here, for just five monthly installments of $19.99 apiece.

Virginia makes a great point in her piece. Essentially, she argues, if you resent your child for "making" you do anything --cook organic food for hours a day, drive to sports practice seven days a week, breastfeed--then the resentment you feel for doing those things is far worse for the child than any benefit they may derive from that activity, and you should find a way not to do those things--either by farming them out to other people or, shocker--simply not doing them. When you give yourself permission to drop these things from your parenting repertoire, she says,

you open up a big beautiful space to the do the things you love as a mother. As mother to two kids, ages 6 and 2, I found out a few years ago that I hated to play catch. But I love to roughhouse. I hate to play with Legos, but I love board games. I hate to make dinner, but I love to make breakfast....

Try it. No resentment. If you make child-rearing a set of practices you love, it becomes a piece of cake to love your children. That's still a cool mothering thing to do, isn't it?

This got me thinking about fitness and exercise and how, if anything, many fitness book-authors and other experts are more rigid and sanctimonious than parenting/pregnancy authors who pretend to be so reassuring.

Wisely, Virginia sounds a note of common sense and following your own instincts, interests and passions in parenting, and that's what I'd say is the best course of action when figuring out an exercise or diet program.

Okay, sure--if you've got a particular, specific goal--running a marathon or building massive arms or getting so lean you can count your muscle fibers or swimming the English channel--yeah, you've got to train in a way that's going to get you there. And maybe you'll need to consult and expert to figure out how to do that effectively and safely.

But presumably you wouldn't choose a goal like that if you didn't love running or doing curls or counting calories or open-water swimming: you're passionate about those things and you want to take it to the next level. Makes sense.

Your choices about exercise and diet should be driven by our own personal tendencies and interests, your passion and energy, much more so than what I say or any other fitness noob on the block tells you about what you 'should' be doing. Unfortunately, many of us cede the decision-making about these fundamental life activities to experts, who, while often well-meaning and frequently very credentialed, are rarely the best people to consult for what activities you might find enjoyable enough to do for hours a week every week, for years on end, for the rest of your life. That's a pretty personal decision--akin to marriage or a career, and one only you can make.

I think the problem is that, whether we're talking about parenting or getting fit, we're lost in a sea of choices and voices so vast and loud that the most important ideas--our own--are frequently and sadly, virtually inaudible.

Mike Boyle has an interesting piece in t-nation this week. Essentially he argues (convincingly) that the difference between squatting and deadlifting is not as stark as most trainers usually believe. Worth checking out.

It got me thinking about the "movement categorization" thing that trainers and other fitness pros have been doing for awhile now in an effort to streamline our choices in the gym. A few years back--well, quite a few now--trainers stopped referring to exercises as for the pecs, triceps, quads, et al, and started referring to them as variations on basic movement patterns. There are different names for the categories, and some folks include a couple of extras, but most trainers include a squat, a hip-hinge, a push, and a pull. The idea is that if you train these basic movement patterns regularly, you've got your bases pretty well covered in the gym.

I don't disagree with this idea; in fact, I use it all the time when I'm working with clients.

But here's the caveat: although these moves nicely cover the basic exercises that can be easily trained using standard gym equipment, they don't cover the full range of human movement. Not by a very long shot.

Consider this example:

Any yogaphile will immediately recognize this as a 'plow' pose. But to strength-and-conditioning enthusiast, what the heck is it? A weak argument could be made that it's some form of pushing move (since the arms are exerting force against the floor to keep the hips lifted), or maybe a deadlift (since the hips are flexed as in the beginning of a deadlift), and part twist (since the lower back is flexed as in come core moves). Or maybe it's hybrid move of some kind.

But it's really none of these things: a plow is its own thing. And the same could be said of almost anything you do lying down, and, indeed, many things you do standing up.

Eric Cressey makes a nice living helping pitchers throw a ball faster. He understands overhead throwing so well that I barely understand his articles anymore. You could say that a pitch is part lunge, part push, part twist, and you'd be kind-of right, but when it comes down to it, a pitch is a pitch. There's plenty in the vast range of motion required by pitching that just isn't addressed by standard strength-training moves.

Where am I going with all this?

Squatting, deadlifting, pushing and pulling are great, and will serve you well in life and athletics. But they aren't the full story. The full story is general movement that involves patterns of running, twisting, reaching, throwing, jumping, catching, climbing, crawling...none of which can be precisely replicated in the gym--nor should anyone try to lest they hope to drive themselves crazy. Those classic gym moves are the scales and arpeggios to the improvised jazz of sport and life: sure, you'll recognize pieces of deadlifting and rowing outside the gym, but for the most part, it's a long, pieced-together fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, make-it-up-as-you-go situation for which you can't fully train.

Except, well--by doing it.

I'd recommend that anyone who's interested in a broad foundation of fitness, therefore, should expose themselves to movements that are random and rather chaotic as often as possible. Sport is useful in this regard, but so is trail running and playing tag with a three-year-old. The outdoors can help enormously, as can anything interactive or competitive.

Along with the gym-specitic moves listed above, then, my list of essential moves would definitely include plenty of RGVM--"Random General Vigorous Movement," a term I'm officially coining right here and now.

Post ideas on how to do this to comments. Thanks!

A great writer, I've come to believe, is a great writer.

Journalists--and writers of all kinds of books--get pigeonholed. It's all part of the general conspiracy amongst otherwise intelligent folks to smack labels on things so that their true scale and scope aren't so overwhelming. I knew a guy who got pigeonholed as a writer once every few years when he consciously switched gears to write about something different. Then he'd write about that new thing for awhile, get sick of it, switch gears, and write about something else.

Lou Schuler is a great writer, and I've come to believe that it doesn't really matter what he's writing about.

Two bits of supporting evidence this week: The New Rules of Lifting for Life, his new book on exercise for folks of middle age and above, co-authored with Alwyn Cosgrove, and Saints Alive, is young-adult novel, now available for the Kindle for FREE on Amazon. Full disclosure: I've read the former, but although I'm just in the beginning stages of the latter, I'm going to recommend it anyway on the strength of the first few pages. More on that soon.

The rules of lifting, it seems, just keep getting newer to Lou and his co-author, fitness innovator and gym co-owner Alwyn Cosgrove. That, it would seem, is in part because they've been writing the books they need from one stage of life to the next. The first New Rules was revolutionary at the time, but to look at it now you see that it's still steeped early-2000's strength-training tradition, impatient with the ins-and-outs of stretching, warming up, and soft-tissue care and itching to get the reader under the heaviest possible weight, in the toughest possible exercises, in the shortest possible time. Although there was a chapter on the core musculature, the programs largely shunted core training off to the sidelines.

New Rules...for Life is an entirely different story: both authors are now firmly in the throes of middle-age, and have shifted their perspective on training considerably. Now it's much more about feeling good, moving well, preserving and improving athleticism and functional movement, than it is about hot-button topics like 'bulking up" and "torching fat."

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty of information on both these topics in the book. But this is the long view of lifting weights. Most writing about fitness reads like a romance novel: hot and bothered, sweaty and intense, the first blush of passion for exercise still fresh in the phrasing: You'll be transformed, they promise. You won't recognize yourself. You'll become a Greek God. Your confidence will soar. You can do anything. Armed with your dumbbells and protein powder, you can take on the world.

Refreshingly, the years have stripped away the breathless urge to over-promise and over-sell. Schuler is into his 50's, and though it's clear he still loves to exercise, he wears his passion differently now. Cosgrove has beaten cancer--twice--but the disease took something out of him. This is something he's never made a secret of, exactly but it's been largely skirted in the series so far.

True to its name, this book is about lifting for life--not only your entire life, but amidst the grit and difficulties that the average life presents: weight to lose, lousy health markers, advancing age, even cancer. There are no huge promises here--the candor about what to expect, especially in regards to weight loss, is impressive: you'll get out what you put in; genetics can deal you a very tough hand; there are no magical solutions. More and more, Schuler and Cosgrove aren't writing rah-rah fitness books but something quieter and more modest, and in that sense more accurate and true to the longtime-lifter's experience.

The programming is dramatically different from previous outings in the series: Cosgrove uses a template approach that gives you a large number of options with each workout, the intention, presumably, being to give you alternatives that can last you, if not your whole life, a good long time.

Briefly: I like Saints Alive very much so far, and I'd recommend that anyone reading this grab a copy off of Amazon. Lou's been modest about the book and its success in Amazon's novel contest, just as he's been understated about his early aspirations as a screenwriter, but scroll through even the first few pages of Saints Alive and you'll see that his creative writing is every bit as engaging as his fitness writing. He puts you right inside the head of this awkward, funny 13-year-old boy and makes you not want to leave. Lou, you've been holding out on us.

I'm not a basketball fan, though I became at least slightly interested in the sport while writing this article. What I discovered upon talking to twenty top collegiate strength and conditioning coaches was this:

Strength and conditioning is equal parts science and religion.

There are the science types--who live and breathe by the peer-reviewed study, the latest whiz-bang tidbit of scientifically valid data, and there are the mavericks, the off-roaders, the outlaws who throw caution to the wind, go by how they think and feel things work, and lead by intuition and force of personality.

And here's the weird, weird thing: both approaches work. Spectacularly. VCU and the University of Memphis both hired outside-the-box strength coaches last year, guys who don't crunch numbers, who don't care about bodyfat percentages and vertical jump heights--and both teams did very well.

Many other teams did well this year too, of course--and many of them had strength coaches who fit the classical number-crunching mold.

Which leads me to my above statement: whether you think training is science or training is religion, you're right. You've just got to believe it will every fiber of your being.

When I was but a wee speck of a muscle, training in the basement of the home of my youth, I used to pull training information from magazines published by Joe Weider. Don't laugh--that's all we had back then. One of the better programs might have gone something like this:

MONDAY: Incline Situps: 1 set to failure; Squats: three sets of 10; Incline Press, three sets of 10; Pullups, three sets of 10; Overhead Press, three sets of 10; Tricep Pushdowns, three sets of 10.

So I'd do that program every Monday--plus something complimentary two or three more days of the week, and make some progress.

But then, a month or two later, I'd get another issue of Muscle and Fitness that featured the exercise routine of this or that fitness dude or football player or buffed-up celebrity. His program that looked like this:

MONDAY: Incline Situps: two sets to failure; Squats: three sets of 12; Flat Bench Press, three sets of 10; Underhand Pullups, three sets of 10; Overhead Dumbell Press, three sets of 10; Bicep Curls, three sets of 10.

He'd tell you why it was such a great program, say why he thought it was the best program going, and how it made him into the man he was. So I'd jump on that program, following it to the (only very slightly different) letter.

And guess what? I'd make progress. I'd invest in the "new" program more. I'd suddenly have more faith that it was going to work. And crazily enough...it did.

Muscle confusion? Hormones? Maybe a bit of both. But I think the real reason it worked was much less tangible. I think it had to do with my belief in the new system.

I once saw a martial arts demo with a guy who said "You've got to throw your strikes with authority, like you think they're going to work. The whole time I'm striking"--and here he demonstrated his own, unique way of throwing a debilitating pokey-handed punch to the solar plexus on a hapless sparring partner--"I'm thinking it'll work it'll work it'll WORK!" Whammo, the guy went down.

Did he really have something all that new and different? Or was he just investing a basic technique with more force, power, and authority? I'd venture to say, probably the latter. It was more interesting to him, something he could get behind in a different way than the regular old way of punching. But in truth, the difference itself didn't matter that much.

And it's possible that, regardless of your approach to training, this is what we're really after: some confidence and investment in our training program, something that will help us go after it thinking, "it'll work."

So--science or religion, whatever gets you going. If you're a number-cruncher and like charts and graphs and feedback loops, good on ya. If you'd rather train by feel, go hard and fast and go home, well, I applaud that too, and I'm just as confident that you'll get good results.

And here's an idea: if you've been using one approach--try using the other one for awhile. You'll probably see a huge leap in progress. If you're a chart guy, leave it at home, crank your tunes and train entirely by feel. If you're an intuitive dude, get concrete for a bit, take some measurements, record some PR's and see what you can accomplish in 6 weeks.

You'll probably surprise yourself.

I'm not a doctor, although I play one in some people's misguided imaginations.

As a trainer, I get asked about the most bizarre, and often hilariously specific ailments:

When I step on the outside of my left foot while getting out of my car--not the '77 Pinto, mind you, only the 2010 Miata--I get a shooting pain up in my shoulder, but only if I'm carrying my briefcase in my right hand. When it's in my left, the pain is in my right shoulder blade. What's going on?

Buddy, I have no idea.

Some trainers are geniuses at assessing and correcting. They look at you walk or lift or hear about your symptoms and they're off and away talking about the scalene muscles and the tranverse abdominis and how you've got a gracilias muscle that doesn't fire right, and they'll fix you right up with eight months of corrective exercise.

Personally, I can't hang with that stuff. If something's really an issue--like, it's messing with your day-to-day functioning, slowing you down when you walk or sit or eat or drive to work, well, get it cleared with a doctor.

Otherwise--here's my crazy, off-the-wall advice: clean up your diet and work out.

Do both things like you mean it, for real, for two months. THEN get back to me with your bizarre, inexplicable ailments that no one can figure out. Oh, they're gone? Shocker.

Fact is that those two little tips should just be baseline for everyone. They should be standard practice. I pity doctors who are forced to take band-aid measures with people who eat atrociously and never exercise. They're like cut-men at a boxing match, sewing you up with chewing gum and plaster so you can go out in 60 seconds and get pummeled again.

Sure, a doctor can solve your acute problems--like aching feet and sleep apnea and racing heartbeat--if you're 100 pounds overweight. He'll give you drugs and maybe surgery. And then, after lots of expense and suffering and other hassle, something else will come up that drains your energy, time, and money just as much, or more, than the last issue.

Or you can just eat better and exercise, and pretty much never have deal with that doctor again. By the way, your depression, and feelings of self-efficacy will also improve with exercise, so that's good too.

Dealing with people who don't take these minimal self-care measures makes me think of the guy who makes it a daily habit to stab himself in the eye with a stick and goes to see an opthamologist to get glasses because, truth be told, he doesn't seem to be seeing things very well lately.

I feel for doctors, because, like I said, people often treat me like I am one.

Spoke with the redoubtable Alwyn Cosgrove for a piece I'm writing about fat loss and strength training (spoiler: the one is affected by the other. Shhhh...). In passing, he mentioned something I found fascinating, one of those "Can't prove it yet, but this seems to be happening" hunches that thoughtful coaches get about ten years before science catches up with them.

Now let's see if I can explain it.

Most people are familiar with the following effect: you go for a run, or sprint session, or some form or other of workout. You work up a sweat. You figure you got a workout, good enough, go home. Then, a few days later, you get pulled into some kind of game: basketball, tennis, racquetball, volleyball, doesn't matter what. And you notice, either at the time or the next day, when your muscles are sore as hell, that you worked way harder chasing the little ball around or competing with your pals than you did 'working out' on your own.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Give someone some context and some motivation--a reason for all that sweat and effort, and bango, he finds he's got way more in reserve than he ever believed.

But Cosgrove's as-yet-unproven theory goes even further: he believes that even if you controlled for every physical factor: speed, direction, force of movement, duration, and on and on, a mentally-engaged workout would still burn more calories than a mentally-disengaged one.

Unpacking that a little: say you played a hard, hour-long game of indoor soccer. And say a computer--or, better yet, a clone of you--could retrace every step you took in the game at the same speed and with the same timing, but without the other players, or the crowd, or the thrill of competition that goes along with those things.

The theory is that you'd get a better workout than your clone.

This is a hard theory to test, but to me it makes intuitive sense: when your brain is turned on, more of your body is too. When an activity is engaging and stimulating on many levels, it doesn't just make the workout go by faster, it makes it inherently more effective.

Yet more (preliminary) evidence that we need to make finding physical activities that inspire passion--not just that burn calories or build muscle--a priority.

For about 20 minutes in the early 90's, I worked at a commercial gym where we had meetings that were supposed to get us fired up about personal training. Not about conducting inspiring and effective sessions, but about selling the sessions as if our lives depended on it. Get people to sign up, doesn't matter how.

There's an oft-quoted scene in the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross in which the Alec Baldwin character--an unabashedly venal, ball-busting, heartless jerk--exhorts his staff of low-rent real estate scammers to "Practice the A-B-C's of sales: Always Be Closing."

When the sales-team leader guy at my gym quoted that scene sans irony, I realized it was time for me to hit the road.

One of the techniques he encouraged us to use was the old either-or scam. Ask your prospective client (who, remember, hasn't agreed to anything yet) "So when should I schedule your regular sessions? For the morning or for the evening?" The implication being that those were the only two choices. Not whether to sign up at all, but when.

I refused to resort to such nonsense, which is probably why i never won the Cadillac--or even the set of steak knives--at our monthly sales meetings. I always thought it was a cheap ploy that anyone with half a brain would instantly see through.

The shocking thing, which won't be so shocking to anyone who has ever come anywhere near sales, is that the either-or trap works. Brilliantly, On smart people who should know better.

I'm sure that psychologists have some name for our tendency to see only two choices when in fact there are many more. We're always looking for ways to reduce complexity--and that is probably a very good thing, most of the time. But when we "either/or" inappropriately (or when it's done to us, as in the sales-pitch trick), reducing our course of action to only two alternatives, we trap ourselves needlessly.

In the world of fitness you see this all the time:

"Don't work out at the gym. Stay home and do calesthenics."

"Don't use dumbbells, use kettlebells."

"I'm not a powerlifter, I'm an Olympic lifter."

"Don't do triathlon, you're a strength guy."

"I don't do CrossFit, I'm a distance runner."

"Strength training? No way. I do yoga."

Or even...

"I don't real novels, I read scientific journals."

"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

All variations on the either-or theme, all of which close down a vast universe of possible options to just two false alternatives.

Maybe it's our bilateral symmetry, or our single dominant-handedness, or the fact that it takes two genders to perpetuate the human race, but for some reason we like it when our horizon narrows to just two choices. That's why the sales-scam works so well. It may be uncomfortable but it's also a kind of relief. It means we really have no choice at all.

I'm studying the Feldenkrais Method, which is an extremely gentle, slow, easy, relaxing form of movement that has astounding potential to improve function, relieve pain and stress, and make movement more efficient. Among other things, the Method challenges our assumptions about the way we move and the way we generally inhabit our bodies. Dancers and athletes use the Feldenkrais Method--but so do people with all manner of movement restrictions, including people who have had strokes and neurological conditions that prevent more strenuous movement.

As everyone knows, I'm also a longtime student, practitioner, and teacher of intense exercise. If someone's doing something hard, I want in. Whether it's triathlon, martial arts, lifting maximal weights, hill running, or circuit-training till you pass out, I'm into it. I love bashing up against what I think are my physical limits--and getting others to do the same--and if I don't do it several times a week, I become hard to be around.

To be honest, in the last few years since I started working with the softer side of movement, I've started to feel a bit divided. Which thing is "mine"? Which one is my "path"? Which people do I hang out with? Which philosophy works for me?

The answer, of course, is both work for me, thanks, and I'm not willing to throw either approach under the bus. There's an enormous amount of wisdom and value in both approaches--and in many approaches that take a middle path or a different approach altogether. Again, the dichotomy between easy vs. hard, yin vs. yang, is false. Feldenkrais himself, an accomplished judo practitioner, boxer, soccer player, and teacher of self-defense, as well as the inventor of perhaps the least physically arduous method of formalized movement in existence, was an embodiment of the value of educating yourself in many different modalities of movement.

And in my own improvised, winding, self-contradictory way, I seem to be on a similar path.

Whether you're talking about exercise, your career, or even your religious or political beliefs, inappropriate either/or thinking can screw you up but good.

Watch out for it.

A little while ago I had a very interesting conversation with Dr. Christopher Scott, an exercise physiologist and expert on metabolism. At present he's researching ways to measure anaerobic energy consumption--meaning, how many calories a person uses when exercising at high intensity. It's a surprisingly difficult question to solve, he says, because all standard measures of energy consumption are based on oxygen uptake. Anaerobic activity, by definition, doesn't use oxygen, so that method doesn't work very well. Scott has been trying to solve the problems that fitness nerds like me have been pondering for decades now--how and why does high intensity activity burn so many calories?

EPOC--the "afterburn" effect that supposedly burns boatloads of calories after you've stopped working out, doesn't really seem to account for the caloric burn in the way we used to think. But something is happening, of course, because sprinters, as we all know, are lean, mean, running machines--even more so than their long-distance running cousins. And even if you're no Usain Bolt, enough people have had success burning blubber off with anaerobic activity to make it clear as day that it's a great way to torch fat.

Ok. So here was the fascinating gem I got from Scott: treadmills and stationary bikes were designed to make it easy to study aerobic metabolism.

This is actually quite significant: when you realize that two of the most widely-used tools for burning fat and building fitness weren't designed for that purpose at all, you realize that many people have got their fitness programs backwards.

Think about it: scientists wanted to know how people responded to exercise. So they created these convenient things that could be used in a lab to roughly simulate exercise. Then they put people on these machines and measured their energy output and oxygen consumption and so on and so forth and got some sense of how peoples' bodies behaved under the stress of something resembling exercise.

No one ever said, "This is a great way to burn fat!" or "These machines are great for getting fit!" Nope. They were a machine that made measuring oxygen consumption convenient for guys in white coats.

In a sense, the definition of what constitutes sensible exercise came out what those white-coated guys could measure: lots about aerobic metabolism. Nada about anaerobic. Nada about flexibility or upper body strength or movement capacity. The ways of measuring and recording physiological response dictated the best ways to exercise.

The fact that to this day we don't have an accurate way of measuring anaerobic energy consumption--even though, anecdotally, anyway, it appears to thrash the aerobic pathway for burning calories, is just one example of how flawed and limited metrics and methods have thrown us off the trail of how best to exercise in our limited available time.

Get off the machines, go outside and move.

After I got back from the Memphis trip that I talked about last time, a strange thing has happened to my approach to training. I go longer, harder, faster. If I dream something up, I try it. I train at odd hours, often outside, sometimes in the dark. I make sure that, at least once a workout, if not several times, I'm seriously gasping and wondering if I can go on.

Ah, the life of the fitness-obsessed.

Essentially, the brakes are off. What I found, or theorized, working with Frank Matrisciano, is that I'd allowed myself to get too comfortable in my training. It had become casual. I was fooling myself: sure, three sets of five with the same old weight will be fine for today. Let's not kill it. I was telling myself I was taking it easy because anything more would be courting disastrous injury, what with my history of tweaks and pulls and scrapes.

And if I'd continued to lift heavy weights, that would have probably been true. But in the last few weeks I've actually dropped most heavy lifting from my roster, and instead am working largely with body weight and a few odd dumbbells or kettlebells. The TRX gets thrown into the mix. The fat jump rope. Some monkey bars at a local park. And a little place I call the Hill Of Doom, an impossibly steep hill that breaks me in about 30 seconds. I do everything in circuits, with almost no rest.

And it's hard as hell. This is probably the toughest month of workouts I've ever done. And my body is changing dramatically, frantically trying to keep up with all the weirdness I'm throwing at it.

I love all the toys that gyms offer (well, most of them). But I think that sometimes all the gear, all that shiny chrome and TV screens, even the iron and steel, just lulls us into thinking we're working hard, when in fact, we could work much harder if we jettisoned all that stuff, went outside, and threw ourselves seriously at some old-school pain-in-the-ass moves that no one wants to do.

Running up a hill at full tilt will gas anyone. If it doesn't, run faster. 60 seconds of real pushups will do the same thing. Too easy? Elevate your feet, do them with good form and get back to me. Pullups, ditto.

I find--with myself and clients--that if the focus is on looking a certain way, I get lost: well, if I go too hard today I'll lose the muscle mass I built yesterday, and I want this bigger but that smaller and yadda yadda. If the primary focus is on crushing it, on working until I just can't go on, I find I feel better, perform better, and--yes, ironically, look better.

I'll come back to the gym and the weights after a bit, I'm sure. It's hard to really reach the gasping levels of exhaustion indoors that you can--quite easily--by going outside and getting after it. I suspect that once I get back to the gym it will be with a newfound appreciation of how far it's possible to push yourself, and how much is really possible to get done in an hour.

On the way to Memphis to interview and train with a guy named Frank Matrisciano--a kind of mysterious Svengali type of strength coach (he doesn't even like that phrase--he prefers "Life-Changer") who currently works for the Memphis Tigers men's basketball team. From what I can tell, he's into outdoor training in different, seemingly random environments, using minimal equipment like med-balls, sandbags, and found objects (I read that a railroad tie figured prominently into one recent session).The sessions are brutal, intense, mentally as well as physically, and--it would seem--shockingly effective. The Memphis gig came up because he'd had great success giving NBA hopefuls the edge they needed to make the pros--but prior to the current gig he'd had equal success with average Joes and Janes training for weddings, reunions, photo shoots and the like.

Matriciano doesn't like publicity--he wears a mask when the media are around so as not to be photographed--so in a way I'm surprised I got the interview.

When Matrisciano was hired, the quote of the day--I'm paraphrasing--was that it would change the face of college basketball. Not being a big hoops fan, I'm more interested in the way that it may or may not change the face of big-time strength and conditioning, and of the fitness industry for average folks like you and me.

I've been a fan of guys like Erwan Le Corre, Frank Forencich and others since the moment I heard about them, and subsequently wrote about them (here and here): outdoorsy, back-to-nature types who believe that we function best when we train in a way that resembles our evolutionary history and environment. The gym--and its high-tech equipment--they contend, is artificial, and may not be optimal for improving actual performance.

All well and good for a weekend or weeklong retreat or workshop of the kind that Le Corre and Forencich teach. And, it would seem, all well and good for four to six week intense boot-camp style off-season retreats that Matrisciano has run up to this point. But good for a highly-ranked college basketball team over months and years? Good for guys whose health and functioning depends not just on intensity but on smart, injury-preventing training and programming? That's the real question.

The question--and the experiment of hiring a maverick-outsider-type like Matrisciano to strength/life-coach a franchise team like the Tigers--is whether unorthodox and intense trumps dispassionate and scientific when it comes to building strength, fitness, and general readiness for high-level performance. The military, for instance, infamous for throwing mindbendingly challenging physical tasks at recruits in order to build confidence, leadership and problem-solving, seems to think it does. But in recent history, strength and conditioning coaches have been drawn to the higher tech, the more scientifically proven. A bit more of the Ivan Drago, a bit less of the Rocky.

Matriciano is all Rocky. Does wild and crazy, brutal and intense, trump decades of research on undulating periodization and reverse-ladder pyramid loading? We shall see.

At the very least, it seems like a lot more fun.

Update: I've now returned from Memphis. A killer workout, and Frank M. has many interesting and novel methods that I will touch on here and cover in depth in an upcoming article for Men's Health. Stay tuned.

Below is a video that I'm in -- briefly -- about Parkour, that flippy, jumpy, climby outdoor gymnastic thing that everyone's doing these days. I'm no Victor Lopez (he's the very impressive traceur who hosts the vid), but I had a good time and surprised myself getting over the wall in the final reel below.

I don't think I'll ever really become a full-blown freerunner; for one thing, I'm not 5'6" and 22, but I think those guys are onto something: to get fit, move through space. To get really fit, expose yourself to challenging environments and move through them in creative, unusual ways. My nod to Parkour in my current workout program is that I'm working on learning to do a muscle-up, and I want learn to walk on my hands. I'm getting the jump on my 2012 fitness goals. I'll let you know how it goes.

It's been an eventful last several weeks: my first Men's Health article was published (in the October issue). In rapid succession I booked two more gigs with them and appear, thankfully to be on their go-to list of fitness scribes who can more or less string a series of words together and have them make some degree of sense.

The latest piece requires me to track down and speak with about 20 college-basketball strength and conditioning coaches, which is interesting and fun. It also requires me to learn phrases like "the hardwood" and "cutting down the net" and "rebound" and "dribble." I'm not a basketball guy. But it's fun pretending to be a sportswriter--those guys can spin a yarn. 

An article I wrote for Experience Life was also honored with a silver medal in the how-to category at the Minnesota Magazine and Publisher's Association banquet last week. Presumably they take into account the photography, editing, layout, et. el, (and the article does look great) as well as the writing, but I'm still very proud of it, and I'm looking forward to tacking the phrase "Award-Winning" in front of my name, regardless of context.  Like the actor Ben Affleck, who is referred to as "Academy Award Winner" even though he won the Oscar for co-writing a screenplay and not for acting, I'm not going to consider it lying to refer to myself as an "Award-Winning Olympic Lifter," or an "Award Winning Improvisational Comedian" because something I was involved did technically win an award, and since those are technically activities I've participated in. As you can see, I fully plan on milking this one for all it's worth. It may be my last chance.

Other than that, on a fitness front, I'm experimenting with a system called the 5/3/1 program, written by powerlifter Jim Wendler, a kind of idiot-proof way of building maximal strength in an exceedingly sensible manner. Look it up--it's a good one. You can accuse me of being lazy and not linking it, but who's the Award-Winning fitness writer, here, me or you? Google it yourself, lazy!

At the same time as I've been upping my strength to personal-record levels using Wendler's system, I've counterintuitively been rehabbing my knees with foam rolling, obsessive levels of glute and core work, and recommitting to doing Feldenkrais work daily, all of which I've come to believe are pretty much essential for everyone. Oddly, it's working, even as my strength is improving. 5/3/1 isn't a very high-volume program, so I'm able to spend more time in my workouts on things that improve the way I move and feel, and the results are encouraging. I may need less volume in my workouts than I once thought. 

Or perhaps it's just another example of the new and unusual thing working better than the thing I should have given up on after four weeks instead of four months. Happens to me all the time.

That's all for now. Back to my NCAA basketball phrase book.

As regular readers of this blog know, I've had some knee issues of late, resulting from eighteen months of fairly intensive aikido training that I did concluding rather abruptly late last year when I tweaked my left one rather severely. Ever since I've dealt with low level knee pain in both knees, off and on.

Anyway, for the last year or so, after being cleared by my doctor for all activities, I've read many articles on how to rehab knees. They all say "glute activation," and I've thought, okay, yeah yeah yeah, a few glute bridges here and there, but I don't really sit as much as most people, so I'm sure my glutes are fine, could this really apply to me, I'm special, after all, I mean, I'm a TRAINER for Pete's sake, sure I don't need glute activation?

And off I went, gritting my way through workouts that were, to a greater or lesser extent, painful on my knees, alternately thinking, "I'll be fine soon," "This will never get better, so I'll just have to suck it up," and "I'm officially ignoring this pain and pretending it's not there," and "Come on, what am I, a wuss?" Standard guy-speak when dealing with physical limitation.

But a few weeks ago I decided to actually give this glute activation stuff a real try. To put it to the test, really, to prove to myself and the world that it would do NOTHING to improve the state of my knees so I could happily return to my denial/resignation cycle.

It was a bit of a rampage: X band walks, glute bridging of various kinds, figure-4 lying knee raises, a few other moves. All told, I was doing about 100 reps per side per day.

And guess what? Knee pain preeeeeetty much gone.

As luck would have it, I ran into this article yesterday on T-Nation in which the author says this about powering up the glutes:

...crush – and I mean crush – your glutes with an absurd amount of joint-friendly volume...Aim for a minimum of 100 repetitions per day, topping out at 300 for those with the dedication.The big question is, "When can I start to reincorporate squats?" The answer is whenever your mind-muscle connection borders obsession. If you're not feeling your glutes when you walk up steps, get in and out of your car, and stand up from the toilet, you're not quite "there."

This is as good an explanation as I've heard of the amount of reconditioning movement you REALLY need to do to affect change in habitual movement/muscle activation patterns of ANY kind. It's got to border on obsession. Not forever--just for awhile, till the pattern gets worked out.

That seems to be what finally worked for me.

I don't think that PT's and trainers really emphasize this enough: that it's got to be a project, something you focus on and commit to for a length of time in order for the solution to take hold. Three sets of desultory hyperextensions once a week will NOT solve a glute activation problem. The solutions to our fitness problems are often not complicated.

But you do have to DO them.

Maybe you're one of the many people who think that the plank is a remedial exercise--something for grandmothers or people in traction.

The cool thing about the plank--and the reason I've become even more of a fan of this move in the last few years-- is that it can be that--a basic move that almost everyone can do in its easiest form (that would be on the elbows and knees--like you're doing a girl-style pushup, only resting on your forearms). But then you can progress it right through the roof, with loading and stability challenges and arms and legs moving this way and that. If you focus 100% on keeping your spine (and your head!) in a neutral alignment throughout the movement, the plank can be a powerful corrective movement for postural issues as well as a very strong core-builder.

One easy way to advance the plank just a tad--which I learned, credit where it's due, from Alwyn Cosgrove--is to shift your position just slightly so that your elbows are in front of your shoulders.

Usually when trainers teach the plank they say to position their elbows directly under the shoulders. This is manageable for most people, particularly if you've been training for awhile. But make the adjustment above, stretching yourself out just a hair so your elbows are a few inches forward of your shoulders, while keeping your back neutral--and suddenly it's a whole new, and humbling, ball game.

So here's something I was thinking about a propos of Dan John's lecture at the Perform Better conference a couple of weeks back.

Most peoples' fitness activities involve low skill, high effort activities.

Or perhaps I should say that the fitness industry has sold us on the notion that getting fit by necessity involves a lot of low skill, high effort activities.

Think about your average gym: treadmills, stationary bikes, ellipticals, weight machines, hell, I'll even toss many free-weight movements under the bus. What's the learning curve on those moves? How long does it take to MASTER most big-box gym activities?

About 30 seconds.

The philosophy behind most gym activities is this: "What can we have people do that NO ONE will find challenging to learn, but that we can make progressively more and more difficult?"

Answer? Dumbbell curls. Seated pec-deck flyes. Lat pulldowns. Riding a stationary bike.

For all intents and purposes, these moves take your brain out of the equation. You don't have to pay attention to them, so most people don't: they just space out, watch the TV, and wait for their 20 minutes in the fat-burning zone to elapse.

Congratulations: we've invented a way of getting fit that circumvents the brain--that pesky gray matter between our ears--so we can make our muscles bigger and stronger and our heart pump faster doing movements that have nothing to do with anything humans are supposed to do with their bodies.

Essentially, these fitness activities are a 'cheat': they allow us to exert ourselves BEFORE we know how to move with coordination and skill. They are, once again, low-skill, high-effort activities.

Running in running shoes? Same deal: high effort, low skill. Running barefoot? High effort...high skill. You've got to learn to do it reasonably well before you can do it with any effort.

Isn't it interesting that the addition of more technology (lat pulldown machines, running shoes) lowers the skill-bar while allowing us to raise the effort bar?

Dan John said that we all need to spend more time in doing high-skill, low-effort activities. I couldn't agree more.

Then and only then, I think, we should add effort.

I find it interesting that the activities most people rave about, and really enjoy, have a skill component: yoga. Boxing. Actual, outdoor cycling. MMA and other martial arts. Dance of all kinds.

If we get back to a skill-based fitness model I think we're all the more likely to enjoy ourselves and reach our fitness goals at the same time.

Just came home from the 2011 Perform Better Summit. Even for non-fitness nerds (any of those types reading this blog?), there's lots of great information: smart presenters and an audience of absurdly fit individuals. At one of the lectures I scanned the room and idly thought, "I wonder what the average body fat percentage is of all the people here?" My estimate was in the low double digits. Get those people in a room doing a workout together--as they do at some of the hands-on segments--and it's a thunderous herd of intensity. Unfortunately, it's rare to see that many FIT people all together in one space. I wonder if, as we like to think, that there was once a time when fitness was the norm or if it's always been bad, but now it's worse.

Regardless.

Here are some highlights and some brief notes about some gems I picked up. Primarily--and this is something that's impossible to sum up in a blog post--you get a sense of what others out there are doing--the ones who present and the ones in the audience with whom  you idly chat between lectures.

David Jack: Interesting and inspiring guy, huge heart. Clearly a master of the people-person thing, in a genuine way. I can't say I got a lot of concrete, usable information out of him that I didn't already know, but he modelled the personal touch very well. I will say this is the first Perform Better lecture that actually made me tear up at least twice. The dude is passionate, and he connects with people. You can tell he loves what he does and he loves his clients, and the importance of that for a trainer almost can't be overstated.

Alwyn Cosgrove: I go to his workouts every time at Perform Better and I love/hate them every time. He's on the cutting edge of fitness science, and he imparts this stuff in a hilarious, easygoing way. Cosgrove is one of the most successful fitness marketers in the world, bar none, and I'm proud to say he's a bit of a pal. I missed his lecture, but read the notes and it's a lot of the stuff that, thanks in large part to him, has been making its way into the mainstream in recent years--long slow cardio isn't helpful for fat loss; nutrition is the #1 (and, his estimation, the #2 as well) most important intervention for fat loss; our cultural lack of movement has caused serious problems and has changed the role of the trainer and of fitness in general.

Sue Falsone: Sue is an accomplished physical therapist and put together an interesting presentation on the head and shoulders and how they affect more or less everything. She had a wealth of information and diagnostics, all of which convincingly proved her point. For a non-PT like me, some of this was over my head, as it were, but there's usually at least one presentation a week that I walk out of thinking "Wow, I know nothing." This was that lecture for me. 

I was struck as well by the contrasts and the similarities between her approach and the Feldenkrais work I've been doing the last couple of years. That's a subject for a later post.

Brian Grasso, an expert in youth fitness, spoke about some of his experiences coaching and creating programs for kids. Grasso doesn't look like the typical fitness nerd: he's got some facial piercings and tats, and thank God for a little bit of flair and off-centeredness in this super-square, biceps and crewcuts industry.

A couple of the lessons: young kids need broad movement exposure. Lots of games, lots of different types of movement. He mentioned that kids probably shouldn't lift weights before after their early-puberty growth spurt (he called it the Maximum Growth Velocity), but should hit it hard shortly thereafter, as it's the period when you can gain strength the fastest. I started lifting weights when I was about 15, which (apparently) was right in the pocket, and I do remember gaining a hell of a lot of strength those first couple of years.

Grasso also made a point about over-coaching kids: that you shouldn't do it, in large part because the nervous system tends to auto-regulate--that is, it's naturally attracted to correct movement. I'm definitely an over-coacher.

Todd Wright did a cool hands-on about how successful athletic movement is about dominating a sphere of space. I wish I could have gotten more out of it, but I was so flattened from Cosgrove's workout that I could barely keep up. Interesting stuff though. He emphasized multiplanar movement with a variety of different types of reaching and extending.

John Berardi, who runs one of the most successful online nutrition coaching programs out there, may have had the most clear-minded thoughts about coaching that I heard all weekend. Useful for me, of course, but also for people trying to make changes in their lives. Some key points: you can't change your diet all at once. Learning to eat properly is similar to learning an advanced physical skill like an Olympic Lift. You've got to break it down into manageable parts. Berardi uses a method in which he proposes some manner of change: taking fish oil. Eating slower, etc. The client has to tell Berardi how confident he is in his ability to complete the task--on a scale of 1-10. If he doesn't get a 9 or a 10 answer, he makes the intervention easier.

Simple, clear, effective. He also said that coaches need to take 100% responsibility for the results AND the compliance of their clients. That means if you assign an intervention and the client doesn't complete it--it's your fault. Ouch. But true and effective. Berardi was a highlight.

The exceptionally personable and expert Charles Staley spoke about Olympic Lifting, how and why to incorporate it into your training program, and some of the finer points of actually doing it. I missed his hands-on lecture--it conflicted with another lecture I really wanted to see (universally this is a response that Perform Better gets to these conferences: you can't see everything, no matter how hard you try.). The number one reason to do Olympic lifting? Staley remarked that these lifts tend NOT to build strength and power very fast, because they're so technical that most of your learning is on a neural level--learning the new skill--rather than making your muscles actually stronger or more powerful. Moreover, he argued, why learn and try to master a whole separate sport, with all its challenges and intricacies, if you're trying to get better at, say, football or tennis? He also poked some gentle fun at weightlifting coaches, who often spend long months lifting nothing heavier than a broomstick. He believes you've got to get some weight into peoples' hands.

So: the number one reason people should do the O-lifts? They're fun. People enjoy doing it. And that turned out to be a theme of the weekend.

Dan John did a presentation called "The Four Quadrants of Lifting" in which he broke down performance and the act of training into four categories: Many Qualities / Low Effort; Many Qualities / High Effort; Few Qualities / High Effort; Many Qualities / High Effort. "Qualities" refers to skills or goals: so a standard PE class is Quadrant One: lots of skills at a low level of effort, and pro football is Quadrant Two: many skills required at a high level of effort. It's a cool model and helps you keep your programming on track if you're a trainer OR trainee: you have to ask, why am I training? What's the best way to get there? Fat loss, John argued, is a fairly simple task: few skills required at a fairly low level of effort (although some might argue that fat-loss programs can be very intense!).

I don't know Dan John's work that well, but he appears to be a concepts man with an extremely broad knowledge base (I think he's a professor of theology or some such when he's not strength-coaching--so he's kind of a Rennaissance man), and I like that. Plus, he's funny, and that helps a lot.

Todd Durkin After Cosgrove's workout, I was a little on the trepidacious side about getting involved in a Todd Durkin workout. He's cheesy as hell, but the guy is a supernova of energy and, I imagine, could motivate a snail to break 10.0 in the 100-meter dash. He had the room perform a workout which, warm-up aside (and he was one of many people there whose "warm-ups" were long and intense--part of a trend towards encouraging more diverse exposure to different movement patterns in different planes of motion) lasted all of five minutes. And it almost killed me. Here's what he had us do:

MAX REPS IN 60 SECONDS EACH OF:

1) Bosu Ball Pushups + Overhead Clap: You assume a pushup position holding the sides of the Bosu, lower your chest onto the disc, clap your hands overhead, return your hands to the disc, and push yourself back up again. here's a photo of me flailing away:

2) Med-Ball Slams: Take a 12-pound, sand-filled med ball slam it on the floor, pick it up, repeat.

3) Heavy Rope Jump Rope: Jump rope in any way you wish using a heavy rope. Killer.

4) Battling Rope. Slam the ropes; nothing to it but a heart attack...

5) TRX Row.

(thanks to my buddy Jen Sinkler, my editor at Experience Life, who took these photos).

You take literally 4 minutes between efforts, but those 60 seconds are all out. Of course Durkin added a competitive challenge to it as well, so that the person who completed the highest number of reps of everything won a prize. My score was 285, which appeared to be top 10 among the guys, but the winners of both the men and women scored well over 300. I think the top guy had about 350. Yikers.There's fit and then there's just sick.

So: for people who say they don't have time to exercise--here's 5 minutes of work inside about 25 minutes of time that flattened almost all of us. And we're fitness nerds.

But this probably wouldn't have been the workout it was without Durkin's INSANE motivational skills. I don't know what that dude eats but I want some of it.

Recurring themes: 1) FUN is essential in exercise. 2) Most people--kids and adults--need lots of many different types of movement. 2) Mindfulness is key. Doing an activity that forces you to pay attention to learn. 4) Fast and intense body-weight movements (and primitive-tool movements like ropes, med-balls, kettlebells) is where it's at.

This conference seems rife for a Feldenkrais presentation and I'm going to make it my personal mission to be lecturing about Feldy at Perform Better in the next five years. There, I said it. Feldenkrais fits absolutely right in the pocket of where fitness is going right now, and what people desperately need: something interesting, something instructive, some powerful way of getting in touch with their bodies that ANYONE can do.

Along those lines: one of the most popular trade-show items at the conference (fitness equipment folks use the PB Summits to sell their wares) was, essentially, a jungle gym: ropes, rings, horizontal bars, parallel bars and the like hanging from a climbable steel structure. The people at the conference couldn't stay off of it all three days. The playground is coming back.

Quick word or two.

I just did two more weeks of Feldenkrais training. Fascinating work that I think the fitness industry really needs. In my last post about body image, I mentioned that we need an approach to fitness that accentuates the positive, rather than rubbing peoples' noses in it that they don't look like the paragons of perfection that they see in the media. We need an approach that allows people to accept and appreciate themselves as they are--even as they strive to achieve something more.

I think that an approach informed by the Feldenkrais Method may be one very effective strategy in creating such an approach. Feldenkrais' method forces people to stay within their comfortable range, appreciate and emphasize what can be done without effort or strain, and to remain absolutely engaged and focused on the movement at hand. If focus flags, or straining or striving begins, you simply take a brief break, reset, and resume the movement (you're even discouraged from thinking of it as "try again.") Ironically, the lack of striving as we usually conceive of it invariably produces better results than the traditional "work through the pain" approach: more improvements in range of motion, coordination, timing, and general quality of movement. 

Obviously, there are times, maybe many times, in your training when you need to work hard, strain and push yourself a little. But only while doing movements that are so ingrained that you could do them in your sleep.

New skllls, new technique and form, and warmups should, in my opinion, be done with minimal strain and effort so you can sense distinctions and make new discoveries about your movements.

I hear a lot about peoples' body issues in my work. What they don't like, what they want to change, how they want to look. I often joke that if not for vanity, low self-esteem, and narcissism, I'd be out of a job--along with all the plastic surgeons in LA. 

It's an interesting conflict of interest that every fitness trainer has to live with--the job SHOULD be to put yourself out of a job--that is, the goal should be to get your clients feeling SO good about themselves physically--not to mention in such great shape AND so empowered and educated on how to keep getting better--that you're no longer necessary.

It doesn't really happen that way. There is, in fact, such an endless, bottomless bounty of low self esteem and poor body image out there, that my job is, happily and sadly, quite secure. And it almost doesn't matter how good a person looks; I have clients who wouldn't look out of place in fashion spreads who still feel terrible about how they look.

I almost feel like we feel like we don't have permission to feel okay abut how we look; that hating our bodies is just part of who we are, culturally. Could we even picture what it would be like to say, "Hey, I look pretty good today," and just own that, without apology or qualification?

I get the sense that many of my clients--and people who talk about fitness to me--are putting their lives on hold until they achieve some long-held ideal of how they're supposed to look. And, yes, it almost always has to do with how they look, not how they feel or how they perform: no one says, "I'll start dating again when I can break 60 seconds in the 400." Nope--they say, 'when I'm a size 6,' or 'when I have a 6-pack.'"

It's almost as if people believe that, once they've reached that magical land of size 6 or six-pack, everything will be perfect. Suddenly the bills won't need paying. The economy will turn around. Your dog will spontaneously housebreak himself. Is it because when we see photos of six-packed guys and lean, lithe, athletic women, that they're never toiiing away in some mindless job like everyone else, but lounging around on beaches, looking dreamy and satisfied with their lives?

Nate Miyaki, a natural bodybuilder and writer for T-Nation, wrote recently

Six-packs are meaningless in the real world. Trust me. I've had one for a long time and other than making me a few pennies, it's gotten me nowhere.

Having fitness goals is great. Wanting to be better is great. Having ideals to aspire to is great. But when you become a size 6 or a six-packed dude, you'll still be you--same problems, same hang-ups, same strengths and weaknesses. And sadly, if you're someone who has hated his or her body because it's too fat or too weak or too slow all your life, I suspect you'll find a way to keep hating it.

Unless you find a way to approach fitness not as a fix for problems but as a practice, an exploration, and an affirmation of what you're capable of rather than a way to discipline and fix and shape.

Building strength, working hard, exerting yourself are important and worthy endeavors. Yes, exercise can reshape your body. But far more important is that it can make you feel capable, get you focused on what you can do rather than what you can't.

I was talking to Frank Forencich of Exuberent Animal awhile ago. He made an interesting point: that we've become too professional in our pursuit of fitness. We're specialists.

It's not altogether surprising: most of us draw our fitness information from coaches and trainers of athletes, who are, by definition, specialists. Ditto for bodybuilders and fitness models, who train to get their bodies to do one, very specific thing. Now, the best trainers are also thinking long-term--how can I get this person to do more while protecting their health so they don't blow a gasket in three years, or five, or twenty? Still--the goal is optimal performance of a very specific kind. And optimal athletic performance--as we've seen with long-distance runners--doesn't always equal health, longevity, or durability. 

By definition, the more you specialize, the less adaptable you are, the less capable of weathering new stimulus, handling different activities outside of your area of specialization.

The next phase in the evolution of popular fitness lore, I think, is going to be the "generalist" approach. To make a cient into a physical jack of all trades, master of none. One thing that the ever-controversial CrossFit approach has right is that the workouts always change, you never know quite what's coming on a given day, so eventually you're prepared for just about anything.

That was also one of the most fun aspects of triathlon training: if you're bored with swimming, jump on the bike. Bored with that? Go for a run.

Another wise man--Gray Cook-- once said to me that if you're in pain, think first about what you can eliminate from your training program or life rather than what you can add to it. It's the removal of accruing repetitive stress that's more likely to fix a problem than adding something corrective.

And guess what? Even the top trainers of pro athletes--like Eric Cressey--make sure to keep their athletes' bodies guessing. Cressey does a "random" day where he, his athletes and staff, will push the sled, flip some tires, and generally throw all their carefully-planned out training parameters right in the commode in favor of some screwing around with heavy things. So maybe our downfall is not in fact what athletes are doing--but what we assume that they're doing when we hear about some otherworldly workouts some of these folks put in once in a blue moon.

So--unless you're shooting for gold--keep things general! 

This is one of the funnier fitness-themed videos I've seen in quite some time. And Martin Rooney--the "Outlaw" in the video--has a point: you can take functional and corrective exercise too far (hilarious turn by the beanpole kettlebell/TRX guy, too), and simply never get around to lifting serious weight or working particularly hard in the gym. 

The Average Fitness Consumer needs both perspectives: to be reminded that exercising well takes skill, patience, and smart practice, and to be told that they're not going to improve without putting in some serious hard work.

Less than thee minutes will change the way you stretch--and maybe the way you exercise!

I'm a trainer with all kinds of certifications and experience. I design dozens of workouts a week and dozens of workout programs a month for all kinds of people with all kinds of goals and limitations. 

But I don't design my own workouts. 

Or I try not to. 

Here's why: no matter how hard I try, when I design my own workouts, I wind up catering to my strengths, ignoring things I hate, and-or just doing things the way I've always done them, with the same, middling results.

What I like to do instead is to grab a program that I haven't done yet designed by a coach I respect--there are so many of them--tack it up on my wall, and do it for a month or three or however long the program lasts. Whenever I do that--I get great results and start thinking that coach x or y or z is the BEST and WHY DID I EVER LISTEN TO ANYONE ELSE?

That's my intention, anyway, In practice, I usually keep going on the program, past its efficacy point. I wind up doing a four week program for eight weeks. And it stops working, just as the coach who wrote it knew it would, and warned me that it would. But I'd made such great progress that usually I keep on it till I hurt something or till I just can't take it anymore. 

And then, finally, I find a new program with totally different parameters and switch over, usually begrudgingly, expecting to lose everything I'd gained in the previous program because the old coach said "You have to do five sets of three on squats," and the new one says "skip heavy back squats altogether."

And of course the new thing works brilliantly, because my body is craving the new stimulus. 

...and I'll think aha, what a great program, coach x or y or z is the BEST and WHY DID I EVER LISTEN TO ANYONE ELSE? And the cycle begins anew.  

At least I recognize my mistakes. And encourage you to learn from them. So:

1) Don't design your own workouts.

2) Assuming you're training for fitness, and not for performance in some athletic in endeavor, change things up--radically--every month. Seriously. Go from low rep focus to high rep focus. Low volume to higher volume. Lots of slow, heavy exercises to lots of light, explosive exercises. High cardio to sprints to no cardio. 

3) Don't fall into the rut of thinking what has worked in the past will keep working. The best workout program in the world stops working after awhile, and you have to do something else.

4) Sometimes things work that everyone says won't work, doesn't work, and for all intents and purposes shouldn't work--usually because your body just needs the new stimulus. 

So I've been seriously remiss on the blog front of late, in case you haven't noticed.

Reason being I was involved in a play called "The Madness of Hercules"--an updated version of the Roman tragedy by Seneca, performed by the wildly innovative company Not Man Apart. If you've never seen these guys, and you get the chance to--take it.

I played one of three chorus-type characters who sort of storytell and support the action with crazy, evocative physical movement. Extremely athletic stuff that I was even a little unsure that I could handle at first, given my nagging knee injury and my generally aging self (I turned 40 on May 9th).

The funny thing was, I needn't have worried. The action was, indeed, very intense--there were a half-dozen times throughout the performance in which I had to help catch the burly actor playing Hercules as he threw himself through the air and landed on some combination of the three of us--and very new to me: I'm not new to stage combat but barrel rolls, jumps, leaps, grabs, and general mayhem were the norm, and they're outside my normal comfort zone, at least to this extent. 

But the funny thing was, I finished the brief run actually feeling better than when I started. My knee was much better. Though I'm not without battle-scars, my body feels more limber and responsive than when I started.

Throughout the process, I kept up with strength training three times a week, but did nothing else formal outside of rehearsals and the show itself to keep fit. I cut out my usual off-day sprinting / CrossFitty cardio-style workouts.

When it came down to it, I think all the twisting, jumping, stretching and leaping challenged my body in new ways, forcing it to grow and adapt and improve, and the layoff from additional intense and repetitive exercise, combined to give me a nice boost in coordination, flexibility, and power.

The take home lesson for me is that, no matter how hard you try to cover everything -- with foam rolling, dynamic and static stretching, and varied and challenging strength-training, a bit of random movement--maybe even a good dose of it, in which you have to simply adapt to environment, do new things, move in new ways-can be extremely beneficial. And maybe it takes the input of a coach, teacher, or (in my case) choreographer to force you into new, unfamiliar movements and make you realize that the limitations you thought you had aren't actual limits at all. Clearly, in this case, I was favoring my injured knee in a way that very well might have been causing me more pain and damage, and that the new movement helped rather than hurt it.

Of course that makes me wonder in what ways we--and even I, ostensibly a fitness expert--place limitations on ourselves because "I'm injured" or "I'm 40" that aren't in fact real.

"The Discipline of Rest". Now that's a provocative title when it comes to a fitness blog.

In the past, I've advocated working out at lightning speed--working on the clock, rest periods be damned.

I still think this can be an excellent way of working, especially for people who are time crunched and can only exercise a few days a week. Most people, moreover, aren't interested in building maximal strength; they're interested in staying lean and fit and building some work capacity and endurance.So this form of exercise--things like circuits, complexes, kettlebell work, sprints combined with bodyweight exercises, Tabata intervals, Prowler pushes and the like, all done in hard bursts that make your heart pound and your muscles burn--can have a broad application across many threads of the fitness population.

But as always, the moment you assert something like "low reps build muscle", or "sprints burn more fat" or "cut fat to burn fat", the opposite soon shows itself to be just about equally valid. Interesting thing, that, and it's part of what makes fitness an interesting filed. Lots of different things work.

So here I'm going to assert that, particularly if you're interested in building muscle, you've got to be disciplined about rest. By rest, I mean rest between sets, primarily, but also rest days--days off from lifting and from other strenuous physical activity, and rest at night, as in sleep.

For a guy like me, that can be difficult. Resting between sets for much more than the time it takes me to switch the weights in my hands or jog across the gym to my other exercise station has always felt like a big fat waste of time to me. Aren't you there in the gym to WORK? Isn't resting for AFTER your workout?

Again, generally speaking, yes. But sometimes, resting between sets--and being really disciplined, as in, whippng out the old stopwatch and counting off those 120 seconds between heavy sets of deadlifts and squats--is not only nice but essential to making progress. Especially building strength and muscle. To build muscle, you've to work hard on every set. If you're too fatigued from the previous set to give your all to the next one, well, you haven't really done you job.

Off days are essential as well. I don't know how other people's lives fadge out, but I usually take two days off from formal exercise a week. Okay, I admit that I might mow the lawn on one of those days, and take the kids to the park for a little extra time on another, but that isn't really exercise in my book, it's just keeping from going stir crazy and getting some sun.

And then, of course, there's sleep. So many obligations cut into our sleep time, and yet, it might be one of the most ignored keys to progress--in gaining a performance edge, in building muscle, and in losing fat--that's out there.

If you're like me--a 'little rest as possible' junkie--give a try to taking it a little slower next workout. Give yourself twice as much time as you think you need to recover between sets. The irony is that you'll probably work harder when you are actually slinging the weight around, and you'll wind up having a better workout.

Here's a vid that's going to be hitting the fitness-blogosphere soon. In searching for a culprit for the obesity epidemic--particularly among children--pediatrician Robert Lustig points the accusatory finger straight at fructose. Here's the long-form version (it's 90 minutes, so settle in!), but if you want a little Lustig from a slightly critical perspective--and don't have the time, check this out. Ludvig has a convincing perspective, and some serious creds, but I'm inclined to believe, as Dr. James Rippe argues in the news clip, that it can't be that simple. Fructose may be a key player, but it strikes me that it's a perfect storm of behavioral-environmental factors that got us where we are. 

What do you guys think?

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm currently in San Diego on another Feldenkrais-studying adventure, and although we are generally discouraged from exercising when class is in session, I snuck off to the gym (yes, I snuck, not sneaked. If my spellchecker lets "irregardless" go by with impunity, I've lost all respect for it).

So I snuck off to the gym after class. Now, today in class had been particularly potent for me. If you haven't actually experienced Feldenkrais work, it's hard to exactly explain what's going on, but on a good day, and after a good lesson, essentially you leave class moving in a way that feels more organized, more organic, more natural. Everything suddenly works together in a completely new and coordinated way that makes you feel like a cross between a cheetah and Mikhail Baryshnikov. You wonder why you, or indeed anyone, moves any other way. By comparison, your old way of standing, sitting, lying down, driving, being, starts to feel tense and fragmented, like you'd been wearing a suit of armor your whole life. You wonder why everyone doesn't drop what they're doing and run to the nearest Feldenkrais practitioner and beg them for lessons.

That's the kind of day I had.

But I still wanted to go to the gym afterwards. However-- I wanted to hang onto my 'new' body. I didn't want to snap back to my old habits.

So I did things a little differently.

My warmup usually consists of lots of dynamic stretching and foam rolling but--and I don't advise this--I actually chose to skip those things altogether. I wanted to signal to my body that it was going to do something else, something new, and starting off with my normal patterns--even if they are usually beneficial--seemed like starting off on the wrong foot. Besides, in a sense, I'd been warming up all day in class. 

So I jumped right into deadlifts, starting with a very light warmup weight. But rather than breeze through it, I took my time to actually feel the weight, to position myself not just technically accurately, but in a way that felt the best to me. I tried to think of the deadlift as one thing, not as a collection of cues: back straight, weight on heels, look straight ahead. etc. For the most part, I just thought, 'I'm going to lift this thing off the ground,' and then paid attention to how it felt. If it didn't feel comfortable (not easy, but comfortable, biomechanically speaking), I'd reset, start again.

Essentially I was applying a Feldenkrais approach--going for less effort, doing the least work for the most result, respecting the body's boundaries and not overstepping them, paying attention throughout the movement, listening to and always trusting physical cues--to a high-effort situation: lifting weights. That is, of course, anathema to the usual way people exercise, and I felt a little odd, in a roomful of grunters and yellers, to by trying to figure out a way to make lifting a weight easier rather than harder. But that's what the strongest guys do--their form is spot on; and then they pile on the weight.

I went through about 8 sets like that, working up to a decent weight, taking my time between sets, and continued through my entire workout in the same manner.

Although I got an excellent workout, I wasn't exhausted in the same way I usually am. I didn't feel broken into pieces as I often do. The feeling of physical integration remained and stayed with me for several hours afterward (it's still with me as I lie in bed writing this).

It was a revelation: done right, strength training can underscore and complement physical efficiency. You're not just strengthening muscles, you're programming movements. If your form is bad--and you wind up "getting a burn" in one particular area during a lift, rather than distributing the effort more evenly throughout the body--then you're programming bad habits. But if you focus on efficiency and integration, then you can program and reinforce good ones.

Or you can address matters more directly, hit up a Feldenkrais class, and find out what all the fuss is about.

Every now and then, circumstances force me to not work out, and I'm almost invariably grateful for it.

Okay-that might not be the most inspirational lead for a fitness blogger, ostensibly charged with supplying a never-ending stream of inspiration to go out there and hit your workout as hard as you can. But for the already converted fitness freak like myself-and maybe even like you, if you read this and other fitness blogs regularly-it's something I can't be reminded of often enough.

I just came off of a seriously tough-and seriously effective-six weeks doing this workout designed by Eric Cressey (it's from 2009, but there are so many training programs out there that I have lined up to try that I'm actually that far behind. Note to people out there looking for some novel program to try. Have you REALLY tried EVERYTHING?) I'm in the process (still) of bouncing back from a knee injury I incurred last December, and this particular plan really helped me shore that up while adding some serious poundage to some of my major lifts. At the same time, I tinkered with my diet and managed to slice off about six pounds. Since I was getting stronger the whole time, I have to conclude that I was dropping pounds I didn't need.

So it was an effective six weeks of working out, rounded off by a deload week as per Cressey's recommendations, during which my training poundages--surprisingly--nudged even further upwards. Not a bad payoff for six weeks of work, and further evidence that Cressey is one hell of a programmer. Seriously: I'm entering my twenty-fourth year of lifting weights regularly (Yes, OMG, OM total G), and there's not much this body hasn't seen or adapted to already, so these results are pretty impressive for a veteran like me.

But there was a cost: I was sore as hell. Knees not bad, but a little achey, elbows a bit strained, lower back iffy, neck stiff. Getting up in the morning, I was starting to feel 80, not 40. No slight to Cressey--I just went after it pretty hard and was now paying the price.

Now, despite my aches and pains, my good results were spurring me on to greater heights: I'd do ANOTHER similar program for another six weeks and get even stronger and better, I thought! I'd lose six more pounds and gain fifty more pounds on my deadlift! I salivated at the thought of my future greatness.

Fortunately, life interfered. This past weekend I traveled from LA to New Mexico to visit family, throwing off my training schedule. By Monday, I was so sore from the combination of training and traveling that I actually allowed myself to be talked-or cajoled--out of a scheduled workout by my wife, who lets me do what I want, but also lets me know how absurd she thinks I'm being when I get tunnel-visioned.

So the weekend-and Monday-were a wash, workout-wise. And today-Tuesday-I actually feel great. Not my usual "no workout for three days" groggy and grumpy, but recovered, refreshed. My knees feel good. My soreness is gone.

It's a pretty clear sign that I was overreached--in a good way--and, in order to fully bounce back, I needed the down time. I'll probably continue to go pretty easy this week, as I'm back in San Diego at a Feldenkrais training--and resume working out for real this coming weekend. I fully expect that once I do I'll actually feel stronger still. 

In my case--and maybe yours too?--more rest has been a key to better progress.

The secret to feeling good? Recovery.

Very interesting interview with Nick Tumminello at this website. It's in-depth, and almost half an hour long, but give yourself time and watch the whole thing--it's worth it. I've always liked Nick's approach: very direct, very common-sensical. At the same time, Nick's always curious and pushing at the edges of convention.

One strong point he makes here is that the program has to fit the client. Nick describes the three major categories of client he works with: the physique athlete, the performance athlete, and the fitness client, all of whom have different needs--indeed, needs that may contradict one another. A physique athlete doesn't care about sprint speed, a performance athlete doesn't care about the size of his arms. The fitness client cares a little about both things but mostly just wants a good workout.

The fitness community is chock-full of experts from strength and conditioning to bodybuilding to physical therapy, and they all have valuable information. But it's up to the service-oriented personal trainer--the General Practitioner of the health and fitness community--who's actually dealing with the client--to suss out what is most important to each client and deliver on those goals, regardless of how much the trainer himself might care more about squat numbers or hip mobility or carb cycling. If a client wants toned arms--have them do curls. It's not going to kill you.

As Nick says, it's a matter of listening to the client--not simply playing to your own strengths as a trainer.

Last week my father-in-law, an intensely hard worker with chronically high blood pressure, came to stay with me and my family. He had been told that he absolutely had to lower his BP, but was getting frustrated: herbs, vitamins, acupuncture, and various diet interventions didn't seem to be working for him; only regular walks seemed to bring his numbers down appreciably.

Jacked up on the zealotry of the recently converted, I told him, "I bet I can lower your blood pressure by fifteen points in fifteen minutes with some Feldenkrais work." A thoughtless boast, and I was pulling the numbers out of the air, but I was confident I could do it.

So we began: I had him lie on his back on a carpeted floor and, in stillness, perform a mental scan of how he was positioned on the floor. He scanned his breath, heart beat, points of tension, areas of contact and non-contact with the floor. As always with a scan, the intention was not to judge or correct but simply to notice: notice the breath, notice the heart rate.

Since I only had fifteen minutes, I settled on one sequence, based on spinal extension, that I thought would help him feel less constricted when he sat at his computer. The full sequence takes much longer, but I took him through a series of movements that would give him at least an idea of what the whole ATM was about, then left him alone in the room to bring himself slowly to standing and to check his results with on his BP machine. 

Ten minutes later, I came back: systolic pressure had dropped slightly, but his diastolic pressure--the more signficant reading--was down over twenty points. It was the lowest reading he'd gotten since he'd started taking thrice-daily BP measurements several weeks before.

Needless to say, he was impressed. He continued to get lower readings for about the next 24 hours, and I'm confident that, had we been able to perform more ATM work, and, indeed, if he were to make it a regular practice, that his blood pressure would drop and stabilize at the lower level.

The Feldenkrais Method has many applications. Unless you're suffering from something acute, probably the number one result people point to is just feeling 'better' in a generalized way. When you experience Feeling Better, it can be quite powerful--but it doesn't usually tend to sell tickets, or get people to investigate the Method for themselves. By contrast, here was a tangible, numerical result that occurred directly from fifteen minutes of Feldenkrais work coached by a not-even-fully-certified practitioner.

Powerful indeed.

My usual Tuesday schedule is as follows:

6:30 wake up.

7:00 breakfast

7:45 drive my daughter to school

8:30 back at home

8:45 work out

9:45 post-workout snack, shower

10:10 Leave house for first client.

10:30 First Client.

What you have to remember is that I live in LA, meaning that an hour round trip to-and-from my daughter's school is actually fairly normal, as is the 1/2 hour commute to my first client, which on Tuesday is a home visit.  If I spend less than two hours in the car on a given day, I consider myself lucky. 

Unfortunately, I had some business to deal with at my daughter's school, and so I hit rush-hour traffic on the way back, slowing the return trip and leaving me with just a half-hour to get my workout in.

I hate those days when they happen, but I often wind up loving the workouts that the need to hurry up creates. It means I gotta jam it all in in record time.

So here's what I did:

Warm up: Bear crawl, 60 steps; Stiff-leg deadlift walk, 12/side; lunge + overhead reach; 6/side

1A-1G: Giant set (all performed in succession with no rest, four rounds total):

1A. Jumprope, 100 skips

1B. Reaction Ball Bounces: 10

1C. Heavy Bag Punches, various combinations: 100

1D. Kettlebell Push Press: 5/side

1E. Kettlebell Swings: 20

1F. Kettlebell Snatches: 3/side

1G. Sledgehammer Tire Hits: 5/side

2. 15 seconds sprint, 45 second walk x 5 (1/2 mile total) 

Sun Salutation, 2 cycles.

This is a fair amount of work, but I'm no Olympian, and I cranked it all out--including the noted warm-up and cooldown--in less than 30 minutes. A less conditioned, equally time-crunched person might simply perform the giant set (1A-1G) for a set period of time--say, 20 minutes--rather than trying to complete four total rounds.

But I don't have kettlebells or sledgehammers or heavy bags, you say. Doesn't matter. Last week I was even MORE time crunched, and just did a series of six 15-second uphill sprints--all out. With warm-up and cool-down, that's less than 20 minutes. I was sore for days.

The point, and it's been made before: the idea of an 'hour long block for working out' is ludicrous. If you're pressed for time, you can bang out a terrific workout in very, very little time.